Women Who Kill Men

reviewed by Barbara Kate Repa

By now, true crime books focusing on female perpetrators have become a popular genre of their own. And this tome, which concentrates on the courts and cases in our own front yard, has added appeal for California readers.

The book is especially delicious to read on the bus or some other public place to track strangers' reactions to its title: Women Who Kill Men. Men recoil uncertainly, while women nod understandingly.

This book profiles California cases from 1870 to 1958. The time span seems odd and goes unexplained, but there may be a clue in the list of other titles in the publisher's series - including Imperfect Victories: The Legal Tenacity of the Omaha Tribe, 1945-1995 and Law and Order in Buffalo Bill's Country: Legal Culture and Community on the Great Plains, 1867?1910.

The most salacious crimes and criminals come in the early years, when most of the murders seemed motivated by love gone wrong and aided by "knockout drops" slipped into food or drink. Very often, it was love letters - liberally offered in evidence - that did in the defendants. Yet a fair number of the fairer sex were exonerated by the "unwritten law" that the men they killed - boors, cads, bullies, or womanizers - deserved to die. And some just couldn't help themselves - such as Laura Fair, who shot her longtime lover, a San Francisco lawyer, for failing to deliver on his promise to leave his wife. After Fair's attorneys argued that "she has never menstruated without becoming a perfect maniac and furious," a jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity.

Back then - as, let's face it, now - looks were important. But then they were reported on with unchecked subjectivity, as in the Los Angeles Times description of Aurelia Scheck, charged in 1906 with shooting her husband so she could join a paramour: "She is a big, fat, dumpy, dull-looking, unattractive woman" and "[l]ike many weak unattractive women," she was "conceited and romantic."

Once that window of thought is opened, the honest reader might admit to yearning to sneak a peek at Scheck, just to form an opinion. But disappointingly, only two of the defendants discussed in the book are pictured. There are snapshots galore of the teenage Beulah Louise Overell, who was acquitted in 1947, along with her fiancé of bludgeoning both her parents to death, then dynamiting a yacht that held their bodies in Newport Harbor.

(That's interesting as crimes go, but hardly as picturesque as the tale of Dolly Oesterreich, who gets a shorter shrift - implicated in 1922 as an accomplice when the teenage lover she seduced and kept covertly in the attic for more than a decade shot her more age-appropriate husband. Oesterreich's murder charge was ultimately dismissed. And her lover, Otto Sanhuber, branded in the press as the "garret ghost," was released due to procedural concerns eight years after the alleged murder.)

The only other photos feature the photogenic Lana Turner, whose 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane, was accused of killing former mobster Johnny Stompanato in 1958. The coroner's jury returned a verdict of justifiable homicide for Crane, who had stepped in to stop a fight sparked by her mother's refusal to take Stompanato to the Academy Awards. Swaths of text are devoted to reviewing a 1982 autobiography, Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth; then Crane's riposte, Detours: A Hollywood Story. And the book ends there.

More cerebral readers might be disappointed by the lack of attention to relevant historical legal developments - despite the fact that both authors teach history. For example, there is only passing reference to women being allowed on juries for the first time in 1919, or to the disparate sentencing of men and women convicted of murder.

Legal scholars might roll their eyes over many of the flaccid conclusions, such as: "The rulings of the judges were significant for the presentation of defense and prosecution cases. The law guided the judges in making these rulings."

And purists will note that several of the women who kill their mothers, their children, their nieces or are acquitted or ultimately not even charged with murder have no real place in the pages of Women Who Kill Men.

But the connective tissue and conclusions are not the point. Read the book for sheer entertainment. Or just take it for a ride on the bus.

Barbara Kate Repa is a lawyer, writer, and editor in San Francisco who frequently writes about women's issues.

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