On February 3, 1978, Rowland Stuart Taylor died in North Carolina while his girlfriend, Velma Barfield, was, as she put it, trying to nurse him back to health. He was a relative of a woman Barfield had cared for, and he had begun to suspect that she was forging checks on his account. She had been mixing an arsenic-based rat poison into his beer and tea. The autopsy found the arsenic.
Margie Velma Bullard was born on October 29, 1932, in Eastover, North Carolina, and raised near Fayetteville by a father who was reportedly physically abusive and a mother who did not step in. In 1949 she escaped by marrying Thomas Burke, and they had two children and were happy, by most accounts, until she had a hysterectomy and developed back pain. Her behavior changed, and she became addicted to prescription drugs. Thomas drank more and more, and their arguments grew bitter. On April 4, 1969, after he had passed out, she and the children left the house; when they returned, it had burned and he was dead. In 1970 she married a widower, Jennings Barfield. He died of heart complications on March 22, 1971.
In 1974 her mother, Lillian Bullard, went through a bout of violent diarrhea, vomiting and nausea and recovered within days. On a Christmas visit later that year she fell ill again with the same symptoms and died in the hospital on December 30. In 1975 Barfield was convicted of seven counts of writing bad checks and served three months of a six-month sentence.
In 1976 she went to work caring for Montgomery and Dollie Edwards in Lumberton. Montgomery fell ill and died on January 29, 1977. A little over a month later, Dollie developed the same symptoms Lillian Bullard had had and died on March 1. Barfield next took a job looking after Record Lee, seventy-six, who had broken her leg, and on June 4, 1977, Lee's husband, John Henry Lee, died after racking pains in his stomach and chest, vomiting and diarrhea. After Taylor, she confessed to killing her mother, Dollie Edwards and John Henry Lee. Jennings Barfield's body was exhumed and held traces of arsenic, a killing she denied. She was tried and convicted only for Taylor, and sentenced to death.
North Carolina had nowhere to hold a condemned woman, and she was kept at Central Prison in Raleigh in a section for escape-prone and mentally ill prisoners, the state's only woman on death row; a women's death row unit was later set up at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women. There she became a devout Christian and spent her last years ministering to other prisoners, work the evangelist Billy Graham praised. Her lawyers sought commutation to life, citing that ministry and the testimony of Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a New York University psychiatrist, who said Barfield had dissociative identity disorder and that her other personality, Billy, had told Lewis that Velma had been sexually abused and that Billy had killed the abusers. The judge was unmoved. "One of them did it," Lewis quoted him as saying. "I don't care which one."
Governor Jim Hunt, who was challenging Senator Jesse Helms at the time, refused clemency, and the decision became a political controversy. After her federal appeal failed, Barfield told her lawyers to drop a last appeal to the Supreme Court; she wanted to die with dignity. She was executed by lethal injection at Central Prison on November 2, 1984, the first woman put to death in the United States since the resumption of capital punishment in 1976, the first since 1962, and the first woman executed by lethal injection. "I know that everybody has gone through a lot of pain, all the families connected, and I am sorry," her statement said. Her last meal was Cheez Doodles and Coca-Cola. She had asked that her organs be used for transplants, but her heart could not be restarted, and only her corneas and some skin were donated. She was buried in a small rural cemetery near Thomas Burke. Jonathan Byrd, a singer-songwriter who is a grandson of Jennings Barfield by his first wife, later wrote a song about her, Velma.