FLORIDA'S 'BLACK 
WIDOW' 
EXECUTED: 
JUDY BUENOANO

 

March 30, 1998
STARKE, Florida (CNN) -

Fifty-four-year-old Judy Buenoano, known as the "Black Widow," was executed in Florida's electric chair for poisoning her husband in 1971.
Buenoano, who was given the nickname by a Florida prosecutor who said she preyed off her mates and her young, was the first woman executed in Florida since 1848, and the third executed in the United States since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
She passed 13 years on Florida's death row writing letters, crocheting blankets and baby clothes, and maintaining her innocence.
"I have eternal security and I know that when I die I will go straight to heaven and I will see Jesus," she recently said.
That may be because she has never shown remorse and because of the nature of her crimes.
 


Unravelling her web of crimes
From 1983 to 1985, Buenoano faced three separate Florida juries who convicted her of crimes against her loved ones.
Pensacola prosecutor Russell Edgar, who gave Buenoano her spider nickname, says her motive was "twisted greed."
She collected more than $240,000 in insurance money from the deaths of her husband, a son, and a boyfriend in Colorado. Colorado never prosecuted her.
The crimes dated back to 1971, but Buenoano never aroused suspicion until 1983, when her fiancée John Gentry survived a car bombing attack in downtown Pensacola. During the investigation, Gentry told police that Buenoano had given him "vitamins" that made him sick.
She was sentenced to 12 years in prison for the car bombing, and Gentry's story about the vitamins led investigators to unravel a web of crimes against her family members.
In 1984, a jury convicted Buenoano of killing her partially paralysed 19-year-old son, Michael Goodyear, and sentenced her to live in prison. Prosecutors say she gave four different versions of what happened, but that she pushed him out of a canoe near Pensacola's East River in 1980.
"It wasn't an accident. The guy was paralysed," Edgar said. "He had 15 pounds of braces on his legs without a life jacket. He was taken up the river in a canoe and basically pitched out."
Goodyear's autopsy revealed traces of arsenic in his system. Although it was never proved, prosecutors believed his crippling illness resulted from her poisoning him.

"A person this cruel really needs to get what she deserves," said Ted Chamberlain, who investigated the case.
Michael's father, too Buenoano's death sentence resulted from a 1985 conviction for killing her husband of nine years, Air Force Sgt. James Goodyear. The elder Goodyear, Michael's father, died of arsenic poisoning in 1971, just three months after returning from a year's tour of duty in Vietnam.
Despite the convictions, Buenoano's daughter, Kimberly Hawkins, 30, steadfastly believes in her mother's innocence.
"She did things with us," Hawkins has told The Associated Press. "She worked a lot ... but she always made time for us."
Edgar says he feels sorry for Buenoano's surviving children but not for Buenoano herself.
"They're without a father, without a brother,
and now without a mother. And we lay it all
at Judy's feet. She did it."
Buenoano was electrocuted in Florida's 
electricchair. Two executions in the chair, including
one last year, resulted in fires, and state
officials were forced to examine whether using
chair. Two executions in the chair, including
one last year, resulted in fires, and state
officials were forced to examine whether using
it was cruel and unusual punishment. Florida's governor, Lawton Chiles, signed a bill continuing its use and adding the provision that if courts ever rule use of the chair unconstitutional, lethal injection would be the state's designated backup.
 
 
Questions:
FRANCESC ROBLES & FILIPP RAMÍREZ