Oliver lived in San Antonio, Texas, and worked as a prostitute. Between 1934 and 1949 several men who had been with her died; the roster records three or more, and only the last is documented in any detail. In 1949 she stabbed Herman Cohn, forty, to death. She was known as Straight Eight.
She was convicted and sentenced to death in February 1949. On June 29, 1951 the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She died in prison in February 1963.
The record is thin and the count is not established. What can be said is that a Black woman working as a prostitute in Texas in the 1930s and 1940s killed at least one man in a dispute, that earlier deaths in the same circumstances were attributed to her, and that she came within reach of the electric chair before being reprieved.
The archive carries several cases of this shape: women in prostitution whose violence arose from the conditions of it, with counts assembled retrospectively from a list of dead men. Mary Jane Jackson in nineteenth-century New Orleans is the closest parallel here. In both, the number of deaths is less certain than the record suggests.