Too Close to Home

Based on a real-life incident. In 1958, Elizabeth Ann Duncan hired farmhands Augustine Baldonado and Luis Moya to murder her pregnant daughter-in-law out of jealousy of her son, Frank, an attorney. As in the film, Frank met his wife, a nurse, while visiting his mother in a hospital after her suicide attempt, a ploy to keep him from leaving home. He represented his mother during the appeals process, but not at her trial. Elizabeth, Baldonado, and Moya were executed in San Quentin's gas chamber on August 8, 1962. Convinced of his mother's innocence, Frank's last-ditch appeal for a stay of execution before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit failed.