Velma Barfield was executed at Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina, on November 2, 1984. She was 52, a grandmother, and the first woman put to death in the United States since 1962. She was also the first woman in the country executed by lethal injection, and she remains the only woman North Carolina has executed since the death penalty returned in 1976.
She was executed for one killing. A jury convicted her in 1978 of the first-degree murder of Stewart Taylor, her fiance, who died after she put an arsenic-based ant poison in his beer and tea. In statements to sheriff's officers before her trial, she said she had also poisoned three other people, including her own mother. Those deaths were put before the jury as evidence of her intent, but she was never charged with them, and no court ever tried her for them.
Margie Velma Bullard was born on October 23, 1932, according to the State Library's NCpedia biography and the University of North Carolina Libraries. Both say she was born on a small tobacco and cotton farm in rural South Carolina, one of nine children, and was raised in a strict Pentecostal household. A 1998 North Carolina Department of Correction review of Jerry Bledsoe's book about her says she grew up in Robeson County, North Carolina, where she suffered under an abusive father and resented her mother for not stopping him. Joseph Ingle, a prison minister who later worked on her clemency petition, wrote in 1989 that her family had histories of violence and sexual abuse.
At 17 she left school to marry Thomas Burke. They had two children and lived in Parkton, in Robeson County, for more than fifteen years. The NCpedia account, by Biff Hollingsworth and Tim West, says Thomas Burke was badly hurt in a car accident in 1965 and afterward drank heavily and used drugs. The Department of Correction review says that after a hysterectomy and back pain, Velma's own behavior changed and she became dependent on drugs. Ingle cites a defense physician, Dr. Selwyn Rose, who later testified that her prescription drug abuse had gone on for more than ten years before Taylor's death.
Thomas Burke died in a fire at the family home. NCpedia dates the fire to 1969 and says he died of smoke inhalation while Velma was away, and that a second fire some months later burned the house to the ground. The Department of Correction review dates his death to April 1965 and says Velma and the children had left the house while he was passed out drunk and came back to find him dead and the house burned. She was never charged in connection with his death, and in her later statements she denied any part in it.
In August 1970 she married Jennings Barfield, a widower. He died on March 21, 1971; NCpedia gives the cause recorded at the time as heart failure. She then moved in with her parents in Fayetteville. Her father died of lung cancer.
Her mother, Lillie McMillan Bullard, died in December 1974. NCpedia says she died within two hours of being admitted to the hospital, that doctors could not identify the illness, and that no autopsy was done. Four years later, in a statement to sheriff's officers, Velma Barfield said she had poisoned her mother. The North Carolina Supreme Court's opinion records the State's evidence that she had forged a check against her mother and feared it would be discovered.
In 1975 she served time in prison for writing bad checks. NCpedia gives the term she served as six months.
In the years that followed, Barfield worked as a live-in caregiver for elderly people around Lumberton. A UPI report in 1984 described two of the people who died as Lumberton residents she cared for as a private nurse, and Governor Jim Hunt, explaining his refusal of clemency, described them as two elderly people who had hired her as a live-in nurse.
Montgomery Edwards, 94, died in January 1977, and his wife, Dolly Taylor Edwards, 84, died in late February 1977, according to NCpedia, which spells her first name Dollie. The court records name Dolly Taylor Edwards as one of the people Barfield poisoned. During the investigation a deputy found an empty bottle labeled "Singletary's Rat Poison" behind the Edwards house, and Barfield told officers she had bought a bottle of poison at a local store. Of Mrs. Edwards she said, "I knew what I gave her caused her death."
She next worked in the home of John Henry Lee and his wife, Record Lee. John Henry Lee died in June 1977; NCpedia says doctors diagnosed only a severe stomach virus. The State later proved that Barfield had forged a check on the Lees' account, made out to a local supermarket. She told officers she had poisoned John Henry Lee. She denied poisoning Record Lee, who survived.
The court opinions and news reports say little about who the Edwardses and the Lees were, beyond their ages and their homes near Lumberton. A daughter of the Lees testified at the trial about a forged check, as did Taylor's daughter.
Stewart Taylor was a farmer from St. Pauls, in Robeson County. UPI described him in 1984 as Barfield's fiance; other accounts call him her boyfriend. He had a grown daughter, who later testified at the trial.
By early 1978, Taylor had discovered that checks had been forged on his account. Barfield herself testified that he found the forged checks and threatened to report her, that she forged again, and that she wanted to make him sick enough that he would not go through his cancelled checks. On the way home from a medical appointment in Lumberton, she bought a bottle of Terro, an ant killer containing arsenic, at a drugstore. She put it in his food and drink, including his tea and his beer. On the stand she said she "did intend to give it to him," but she said she meant only to make him ill, and that she planned to nurse him back to health. A UPI report on the 1983 federal appeal summed up her account the same way.
