And back at their house in Santa Barbara, Elizabeth and Frank continued to share a bed. One of her oldest friends later recalled, ‘She said that sometimes she’d call to Frankie and that he’d come and jump in bed with her and console her or she’d go and jump in Frankie’s bed.’ Frank later denied that any such activities ever took place but by that time the damage had already been done.
Elizabeth adored taking centre stage at every gathering, especially with her group of elderly friends who seemed in awe of her razor sharp wit and pushy personality. One of her most adoring fans was a stony-faced widow in the first throes of senile dementia called Mrs Emma Short. One day she popped round to Elizabeth’s house and was immediately shown ‘Frankie’s’ bedroom. His mother cooed at her son as he lay asleep, ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ Elizabeth then described him as ‘still Mama’s little boy’. Frank was almost 30 years of age at the time.
Elizabeth Duncan openly admitted that she couldn’t stand the thought that her beloved son might actually leave home one day. Once, when she suspected Frank was about to move into his own apartment, she swallowed back just enough sleeping pills to send out a customary ‘cry for help’ message. When the doctor treating her pointed out that her adult son Frank might one day get married and leave home, she snapped back, ‘Frank would never leave me. He wouldn’t dare. He wouldn’t dare get married.’ A few weeks later she told one friend that if Frank ever contemplated marrying, she would ‘get rid of her’. That icy threat sent a shiver up her friend’s spine.
In November 1957 Frank even dared stand up to his mother by insisting she could not afford to buy a beauty parlour in Santa Barbara. A bitter row erupted and Frank ordered his tearful mother out of their home.
Within hours, Elizabeth had thrown back yet another handful of sleeping tablets. She wanted him to feel sufficient guilt to allow her back into his life. Frank rushed to her bedside as she lay recovering from her ordeal in Santa Barbara’s Cottage Hospital. Elizabeth purred with delight as Frank held her hand and begged for forgiveness.
Then into the ward walked attractive 29-year-old nurse called Olga Kupczyk, who’d moved to Santa Barbara the previous year from Vancouver, Canada, where her father had worked as a foreman on the railroad. She was a quiet, friendly girl without an enemy in the world.
Elizabeth Duncan watched with anger from her hospital bed as a romance blossomed between Olga and her beloved son. When Frank suffered a severe bout of flu a few days later Olga sent him a bunch of get-well roses. Elizabeth threw them straight in the bin. Not long afterwards, Elizabeth informed her elderly, demented cronie Mrs Emma Short that she would ‘break that little bitch’s legs’ if she continued romancing her beloved son.
Frank tried to play down his relationship with Olga because he knew his mother was angry about it. Then, in May 1958, Olga told Frank she was pregnant. The expected backlash from Elizabeth was as predictable as a bag of sand in the Sahara. Initially, Frank only admitted to his mother he was contemplating marriage to Olga. Within minutes, Elizabeth had picked up the telephone and started raging at the pretty young nurse, ‘I will kill you before you ever marry my son.’
Frank tried to calm her down by promising he wouldn’t actually marry Olga without first giving Elizabeth some notice. But he went back on his word almost immediately by obtaining legal dispensation to marry Olga the following day. Frank couldn’t face telling his mother the truth. She’d long since turned him into a coward.
The secrecy that surrounded Frank and Olga’s wedding was more befitting a rock star than a mummy’s boy with a bad lisp and an average career in law. Frank ensured there were no telltale announcements in the local press. But he avoided certain issues by continuing to live with his mother and pretending that nothing had happened. The young couple’s romantic wedding night was interrupted when Frank got out of bed to return home to his domineering mother. As Frank later admitted, ‘It was a nightmare. I was going back and forth like a yo-yo.’ In many ways he only had himself to blame.
Frank had also completely misjudged his mother’s cunningness. She’d known about the wedding within hours of the ceremony, after phoning the hospital to speak to Olga only to be told by another member of staff that Nurse Kupczyk was packing in her job because she’d just got married.
This was war. And there could only be one winner: Elizabeth Duncan.
Just four days after the wedding ceremony, Elizabeth mounted her first outright attack on the unfortunate Olga by placing an advert in the local newspaper. It stated that Frank Duncan was not responsible for debts contracted by anybody other than his mother. When Frank spotted the notice he weakly begged his mother to keep her nose out of his business.
