A Death on Garden Street

When Olga Duncan disappeared from her Garden Street apartment, her newish husband Frank wasn’t terribly concerned at first. We were less prone to anxiousness in that era. We feared neither gluten nor the anaphylactic shock brought on by a carelessly packed peanut butter sandwich. The habits of highly effective go-getters hadn’t yet caffeinated the life force and strapped it to a rocket sled. Someone could wander off for a day or two and we wouldn’t think anything sinister was afoot. Sometimes we were wrong about that, but not often.

Santa Barbara in 1958 was like most places in 1958. The young men all had jug ears and white t-shirts and looked like Martin Milner, the young ladies waterskied twelve-abreast with matching bathing caps, and daily life was the color of a Kodachrome? snapshot. Super-8 home movies were often silent and featured lots of waving at the camera.

Gas station attendants wore funny little paper hats and would helpfully swarm an incoming car like gulls converging on a dropped hot dog. 1958’s murderers were also of their time. Very broadly speaking, they were dour men with downcast eyes and the unkempt, swept-back hair of the perennially fleeing, their black and white mug shots often radiant with disappointment.

That year, a Friday night in this tumbledown beach town would find a parade of hot rods peaceably cruising down State Street, revving their customized engines in great clouds of smoke and generally ignoring the spirit of the Paris Accords. The automotive pageant would terminate at the corner of State and Valerio and the beloved Blue Onion drive-in restaurant there, the cars clustering around the place in the blanched light of their innumerable headlamps, drivers happily shouting about exhaust manifolds while devouring gigantic burgers brought right out to the car by gum-chomping waitresses on roller skates.

Mother Out-Law

Into this milieu I’m now obliged to introduce Santa Barbarans Frank and Olga Duncan, and Frank’s mother, the checkered and complicated Elizabeth. Here they are in 1958’s present tense. Frank Duncan is a grown man, a practicing attorney, and a doting son with the iron will of a napkin. He lives with his single mother, Elizabeth Duncan (born Hazel Sinclair Nigh) and they are oddly, even uncomfortably, inseparable.

Elizabeth is a familiar and annoying fixture in the Santa Barbara courthouse, known for attending all Frank’s trials and gleefully applauding when he wins – to the chagrin of the local legal establishment.

In appearance, Mrs. Duncan is pinch-faced and bespectacled and nondescript, a flesh-and-blood version of the nice old lady who cares for Tweety Bird in the Warner Brothers cartoons. Her inner landscape is less sanguine.

Since her nervous breakdown in 1948, ostensibly catalyzed by the tragic sudden death of Frank’s infant sister, Mrs. Duncan has been a wandering star, so to speak. She has married somewhere between 14 and 20 times, often re-hitching without bothering to dissolve her previous union. She lives on the disordered fringes of decent society—writing bad checks, engaging in shadowy financial schemes, and at one point managing a bordello. She is not a Doris Day figure.

Nurse Olga’s Ill-Timed Mercy

Our story begins one evening at the Duncan home. Frank, as attorney, is going through his mom’s sheaf of marriage certificates and other paperwork in an attempt to sensibly establish her legal status. Despite his long acquaintance with mom's devolving sense of self and chronic dalliances with the justice system, the documentary task this evening causes Frank to snap. He stands and boldly tells his mother he has had enough. He is moving out.

She protests, grabbing Frank by the Arrow Shirt and begging him not to leave, but to no avail. Frank struts angrily off to his room to pack. Elizabeth goes to her room and chugs a bottle of sleeping pills.

Not surprisingly, the desperate gambit works. Frank finds her nodding off en route to the next world, rushes her to Santa Barbara's St. Francis Hospital, and she is saved. Elizabeth Duncan lies comatose for four days and emerges to find herself in the tender care of a lovely young nurse named Olga Kupczyk; a kind-hearted beauty with whom Frank, briefly operating outside his unconscious mom’s controlling emotional purview, becomes quickly smitten.

Mom is Upset

Elizabeth’s rage at her smothered son’s suspected betrayal ramps as her health returns. Once on her feet again she begins boldly visiting Olga’s uninhabited Garden Street apartment during the work day, letting herself in with a key she has somehow procured, going through Olga’s drawers and cabinets looking for any tormenting evidence of the romance blossoming between the young lady and her Frank.

