Josephine Virginia Gray was never convicted of murder. In 2002 a federal jury in Maryland convicted her of five counts of mail fraud and three counts of wire fraud. The charges rested on a claim that the government had to prove to the jury: that she intentionally caused the deaths of her second husband, William Robert Gray, in 1990, and of her cousin and partner, Clarence Goode, in 1996, then hid her role from the insurance companies that paid on their lives. Evidence about the 1974 shooting death of her first husband, Norman Stribbling, was put before the jury for a narrower purpose, to show her motive and intent. The trial judge then found, for sentencing, that the two killings charged in the indictment were premeditated, and sentenced her to 40 years in prison.
The case reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit twice. In 2005 the court upheld every conviction but sent the sentence back after the Supreme Court changed the federal sentencing rules. In 2007 it affirmed the same 40-year term. On December 12, 2024, President Joe Biden signed a group clemency warrant that commuted her term of confinement to expire on April 11, 2025, leaving her supervised release in place. She did not face a murder trial in state court; accounts differ on whether Maryland ever filed murder charges against her.
Court papers list her as Josephine Virginia Gray, also known as Josephine Mills and Josephine Stribbling. She lived in Montgomery County, Maryland, the suburban county northwest of Washington, D.C.; in 2006 the U.S. Attorney's Office gave her age as 60 and her home as Wheaton. Little of her early life appears in the court record. Her date and place of birth were not given in the appeals opinions; the Free Beacon gave her age as 78 in December 2024.
The opinions describe three men in her life over more than two decades. The first was Norman Stribbling, her first husband. The second was William Gray, who went by Robert and whom she married in 1975. The third was Clarence Goode, her cousin, who lived in the Gray household and who, by the court's account, became her partner.
Norman Stribbling held a life insurance policy with John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company, and his wife was the beneficiary. He was found shot dead in Montgomery County early on March 3, 1974. His widow filed a claim, and John Hancock later sent her a check for $16,000. The U.S. Attorney's Office noted in 2006 that she was suspected in his death but was not convicted of it.
While still married to Stribbling, the Fourth Circuit wrote, she had been having an affair with Robert Gray. In August 1975 the couple bought a house in Gaithersburg, Maryland, paying most of the down payment with the money from Stribbling's policy. They married in November 1975.
No one was tried for Stribbling's death. Its circumstances came into court only in 2002, when the federal judge let the prosecution present some of the evidence about it. Two men testified that she had tried, without success, to hire them to kill Stribbling for money. Another witness said she had offered money for an alibi. A fourth said that she had admitted shooting him. The jury was told it could weigh that evidence only for what it showed about her motive and intent in the conduct charged over Robert Gray's death, and for no other purpose.
Robert Gray carried two policies that mattered to the later case. A Minnesota Mutual policy would pay off the mortgage on the Gaithersburg house if he died, with anything left over going to his spouse. An accidental death policy with the Life Insurance Company of North America, known as LINA, named his wife as beneficiary.
By 1990 Clarence Goode was living with the couple; the U.S. Attorney's Office said he and Josephine Gray lived together from 1990 to 1996. In August 1990 Robert Gray left the house. He told relatives that his wife was trying to kill him and that she was having an affair with Goode, according to the Fourth Circuit. He removed her as beneficiary on two other policies and asked family and friends to help him avoid an attack.
Late in August he went to the authorities. In one criminal complaint he accused his wife of assaulting him at his workplace. In another he accused Goode of threatening him at his house. On October 5, 1990, he appeared in court on those complaints, and the case was continued. That afternoon, he told police, his wife's car came up behind his on the drive home and she signaled him to pull over. When he did not, she pulled alongside, and Goode threatened him from the passenger seat. Warrants were issued for both. He told two relatives and a police detective about the October incidents, and told a relative that Goode had threatened him on another occasion that fall.
The trial on his complaints was set for November 16, 1990. Robert Gray was found shot dead on November 9, 1990, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office; the Fourth Circuit put his death about a week before the trial date.
Josephine Gray told police she had nothing to do with his death. Witnesses contradicted her account of the weapon, and police recovered evidence from her that the prosecution linked to the killing. She gave an alibi, which other witnesses at the 2002 trial contradicted. No one was charged with the killing at the time.