Taylor became sick. NCpedia says he first complained of stomach pain at a revival meeting in Cumberland County. He was taken to the hospital once and released; the Fourth Circuit noted that his doctors did not suspect arsenic and that Barfield did not tell them. On February 3, 1978, he was brought back to the hospital by ambulance. A rescue squad member testified that Taylor's arms and legs had to be held down in the emergency room. He died at the hospital. His daughter later testified that when she collected his wallet, it held two dollars.
An autopsy found arsenic. NCpedia says the autopsy was ordered after a tearful telephone call from Barfield's own sister to the Lumberton police; the court opinions do not describe how suspicion first fell on her. Three pathologists later testified at the trial to the cause of death, each relying on an autopsy.
The investigation was handled by Robeson County sheriff's deputies, among them Officers Lovette and Parnell, whom the North Carolina Supreme Court names. On March 10, 1978, they talked with Barfield at the Robeson County Sheriff's Department, and she denied any involvement. Three days later, on March 13, she came back, accompanied by her son, and gave the officers four separate statements, about the deaths of Taylor, John Henry Lee, her mother and Dolly Edwards. In one of them she said, "I had given poison to people before and they died."
Her account of that morning was disputed later. At a pretrial hearing she testified that she had taken several prescription drugs before the interview, among them Valium, Tranxene, Elavil and Sinequan, that she had not been read her rights, and that an officer had told her it would be easier on her if she told everything. Her son testified that she was unsteady and that he found a pill container in her hand. The officer testified that she was upset and crying but not under the influence, that she was warned of her rights on March 10 and again on March 13, and that no promises or threats were made. The trial judge found the statements voluntary, and the state Supreme Court upheld that finding.
The other bodies were exhumed. According to the Fourth Circuit, all four of the earlier deaths the State relied on, those of her mother, Jennings Barfield, Dolly Edwards and John Henry Lee, were examined after exhumation, and the autopsies showed arsenic poisoning. Barfield admitted poisoning three of them. She denied poisoning Jennings Barfield.
On March 28, 1978, she was indicted in Robeson County for the first-degree murder of Stewart Taylor. It was the only charge of murder she ever faced.
The case drew heavy coverage in Robeson County. A Lumberton radio station and the newspapers of Robeson and the surrounding counties reported on it, and her lawyer asked to move the trial. Judge Hobgood first moved it to Scotland County, then to Bladen County, because Scotland County had limited court time and about twenty other defendants already in jail waiting for trial there.
Her court-appointed lawyer, Robert D. Jacobson, learned that she was suspected of at least four other poisoning deaths and asked the court for a second lawyer. The request was denied, and he represented her alone through the trial and the first appeal. Ingle wrote that he had never handled a capital case before. The state Supreme Court, by contrast, called his work "high quality."
Three psychiatrists examined her before trial. Dr. Bob Rollins of the forensic unit at Dorothea Dix State Hospital found her competent, able to tell right from wrong, and without mental illness at the time of the poisoning. Dr. A. Eugene Douglas, who examined her on the court's order, agreed. Dr. Anthony Sainz found no mental illness but described a passive-aggressive personality with immature judgment. Sainz fell ill with tuberculosis, and his testimony was taken by deposition in his hospital room on November 30, 1978.
The trial opened at a special criminal session of Bladen County Superior Court on November 27, 1978, before Judge Henry A. McKinnon. The prosecutor was District Attorney Joe Freeman Britt.
The State's case went beyond Taylor's death. Over defense objection, the jury heard evidence of the four earlier poisoning deaths and of the forgeries that came before them. The pattern the prosecution laid out, and the state Supreme Court later accepted, was that in each case she had lived or worked in the person's home, that she forged checks on the person's account to get money, and that once the forgery was found out, or she feared it would be, she obtained poison and gave it to the person. The one exception the court noted was Dolly Edwards. The money, the State said, paid for her addiction to prescription drugs. Taylor's daughter identified a check for 300 dollars, dated January 31, 1978, that she had found in her father's bank statement. Record Lee's daughter identified a 50 dollar check drawn on the Lees' account.
Barfield testified in her own defense. She admitted buying the Terro and putting it in Taylor's food and drink, and said she had meant to make him sick, not to kill him. The Supreme Court later pointed out that this conflicted with what she had told the officers, that she had given poison to people before and they had died, which showed she knew what the poison could do.
The defense also argued that she was not responsible because of her mental state. The judge refused to put an insanity defense to the jury, because all three psychiatrists had found that she knew right from wrong, and there was no evidence that she did not understand what she was doing. The state Supreme Court later upheld that ruling.
