Before she was electrocuted, Rhonda Belle Martin tucked a note into her Bible. She had written and signed it a year earlier, on October 14, 1956, and prison officials found it there. At her death, it said, she wanted her body given to a scientific institution, "especially to see if someone can find out why I committed the crimes I have committed. I can't understand it, for I had no reason whatsoever." She had poisoned her mother, two of her husbands and three of her daughters with rat poison, and tried to kill a third husband, who was also her stepson.
She was born Rhonda Belle Thomley in Alabama on November 4, 1906; some accounts give 1907. She married five times: W. R. Alderman in 1922, George Garrett in 1928, Talmadge John Gipson briefly in 1939, Claude Carroll Martin in 1950, and, eight months after Claude's death, Claude's son Ronald. She had seven children, and five of them died before they were twelve. She worked as a waitress, in Montgomery at the time of her arrest.
The deaths began with her three-year-old daughter, Emogene Garrett, in 1937. George Garrett died in 1939. Ann Carolyn, six, followed in 1940, Ellyn, eleven, in 1943, and her mother, Mary Frances Gibbon, in 1944. Each was put down to illness. Claude Martin, a man of fifty-one, died in 1951. Martin later confessed to feeding arsenic rat poison to all six. She denied killing two other children who had died young, and prosecutors did not charge her with them.
It was Ronald Martin who survived. He fell ill while the couple was living in Mobile, and the illness left him a paraplegic. Investigators looking into it found arsenic and began to look back at the deaths around his wife. She was arrested in March 1956 and signed a statement admitting the poisonings, and on May 19, 1956, she was charged with the murders of George Garrett, Emogene, Carolyn, Ellyn, her mother and Claude Martin.
She was tried for Claude Martin's murder alone, convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Prosecutors put the motive down to insurance. She never gave one beyond the note. On October 11, 1957, she was strapped into the electric chair at Kilby Prison, a Bible in her hand, and 2,200 volts were sent through her body. She was pronounced dead six minutes later. She was fifty, and she was the third and last woman to die in Alabama's electric chair before the United States Supreme Court halted executions in 1972.