Early on the morning of November 2, 1984, North Carolina put Velma Barfield to death at Central Prison in Raleigh. No woman had been executed in the United States since 1962, and none since the Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in 1976. The women who followed her into a death chamber came slowly. Judy Buenoano, electrocuted in Florida in 1998, was the third. Aileen Wuornos, executed in the same prison in 2002, was the tenth. When Texas executed Kimberly McCarthy in 2013, the Associated Press counted her as the thirteenth.
Five of those cases follow, from three states and three decades. Two of the women were poisoners whose crimes went unnoticed for years. One shot men she met on Florida’s highways. One died insisting she had not killed her husband and children. One was executed for the murder of a neighbor, with two older deaths she was indicted for but never tried laid before the jury that sentenced her.
Margie Velma Bullard was born on October 23, 1932, on a small tobacco and cotton farm in rural South Carolina, one of nine children, according to the State Library’s NCpedia and the University of North Carolina Libraries. She grew up in Robeson County, North Carolina, married young and raised two children in Parkton. A defense physician later testified that her abuse of prescription drugs had gone on for more than ten years before the death that brought her to trial.
That death was Stewart Taylor’s. Taylor was a farmer from St. Pauls, in Robeson County, and her fiance; news and library accounts spell his first name Stuart. Early in 1978 he discovered that checks had been forged on his account. Barfield bought an ant poison containing arsenic and put it in his food and drink. On the witness stand she said she had meant only to make him sick enough that he would not go through his canceled checks. He died in the hospital on February 3, 1978, and an autopsy found arsenic.
On March 13, 1978, she gave Robeson County sheriff’s officers four statements. She admitted poisoning Taylor and three others: her mother, Lillie McMillan Bullard, who died in December 1974; Dolly Taylor Edwards, an elderly woman in whose home she had worked, who died in 1977; and John Henry Lee, whose household she had also served, who died in June 1977. "I had given poison to people before and they died," she told the officers, as the North Carolina Supreme Court later recorded. Exhumations found arsenic in all three, and in the remains of her second husband, Jennings Barfield, who had died in 1971. She denied poisoning him. The only murder charge she ever faced was for Taylor.
She was tried in Bladen County after a change of venue. The jury heard the earlier deaths as evidence of intent and of a common plan: in each household, the State argued, she had forged checks and turned to poison when discovery threatened. It convicted her of first-degree murder, and on December 2, 1978, Judge Henry A. McKinnon sentenced her to death. The North Carolina Supreme Court affirmed in 1979, and the federal courts refused relief in 1982 and 1983.
On death row she became a born-again Christian and ministered to other prisoners and to guards, NCpedia records. The evangelists Billy and Ruth Graham supported her plea for clemency. The decision belonged to Governor Jim Hunt, who was then in the last weeks of a campaign to unseat Senator Jesse Helms. In late September 1984 he refused, calling her crimes deliberate and too serious to justify a life sentence, United Press International reported. The daughter of one of the people who died called the decision "very courageous." On November 1 the Fourth Circuit turned down her last appeal. "This case has not been characterized by any rush to execution," the judges wrote.
She was executed by lethal injection the next morning, at 52. She was the first woman in the United States put to death by that method. In October 2026 WLOS reported that she remained the only woman North Carolina had executed since 1976.
Judias Buenoano, known in Florida as Judy, married James Goodyear in 1962, according to a history of the case published by the federal court in Orlando. Goodyear was an Air Force sergeant who served in Vietnam. He died at 37 on September 16, 1971, in the naval hospital in Orlando. No one suspected poison at the time.
Her elder son, Michael Goodyear, joined the Army in 1979 and was found to be suffering from arsenic poisoning. It left him with severe nerve damage, and he needed heavy leg braces to walk, the First District Court of Appeal recorded. On May 12, 1980, he was discharged into his mother’s care. The next day she took him and his younger brother fishing on the East River in Santa Rosa County, and the canoe they were in overturned. A fisherman pulled the mother and the younger boy from the water. Michael, 19, drowned. Her accounts of the accident did not agree with one another, and she was the beneficiary of several policies on his life.
