8 MAY 22-28, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | it was all of the negative things. She was the leader of this gang and the most vicious woman in the world. That’s all that I knew,” DeOliveira explains. “The family didn’t want anyone to know about it.” “I thought it was super cool,” says DeO- liveira’s daughter, 56-year-old Christine Ca- mara. “This woman who looked just like my mom, but was the complete opposite, very unlike our normal rule-following family.” Some of their extended family members claim to have information about what hap- pened to Jarman — half-siblings who think she lived on the run until she was over 100, cousins who insist she was smuggled into a bomb shelter and stayed there — but the truth is obscured by interpersonal confl icts and contradicting accounts, DeOliveira says. LaVerne and his brother, LeRoy, were adamantly against anyone digging into their mother’s whereabouts. After LeRoy passed in 1993, his son asked the governor of Illinois to grant Jarman clemency (an act inspiring the newspaper article that DeOliveira’s son found). The clemency request was unsuc- cessful. At the time, LeRoy’s son said he believed Jarman was still alive, but that he had never met her and wasn’t in contact with her. He claimed Jarman used to communicate with his father using coded classifi ed ads in newspapers like the Kansas City Star, and that LeRoy dug a tunnel beneath his garage, hoping to one day sneak Jarman inside, but she never came. Another family member, Jarman’s sister- in-law, once told reporters that she had met up with Jarman in 1975 at a bus station in Sioux City, Iowa. She said Jarman asked about how her sons were doing and reported that she was unmarried and working as a waitress in an- other town, but that Jarman didn’t want to let them know where she was going. None of her relatives have ever revealed where Jarman ended up — if anyone even knows. “You have to go back to the sons. They controlled it,” DeOliveira says of her father and uncle. “LaVerne and LeRoy would not have di- vulged anything. They were super protective, just dead set against any publicity or any research at all. LeRoy’s son waited until his dad died before he went for clemency because his dad would not allow it.” But once they learned about the Blonde Tigress, DeOliveira’s children and grandchildren wanted to know more. For decades, they asked DeOliveira questions about her grandmother, and for decades, she re-read the same old articles and re-heard the same family stories, trying to fi nd answers for them. One day, her search yielded a new result: Pettem’s book. Finding Marie Millman Pettem and two assisting re- searchers spent more than two years combing through newspaper archives, court transcripts, prison records and genealogical databases to piece together Jarman’s life, crimes and possible fi nal whereabouts. The grandson who re- quested clemency for Jarman told reporters in 1994 that she used the alias “Marie Mellman or Millman.” Pettem searched for records of every woman named Marie Mellman or Marie Millman in the United States within Jarman’s general age range. She then eliminated those who were recorded in the federal 1940 census, as Jar- man was recorded while in prison. Finally, she removed the Maries with documented parents or siblings, and who married into the last name Mellman/Millman. That left only one candi- date: Marie Millman of Den- ver, Colorado. She fi t the profi le in many ways. According to Pettem’s research, she lived alone and had no known family. She was unmarried and worked as a waitress, matching what Jar- man’s sister-in-law said about their 1975 meeting. Her social security num- ber was issued in Missouri, aligning with the grandson’s claim that Jarman communicated with LeRoy using coded ads in the Kansas City Star. And she had no employment or housing records prior to 1951, fi tting the timeline from an FBI wanted poster, which said a complaint made in January 1952 alleged that Jarman had fl ed Illinois. DeOliveira says she fully believes that Millman is her grandmother. Beyond that, she adds that she is “grateful” for Pettem’s book because it is the fi rst thing she’s ever read about Jarman that showed her compassion. Jarman was a 32-year-old mother of two in the midst of the Great Depression, separated from her alcoholic husband who had previously been arrested for nonsup- port. She met her lover and eventual partner-in-crime, George Dale, the winter be- fore their 1933 robbery spree. He helped support her and her sons after she had lost her job. The couple soon turned to crime to make ends meet. During the dozens of robberies, a man named Leo Minneci reportedly drove the getaway car as Jarman stood lookout and Dale acted as the gunman. In their fi nal caper, Dale shot and killed an elderly storekeeper, though media coverage of the mur- der case disproportionately revolved around Jarman. A Colorado headline from the time reads, “Woman Bandit is Sentenced to 199 Years in Prison,” relegating Dale’s death sentence to a subhead. “I believe that she was a victim,” Pettem says. “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong guy. ...Nobody cared about reading about George, so she got all the press. They sensationalized ev- erything to sell newspapers.” Jarman’s “Blonde Tigress” moniker came from newspaper reports that said she at- tacked the storekeeper “with the savagery of a tigress,” accusing her of beating him as he lay dying and naming her the leader of the gang of robbers. Pettem disputes those claims, pointing to their absence from police records and offi cial witness testimonies dur- ing Jarman’s trial. “She wasn’t this horrible, most dangerous woman in America,” Pettem says. “I believe that she was just an ordinary woman. She went along with George to go on these rob- beries for survival. She was trying to support her kids.” “The Blonde Tigress sells. Ordinary does not sell. But for me, ordinary was just such a blessing,” DeOliveira notes. “It was a relief to actually hear that she was a good person. She was a good mother. ...And if it turns out that it wasn’t her, Marie, I’m still satisfi ed because I found out what kind of person she was.” There are some potential holes in Pettem’s theory. Millman was supposedly born in 1908, while Jarman was born in 1901. Millman died in 1980, thirteen years before Jarman’s grandson petitioned for her clemency under the belief that she was still alive. Pettem’s conclusion also rests entirely on the accuracy of the alias, which came second-hand from the grandson, who said he got the name from his father, LeRoy. Pettem argues that the differing birth years are fi tting for a woman on the run. “If you’re faking your ID and you’re living under an alias, you’re not Blonde Tigress continued from page 6 continued on page 10 A 1953 wanted poster for Eleanor Jarman. It was issued after a complaint fi led in January 1952 alleged that Jarman had left Illinois. In 1951, Marie Millman appeared in Colorado. FBI Pat DeOliveira poses with a photo of her grandmother, Eleanor Jarman. CHRISTINE CAMARA
