BIOGRAPHY:Barbara Graham

Barbara Graham (June 26, 1923 – June 3, 1955) was an American criminal and convicted murderess. She was executed in the gas chamber on the same day as two convicted accomplices, Jack Santo and Emmett Perkins. Nicknamed "Bloody Babs" by the press, Graham was the third woman in California to die by gas.Graham was born Barbara Elaine Wood in Oakland, California. When Barbara was two, her mother, who was a teenager, was sent to reform school. Barbara was raised by strangers and extended family, and had a limited education. As a teenager, she was arrested for vagrancy and was sentenced to serve time at the same reform school where her mother had been.[1]

Released from reform school in 1939, Barbara tried to make a new start for herself. She married and enrolled in a business college and soon had her first child. The marriage was not a success, and by 1941 she was divorced. Over the next several years, she was married twice more and had a second child, but each of these attempts at a normal life failed.[2]

After this string of failures, Barbara is said to have become a prostitute, working for San Francisco's Sally Stanford. She was soon involved in drugs and gambling and had a number of friends who were ex-convicts and career criminals. In 1953, she married Henry Graham, with whom she had a third child, named Tommy.

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