Next Elizabeth began harassing Olga every time she saw her in the street. She also persuaded local shopkeepers that Olga was in debt at nearby department stores and should not be given any credit. Elizabeth even telephoned Olga most days threatening, ‘If you don’t leave him alone, I’ll kill you.’
But a few veiled threats were not enough to get rid of Olga. So Elizabeth recruited the help of her demented pal Mrs Emma Short and another Miss Marple clone, seamstress Helen Franklin. Together, this unlikely threesome hatched a plot to kidnap Frank and then ‘drum some sense into the boy’. They were going to knock him out with sleeping pills, drive him to Los Angeles and then force him to sign the relevant divorce papers. A few days later, those two little old ladies, Mrs Short and Mrs Franklin, talked their way into Frank’s apartment and tried to tie him up but he refused to cooperate and they ran out of the flat. Frank later laughed it all off as a practical joke.
Then Elizabeth got chatting to one of her less salubrious acquaintences, a local ex-convict called Ralph Winterstein, who’d been sent to clean her windows by the Salvation Army. Would he mind impersonating her son Frank in order to obtain an annulment of his marriage? Elizabeth convinced Winterstein that Frank couldn’t go in person to the courts because he didn’t want his professional reputation as a lawyer ruined by being spotted at the divorce court offices.
On 7 August 1958, Winterstein (posing as Frank), Elizabeth Duncan (posing as Olga) and Emma Short (posing as Olga’s aunt) went to an attorney’s office in nearby Ventura County. The case was immediately scheduled for later that day. But when this unlikely threesome turned up in court, Sally Army man Winterstein broke down and admitted he was not Frank. He was later convicted of perjury and Elizabeth was spitting fire.
Olga was so worried by her unpredictable mother-in-law that she moved apartments twice but the obsessive Elizabeth Duncan tracked her down each time after following her beloved son Frank home from work. Elizabeth then insisted to one apartment block manager that Frank and Olga were ‘living together in sin’. Elizabeth then went and ruined it all by ranting, ‘She is not going to have him. I will kill her, if it’s the last thing I do.’
Then Elizabeth and her doddery partner in crime, Emma Short, started discussing murder as if it was as normal as that day’s weather forecast. Elizabeth concluded that her old favourite of throwing acid in Olga’s face couldn’t guarantee a fatality. Even with a badly burned face, Olga could prove a threat to Elizabeth’s bid to win back her son. Another plan involved luring Olga into Emma Short’s apartment where Elizabeth would be waiting with a rope. She’d leap out of a cupboard, strangle the nurse, then weigh her body down with rocks and hurl it into the nearby Pacific Ocean. Emma Short wasn’t keen because she didn’t want a corpse hanging in her neatly stacked closet for hours before they hauled it down to the beach. ‘I’d never be able to get rid of the smell,’ she said, with utter seriousness.
She approached another elderly neighbour called Barbara Reed to help ‘take care’ of Olga by throwing acid into her face before Elizabeth smothered Olga with a chloroformed blanket. Then Olga would be trussed up, driven to the mountains in Frank’s car and thrown off a cliff. Elizabeth even offered to pay £1,500 to Mrs Reed for her assistance. Mrs Reed told her friend Elizabeth she’d think about it and then told Frank who immediately
confronted his mother. Elizabeth naturally insisted that Barbara Reed was lying. For some bizarre reason, Frank believed her.
Elizabeth decided it would be better to hire someone else to do the dirty deed on her behalf so she began chatting up drifters in local lowlife bars and then offering them money to murder her daughter-in-law. Most of the men she approached thought she was high on drink or drugs and took little notice. Then Elizabeth remembered a woman called Diane Romero, whose husband Rudolph had been successfully defended on a drugs charge by her beloved son Frank. Elizabeth located Mrs Romero and pointed out that her and her son were owed a favour. She spun a yarn that Olga was blackmailing Frank and offered Mrs Romero $1,500 to visit Olga’s apartment at 1114 Garden Street, Santa Barbara, and kill her. Mrs Romero reluctantly agreed to the hit. But the next day she knocked on Olga’s door and was horrified to discover she’d once been a patient of Olga’s back in British Columbia.
