We’ve all heard of mothers who dote on their sons, and of momma’s boys. But few mother-son relationships are as questionable as the relationship between Ma Duncan and her son, Frank.
Elizabeth Ann Duncan, known to everyone as Ma Duncan, was born sometime around 1904 or 1905 – dates are quite conflicting. She was a precocious child, and lived a rather transient life, moving from place to place.
Her transience certainly led to many rumours about Ma Duncan. Some say she was a drifter who married bigamously and illegally as often as twenty times. Of course, none of this is verifiable. But her MO was fairly simple – she married for money, and planned to jilt her lovers out of their fortunes.
When she wasn’t running around marrying and scheming, she was a well-known madam of a San Francisco brothel.
Of course, Ma Duncan earned her nickname somewhere – she became a doting mother. There are many rumours as to the number of children she had, but one thing is for sure – she doted on her son, Frank, to the point where many questioned just how close the two were.
In 1948, Ma moved in with Frank, who was working towards a successful legal career, after her daughter, Patty Ann, died suspiciously of a ‘spontaneous cerebral hemorrhage’.
Sometime in the 1950s, Ma and Frank moved again to Santa Barbara. Ma was proud of her son – he had a successful legal career, and she was his number one cheerleader. She went to every single one of Frank’s hearings, holding his hand as he entered, and applauding her son obnoxiously if the case ruled in his favour.
Somewhere along the way, Frank decided he wanted to be independent of his mother. As a 29-year-old, he thought it was time to leave the nest. Ma Duncan was absolutely heartbroken.
Ma vowed to show Frank what-for. To punish him, she attempted to commit suicide by swallowing an overdose of sleeping pills. Frank was distraught. He immediately returned to his mother’s side in order to aid in her recovery. Just as she wanted. He was not allowed to leave her.
As Ma was recovering in hospital, she was being well looked after by a pretty nurse named Olga Kupczyk. She was Frank’s age, and the two younger adults got along very well. Ma Duncan did not like this turn of events one bit.
Upon her release from hospital, she began phoning Olga constantly, warning her to stay away from Frank. She made very loud, and very public, death threats against Olga. When that didn’t work, she took things a step further.
Somehow, Ma got the landlady of Olga’s apartment to let her in. Ma snooped, and poked, and prodded. She said she was looking for Frank’s clothes so that she could launder them. Whether she found anything or not is unclear. But the landlady later remembered Ma telling her: “She is not going to have him. I will kill her if it is the last thing I do.”
If Ma’s behaviour was already raising red flags, nothing was going to stop her after June 20th, 1958.
On that day, Frank secretly married Olga. And Ma Duncan went into a royal fit. In August of that year, Ma hired Ralph Winterstein to help her with her plan. She would play the role of Olga, and he Frank. They presented themselves at an uncontested hearing and had the marriage fraudulently annulled. That would show Olga, Ma figured.
When she later found out that Olga was pregnant, Ma refused to believe it.
Olga was the devil, she said. Olga had framed Frank. It could not be his child. Frank was still ‘pure’. He’d never do something so strictly against his mother’s wishes as have a child.
At the time, Frank was living in Olga’s apartment. But he moved back to his mother’s home in short order after receiving a call from Barbara Reed.
Barbara, a friend of Ma’s, told Frank that Ma had offered her $1,500 to help her kill Olga. Frank couldn’t believe it. His mother would never do such a thing! He had to be by her side to ensure no one else told ridiculous lies about his mother!
It seemed both mother and son were quite devoted and attached to each other – to the detriment of everyone around them.
Despite Frank running back home, Ma still wasn’t happy. Olga needed to go.
On November 18th, 1958, a friend of Olga’s at the hospital where she worked noticed that Olga hadn’t come in. The friend, Adeline Curry, went to Olga’s apartment and found the door ajar. She entered and took a look around. The sheets on the bed were turned down, but the bed didn’t look slept in. And Olga was gone. Adeline immediately reported her missing. At the time, Olga was seven months pregnant.
