Geraldine Brown Parrish was born in rural North Carolina on May 2, 1936, into a poor family with several brothers and sisters. Little else is recorded of her early life. She became a self-ordained storefront preacher in east Baltimore.
From the late 1970s her relatives described a change in her manner towards them. In the early 1980s she began urging relatives, friends and acquaintances to take out life insurance policies naming her as the only beneficiary in the event of an untimely death, and then arranged for the deaths.
The killings were done by two men she paid. Edwin Bernardo Gordon, who was twenty, was paid more than two thousand dollars to shoot Frank Lee Ross, forty-six, a former husband of one of her sisters, on November 12, 1985. On October 6, 1986 Albert Robinson and Parrish's own brother, Ronald Brown, were killed by Lionel Robinson, who was no relation to the victim. On March 6, 1987 her housekeeper, Helen Wright, sixty-five, was killed, and afterwards Parrish collected more than ten thousand dollars on her policy.
She was also convicted over the botched attempts on the life of her niece, who was twenty-nine. The niece was shot in the head on two separate occasions and on another had her throat slit, and survived all three. It was the niece who exposed her.
She was arrested in 1988. In April 1989 a Baltimore jury convicted her of arranging the killing of a New Jersey man for his insurance, and the following month she and Gordon pleaded guilty in Baltimore Circuit Court to three murders and three attempted murders, in what prosecutors likened to a brokerage deal trading in lives. She had at one point feigned insanity and claimed to be illiterate, and had faked seizures in court. Judge Elsbeth Levy Bothe imposed two consecutive life sentences and six concurrent ones, eight life terms in all. The prosecutor, Jack I. Lesser, said they were some of the most unbelievable murderers he had seen and that he could not believe how vicious and cold-blooded they had been. Gordon, twenty-three and already serving life without parole for an unrelated contract killing, received six concurrent life terms.
Two things about the case attracted attention beyond Baltimore. She had married at least eight men, four of them within eighteen months, and a nephew who married her said he had been put under her spell by a root woman in North Carolina who he believed had doctored a meal of barbecued goat meat; that is what produced the voodoo widow name in the local press. And when the authorities searched a paupers' cemetery for the body of one of her victims, they exhumed the wrong body twice.
She served her sentences at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women at Jessup, as prisoner number 906-073. In 1994 she sued a Woodlawn woman in Baltimore Circuit Court, claiming she had reneged on a deal to pay $100,000 for the rights to her life story. She died in 2004, aged sixty-seven or sixty-eight.
David Simon wrote about the case in Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, in which Detective Donald Waltemeyer twice went to exhume one of her victims and twice found the wrong man, and the first season of the television series drawn from the book, Homicide: Life on the Street, based its character Calpurnia Church on her.
The counting needs care. Most accounts, including the Baltimore Sun's, give four murders and three attempted murders. The wire reports of the guilty pleas describe pleas to killing three people and attempting to kill three others, with the fourth murder the one the jury had convicted her of the month before. The press gave her age at the pleas as fifty-four, which does not fit a 1936 birth date.