100 Murder Cases

The California coffee cup murder

The dance at the schoolhouse in Tuttletown, Calif., on April 27, 1929, was the last hoedown for Carroll Rablen.

His wife, Eva, 32, loved to kick up her heels, so the couple attended many dances. But Carroll, 34, preferred to sit it out. Battle wounds left the World War I veteran deaf; he couldn't hear the music.

After midnight, Eva brought a cup of coffee and sandwiches to her husband as he waited in the car. Then she sashayed inside as strains of "Turkey in the Straw" filled the hall where Carroll's father, Steve, and uncle, John, were playing fiddle and guitar.

After a few sips, Carroll screamed in agony and slumped over.

"Papa! Coffee... bitter," he moaned.

Within the hour, he was dead.

Within the week, Eva was charged with his murder. Newspapers dubbed her "Borgia of the Sierra."

Carroll met Eva about 18 months earlier through a lonely-hearts ad he placed in a San Francisco matrimonial newspaper, the print and paper ancestors of today's online dating services. He was too shy to meet women face-to-face.

Quanah, Texas, was her hometown. She lived with her twin sister, worked as a waitress, and had an 11-year-old son from a previous relationship.

"Mr. Rablen, dear friend," she wrote in one letter. "You spoke about the boy. He has had no father since he was a month old. The father left me. I haven't seen him. If a man leaves me I don't want to see him." No one knew where the dad was.

Romance blossomed on paper, and Carroll invited Eva to meet him in San Francisco. A Reno wedding quickly followed. Eva, her son, and her sister came to live at the Rablen family farm, but she was not warmly welcomed. Steve thought she was a gold-digger, hungry for Carroll's military pension.

Circumstantial evidence started to pile up. Police found a bottle of strychnine from a local Bigelow drug store discarded near Carroll's parking spot.

Bigelow's sale register showed the signature of a Mrs. Joe Williams who bought the poison three days before Carroll's death. A clerk recalled she said she needed it to get rid of gophers.

Two clerks identified Eva as the woman who bought the strychnine.

Police arrested the widow, but the evidence was still too slim for a sure conviction. There was one complication: The coroner could find no strychnine in the corpse.

Investigators called on the era's superstar criminologist — Dr. Edward O. Heinrich of the University of California, Berkeley. He was known as "America's Sherlock Holmes" and the "Edison of Crime Detection."

His new methods detected deadly doses of strychnine in Carroll's body that were previously overlooked. A handwriting expert, Heinrich also said that Eva's writing matched the signature of Mrs. Williams.

Another puzzle piece came from a hunch by the famed scientist.

He suggested that Eva may have bumped into someone as she squeezed through the crowd. Police found one woman who said Eva jostled her, and splashed a few drops of coffee onto the woman's pink dress.

Luckily, she had not yet washed it. Chemical analysis showed traces of strychnine in the stains.

"Net Tightens Around Wife In Poisoning," noted an Oakland Tribune headline two weeks after Carroll's death.

Eva's preliminary hearing lured roughly 6,000, who came by car, carriage, horseback, and even on foot. Usually, such hearings fit nicely into the office of the justice of the peace, large enough for about 20 people. But the proceedings had to be moved to an outdoor dance floor in a park to accommodate the spectators.

The show came to an abrupt, unexpected end when Eva changed her plea to guilty.

She admitted to spiking her husband's coffee with strychnine.

But she said she had a good reason for the "coffee cup murder," as the press started calling the case.

The dead man made me do it, she said.

Life with Carroll was awful, she explained, and things started to go downhill soon after the wedding. The newlyweds quarreled constantly.

Carroll's obsession with suicide was at the center of the strife, she told the judge. Pain from his war wounds, his deafness, and paranoia about people laughing at him made life unbearable.

He constantly talked about death and threatened to cut his own throat or shoot himself. When he couldn't muster the courage to end it all, he started badgering his new bride to assist him.

Finally, she gave in. All the plans were his, including the name she used to sign the drug-store register, Eva insisted.

Instead of sending her to the gallows, the judge gave her a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Reporters speculated that the reason behind her confession was the growing body of evidence that made a conviction seem likely.

The lighter sentence may have been connected to a psychological test arranged by her lawyers a few days earlier. The test found that her emotional intelligence was on a par with her 11-year-old son. She was not fully aware of the consequences of her actions.

Nancy Barr Mavity, a well-known reporter from the Oakland Tribune, was there to record the moments before Eva stepped into San Quentin. Mavity noted that the prisoner was smiling, despite the prospect of spending the rest of her life in a cell.

"I'm not at all downhearted or discouraged," Eva said.

After just about a dozen years, the Borgia of the Sierra was granted parole and walked free in 1941.