Unwitting pioneer of the battered-woman defense

Convicted of murder, she was sentenced to death. In 1935, the state Supreme Court upheld the sentence -- the first time it had done so against a woman.

Madison's aloofness earned her such newspaper monikers as "Sphinx Woman" and "Iron Woman." Unlike other female defendants, she didn't flirt or cry fetchingly. Supposedly on the advice of her lawyers, she lied on the witness stand, omitting the circumstances of the killing and claiming that the dead man in her apartment was a stranger.

Her conduct alienated nearly everyone.

"They really wanted to nail her," said Cal Poly San Luis Obispo history lecturer Kathleen A. Cairns. "They didn't like her lifestyle [nor] the fact that she didn't break down and cry."

Cairns learned of Madison's case when she ran across "Newspaperwoman," the 1949 autobiography of legendary Herald-Express editor Aggie Underwood. Motivated to know more, Cairns wound up writing "The Enigma Woman: The Death Sentence of Nellie May Madison," which is scheduled for publication this spring by the University of Nebraska Press.

Cairns' research took her from Madison's birthplace to her forgotten grave.

"Nellie had been an ambitious, free-spirited young woman, full of optimism for the future," Cairns said in a recent interview. "She also had lousy taste in men."

She was born Nellie May Mooney in Red Rock, Mont., in 1895. The youngest child of Irish immigrant ranchers, she was an expert horsewoman and a crack shot, Cairns says.

In 1908, at age 13, she eloped with a man 11 years her senior.

"It was her family's first serious warning of the reckless and impulsive streak that would cause them, and her, so much anguish and grief," Cairns wrote.

Nellie's parents had the marriage annulled and brought her home. She attended business school in Boise, Idaho, where she married twice more.

Nellie and husband No. 3 moved to Los Angeles in 1920. But he walked out, Cairns says, and Nellie divorced him in 1924.

She soon married the brother of her divorce attorney. Husband No. 4, William Brown, was a lawyer too. The couple lived in a middle-class neighborhood and spent weekends at a friend's ranch in Frazier Park.