Nevada & Georgia : Women on the Gallows, 1873-1890

This episode of Foul Play explores two parallel cases of women executed in the American West and South during the late 19th century: Elizabeth Potts of Carlin, Nevada, and Susan Eberhardt of Webster County, Georgia. Both were convicted of murder in 1890 and 1873 respectively, though their circumstances differed vastly. Elizabeth Potts, a woman with a secret bigamous marriage and a body buried in her cellar for nearly a year, was the only woman ever executed in Nevada. Despite 267 neighbors petitioning for clemency and the sheriff calling the evidence against her insufficient, she was hanged. Susan Eberhardt, an 18-year-old illiterate farmhand, was coerced by her employer, Enoch Spann, who had already attempted to kill his wife and threatened to kill her if she resisted. She saved the victim’s life days before the murder and was forced to participate under duress. Though her jury deliberated for two hours—signaling doubt—and both juries petitioned the governor to spare her, she was executed anyway. The episode confronts the central question of American justice: how guilt is defined, who gets punished, and who decides. It reveals a pattern of systemic failure to recognize coercion, silence, and desperation in women’s lives, especially in frontier and post-Civil War contexts.