A CHANGING STORY
Cowgirl, facing gallows, finally fesses to killing her fifth hubby
Six shots and screams of terror woke residents of the Sterling Arms apartment complex in Burbank, Calif., shortly before midnight on March 24, 1934. Tenants filled the hallways, and the landlady banged on the door to Apartment 123, which seemed to be the source of the noise.
Eric Madison, 42, lived there with his wife, Nellie May, 39.
“Are you all right?” the landlord yelled.
Nellie stepped out. “Everything’s quiet in my apartment,” she said calmly and slipped back behind the door.
The other tenants decided the noise probably came from the Warner Brothers studio next door, where a gangster movie was in production. They went back to sleep.
All was calm the next morning, and there was a “do not disturb” note on the door of Apartment 123. It was in Nellie’s handwriting.
Not a sound came from the apartment all day. That afternoon, the landlady used her pass key to get in and take a look.
On the floor, she found a dead man in blood-stained, bullet-riddled underwear.
Nellie was gone, but the janitor recalled seeing her slip out that morning.
Police tracked the fugitive down at a friend’s home in the mountains north of Los Angeles.
Nellie was huddled in a closet behind a row of coats and a suitcase. Her feet were sticking out from under a blanket.
“I’m just sitting in here changing my shoes,” she snapped as detectives told her to get out.
They slapped on handcuffs and started to investigate a package she had with her. They found a knife and a receipt for a .32-caliber
Colt revolver, purchased the day of the shooting. Ballistics experts said that the gun used the same kinds of bullets that ended Eric Madison’s life.
Nellie was hauled back to Los Angeles for an interrogation. By that time, police and a flock of reporters had learned a lot about Mrs. Madison’s unconventional and shocking life.
She was a daughter of Irish immigrants and grew up working on their Montana ranch. Some recalled that she might have ridden in rodeos. Newspapers described her as a Montana cowgirl.
Almost everyone who knew her as a girl remembered a brown-eyed beauty and a crack shot.
There were four other weddings, the first when she was 14. Then
there were another couple of shortlived marriages, and a fourth to an attorney. An annulment ended the first marriage, divorces the next three. One ex reported that she had fired a gun at him during their stormy union some years earlier.
Despite five husbands, she had no children, something that raised suspicions about her morals and made her an unsympathetic character.
Nellie said little to investigators or the press, maintaining a cool silence. Her demeanor drove reporters wild, leading to a slew of screaming headlines and poetic nicknames —“The Sphinx Woman” and the “Iron Widow.”
For her 2009 book on the case, author Kathleen A. Cairns chose one of these sobriquets for the title,“The Enigma Woman: The Death Sentence of Nellie May Madison.”
Her case flew into court, starting a little over two months after the murder. Circumstantial evidence was all prosecutors had, and there was no apparent motive.
On the stand, Nellie dropped a bombshell. She said she was weeping as she attended the funeral of the man found in her apartment. Tears, however, stopped flowing when she gazed upon his face.
“The person in the coffin did not resemble my husband,” she said.
Nellie denied killing Madison or anyone else. She said the body she saw at the mortuary and in pictures of the murder scene was not the man she married.
“I believe he is alive,” declared.
Prosecutors brought the death bed and his bloody underwear into court. They said that the laundry marks proved the underwear belonged to Eric Madison.
The jury found Nellie guilty and on July 5, a judge sentenced her to hang. If the sentence had been carried out, she would have become the first woman to be executed in California.
She was spared that distinction. As she awaited her date with the hangman, Nellie came up with a new story.
“’Why Didn’t I Confess Before?’ Sobs the Confessed Cowgirl Murderess,” was the headline of a syndicated newspaper feature that ran throughout the country in August 1935. “He Threw Knives and I Shot Him She Admits — Too Late for a Jury to Hear.”
Nellie offered a long confession, explaining why she pumped five bullets into her husband’s back. She said he was a brute who slept around and spent all her money she and that she was a battered woman.
The night of the shooting, Eric came home drunk and they had a violent fight. Nellie ran to a closet and pulled out a revolver. She said she bought it that day because she feared he was going to kill her.
Eric dashed to a box next to the bed that contained a stash of butcher knives. He grabbed one and bellowed, “You will pull a gun at me. I’ll cut your heart out.”
“I remember hearing a knife whiz past me,” she said. He reached for another knife, and she protected herself. “I was shooting wild with my eyes closed most of the time.”
The story of the abusive husband and tireless campaigning by a new attorney, friends, family, and sympathetic newspaper reporters sparked public outrage over the execution. In September 1935, the governor commuted her sentence.
In 1943, she was paroled. About a year later, she snagged another husband, her sixth. She lived with him quietly until her death from a stroke in 1953.
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