Under Maryland law, an insurer will not pay a beneficiary who wrongfully caused the death of the insured. Minnesota Mutual and LINA both relied on local police to tell them whether she had been involved, the court said.
Minnesota Mutual paid about $51,625 to Perpetual Savings Bank, which held the mortgage, and the house was then sold at what the court called a significant profit. The policy was worth more than the mortgage, and the company owed the rest to the surviving spouse, but it did not pay for about ten years because it did not know where she was. In 2001 federal agents gave the company her current address. It sent her a form letter and claim form. She called to ask whether the policy carried a double benefit for accidental death; it did not. She mailed in the form, called the next week to check on it, and in time received a check for more than $2,400. The U.S. Attorney's Office put her total from Robert Gray's policies at more than $54,000.
She had filed a claim under the LINA policy in May 1991. LINA did not pay, because it suspected her. After her federal indictment it asked her to give up her claim, and when she refused it filed an interpleader action, a suit asking a court to decide who was entitled to the money. She counterclaimed for the full benefit and her lawyer's fees. LINA's legal costs came to more than the policy was worth. When the other possible beneficiaries dropped out, LINA paid her $2,000.
In March 1996, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Clarence Goode applied for a $100,000 life insurance policy with Interstate Assurance naming her as sole beneficiary. According to the Fourth Circuit, after she threatened him, Goode closed the bank account that paid the premiums. In June 1996 Interstate wrote to him that the policy would lapse after a 60-day grace period. His mail went to her address.
Goode was found shot dead in Baltimore on June 21, 1996. Before his death he had told a relative that he planned to visit Josephine Gray. Police later found physical evidence the prosecution used at trial. In its statement of the facts, the Fourth Circuit wrote that she killed him shortly after learning that the policy might be cancelled.
She filed a claim with Interstate in September 1996. The company refused to pay because it suspected her, and after two years with no arrest it filed an interpleader action in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City. Her lawyer mailed her answers to that court; in them she flatly denied any part in Goode's death. Because no one could then prove otherwise, the parties settled. The Fourth Circuit gave the payment to her as $99,990; the U.S. Attorney's Office said the insurer paid her $90,000 and paid Goode's young son the remaining $10,000.
The Free Beacon reported in 2024 that she collected about $165,000 in all from insurance on the three men.
Soon after Goode's death she began seeing a new boyfriend. She showed him a copy of Goode's policy, the Fourth Circuit recounted, and said she would buy him a new Mustang GT with the money. She did not buy the car, but she asked about insurance on his life.
A woman who met her in the late summer of 2000 became a friend who talked with her by phone and sometimes visited her house. This friend testified that Gray asked her to help get a policy on the boyfriend's life through a company in Virginia. When federal agents first contacted the friend in February 2002, she asked at once about him, worried that he might be in danger too.
The friend also gave the jury the account at the center of the government's case. During one visit, she said, Gray was clearing out a cluttered room and came back with newspaper articles about her past arrests, which reported that she had killed her former husbands. When the friend asked whether the stories were true, Gray said she was going to tell her something she had never told anyone, and asked her to keep it to herself. Then, the friend testified, Gray said calmly that she had killed both of her husbands and another man. According to that testimony, Gray said she shot Stribbling, whom she described as abusive, and made it look like a robbery. She said she had help with Robert Gray, and that the help came from Goode. Goode later tried to blackmail her for part of the insurance money, the friend recalled her saying, and so she "had to get rid of" him too.
A federal grand jury in Maryland indicted her on eight counts. The case, numbered 8:01-cr-00566, was assigned to U.S. District Judge Deborah K. Chasanow in Greenbelt and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Sandra Wilkinson and James Trusty, after an investigation the U.S. Attorney's Office credited to the FBI and the Montgomery County and Baltimore City police departments. Chuck Shepherd's syndicated column, printed by the Orlando Weekly in January 2002, reported the indictment that month and noted that she had been charged over the insurance money, not the killings themselves. The column also reported that relatives had been unwilling to testify against her over the years.
