Daddy Must Die: Youth, Gender, and Juvenile Rights in the 1933 Arizona Ouija Board Slaying

Doris Morgan Rueda (SLS Center for Law and History) will give a talk titled Daddy Must Die: Youth, Gender, and Juvenile Rights in the 1933 Arizona Ouija Board Slaying.

Doris Morgan Rueda will present a work in progress that examines gender and youth in the controversial murder trial and subsequent legal trials of a mother and daughter in 1933 Arizona. Dorothea Turley and her daughter Maddie were arrested in December 1933 after Maddie confessed to shooting her father under the direction of her mother and her mother's beloved ouija board. On vacation in the outskirts of Arizona during the Great Depression, the mother and daughter faced off against each other during Dorothea's trial and many times again in related civil suits as well as the court of public opinion. The various legal proceedings that followed the tragic shooting death of Ernest Turley shattered the Turley family irreparably and invites scholars to think critically about gender, age, and the many meanings of juvenile rights within the American legal landscape.