LA Times highlights story of Alabama man who tried to kill his wife with rattlesnakes, was last person to be hung in California

LOS ANGELES, Calif. (WIAT) — The story of a man who was born to a sharecropper family in west Alabama and would later be tried in a highly-publicized trial over using rattlesnakes to kill his wife is being retold by the Los Angeles Times.

The piece, “When the evidence hissed: the snake-killer trial that led to California’s last hanging,” was written by LA Times staff writer Keri Blakinger and published Wednesday. In the piece, Blakinger highlighted the life of Robert James, better known as “Rattlesnake James,” who was executed by hanging on May 1, 1942, seven years after he and Charles Hope had a rattlesnake bite James’ wife, Mary Emma Busch, drowned her in the bathtub and dumped her body in a fishpond.

Busch was James’ fifth wife. In trial, prosecutors argued that James wanted Hope to kill his wife so he could collect a $5,000 life insurance policy on her.

“His journey to the scaffold wasn’t just strange — it was pure noir, ripped from the pages of a Raymond Chandler novel,” Blakinger wrote in the piece. “There was a dead blond beautician. A philandering husband. A double indemnity life insurance policy. And then there were the murder weapons: diamondback rattlesnakes named Lethal and Lightning.”

One moment during James’ trial was when one of the snakes was brought into the courtroom as evidence, subsequently letting itself loose in the room before handlers could take care of it.

James, who was born Major Raymond Lisenba before changing his name, was born in Hale County and grew up in Cottondale, along the outskirts of Tuscaloosa County. He married his first wife, Maud Duncan, in Birmingham in 1914, but she later divorced him when he refused to return home to her after serving in the Marine Corps during WWI.

By 1932, James had moved to California, where he worked as a barber. Before Busch’s death, investigators suspected that James also murdered his third wife, Winona Wallace, and staged it as a car accident before collecting life insurance on her.

Nonetheless, the rattlesnake trial lasted six weeks and was widely covered in the California press at the time. He was found guilty of murder in 1936 and sentenced to death by hanging.

“Despite his courtroom bluster, James went on to fight his death sentence,” Blakinger wrote. “At first, he claimed his confession had been beaten out of him. Then, he said the live snakes had frightened the jury, biasing them against him. His appeals made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, though in 1942, the justices upheld his guilt in a 7-2 decision.”

On May 1, 1942, James was hung at San Quentin State Prison, where it took 13 minutes for him to die due to a shoddy scaffold.

Read the full story here.