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 a botched attempt on the life of her niece, who was twenty-nine, and who survived. It was the niece who exposed her.
She was arrested in 1988. In April 1989 she and Gordon pleaded guilty in Baltimore Circuit Court. She had at one point feigned insanity and claimed to be illiterate. Judge Elsbeth Levy Bothe imposed two consecutive life sentences and six concurrent ones. The Baltimore prosecutor, Jack I Lesser, said these 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 was already serving life without parole for an unrelated contract killing.
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, and in 1994 tried to sell her life story, before the publisher withdrew. She died in 2004, aged sixty-eight.
David Simon wrote about the case in Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, and it was loosely the basis of an episode of the television series drawn from that book.
The counting needs care. Most accounts give four murders and three attempted murders. One contemporary newspaper report of the guilty pleas describes them as pleas to killing three people and attempting to kill three others. The four named above are the four attributed, and that discrepancy is left as it stands.
Almost every field in the earlier version of this entry was wrong: her birth year, the year of conviction, the count, the method, and a death sentence that no source consulted records. The corrections are set out above.