Gray was born in 1946 in Maryland. Her first husband, Norman Stribbling, was shot dead in 1974. Her second husband, William Robert Gray, was shot dead in 1990. Her boyfriend Clarence Goode was shot dead in 1996. She was a beneficiary of insurance on all three.
She was charged in the 1974 and 1990 deaths at the time and the prosecutions did not succeed; witnesses declined to testify, and in one case a witness's fear of her and of an associate was documented. No murder conviction was ever obtained. The Maryland press called her the Black Widow.
In 2001 federal prosecutors charged her with mail and wire fraud, on the basis that she had collected insurance proceeds on deaths she had caused. That is a distinction worth being clear about: the fraud case required the jury to find the killings as a predicate, but she was convicted of fraud, not of murder. She was sentenced on December 2, 2002 to forty years, and resentenced to forty years on August 7, 2006 after an appeal.
The range of two to three is a fair statement of a case in which three people were shot, one woman collected on all three, and no homicide charge ever stuck. The entry records the convictions she actually has.