Criminalware - The Crime of Mayhem a.k.a. Hell Hath No Fury

Oh my, the hat!

The book that sparked Criminalware, 1886 Professional Criminals of America, was filled with men. Out of the 204 criminals presented in the book, only 18 of them were female. While crime is a mostly male endeavor, women are capable of committing crime, too. There is an old adage that "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," and Bertha Boronda's fury against her husband's cheating kept him from ever cheating again.

On the evening of May 29, 1907, Frank Boronda and his wife ate dinner, went to the theater and then returned home. After returning home, according to Bertha, she confronted her husband by asking him if he still loved her. While he was a firefighter, and required to sleep at the firehouse, he had previously come home for meals. When Frank quit coming home for meals, and then suddenly traveled to Oakland for an overnight trip, she became suspicious that he was having an affair.

Later that night, Bertha took a straight razor to Franks manhood. While he lay there bleeding, she told him to be quiet and she would get the doctor. However, she did not. She ran to Frank's nephew, who lived nearby, and told him "Frank is hurt." She then disappeared into the night. Somewhere along the way, Bertha had changed into men's clothes to avoid detection by the police, trying to make her way to Mexico.

She was eventually found by the police near the train tracks and arrested, charged with the crime of mayhem. At the time, the legal definition of mayhem was: "Every person who unlawfully and maliciously deprives a human being of a member of his body or renders it useless, or cuts or disables the tongue, or puts out an eye, or slits the tongue, nose, ear or lip, is guilty of mayhem". And a "member of his body" she did render useless.

Her crime, of course, made headlines in the local paper. This made finding a jury challenging. Everyone in San Jose and all the surrounding towns knew of the crime. Since women were not allowed to serve on juries until 1917, her jury, judge, prosecutor, and lawyer were all men. Though testimony and evidence both showed she committed the act, she swore under oath she had no recollection of the events of that evening. The jury did not buy her claims of insanity, and convicted her of mayhem.

She was sentenced to 5 years at San Quentin Prison and was received there on February 29, 1908, which happened to be leap day. Bertha would not serve out her entire sentence. She was paroled on good behavior from San Quentin on December 20, 1909. From the day of her arrest through the day of her parole, her entire incarceration totaled 2 years, 6 months, and 20 days. She was formally discharged from San Quentin on September 19, 1911.

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Click on the thumbnails to read more about the case.

A big thank you to the California State Archives for the stylish mug shot used for this project and the University of California - Riverside's California Digital Newspaper Collection for the newspaper articles.