Counts One through Four charged a scheme to defraud Minnesota Mutual and LINA of the benefits paid on Robert Gray's death. They rested on calls and mailings in April and May 2001 connected with the claim for the leftover Minnesota Mutual money. Counts Five through Eight charged a scheme to defraud Interstate Assurance of the benefits on Goode's death; two of them rested on the court papers mailed to Baltimore in the interpleader case.
The indictment alleged that she "intentionally caused the death" of each man and then hid her part in it from the insurers, denying any involvement in claim forms, phone calls and court filings. The Fourth Circuit later summed up what that meant at trial for the Robert Gray counts: the government was required to prove that she intentionally killed him and then intentionally concealed that from Minnesota Mutual and LINA.
Her defense, as the appeals court described it, was that she was a passive beneficiary and that Robert Gray's death had nothing to do with her. Against that, the judge allowed the prosecution to put in the evidence about Stribbling's death: the medical evidence, the two men who said she had tried to hire them, the alibi offer and her reported admission. The judge excluded other evidence about Stribbling, limited how much the prosecution could present and instructed the jury on its limited use.
The judge also admitted Robert Gray's own statements from the last three months of his life: his two criminal complaints and what he had told relatives and a detective. Statements by a person who is not in court are usually barred as hearsay. They came in under a rule of evidence that strips a defendant of that objection when her own wrongdoing was meant to, and did, keep the witness from testifying. The judge found, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Robert Gray was killed before his November 1990 court date, after she knew he was a witness against her.
One gap appeared late in the trial. Defense counsel moved for acquittal on the two counts built on the interpleader mailings, arguing that the government had not proved the papers were mailed. The judge held the motion and let the prosecution reopen its case to call her former civil lawyer, who testified that he mailed them to the Baltimore court. The motion was then denied.
The jury returned its verdict on August 16, 2002, convicting her on all eight counts. Judge Chasanow sentenced her to 40 years in prison, three years of supervised release and $170,000 in restitution, with an $800 special assessment.
The fraud guideline alone would not have produced anything close to 40 years. The court reached that term in two ways. The first used a cross-reference in the federal sentencing guidelines to the guideline for first-degree murder, which applies when the conduct behind a fraud amounts to murder. That required the judge to find that the intentional killings of Robert Gray and Goode were premeditated. The second, offered in the alternative, started from the fraud guideline, added increases for more than one victim and for possessing a firearm, and then departed upward because of the premeditated killings. Both routes reached the same offense level.
Either way, the Fourth Circuit later noted, her sentence rose because of a finding of premeditation that the jury had not been asked to make.
Her appeal was heard by Judges H. Emory Widener Jr. and Dennis Shedd and District Judge James C. Cacheris, sitting by designation. Judge Shedd wrote the opinion, issued April 29, 2005, as United States v. Gray, 405 F.3d 227.
The court rejected every challenge to the convictions. The insurers had a property interest the fraud laws protect, because her conduct caused them to pay and took away their control over their own money. There was enough evidence that she meant to defraud Minnesota Mutual: she lied to police, gave a false alibi and hid her role when she claimed the leftover benefit. The judge could consider the former lawyer's testimony after reopening the case. The Stribbling evidence was relevant, necessary and reliable, and the limiting instruction kept it from being unfairly prejudicial. Robert Gray's statements were properly admitted; the court held that the forfeiture rule applies whenever a defendant's wrongdoing was meant, at least in part, to keep a witness from testifying, whatever the charges at the later trial.
The sentence was another matter. Early in 2005, in United States v. Booker, the Supreme Court had held that the mandatory federal guidelines violated the Sixth Amendment when judge-found facts raised a sentence. Gray had not objected on that ground at sentencing, so the court's review was limited to plain error. It found one: her sentence had been raised on a fact the jury did not find, and the error affected her substantial rights. The court vacated the sentence and sent the case back for resentencing under Booker.
On remand Judge Chasanow again sentenced her to 480 months, or 40 years. She applied the 2000 edition of the fraud guideline, avoiding a later version that could have raised the base level and broken the constitutional bar on ex post facto punishment. She again applied the cross-reference to first-degree murder and, as an alternative ruling, imposed the same term as an upward variance from the advisory range of 135 to 168 months that would otherwise have applied.