Mrs Romero made an excuse and retreated to the nearest payphone where she called Elizabeth and cancelled the hit. Then Mrs Romero’s husband, Rudolph Romero, was approached by Elizabeth who offered him $2,000. He declined her kind offer and even ignored her threats to have him thrown back in jail. But he didn’t bother telling the police about his strange encounter with Elizabeth Duncan.
On 12 November 1958, Elizabeth Duncan set off – with the demented Mrs Emma Short in tow – to the seedy side of Santa Barbara and a grubby beer house with the unlikely name of the Cafe Tropical. She’d heard of the tavern when Frank had defended owners Esperanza Esquivel and her husband Marciano on charges of receiving stolen goods. The case against Mrs Esquivel, an illegal Mexican immigrant, had been dismissed but Marciano had pleaded guilty and was awaiting sentencing at the time.
Elizabeth and her friend Mrs Emma Short strolled into the Cafe Tropical and ordered coffees as if they were sitting down to breakfast in a family diner. Elizabeth immediately introduced herself to Mrs Esquivel and told her she was Frank’s mother. She claimed that Olga was blackmailing her and threatening to throw acid in her beloved Frank’s face if he didn’t give her money.
‘You got any friends who’d help me get rid of her, perhaps get her out of the way?’ Elizabeth asked in much the same way that most people would ask if they could have sugar in their coffee.
Mrs Esquivel’s brows arched and she gave the question some thought. ‘I know some boys, but I don’t know if they’d talk to you or not.’
‘Maybe I could meet them,’ suggested Elizabeth in her finest sugary sweet tones.
‘Come here tomorrow afternoon and they’ll be here.’
At 2.45pm the following day, Elizabeth and her doddery old friend Mrs Emma Short were introduced to two young Mexicans, 21-year-old Luis Moya Jnr and his best friend, 26-year-old Augustine Baldonado, known to all as Gus. Both were unemployed labourers who occasionally swept the floors of the Cafe Tropical in exchange for meals. Baldonado also lived with the Esquivels.
Moya, from the Mexican town of San Angelo, was a convicted burglar and desperate for money to feed his drug habit. Baldonaldo was similarly inclined, but neither had ever expressed a desire to kill someone for a fee.
As the quartet sat down, Mrs Esquivel did the introductions. ‘This is Mrs Duncan. She wants to talk to you,’ she said. Uneasy smiles were exchanged before the extremely nervous Mrs Emma Short was dispatched to a back table away from the negotiations.
‘How much?’ asked Moya.
‘$3,000,’ ventured Elizabeth as calmly as ever.
‘Make it $6,000,’ snapped Moya.
‘You got a deal,’ said Elizabeth. ‘$3,000 up front and the remainder after the job’s done.’
‘We need a car, weapons and gloves,’ added Moya, who’d taken the role of official spokesman for the two would-be killers. ‘We ain’t got much dough so can we have somethin’ right now?’
Elizabeth didn’t trust them an inch but threw them a $100 bill before providing a list of other ‘props’ that might come in useful such as rope, sleeping pills and acid, which she already had from all those previous unsuccessful attempts on her daughter-in-law’s life. Elizabeth also supplied the precise location of Olga’s apartment and her work routine since Olga had returned to nursing at the nearby St Francis Hospital.
As Moya later explained: ‘We all agreed that if we saw her coming or going from work and if there was nobody around, we’d kidnap her off the street, or go up to the apartment and have the door opened for us and force our way inside and perhaps knock her out or somethin’ and then tie her up, get rid of all her clothes or part of her clothes and make it look like she was on vacation or something. Then we’d take her to San Diego and get her across the border into Mexico and do away with her in Tijuana.’
Elizabeth Duncan even pointed out at the time, ‘You’d better watch out. She’s a pretty strong girl. She might put up quite a fight.’
The two men looked blankly at Elizabeth. The strength of a mere woman was not something they’d lose any sleep over. Moya then blandly announced: ‘I know where to get hold of a gun.’
He turned down Elizabeth’s kind suggestion that they use her car to transport Olga to her grave. Even these two drifters knew it was better to make sure there were as few links to their employer as possible.
