A childless, much-married woman who worked outside the home, Nellie's life took a turn for the worse at an early age. Nellie May Madison (1934), Cairns has exhaustively researched the life, murder conviction, and death sentence of the woman the media came to vilify as the Enigma Woman, the Sphinx Woman, and the Iron Widow.īorn Nellie Mooney in 1895 in Red Rock, Montana, the Enigma Woman grew up on a 1,600-acre sheep ranch near Dillon, Montana, had an unhappy childhood, and led an extraordinarily unconventional life, especially by the standards of the time. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including the appellate records of The People of California v. It is a well-written, true-crime tale that provides a glimpse into the inner workings of the California justice system in the last century. Part of the Women in the West series of the University of Nebraska Press, the book is certainly no enigma.
A violent, abusive spouse, Eric was shot multiple times in the back and head by his wife, in all likelihood as he lay in bed in the couple's Burbank apartment, shortly before midnight on March 24, 1934. Cairns tells the story of a woman sentenced to death in California in the 1930s for the murder of her adulterous, manipulative husband, Eric Madison. In The Enigma Woman, historian Kathleen A. 'Til Death Do Us Part: A Battered Woman's Capital Murder Case Reexamined Bessler (The George Washington University Law School) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
The Enigma Woman: The Death Sentence of Nellie May Madison.
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