The jury found her guilty of first-degree murder. At the sentencing phase, the prosecution offered no new evidence. The defense presented her long overuse of prescription drugs and her need for money to buy them, and asked the jury to find that she had acted under mental or emotional disturbance and with impaired capacity. The jury found no mitigating circumstances. It found three aggravating circumstances: that the murder was committed for pecuniary gain, that it was committed to hinder the enforcement of the law, and that it was especially cruel within the meaning of the state's capital statute. It recommended death.
On December 2, 1978, Judge McKinnon sentenced her to death by asphyxiation. She was received into the state prison system on December 4, 1978, according to the Department of Adult Correction.
Ingle wrote that the prosecutor portrayed her as a cold-blooded killer who enjoyed watching her victims die. Her later lawyers argued that withdrawal from prescription drugs during the trial may explain behavior that jurors saw, including laughing at the prosecutor. The Department of Correction's 1998 review of Bledsoe's book says Britt presented evidence that she had killed her mother, her second husband, John Henry Lee and Dolly Edwards.
The North Carolina Supreme Court heard her automatic appeal and stayed her execution while it did. On November 6, 1979, in State v. Barfield, it found no error. Justice Britt wrote the opinion, and Justice Brock took no part. The court ruled against her on every point.
It held that the trial judge had not abused his discretion in refusing a second lawyer, in moving the case to Bladen County rather than further away, in refusing a continuance when Dr. Sainz fell ill, or in refusing to question jurors one at a time. It held that three jurors who said they could never vote for death were properly excused. It held that the evidence of the other poisonings was admissible to show knowledge, intent, motive and a common plan, because the means of death and the circumstances were the same, and that the prosecutor could refer to it in argument. It upheld the finding that her statements of March 13 were voluntary, and it held that the officers did not have to repeat the Miranda warnings before each of the four statements. It upheld the refusal to submit insanity to the jury. It held that North Carolina's death penalty statute was constitutional.
On proportionality, the court found evidence to support each aggravating circumstance, found no sign that the sentence came from passion or prejudice, and pointed to the way death was inflicted and the way she conducted herself after she gave Taylor the poison. It declined to set the sentence aside. The Fourth Circuit noted later that the state Supreme Court had struck down death sentences in five of the first thirteen cases it reviewed under the new statute, and that hers was the first it upheld.
The United States Supreme Court denied review on June 30, 1980, and denied rehearing on September 17, 1980. An execution date was set for October 17, 1980.
New lawyers took over: James D. Little of Fayetteville, known as Jimmy, and Richard H. Burr III of the Southern Prisoners' Defense Committee. On October 3, 1980, they filed a motion for appropriate relief in state court, raising thirteen grounds, and the execution was stayed. Superior Court Judge E. Maurice Braswell held a hearing during the week of November 17, 1980, and on November 26 denied relief in a 37-page judgment. The North Carolina Supreme Court declined review on July 8, 1981, and the United States Supreme Court denied review again on October 19, 1981.
On March 9, 1982, her lawyers filed a petition for habeas corpus in the federal court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Chief Judge Franklin T. Dupree Jr. stayed the execution and heard argument on March 26. The main claim was that Jacobson's representation had been ineffective in six areas, from the psychiatric and mitigating evidence to the jury argument and the appeal. On May 21, 1982, in Barfield v. Harris, Judge Dupree denied the petition. He adopted Judge Braswell's findings and described her post-conviction lawyers as exceptionally able.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed on October 3, 1983, in an opinion by Senior Circuit Judge Haynsworth, with Judges Phillips and Murnaghan. Her lawyers argued that the jury may have treated the four earlier deaths as further reasons for death, which North Carolina law does not allow. The court accepted that the jury may have done so, but held that at most this was an error of state law, not a violation of the federal Constitution. It also rejected her claim that the state Supreme Court's proportionality review was inadequate because it did not name the cases it compared. "We find no constitutional error in either the guilt determining or sentencing phases of Barfield's trial," the court wrote. Reporting the ruling, UPI noted that she was North Carolina's only woman on death row and that she had never been tried or convicted for the deaths she confessed to.
The full Fourth Circuit declined to rehear the case on November 22, 1983. The United States Supreme Court denied review on May 21, 1984, and denied rehearing on August 16, 1984.
Barfield was held at the women's prison in Raleigh, then the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women, whose superintendent was named as the respondent in her federal case. In 1980, Ingle noted, only 8 of the 714 people under death sentence in the country were women.
