The affectionately backhanded compliment “Beautiful Downtown Burbank” was coined on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and made legendary by Johnny Carson on his Tonight Show.
Long the home of movie studios and production companies, Burbank is over the hill from Hollywood in the also-maligned San Fernando Valley, but it wasn’t until we moved to Toluca Lake – right on Burbank’s southwest border – that I came to know Burbank’s quirky stores and wildly varied architecture. Best of all, it’s home to the oldest Bob’s Big Boy left in America!
With my background in true crime – some of you might remember my book The Alaskan Blonde – it wasn’t long before I was sitting at the microfiche reader in the Burbank Central Library and, fueled by beef and potato-filled piroshkis from the Armenian bakery nearby, began searching the local newspaper archives.
The most famous murder in Burbank’s history is the 1953 slaying of elderly Mable Monohan. One of her killers, Barbara Graham, was the subject of the melodramatic but sobering 1958 movie I Want to Live!, which was directed by Robert Wise and won the lead actress Oscar for Susan Hayward. Graham was one of just four women that’s ever been executed by the State of California, and her sentence was highly controversial.
Earlier than that in 1934, Burbank was where Nellie May Madison, convicted of murdering her husband, became only the second woman in California history to receive the death sentence. On the fatal night, many neighbors thought the shots they heard were from late-night filming at the nearby Warner Bros. studio. Madison however escaped the noose.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Burbank was a hunting ground for the Toolbox, Sunset Strip and Dating Game serial killers. “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez terrorized a victim here too, and sometimes it was disconcerting walking the quiet, leafy streets and then coming to a house or dead-end street where something terrible had happened.
There were plenty of other “regular” crimes too: family arguments that turned fatal, kidnappings, drug busts and – going back to the beginning of the last century – honest-to-goodness duels, and even an arrest for allowing a sick horse to roam free.
History Press had published several Burbank books by Wes Clark and his co-author, the late Mike McDaniel, but they featured little crime (after all this was safe, suburban Burbank, right?).
Once I knew it was not such a sleepy city, I reached out to History Press. The result is True Crime Burbank, a chronological look at the city’s darker deeds from early days to the 1980s. It features photos, police records and shocking headlines, and comes out August 18, 2026.
TRUE CRIME BURBANK
Genre: True Crime
Release: August 2026
Format: Print
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org
Burbank is known as a haven from the craziness of nearby Hollywood, but the city has a dark underbelly.
Nellie May Madison shot her husband to death at their home in 1934 and became the first woman to be condemned to death in California. The brutal 1953 murder of Mable Monohan inspired an Oscar-winning movie, but that didn’t save Barbara Graham and her killer collaborators from the gallows. In the decades that followed, infamous and violent offenders such as the “Dating Game Killer”, the “Toolbox Killers”, and “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez hunted for victims in the area, while slayings of detectives, private eyes, bookies and secret gamblers piled up in the cold case files of the police department.
About the author
James T. Bartlett is a British journalist and author. He wrote the Anthony Award-nominated true crime book The Alaskan Blonde, and the Gourmet Ghosts alternative guides to crime, ghosts, and the history behind Los Angeles bars, hotels, and restaurants. As a journalist he writes for the Los Angeles Times, BBC, The Guardian, Westways, Crime Reads, Tolucan Times and many others, and you can find out more at www.gourmetghosts.com and on Facebook and Instagram.