Barbara Graham might have been a diabolical dame in a hard-boiled detective story beautiful, sexy, and deadly. Charged alongside two male friends in the murder of an elderly widow during a botched robbery attempt, Bloody Babs became the third woman executed in California after a 1953 trial that played out before standing-room-only crowds captured the imaginations of journalists, filmmakers, and death penalty opponents. Why, Kathleen A. Cairns asks, of all the capital cases in the twentieth century, did Graham s have such political resonance and staying power?

Leaving aside the...