On the night of June 25, 1983, Judy Buenoano told John Gentry, the Pensacola wallpaper businessman she lived with, that she was pregnant, and sent him out for champagne to celebrate. She had told him where to park. When he turned the key, dynamite wired to the ignition blew his car apart in a restaurant parking lot. Gentry, thirty-seven, survived with massive internal injuries. She was not pregnant. She had, it turned out, booked a cruise, and since November 1982 she had been telling friends that Gentry was terminally ill. He told investigators she had been giving him vitamin capsules, and that the two of them had taken out life insurance on each other; the policy on him was worth about half a million dollars.
The capsules held arsenic and paraformaldehyde. A search of her home turned up wire and tape matching the bomb, and federal agents traced the dynamite to an acquaintance of hers in Alabama with whom she had exchanged many phone calls. She was arrested in July 1983 for the attempted murder of Gentry. Until the bombing no one had investigated the deaths around her. Now her first husband, her son and a former boyfriend were exhumed.
She was born Anna Lou Welty in Quanah, Texas, on April 4, 1943, the youngest of three children. Her mother died when she was four and she was sent to her grandparents. When her father remarried, she joined him and her stepmother in Roswell, New Mexico, where, by her account, they starved her and worked her like a slave. At fourteen she spent two months in jail for attacking her stepmother, and afterward chose reform school, graduating in 1960. She became a nursing assistant, and in 1961 gave birth to a son, Michael, out of wedlock, a fact she was said to resent for the rest of his life.
She married James Goodyear, an Air Force sergeant. He died in Orlando on September 16, 1971, of what was taken for natural causes, and she collected on his insurance. She then moved in with Bobby Joe Morris in Trinidad, Colorado, who died in January 1978. That year she legally changed her name to Buenoano, a mangled Spanish rendering of Goodyear. Both exhumed bodies held fatal levels of arsenic. By the time Colorado connected her to Morris she was already under sentence of death in Florida, and she was never tried for him. Another boyfriend, Gerald Dossett, was exhumed as well, with no charges, and she was suspected in a 1974 death in Alabama.
Around 1979 Michael fell severely ill and was left paraplegic, able to move only with heavy metal braces on his arms and legs. His exhumed body also showed arsenic. On May 13, 1980, she took him and his younger brother James canoeing on the East River near Milton, Florida. The canoe rolled. She and James came up from under it. Michael, nineteen, with no life jacket and weighed down by his braces, drowned. She used his life insurance to open a beauty salon. At one trial two witnesses testified that she had admitted killing him.
In 1984 juries convicted her of murdering Michael, for which she was sentenced to life, and on October 18 of attempting to murder Gentry, for which she got twelve years. She was also convicted of grand theft by insurance fraud and was thought to have set fires for insurance money. In 1985 she was convicted of the first-degree murder of James Goodyear, and on November 26, 1985, sentenced to death. "I didn't ever kill anybody, Judge Thompson," she told the court. "I didn't kill my husband. I didn't bomb Mr. Gentry's car." She asked him to spare her life.
She spent thirteen years on the women's death row at Broward Correctional Institution. In her last appeals she argued that an FBI crime-lab chemist, Roger Martz, had given unreliable evidence against her and had tampered with Gentry's capsules; the Florida courts rejected it. She was fifty-four when she was put to death in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on March 30, 1998. Her last meal was steamed broccoli, asparagus, strawberries and hot tea. Asked for any last words, she said, "No, sir." She was the first woman executed in Florida since 1848 and the first woman electrocuted in the United States since executions resumed in 1976. The press had long called her the Black Widow.