In December 1944 detectives dug in the garden of a house on Hampden Place in Pacific Palisades and found the body of Margaret Logan in a shallow grave. She had been shot and brutally beaten. Her companion and housekeeper, who had been cashing her checks and telling callers that Mrs. Logan was ill, was a woman on parole from a life sentence: Louise Peete, sixty-four, who twenty-four years earlier had been convicted of shooting a Los Angeles mining engineer and burying him in his own basement.
She was born Lofie Louise Preslar on September 20, 1880, in Bienville, Louisiana, the daughter of a prosperous newspaper publisher, and went through a series of marriages and names. Her first husband, Henry Bosley, whom she married in 1903, killed himself in 1906. In Texas she shot a man named Joe Appel, and the killing was ruled self-defense; accounts date it to 1912 or 1913. Harry Faurote, whom she married in 1913, died the same year. In 1915 she married Richard Peete.
In May 1920 she leased the house of Jacob Charles Denton, a wealthy mining engineer, at 675 South Catalina Street in Los Angeles. About two weeks later, on June 2, Denton disappeared. She stayed in the house, forged his signature, disposed of his property and told people he had gone away, then rejoined Richard Peete in Denver. In September Denton's lawyer had the house searched, and on September 23, 1920, an hour's digging in the basement turned up his body with a bullet in it. She was indicted on October 28. The trial before Judge Frank R. Willis drew crowds into the streets. On February 5, 1921, the jury found her guilty of first-degree murder and fixed the penalty at life imprisonment; she showed no emotion. She maintained that she had not killed Denton and gave some twenty conflicting accounts of what had become of him. Richard Peete wrote to her faithfully in prison, and in 1924, when his letters went unanswered, he killed himself.
She was a model prisoner and was paroled in April 1939, after eighteen years. Margaret Logan and her husband, Arthur, an elderly couple who had supported her while she was in prison, took her in as a housekeeper and companion in their Pacific Palisades home, knowing her record. Around the end of May 1944 Margaret Logan disappeared. Peete had Arthur Logan committed to a state hospital as insane, moved into the house with a new husband, Lee Borden Judson, whom she married that year, and kept up the story that Mrs. Logan was unwell. She was arrested on December 20, 1944, and Judson told the police what he suspected.
At her trial she said that Arthur Logan had killed his wife in a fit of insanity and that she had hidden the death because of her own record. Prosecutors drew the parallels with the Denton case, and on Monday, May 28, 1945, a jury of eleven women and one man in the court of Superior Judge Harold B. Landreth found her guilty of first-degree murder without recommending mercy, which meant death. Lee Judson, who had been cleared, killed himself soon afterward by jumping from the thirteenth floor of a Los Angeles office building. The Supreme Court of California affirmed the conviction on June 7, 1946, rejecting her argument that evidence of the Denton case should not have been used against her.
She was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin on April 11, 1947, at sixty-six, the second of the four women put to death in California's gas chamber. It took about ten minutes. As the matron and other prisoners wept, she told them not to be troubled. She is buried in the Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles.