In 1958, the main courtroom at the Ventura Courthouse was the site of the nationally publicized murder trial of Elizabeth Ann Duncan. Duncan was accused of hiring two men to kidnap and kill her daughter-in-law, a nurse named Olga Duncan. The daughter-in-law was six-and-a-half months pregnant and was beaten with a wrench, pistol-whipped, strangled and dumped in a shallow grave off Casitas Pass Road. The coverage of the trial was so extensive that an extra 150 seats were added to the 99 seats in the courtroom, and a table for dozens of reporters was set up along the front rail. After a five-week trial, which included evidence that Duncan had previously hired a man to pose as her son to seek an annulment of the marriage, Duncan was convicted. After appeals were denied, Duncan and her two co-defendants were executed in the gas chamber in August 1962.