Shortly afterwards, Elizabeth left the Cafe Tropical and headed to the nearest pawn shop to raise the cash for the hitmen’s first proper down payment. She traded in two rings for $175, which she gave to Moya in the kitchen of the cafe a few minutes later.
Elizabeth and the two young Mexicans even agreed on a code word – ‘Dorothy’ – to be used at all times. Elizabeth also mentioned she’d already wasted $1,000 on another hitman who’d let her down. Moya and Baldonado knew she meant business.
As Elizabeth and Mrs Emma Short tottered back out of the cafe, she turned to her elderly friend and said, ‘I think we got a real bargain with those two.’ But then Elizabeth had absolutely no intention of paying the two Mexican drifters another penny.
Moya never even suspected she’d renege on the deal. He later explained: ‘We trusted Mrs Duncan. We reckoned her word was good, as we made good ours.’ And Moya and Baldonado certainly kept to their side of the bargain. They hired a cream-coloured Chevrolet and borrowed a .22 pistol from a pal.
At 11.00pm on the evening of 17 November, Baldonado arrived at the cramped apartment of Moya’s girlfriend Virginia Fierro and picked up his accomplice before they headed off to carry out the hit.
That evening Elizabeth’s daughter-in-law Olga was entertaining two old nursing colleagues from the Cottage Hospital where she’d once worked. They left the apartment at around 11.10pm. Twenty minutes later the Mexican’s cream-coloured Chevy rolled quietly up near the neat two-storey apartment block on Garden Street. Moya slipped silently up the stairs alone, leaving Baldonado slumped in the back seat.
When Luis Moya knocked on the door of number 1114, Olga answered wearing a skimpy pink dressing gown over her seven-months-pregnant belly. ‘I brought your husband home, Señora,’ he said in broken English. ‘I met him in a bar and he’s pretty drunk. He got a lotta money on him and told me to bring him home. He’s downstairs in the car but I need help getting him up here.’
Although Frank rarely drank alcohol, Olga didn’t question Moya any further. ‘Sure, let’s go get him,’ she said.
She walked down to the pavement with Moya and saw what she thought was Frank slumped in the back seat.
‘Frank?’ she called quietly, not wishing to wake up the neighbours.
As she leaned in to take a closer look, Moya pulled out his gun and smashed it over the back of her head before bundling her into the back of the car, screaming. Just then the man in the back seat – Baldonado – sprang to life. As Moya raced round to the driver’s seat, Baldonado held Olga down. But she continued screaming and struggling and even made a grab for the door handle. Baldonado tried to throttle her but she just wouldn’t be silenced. At a set of traffic lights, Moya leaned back and smashed the gun butt into h
er head until she finally crumpled to the floor with blood pouring from her head. Soon they were heading out of town and south towards the Mexican border.
But then the ancient, rusting Chevy started shuddering and both men wondered if it would make the 250-mile trip to Mexico. The two hitmen decided to divert and head for the mountains just 30 miles south of Santa Barbara. As Moya later explained: ‘We’d find a nice little spot to bury her in.’
That ‘nice little spot’ turned out to be a ditch just off Highway 150. But as the drifters pulled Olga’s body out of the back of the Chevy she recovered consciousness. They couldn’t shoot her because the gun had been broken during that earlier ferocious assault. So both men took it in turns to strangle Olga before grabbing a nearby rock to make absolutely sure she was dead this time. Baldonado even leaned down to check her pulse.
They intended to bury her, but had forgotten to bring a spade, so both of the hitmen began digging with their bare hands. It took almost four hours, but finally Olga’s corpse was dumped in the hole. On the short drive back to Santa Barbara Baldonado blurted out the six-million dollar question: ‘Let’s hope the old lady pays up.’
‘No problem, hombre,’ replied Moya. ‘She’ll pay.’
The two men then screeched to a halt on the edge of town to rip the blood-splattered seat covers out of the car before returning it to the rental office. They told the company they’d got drunk the previous night and accidently started a fire with a cigarette. Then it was off to celebrate their big windfall by having a party with their few friends.
Hitmen: True Stories of Street Executions Page 5