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involvement in the bogus attempt to annul Frank’s marriage. Detectives also located Elizabeth’s dotty old friend Mrs Emma Short, who suffered from the early signs of senile dementia. However, when the police called round at her home she poured out the entire story about the murder plot and how Olga was to be killed in Mexico. Mrs Short said she was terrified of Elizabeth Duncan and felt an undercurrent of violence every time the two women met. She told police she’d been too scared to report anything earlier, but now she knew it was time to speak up or be accused of conspiring with her friend in the murder of Olga.
    Police obtained confirmation of Mrs Short’s bizarre claims from the equally scared Mrs Esquivel. Baldonado was immediately hauled in for questioning, but refused to talk so he was jailed on a holding charge of failing to support his children. Moya was then re-arrested for violating his parole on an earlier conviction.
    But there was still no sign of Olga’s body and Elizabeth Duncan’s lips remained sealed even though she was arrested and thrown in prison on a holding charge. In jail, sheimmediately began planning her escape and even offered bribes to other inmates to help her. Detectives knew they stood little chance of convicting anyone on the word of Mrs Short and Mrs Esquivel. They needed a confession from one of the main players or else they’d all walk free.
    Eventually it was Baldonado who cracked. He knew that Elizabeth had conned both him and Moya and refused to let her get away with it. So he led them to Olga’s battered remains – on condition that he didn’t have to watch them dig her up. Shortly afterwards, Moya also confessed. With Mrs Short and Mrs Esquivel both granted immunity from prosecution, would Elizabeth finally confess? Not on your life: she carried on spinning her web of lies.
    At her trial in March 1959, any suggestion that Elizabeth Duncan might be insane was thrown out by the court. A psychiatirst proclaimed that Elizabeth suffered from ‘what is known in medicine as a personality trait disorder, more commonly called psychopathic personality … But my findings are that she is not insane.’ All three defendants were eventually found guilty of murder in the first degree. Each was sentenced to death.
    Over the next three and a half years, a succession of appeals were made in a bid to stave off the executions. And the man leading the fight was none other than Elizabeth’s beloved son Frank. Eventually he made a personal plea to a federal judge in San Francisco for yet another last-minute stay of execution, but this time his appeal fell on deaf ears. Finally Elizabeth Duncan, Luis Moya Jnr and Gus Baldonado headed for the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison on 8 August 1962.Elizabeth Duncan, still an outwardly respectable-looking woman in late middle age, settled into the cold steel chair as if she was about to start a lengthy knitting session. She made herself comfortable before fixing her gaze on the two guards strapping down her arms.
    ‘Where’s Frank?’ she asked sternly. No one reacted so she closed her eyes slowly and took her final four deep breaths. At 10.12am, Elizabeth Duncan was pronounced dead.
    Three hours later Moya and Baldonado smiled pleasantly as they entered the same room. They sat in chairs marked A and B and continued their friendly banter even after a lever had been pulled to release the cyanide pellets into the vat of acid beneath their chairs.
    As the poisonous fumes wafted upwards their moods finally changed. ‘I can smell it,’ said Moya. ‘And it doesn’t smell good.’
    Ten minutes later both men were dead.

Chapter Five:
JIMMY MOODY O.B.E
    C ombine the Kray Twins and the Richardsons with a sprinkling of guv’nor Lenny McLean, plus an IRA hitman thrown in for good measure and you start to get an idea of Jimmy Moody’s underworld credentials.
    And as they say in gangland Britain: ‘He may be dead but his spirit lives on.’ For Moody’s