Judias Anna Lou Welty was born in Quanah, Texas, on April 4, 1943, into a poor and violent household, and served time as a teenager for assaulting her stepmother and half-siblings.
In 1971 her husband James Goodyear, an air force sergeant, died in Orlando after a short illness of unexplained cause. She collected on three insurance policies. In 1978 a man she lived with, Bobby Joe Morris, died in Colorado in similar circumstances. Both were later found to have died of arsenic poisoning.
Her son Michael Goodyear had been left paraplegic and unable to use his hands by an illness that began in 1979, which was arsenic. In May 1980 she took him out in a canoe on the East River in Florida, wearing heavy leg braces, and it capsized. He drowned. She and another son were unhurt. There were insurance policies on Michael.
In 1983 her fiance John Gentry survived a bomb placed in his car; he had also been unwell for months after she gave him what she said were vitamin tablets. That investigation brought the rest of it out.
She was convicted in 1984 of the attempted murder of Gentry and of the murder of her son, and in 1985 of the murder of her husband, for which she was sentenced to death. She was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on March 30, 1998, the first woman executed in Florida since 1848 and the third in the United States since 1976. The press called her the Black Widow.