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.
"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 |
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