On June 21, 1996, the body of Clarence Goode, twenty-eight, was found in his car in a rough part of Baltimore, shot. Accounts of the wounds differ, one describing shots to the chest and back, another a shot to the head with the body in the trunk. A bag of cocaine had been tucked into his underwear, and to the Montgomery County detective Joe Mudano the scene looked staged to suggest a drug deal gone wrong. Three months earlier Goode had applied for a $100,000 life insurance policy naming as his sole beneficiary Josephine Virginia Gray, the cousin he had lived with since he was a teenager and, for the last six years, her lover.
She had been a suspect in a killing for more than two decades. Josephine Gray had been married to Norman Stribbling for about ten years and had five children with him when their marriage broke down in the mid-1970s. She was having an affair with William Robert Gray, and Stribbling told friends he had woken to find her pointing a gun at him. About a month later, on March 3, 1974, he was found shot to death in his car. She collected $16,000 as the beneficiary of his insurance. Investigators alleged that she and Robert Gray had offered two of her relatives $10,000 to kill him, and the two were charged with soliciting murder, but the case never came to trial because the key witnesses, as prosecutor James Trusty put it, dropped off the face of the earth. In August 1975 she and Robert Gray bought a house in Gaithersburg, using most of Stribbling's insurance money for the down payment, and three months later they married.
In the early 1980s her cousin Clarence Goode came from Brooklyn to live with the family, sent by his mother when he seemed to be going wrong. As his life improved, the Grays' marriage fell apart. In August 1990 Robert Gray moved out of the Gaithersburg house, telling relatives that his wife was trying to kill him and that she was having an affair with Goode. On November 9, 1990, he was found shot to death in his apartment. Despite being a suspect, she collected more than $54,000 from his life insurance policies, one of which paid off the mortgage.
According to prosecutors, she told a friend in 2000 that she had killed both her husbands and another man: that she shot Stribbling and left his body by the road to look like a robbery, that she killed Robert Gray with her boyfriend's help, and that she had to get rid of Goode because he threatened to blackmail her over Robert's murder. A co-worker she was seeing testified that she admitted being involved in Robert Gray's death. Police found Goode's bloodstains in her house and a nine-millimeter casing matching the one from his killing. She was said to have used voodoo to try to escape prosecution.
In January 2002 Montgomery County charged her with the murders of Stribbling and Robert Gray, but it was a federal case that convicted her. Indicted on five counts of mail fraud and three of wire fraud over the insurance paid on Robert Gray and Clarence Goode, she was found guilty on August 16, 2002, the jury finding that she had intentionally caused both deaths, which made her claims on their policies illegal. Evidence about Stribbling's death was admitted to show intent. On December 2, 2002, U.S. District Judge Deborah K. Chasanow, holding that she had committed premeditated murder and applying the guidelines for first-degree murder rather than fraud, sentenced her to forty years, with $170,000 in restitution. In 2005 the Fourth Circuit upheld the convictions but, after the Supreme Court's Booker decision, sent the sentence back, and in August 2006 Chasanow imposed forty years again. None of the murder charges ever produced a conviction.
In December 2024 she was among some 1,500 federal prisoners granted clemency by President Joe Biden. In all she had collected about $165,000 from the three deaths.