Nothing came of either death until 1983. On June 25 that year a bomb went off in the car of her fiance, John Gentry, near Pensacola. He was critically injured and survived. Investigators learned that capsules she had given him months earlier had made him ill, and that she had persuaded him to insure his life for her benefit. They began looking back. In 1984 James Goodyear’s body was exhumed in Orlando, and tests found that he had died of arsenic poisoning. A former partner, Bobby Joe Morris, had died in Trinidad, Colorado, in the late 1970s; his remains were exhumed the same year and showed acute arsenic poisoning.
Three Florida counties tried her. A Santa Rosa County jury convicted her on March 31, 1984, of the first-degree murder of her son and of grand theft from an insurer, and she was sentenced to life. An Escambia County jury convicted her on October 18, 1984, of the attempted first-degree murder of John Gentry; she received 12 years. On November 1, 1985, an Orange County jury found her guilty of the first-degree murder of James Goodyear, and on November 26 the judge sentenced her to death. She was never charged in Morris’s death. The Deseret News reported at her execution that she had been suspected of killing a boyfriend but was not charged because she had already been sentenced to die.
The Eleventh Circuit rejected her federal case in 1996. At the end her lawyers attacked the FBI laboratory work on Gentry’s capsules, after a Justice Department report had criticized the chemist who did it. On March 26, 1998, the Florida Supreme Court refused to stop the execution, finding that the chemist had not testified in the Orange County trial and that the jury there had heard ample other evidence of her guilt.
A month earlier Texas had executed Karla Faye Tucker, and Buenoano, like Tucker, described herself as a born-again Christian. In prison she crocheted blankets and baby clothes. Guards brought her into the death chamber at Florida State Prison at 7:02 a.m. on March 30, 1998. Asked whether she had a final statement, she answered, "No, sir." She was pronounced dead at 7:13 a.m., at 54. She was the first woman Florida had executed since 1848, when an enslaved woman named Celia was hanged, CBS News reported.
Aileen Carol Wuornos was born in Michigan on February 29, 1956. Between late 1989 and late 1990, seven middle-aged men who had given her a ride on or near Florida’s highways were shot and robbed. Richard Mallory, 51, of Clearwater, was last seen on November 30, 1989, and was found dead in Volusia County on December 13. David Spears, 43, of Winter Garden, was found in Citrus County on June 1, 1990. Charles Carskaddon, 40, had set out from his mother’s house in Missouri to bring his girlfriend home from Tampa; he was found in Pasco County on June 6. Peter Siems, 65, of Jupiter, left home that June and was reported missing; his body has not been found. Troy Burress, 50, of Ocala, was found in Marion County on August 4. Charles Richard Humphreys, 56, known as Dick, had just marked his 35th wedding anniversary when he was found in Marion County in September. Walter Antonio, 62, of Brevard County, was found in Dixie County in November 1990.
The killings crossed six counties, and for months each was handled on its own. The break came from the case without a body. Siems’s car was found wrecked at Orange Springs on July 4, 1990, and witnesses had seen two women walk away from it. Composite sketches went out that November. Pawn records gave investigators a name: Wuornos had left a thumbprint on the ticket when she pawned Mallory’s camera. On January 9, 1991, she was arrested in Port Orange, near Daytona Beach, on an outstanding warrant for carrying a concealed firearm. Her former companion agreed to help the police, and after a series of recorded telephone calls Wuornos confessed on videotape. She said she had shot every man in self-defense.
She was tried first for Mallory’s murder, at DeLand, before Judge Uriel Blount. Over defense objections the jury heard evidence of the other killings, admitted to rebut her claim of self-defense. Wuornos was the only defense witness; she told the jurors that Mallory had attacked her and that she fired to save her life. On January 27, 1992, they convicted her of first-degree murder and armed robbery, and on January 31 Judge Blount sentenced her to death. She never went to trial again. On March 31, 1992, she pleaded no contest to the murders of Humphreys, Burress and Spears, and she later pleaded guilty to the murders of Carskaddon and Antonio. By February 1993 she held six death sentences. She was never charged in the death of Peter Siems, which she admitted.
In November 1992 a Dateline report revealed that Mallory had been convicted in Maryland in 1957 of a sexual offense against a woman and had spent about ten years in custody, a record the jury never heard. Her lawyers argued that it should overturn the verdict. No court agreed. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed all six death sentences between 1994 and 1996. Concurring in the Mallory appeal, Justice Gerald Kogan wrote that the facts presented "two quite different pictures of Aileen Wuornos," one of a woman who had lived a life of victimization and one of a calculating killer.
