Hanging of Eva Dugan, The

DESCRIPTION: "Down in Arizona was just the other day The first time that a woman the death price had to pay, Yes, Mrs. Eva Dugan... Stepped up to the gallows." She leaves a note, "Bring me joy, oh, bring me sorrow, With the comin' of the morrow, I won't beg...."
AUTHOR: Words: Arthur Fields / Music: Fred Hall
EARLIEST DATE: 1930 (recording, Al Craver (Vernon Dalhart))
KEYWORDS: death execution
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Feb 21, 1930 - Hanging of Eva Dugan for the crime of murdering Andrew J. Mathis
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Cohen-AmericanFolkSongsARegionalEncyclopedia2, p. 543, "The Hanging of Eva Dugan" (1 text)
RECORDINGS:
Vernon Dalhart (as Al Craver), "The Hanging of Eva Dugan" (Columbia 15530-D, 05/1930)
NOTES [1276 words]: This would seem like a natural for true crime books: The only woman ever executed in Arizona, and a story with a truly macabre ending. Amazon offers to sell a volume, Rod Kackley, The Day Eva Dugan Died: A Shocking True Crime Story, (independently published), 2022. But I haven't found any other sellers who have it, and no description tells whether it is fiction or non-fiction; I'm not going to throw money at a book that might be fictionalized and that the author couldn't sell to a publisher.
The other two accounts I have found, Whitehurst's and Rogers's, are both short, and they feel rather different, with Rogers both more detailed and more sympathetic.
She was born Eva McDaniels in Missouri in 1878 (Rogers, p. 11).
According to Whitehurst, prior to coming to Arizona, she had worked as a cabaret singer in Alaska during the Klondike gold rush. She certainly seems to have liked fine clothing, although by the time of her trial she was middle-aged, overweight, and not very attractive. She apparently had five husbands (Rogers, p. 11); Whitehurst claims that "each... [of] her husband[s] had gone missing." The last of the five was named Dugan; hence the surname she used in Arizona.
In 1927, she briefly went to work as a housekeeper for a 58-year-old chicken rancher named Andrew J. Mathis (Whitehurst). She doesn't seem to have done a very good job, because he soon fired her. Soon after, he turned up missing, along with his cash box, other odds and ends -- and, notably, his Dodge coupé (Rogers, p. 11). However, a search for his body revealed nothing (Rogers, p. 12).
Dugan wasn't smart, offering some of Mathis's possessions for sale and claiming he was off to California (Rogers, p. 12) -- a story that apparently caused instant suspicion. A postal worker identified her when she sent a postcard to her father and turned her in (Whitehurst).
Taking the car was probably Dugan's biggest mistake. She sold it for $600 (Whitehurst), but cars are traceable, and the vehicle was traced back to Mathis. Authorities managed to track her down in White Plains, New York, where she was working in a hospital (Rogers, p.12). Dugan was originally arrested for theft, not murder (Whitehurst).
Dugan claimed that someone named "Jack" had stolen the car, but "Jack" never appeared (according to Whitehurst, some suspected that he was Edward Hickman, of the Marian Parker murder, but given that his only role was to help sell the car, this seems unlikely). Dugan was convicted of auto theft and sentenced to three to six years (Rogers, p. 13).
Then Mathis's body was accidentally found, by a camper, buried in a shallow grave. His skull had been bashed in (Whitehurst; Rogers, p. 13). Now there was enough evidence to charge Dugan with murder.
Was there enough evidence to prove it? The identification of the body had been done mostly by dental evidence; I read somewhere that chemicals had been used to hasten the destruction of the flesh. So the appearance of the face could only be reconstructed from the skull. There were no witnesses; the murder weapon was not identified (Rogers, p. 14). Dugan might have been able to offer an alternate explanation for her acts -- e.g. she had gone to Mathis's home to demand back pay, and when he wasn't there, she stole his property to pay her bills -- but her testimony was inconsistent and, according to Rogers, p. 14, "nonsensical." She did at least once claim that her mysterious "Jack" had actually committed the murder.
After a short trial, on February 25, 1928, the jury deliberated for less than three hours and convicted Eva of first degree murder. This is the one truly disturbing aspect of the case. Although I don't personally think that the evidence rises to the level of proof that Dugan murdered Mathis, it is certainly the most likely scenario. But how could the prosecutors possibly know it was premeditated?
Not that it matters. She was convicted and sentenced to death. Whereupon a campaign began to secure a commutation. (Eva spent the time knitting, selling the things she made to anyone who would buy one, and giving numerous interviews, for which she also charged; Whitehurst.) She gained a lot of press attention in that time, but no luck in changing the sentence. The governor of Arizona -- trying, I suspect, to wash his hands of the matter -- declared that the law did not give him the right to commute her sentence. Her only hope was to be declared insane (Rogers, p. 14).
Thus began the last campaign to save Dugan, conducted hastily in the few days before her scheduled death. The current prison doctor and warden, a previous doctor and warden, and a psychiatrist all declared that they thought her insane. Another doctor declared that she had "a social disease" which affected her mind (which Rogers, p. 15, declares was syphilis, although that seems a bit dubious -- by 1930, Salvarsan had been available for decades, so if she had syphilis, there was a cure!). It was enough to get her a sanity hearing three days before her scheduled execution. It sounds surreal; no attempt was made to bring in experts to evaluate her sanity. The court merely examined the witnesses who had said she was insane. then gave the case to the jury, and the jury ruled her sane (Roger, p. 16).
There were two more odd events before the hanging took place. One was a rumor that Dugan wanted to kill herself before they could hang her. To prevent that, they moved her to the condemned cell early, and searched her possessions -- and, yes, she had a bottle of something labeled as poison (Rogers, p. 17) There were also several razor blades (Whitehurst).
The other was a telegram, apparently from a daughter of Dugan, saying the daughter would pray for her and that God was with her. It was the only communication the daughter had had with her during the entire saga (Rogers, p. 17). This is said to be the only event that disturbed Dugan's calm, so the song is right to say that she was mostly calm.
There was one last macabre twist. It's worth remembering that there is an art to executing someone by hanging. The goal is to break the person's neck so as to kill quickly. If the force of the drop is not great enough, the victim will instead die by slow strangulation, a process that can take ten or more minutes.
It's rare for the reverse to happen -- for the force of the drop to be too great. But Eva Dugan was obese, and the executioner apparently did not take that into account. When she was dropped, the force was so great that her head broke off her neck, with her body falling to the ground spraying blood. Several of the numerous gawkers who had shown up to witness the execution were said to be traumatized (Rogers, p. 18. Serves them right, sez I -- they weren't official witnesses; they were people who wanted to see a person be killed!). This contributed to a push in Arizona to replace the gallows with the gas chamber as a means of execution (Whitehurst).
To this day, Dugan is the only woman to have been executed in the state of Arizona (at least as of 2024, the date on her Wikipedia entry when I checked it. Rogers, p. 18, says that she was the first woman to be executed west of the Mississippi River), so the song is right on that point also.
For those who like that sort of thing, the noose that was used to hang her has been preserved and is in a museum. One wonders if it still has blood on it.
Rogers is a bit sarcastic about the existence of a song about the event, which apparently was widely publicized. But since Vernon Dalhart released it only under his Al Craver alter ego, not under his own name, it apparently didn't become popular enough to go into tradition. - RBW
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