For love and desperation!

In Lousiana in the 1940s Toni Jo Henry commits a gruesome murder. She shoots an innocent man. For the legal system it's straightforward: the 26 year old Toni Jo should go to the electric chair. On the 28th November 1942 she is excecuted.

Victim dead, murderer dead, case closed. But what drove this pretty as a picture woman to do it?

Anne-Beatrice, as she was christened, is just 6 years old when her beloved mother dies. The child is forced to leave school and goes to work in a pasta factory. Any perspective for education and a future vanishes...

Shortly afterwards she looses the only security she has; her home. Her father can't accept the new family situation. He drinks and beats his children. At the age of 13 the young girl runs away only to find a far worse place in the world.

With her new name, Toni Jo tries her luck as a prostitute. As if that weren't enough she comes into conflict with the law and also gets involved in the underworld and drug milieu.

Right here in this hopeless world she meets a man who will turn her life upside down: Cowboy Claude Henry!

For the first time in years Toni Jo feels loved and even believes in a better life. They get married and everything is good...

No, of course not. Cowboy Henry isn't exactly a saint. In a bar room fight he kills a former policeman Arthur Sinclair and is sentenced to 50 years in jail. And all dreams of a carefree life come to an end. There will be no happy family, no peaceful home and happy children.

So in fact the happiness was built on sand. Toni Jo refuses to believe it. On the brink of despair she decides to free Cowboy Henry from prison. She kidnaps, together with her accomplice Arkie, the passerby Joseph P. Calloway and they take his car to drive to the Bexar County Prison, where her love is captured.
Till this day, we do not know what brings her to shoot in cold blood the driver Joseph P. Calloway. Maybe she couldn't resist the situations pressure or was carried to an extreme and so, in this moment, not longer herself.