For nearly 80 years, from 1855 to 1933, San Quentin housed the state’s incarcerated female population. In the years that followed, four more women would come to live inside the prison’s walls to spend their final hours on California’s once infamous Death Row.
In her book, “San Quentin: Inside the Walls,” Nancy Ann Nichols offers a look into the lives of female residents and the convictions that brought many of them to The Q. Amongst them was Ethel Leta Juanita Spinelli, who in 1941, became the first woman executed by the state of California. “The Duchess,” as the newspapers called her, was an alleged gang leader who ordered the killing of Robert Sherrard, a 19-year-old member of her crime ring.
Clinton Duffy, the San Quentin warden who oversaw Spinelli’s execution, described her as “The coldest, hardest character, male or female, I have ever known…”
“At 52,” Duffy said, “she was a homely, scrawny, nearsighted, sharp-featured scarecrow, with thin lips, beady eyes and scraggly black hair flecked with gray. It hardly seemed possible that even young punks, with neither brains nor character, would take orders from her.”
According to a 2019 Wall City magazine article entitled, “The Women of San Quentin,” many of the factors contributing to these women’s incarcerations were the same as any modern incarcerated person. These included abuse and mental health issues, often compounded by the impact of long-term social and economic struggles.
A 2017 report from Inside CDCR offers a snapshot in time — the 1922 accounting of female inmates held in San Quentin’s Women’s Ward. Alongside many names are convictions for commonplace crimes like larceny, forgery, theft, and opium possession. Other women, though, were sentenced to serve prison time for gender specific crimes that included abortion and bigamy. These women were often the subjects of salacious stories in local newspapers, tales of prison cells outfitted with “trap doors” that allowed lecherous male inmates and staff to visit in the dark of night.
Nichols works to undermine such myths. Through much of San Quentin’s early years, she says, women were housed above the Captain’s office. There they lived and worked, often tasked with sewing prison uniforms for the men. That such late night “suitors” would have had to travel through the Captain’s office makes such late night rendezvous improbable.
In 1924, construction began on South Point for a separate women’s wing outside SQ’s main walls. “Bayview,” according to Nichols, opened in 1927. Only six years later, all of the state’s female inmates moved to the new women’s prison in Tehachapi. The new facility offered a more open farm setting where the state experimented with an early version of rehabilitative programming.
Resident Elizabeth Ann “Ma” Duncan transferred to San Quentin State Prison in 1962, at the age of 58. Nichols writes that prison records detail a story wherein Duncan was angry with her son over his marrying a nurse against her wishes. To remedy this, “Ma” first tried having the marriage annulled and hired another man, Ralph Winterstein, to appear in court to pose as her son. The effort failed.
Mrs. Duncan then agreed to pay two men $6,000 to kill her daughter-in-law. Convicted of the nurse’s murder, all three were sentenced to California’s gas chamber.
“Ma” Duncan’s execution on Aug 8, 1962, brought to an end the era of incarcerated women at San Quentin. In the 62 years since, no female resident has been housed or executed in California’s largest prison.