In 2001 she asked to end her appeals and dismiss her lawyers. At a hearing on July 20, 2001, she told Circuit Judge Michael Hutcheson that she had killed the men to rob them and had lied at trial. "I am a serial killer. I would kill again," she said. He found her competent, and on April 1, 2002, the Florida Supreme Court dismissed her remaining appeals. Governor Jeb Bush signed her death warrant that September. When her last lawyer, Raag Singhal, raised "grave doubts" about her mental state, the governor stayed the execution and ordered an examination. Three psychiatrists concluded that she understood she would die and why. State Attorney John Tanner, who watched 30 minutes of the interviews, called her "cognizant and lucid," CBS News reported, and the stay was lifted.
She was executed at Florida State Prison and pronounced dead at 9:47 a.m. on October 9, 2002. She was 46. In her final statement she said she was "sailing with the Rock," a reference to Christ. Dick Humphreys’s daughter, who watched, called it "a little bit too easy." Wuornos was the second woman Florida had executed since 1976, after Buenoano.
On April 7, 1987, a police officer answering a report of a possible shooting at a Houston apartment complex found Frances Newton, then 21, with a cousin. Her husband, Adrian Newton, her son, Alton, who was 7, and her daughter, Farrah, who was 21 months old, had been shot dead, according to Amnesty International. Prosecutors said she killed them to collect about 100,000 dollars in life insurance on her husband and her daughter, The Austin Chronicle reported. She was arrested about two weeks after she filed a claim and was charged with capital murder. She said her husband owed money to a man the police never interviewed.
The weapon the State relied on was a pistol recovered from a burned, abandoned house that belonged to her parents. Her cousin testified that Newton had carried a bag into another house shortly before the two of them went to the apartment. Newton’s account was that she had found the gun among her husband’s things and hidden it. A prosecution expert found nitrites near the hem of her skirt and said they were consistent with a gun fired close by. Defense experts later said fertilizer could explain them; Farrah had spent that day with an uncle who kept a large garden. No blood was found on Newton’s clothing, and no residue on her hands or the sleeves of her sweater.
Her court-appointed lawyer, Ron Mock, admitted before trial that he had not spoken with the prosecution’s witnesses or subpoenaed any for the defense. The judge removed him, then refused a continuance, and Newton went to trial with Mock after all, the Chronicle reported. The State Bar of Texas disciplined him repeatedly in later years and suspended him until late 2007. A Harris County jury convicted her in October 1988, and she was sentenced to death.
The doubts gathered over the following years. An investigating officer had told Newton and her father that two guns were recovered, and at trial he said there had been "mention of a second one." The district attorney’s office insisted there was only one. The tests of 1987 had used up the nitrite particles, and because the skirt had since been stored with the victims' bloodstained clothing, it was no longer fit for retesting. The case also leaned on the Houston Police Department crime laboratory, whose reputation The Austin Chronicle described as damaged by repeated charges of shoddy work; an independent audit in March 2003 had found serious defects in its DNA section. In October 2004 a judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals called for a halt to executions that rested on that laboratory’s evidence until the evidence was checked.
Newton was to die on December 1, 2004. That day Governor Rick Perry, on the recommendation of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, granted a 120-day reprieve so the evidence could be tested again. He said he saw no "evidence of innocence." The retesting confirmed the pistol as the murder weapon. On August 24, 2005, the Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed her latest appeal, Judge Cathy Cochran writing that the evidence was "more than sufficient." Her lawyers, led by David Dow of the Texas Innocence Network, pressed the claim that the second gun had been concealed from the defense. The board voted 7 to 0 against clemency, and the federal courts and the Supreme Court turned down her final appeals.
She was executed by lethal injection at Huntsville on September 14, 2005, at 40, after eighteen years in which she maintained her innocence. She was the third woman put to death in Texas since executions resumed in 1982 and the first Black woman executed in the state since the Civil War, The Austin Chronicle reported.
