Santa Cruz, California. The ninth of September, 1933 — Admission Day, the state's own holiday — and up on Beach Hill, above the bay, the afternoon is coming down soft and warm. In the garden of a big house called "The Cabins," Francis J. M. Grace sits in his chair: fifty-nine years old, a millionaire, a retired shipping man of the Grace family, and a semi-invalid whose heart will not let him do much of anything anymore. His wife has driven downtown to shop, and the house is nearly empty but for a young nurse sitting with him. Then a woman comes up the path and stops at the edge of the lawn, and the nurse knows her: she used to work in this house, until she was let go. Grace gets up and crosses the lawn, and the two of them talk for two or three minutes — in full view, out of earshot. He comes back disturbed. The nurse asks the woman to leave, and is refused. And as the old man and the nurse start for the house, there is a shot. Grace lurches through the screen door and goes down in the hallway, his head in a pool of blood. The woman is standing a few feet away with the pistol in her hand. She does not run, and she does not deny it. She is asked why she has done this dreadful thing, and she says: "I had a reason." She says it again to the butler, who takes the gun out of her hands while she begs him for it back, saying she wants to kill herself; she says it to Mrs. Grace, coming up the drive; and she says it in the county jail that night: "I had a good reason for shooting Mr. Grace." Asked to explain, she says only: "You wouldn't understand it if I told you." Within minutes of the shot she had swallowed the sedative she carried in her purse, at the garden tap, and by nightfall she was unconscious. By then Santa Cruz had everything but the one thing it wanted: a discharged army nurse, a woman whose registry called her reputation "most excellent" — and, the prosecution would say, a woman who had taken rooms across the street from his garden seven separate times in fifteen months, under a false name, always the room that looked out on the lawn. Her name was Frieda Weltz, and by November she was on trial for first-degree murder in Santa Cruz — a charge that carried the death penalty — with the whole case come down to a trigger. The prosecutor told the jury that whatever had passed between this woman and this man "does not constitute a defense in this case," and that the court would instruct them to disregard it. So ten days of evidence went to the only question the law would let twelve people answer: whether the gun went off by itself, in a garden, in front of a witness. Eleven men and one woman sat in that box and heard a woman who had said, four times, that she had a reason — and for ten weeks nobody in Santa Cruz could get her to say the rest of it. What that reason was, and what a courtroom in 1933 was willing to do with it, is this story. The case file — every paper, every page, every source we could pin to the ground — is at Section29.com. Blog: Section29.com · YouTube: Forgotten True Crime · Facebook: Forgotten True Crime Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops — and if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think. Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio. Music by TrackTribe
