In Search of the Blonde Tigress: The Untold Story of Eleanor Jarman

Pettem (Cold Case Chronicles) stumbles in this poorly sourced true crime account of a forgotten cause célèbre from the 1930s. Eleanor Jarman was born Ella Marie Berendt in Iowa in 1901, the youngest of 10 children. After having two sons, Jarman moved to Chicago, where she began sharing rooms with George Dale, a factory worker turned thief. In 1933 she joined Dale and another man in a series of robberies, one of which resulted in the death of a shopkeeper. Dubbed the Blonde Tigress by the press, Jarman was found guilty at a jury trial and sentenced to 199 years in prison. But in 1940 she escaped prison with a fellow inmate, never to be caught. Pettem believes that Jarman made a new life for herself as a waitress in Denver, Colo., and died in 1980, but the evidence for that is thin at best: the waitress’s first name was Jarman’s ultra-common middle name (Marie), and she worked at diners in Denver as Jarman had done in Chicago. As well, Pettem gives no sources for her regular references to what someone who lived decades ago was thinking, and frequently leans on “maybe” and “perhaps” to qualify her narrative. There’s a fascinating story here, but Pettem drops the ball in telling it. (May)