Olga’s landlady calls the intrusive Mrs. Duncan on the trespass, to which Frank’s mother goes ahead and hollers that she will kill Olga before she lets the two of them spend any more time together.

The stunned landlady reports this madness to a freaked-out Olga, who reports the threats to Frank. He responds with a knitted brow and bland assurances. He can't begin to believe his dear mother would say such a thing, let alone act on such crazy talk. "Mama's Boy" is a warped understatement. Olga begs Frank for a commitment before his mom can tear them apart. His grasping mother, in turn, begs him to promise he won’t marry Olga without telling mom first. He makes that promise to mom and secretly marries Olga the next day.

She leans in to see Frank and is grabbed by the accomplice in the back seat, pistol-whipped and driven away, never to be seen alive again.

When he builds up the courage to tell his mother he is moving in with Olga, mom goes off like an overpacked roman candle – first raging like a madwoman, then falling pitiably to Frank’s knees and pleading. The feckless Frank bends, acquiescing to mom’s wish that he return home. He will remain married to Olga but will live with his mother. This is not an arrangement the MFT licensure board would endorse.

Mom, Apple Pie, and a Blunt Object

{*sigh*} Mother Duncan is crazed with jealousy. Her criminal mind, such as it is, races. Not satisfied to have the young marrieds living at separate addresses, she contrives to annul the marriage by hiring a Salvation Army boarder to impersonate Frank while she plays the role of Olga.

The two appear before a Ventura magistrate who, incredibly, falls for the cobbled-together skit and indeed annuls the marriage, believing (among other things) the weathered 56 year-old Elizabeth Duncan to be a 30 year-old blushing bride with second thoughts. How long can the ruse last? Elizabeth knows the scheme will unravel quickly.

Soon enough, Frank’s uniquely awful mom is thinking the unthinkable. She recklessly offers a car-hop at the Blue Onion $1500 to hurl Olga off a cliff. The waitress politely declines, and goes directly to Frank to spill the beans. When Frank timidly confronts his mother she denies it. “Okay, then,” Frank says, or something very like that, taking the word of his dear old mom and dismissing the increasingly panicked pleas of his Olga. Next Mrs. Duncan tries to enlist an elderly lady friend to lure Olga into her apartment where Elizabeth will spring from a closet and bludgeon Olga. Her friend is (to say the least) taken aback by the scheme and declines to help. Nobody thinks to mention any of this to the police.

Mother and Child Reunion

Finally Ma Duncan finds a couple of jittery clods who will do Olga in for the sum of $6000, to be paid in two installments. On the evening of November 17, at around midnight, the two amateurs arrive at Olga’s apartment. One of them knocks on her door, claiming to be a friend of Frank’s. Olga’s hubby is reportedly very drunk and in the back seat of the man’s car. Could she come out and help get him into her apartment? Olga throws on a housecoat and slippers, walks with the gentleman across Garden Street to the car, leans in to talk to her Frank and is grabbed by the accomplice in the back seat. The recent Mrs. Olga Duncan is pistol-whipped and driven away, never to be seen alive again. She is hastily buried by hand at the bottom of a Casitas Pass embankment, near Carpinteria. The murderers had forgotten their shovel.

Some days later the hired killers are apprehended on unrelated charges and in short order began to sing like canaries (to borrow from old Cagney movie terminology), implicating Ma Duncan forthwith. She and her accomplices are charged with first–degree murder, and when the case goes to trial, who should assist the legal defense of the murdering mom but Frank himself. The jury, likely disturbed and bewildered by the victim’s husband defending the accused murderess of his own wife – and having incontrovertible evidence besides – returns a guilty verdict in a scant four hours.

Elizabeth Duncan will go to her death in 1962, proclaiming her innocence to the end. In her final days she will repeatedly ask to see her Frank, who at the moment of his mother’s State-sponsored nap time is stuck arguing at the California Supreme Court for a stay of her execution. At this writing, Frank’s mother is the last woman to have been executed in San Quentin’s gas chamber. Frank will remarry and become a successful and highly respected Los Angeles attorney.

Santa Barbara & San Quentin; two saints joined at Elizabeth Duncan. Life's funny that way.

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