Dorothy Booth was 71, a retired college psychology professor who lived in Lancaster, a suburb about 15 miles south of Dallas. Kimberly McCarthy lived next door. McCarthy, born in 1961, was a former nursing home therapist who had become addicted to crack cocaine. On July 21, 1997, according to the federal courts' account of the State’s case, she came to Booth’s door asking to borrow sugar. Booth let her in, and McCarthy stabbed her to death, took her purse and her diamond wedding ring, and drove away in her car. Over the next two days she pawned the ring for 200 dollars and used Booth’s credit cards. Police found her name on the pawn receipt and arrested her on July 24. In her kitchen they found a knife stained with Booth’s blood. Booth’s daughter later remembered her as "an incredible person who was taken before her time."
A Dallas County jury convicted McCarthy of capital murder on November 17, 1998, and she was sentenced to death. On December 12, 2001, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the conviction, because a detective had questioned her after she asked for a lawyer, and the written statement he took had been used against her at trial. A second jury convicted her again in November 2002 without the statement and returned answers that sent her back to death row.
At both sentencing hearings the State put before the jury the deaths of two elderly Dallas women in December 1988, Maggie Harding, 81, and Jettie Lucas, 85. The Associated Press reported that DNA evidence in blood linked McCarthy to both. She was indicted for the two killings but never tried, and she denied any part in them. Prosecutors suggested she may have killed them to pay for drugs. Because no jury ever decided those charges, they remain accusations.
The retrial jury had eleven white members and one Black member, Amnesty International and the AP reported. McCarthy was Black and Booth was white, and her trial lawyer did not challenge the prosecution’s jury strikes. Her appeals failed in the state and federal courts between 2004 and 2012. Execution dates in January and April 2013 were withdrawn, the first less than five hours before it was due, so that her lawyers could pursue a claim of racial bias in jury selection and while the Legislature considered death penalty bills. In June 2013 her lawyer, Maurie Levin, argued that prosecutors had excluded Black jurors and that her earlier lawyers had failed to raise it. On June 24 the Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed the application on procedural grounds without reaching its merits.
McCarthy was executed by lethal injection at Huntsville on June 26, 2013, and pronounced dead at 6:37 p.m. She was 52. "This is not a loss, this is a win," she said in her final statement, and she spoke of going home to Jesus. She was the first woman executed in the United States since Teresa Lewis in Virginia in September 2010, and her death was the 500th execution in Texas since 1982. Booth’s godson, speaking for the family, said the number 500 was "just a number." "We’re just thinking about the justice that was promised to us by the state of Texas," he said. The family had waited sixteen years.
• October 23, 1932: Velma Barfield is born in rural South Carolina.
• September 16, 1971: James Goodyear dies in the naval hospital in Orlando.
• December 1974 to June 1977: the deaths of Lillie McMillan Bullard, Dolly Taylor Edwards and John Henry Lee in North Carolina, later confessed to by Barfield.
• February 3, 1978: Stewart Taylor dies; an autopsy finds arsenic.
• December 2, 1978: Barfield is sentenced to death.
• May 13, 1980: Michael Goodyear drowns in the East River, Santa Rosa County.
• June 25, 1983: a bomb injures John Gentry near Pensacola.
• March 31, 1984: Buenoano is convicted of murdering her son.
• November 2, 1984: Barfield is executed in Raleigh.
• November 26, 1985: Buenoano is sentenced to death for James Goodyear’s murder.
• April 7, 1987: Adrian, Alton and Farrah Newton are shot dead in Houston.
• October 1988: Frances Newton is convicted in Harris County.
• December 1988: Maggie Harding and Jettie Lucas are killed in Dallas.
• November 30, 1989, to November 1990: seven men are shot after giving Aileen Wuornos a ride.
• January 9, 1991: Wuornos is arrested near Daytona Beach.
• January 31, 1992: Wuornos is sentenced to death for Richard Mallory’s murder.
• July 21, 1997: Dorothy Booth is killed in Lancaster, Texas.
• March 30, 1998: Buenoano is executed in Florida’s electric chair.
• November 17, 1998: McCarthy is convicted of capital murder.
• July 20, 2001: a Florida judge finds Wuornos competent to end her appeals.
• December 12, 2001: McCarthy’s first conviction is reversed.
• October 9, 2002: Wuornos is executed.
• November 2002: McCarthy is convicted again at retrial.
• December 1, 2004: Governor Rick Perry grants Newton a 120-day reprieve.
• September 14, 2005: Newton is executed in Huntsville.
• June 26, 2013: McCarthy is executed, the 500th execution in Texas since 1982.