It didn’t take very long for investigators to pinpoint Ma Duncan as their primary suspect. She’d been very vocal about wanting Olga dead. And her abuse towards Olga had been well documented by friends, neighbours, and colleagues of Olga’s. It also didn’t take them long to uncover the fraudulent marriage annulment. Ma Duncan was in hot water.
Many people came forward to state that Ma Duncan has offered them money to help her get rid of Olga, including her friend Barbara. But two such individuals stood out the most – 25-year-old Augustine Baldonado and 22-year-old Luis Moya.
They were very quick to confess, and told investigators that Ma had offered them $6,000 – which she never paid in full – to take Olga to Tijuana and kill her there. They accepted.
They were known to investigators. Both Baldonado and Moya had been in and out of the system for petty theft. While no strangers to law enforcement, they were strangers to murder. And it showed.
On the night of November 17th, 1958, Moya knocked on the door of Olga’s apartment. He lied, and said that Frank was in the backseat of his car. He told her that Frank was drunk, and needed help into the apartment. Olga went to help her husband get home.
However, it wasn’t Frank in the backseat. It was Baldonado. When Olga bent over into the backseat in order to take a look at her husband, she was hit in the head with a pistol. They stuffed her in the backseat, and went about driving her over the border to Tijuana. But there were a couple hiccups.
For one, the car that Baldonado and Moya had rented from their friend was not in good shape. It would never make the trip from Santa Barbara to Tijuana. For another, Olga was struggling and fretting in the backseat, despite a hefty concussion.
Instead of going all the way to Mexico, Baldonado and Moya took a detour. They headed for Casitas Pass, in Carpinteria, California. There, they took turns beating her with the pistol, which had broken from the first blow to Olga’s head. Then, they strangled her. At some point, they figured she was dead, and intended to bury her. They had to dig the grave with their bare hands, as they hadn’t thought of bringing shovels. Baldonado even led investigator’s to Olga’s body.
The coroner corroborated most of Baldonado’s and Moya’s story – with one caveat. Olga wasn’t dead when they buried her. They buried her alive.
Ma, who had already been arrested for fraud, was also charged, alongside Augustine Baldonado and Luis Moya, for conspiracy to commit the murder of Olga Kupczyk on December 19th, 1958.
Frank represented his mother. As they’d done many times before, they walked into the courtroom hand in hand. Frank simply could not believe his mother was capable of such a dastardly deed. But chins wagged, and Ma Duncan’s guilt was a true fact in the eyes of the public. And Frank’s behaviour was under intense scrutiny.
People came from far and wide to hear the story of the mother-in-law who was so jealous of her son’s marriage that she had her son’s wife killed. They even gossiped about the true nature of the relationship between mother and son, though no one outright said what everyone was thinking.
It was media gold. “The inept abilities of the murderers, the jealous mother-in-law, and the husband who couldn’t betray mommy all made for great news” (Ashley Horsfall, Medium).
Elizabeth Ann “Ma” Duncan took the stand in her own defence. She claimed that she was innocent – Baldonado and Moya were blackmailing her. Her story was flimsy, at best, but it was the version of events that Frank stuck with.
After 4 hours and 51 minutes of deliberation, the jury reached a verdict. Ma Duncan, Augustine Baldonado, and Luis Moya were found guilty. They were all sentenced to death by the gas chamber.
Ma Duncan and her ever-devoted son immediately launched appeal after appeal. Each one was denied.
On August 8th, 1962, Elizabeth Ann “Ma” Duncan, Augustine Baldonado, and Luis Moya were each executed by the state of California in the gas chamber.
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Sources:
Ma Duncan: Mother-in-Law and Murderer – Ashley Horsfall – Medium
Mother-in-Law Knows Murder: The Tragic Death of Olga Kupczyk – Joan Renner – LA Magazine
Elizabeth Ann Duncan Wikipedia page