Gray appealed again. She accepted that the murder cross-reference applied but argued that the indictment showed only an intentional killing, which would point to the guideline for second-degree murder. She also argued that due process forbade the judge from finding the facts behind her sentence by a preponderance of the evidence. A panel of Judges William Traxler and Dennis Shedd and District Judge Norman K. Moon rejected both points in an unpublished opinion on November 5, 2007. The indictment, the court wrote, "clearly depicts conduct of premeditation and deliberation by the defendant," so the first-degree murder guideline was correct. And a district court, even after Booker, may make factual findings about sentencing factors by a preponderance of the evidence. Because the cross-reference was proper, the court did not need to decide whether the alternative variance was reasonable. The 40-year sentence was affirmed.
The record on state charges is not consistent. The Free Beacon reported in 2024 that Maryland authorities had charged her with murder, and that she did not face a murder trial in state court after the state's attorney said the federal sentence ensured she would die in prison. The U.S. Attorney's Office, in its 2006 release, said that state charges were never brought against her. Neither gives dates, counts or a formal outcome for any state case, and no state court tried her for murder.
She served part of her sentence in home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Free Beacon.
On December 12, 2024, ABC News reported that President Biden had commuted the sentences of 1,500 people who had been placed on home confinement during the pandemic and had pardoned 39 others. The White House called it the largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history, and Biden said the people whose sentences he commuted had shown successful rehabilitation and commitment to making their communities stronger and safer.
The clemency warrant Biden signed on December 12, 2024, published by the Office of the Pardon Attorney, lists Josephine Gray among those whose total sentence of confinement was commuted to expire on April 11, 2025. The warrant left each person's term of supervised release intact. On December 18, 2024, the Free Beacon reported the commutation of her 40-year sentence, noting that the White House had described the grants as aimed at people convicted of non-violent crimes. James Trusty, the former federal prosecutor who tried the case in Greenbelt, told the Free Beacon that he learned of the commutation from a court docket alert. He said her record "puts the lie to" the claim that the recipients were non-violent offenders, and that the decision did not "feel like a 'rule of law' moment."
The courts drew careful lines in her case. A jury found her guilty of mail and wire fraud on charges that included, as an element the government had to prove, that she intentionally caused the deaths of Robert Gray and Clarence Goode. A judge found, by a preponderance of the evidence and for sentencing, that those killings were premeditated, and the Fourth Circuit upheld that finding. Stribbling's death was presented only as evidence of motive and intent; no court tried her for it. Her reported statements to the friend who testified about all three deaths reached the jury as testimony, not as findings. No state court tried her for murder.
March 3, 1974: Norman Stribbling, her first husband, found shot dead in Montgomery County, Maryland; John Hancock later pays her $16,000.
August 1975: She and Robert Gray buy a house in Gaithersburg with most of the insurance money; they marry in November 1975.
August 1990: Robert Gray leaves the house, tells relatives she is trying to kill him, and files complaints against her and Clarence Goode.
October 5, 1990: Court hearing on his complaints is continued; that afternoon, he reports, Goode threatens him from her car; warrants issued.
November 9, 1990: Robert Gray found shot dead, a week before the November 16 trial date on his complaints.
May 1991: She files a claim under Robert Gray's LINA policy.
March 1996: Goode applies for a $100,000 policy with Interstate Assurance naming her as sole beneficiary.
June 21, 1996: Clarence Goode found shot dead in Baltimore.
September 1996: She files a claim on Goode's Interstate Assurance policy; Interstate later settles for $99,990.
Late summer 2000: She meets the friend who later testifies against her.
April and May 2001: Calls and mailings over the leftover Minnesota Mutual benefit, later charged as fraud.
January 2002: Federal indictment reported.
August 16, 2002: Jury in Greenbelt convicts her on five counts of mail fraud and three of wire fraud; later sentenced to 40 years.
April 29, 2005: Fourth Circuit affirms the convictions, vacates the sentence under Booker.
August 7, 2006: U.S. Attorney's Office announces that Judge Chasanow has resentenced her to 40 years.
November 5, 2007: Fourth Circuit affirms the 40-year sentence.
December 12, 2024: President Biden's clemency warrant commutes her confinement to expire April 11, 2025, supervised release left in effect.
December 18, 2024: The Free Beacon reports the commutation.