The Department of Correction's review of Bledsoe's book says she became drug free in prison and went through what the book calls a religious conversion. NCpedia and the UNC Libraries say she became a born-again Christian and ministered to other prisoners and to guards. Ingle, who visited her regularly, described her as witty and caring. He wrote that she knitted, doted on her grandchildren and looked forward to family visits every weekend, and that Burr never heard her say a bad word about a guard. Women at the prison, Burr said, loved her "like a mother or sister."
From March to September 1984, Little, Burr and Lao Rubert of the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons prepared a petition to Governor Jim Hunt asking him to commute her sentence to life in prison. Barfield wrote to the governor herself, asking that her faith be counted in her favor. The evangelists Billy and Ruth Graham supported her request, according to NCpedia and the UNC Libraries.
The petition included statements from people who had known her for years and from people who knew her only in prison. Ingle wrote that the strongest came from women at the prison and that the warden made a tearful plea for her life. In the summer of 1984 the psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis interviewed her, with Burr present. Ingle reports that Lewis found a pattern consistent with bipolar disorder and that her report became part of the petition. Lewis's 1984 evaluation was also filed in the federal courts later that year.
Hunt was in the last weeks of a campaign to unseat Senator Jesse Helms. Ingle wrote that Burr and Little met the governor in late September for about an hour and a half, though they had been promised two hours, and that Burr found him cool and formal. According to Burr's account, Hunt kept saying that her good life in prison was not enough, and his focus was on whether anything showed that the jury's verdict or the judge's sentence had been wrong.
On September 27, 1984, Hunt denied clemency. UPI reported that he called her crimes deliberate and too serious to justify commuting the sentence, and that he cited the deaths from repeated doses of arsenic of her boyfriend, her mother and the two elderly people who had employed her. Taylor's daughter told UPI the governor's decision was very courageous. Ingle, writing as a death penalty opponent, called the decision the politics of death.
The execution was set for 2 a.m. on November 2, 1984.
At first Barfield refused to fight the new date. Her children, Ingle wrote, did not want more litigation without some real chance of success. Then Rubert found that her competency to stand trial had never been tested in court. Medical information suggested that she may have been in withdrawal from her prescription drugs during the 1978 trial. On October 22, Burr visited her, and she decided to go ahead. Ingle quotes her as saying she did not want the state to have the last word in the case.
On October 26, the University Daily Kansan, compiling UPI reports, said she had chosen lethal injection, which state law allowed a condemned prisoner to choose instead of the gas chamber, and that she had agreed to reconsider her refusal to appeal.
On October 29 her lawyers filed a second motion for appropriate relief in state court, raising six issues, among them that withdrawal from Valium and other drugs had left her unable to help in her own defense in 1978. On October 30, Robeson County Superior Court Judge Craig Ellis denied it after a 20-minute hearing in Lumberton. Britt called the argument "weak and feeble," UPI reported. The North Carolina Supreme Court refused a stay that evening, with two justices dissenting without written opinions.
Her lawyers went back to federal court the same night. On October 31, Judge Dupree denied a stay but granted a certificate of probable cause, which allowed an appeal. "If she ever needed us, it's now," Burr told reporters.
The Fourth Circuit heard argument in Richmond at 8:30 a.m. on November 1. Judges Phillips, Murnaghan and Sprouse rejected the appeal and denied a stay in Barfield v. Woodard. They dismissed the claims about jury selection as repeating claims already decided, and the claim of prosecutorial misconduct as successive or an abuse of the writ. On competency, the only claim they decided on its merits, they held that her evidence, including her own affidavit, a prison minister's affidavit and Dr. Lewis's evaluation, raised only "a basis for bald conjecture," set against affidavits from the trial judge and her trial lawyer and two psychiatric evaluations from 1978 that found her competent. "This case has not been characterized by any rush to execution," the court wrote. Ingle wrote that the order arrived shortly after 5 p.m., about nine hours before the execution.
She did not ask the United States Supreme Court to intervene. Little told UPI that the Court had consistently refused to look at the merits of her legal issues. UPI counted twelve courts that had heard her case over six years.
Barfield was moved to Central Prison under death watch before the execution. Her children waited with Burr in an associate warden's office. Outside, about 300 opponents of the death penalty held a candlelight vigil on a grassy hill, UPI reported, and supporters of the execution gathered nearby. Ingle, who was in the vigil, wrote that the supporters chanted for her death as 2 a.m. approached, and that one of her brothers watched them from the curb.
Late the night before, she told a friend that going into the death chamber was her "gateway to heaven." Little gave her two red roses at their last meeting. Hours before her death she offered her eyes, kidneys and liver for transplant, and Little said the gift helped her feel her life had not been lived in vain.
She was put to death by lethal injection early on November 2, 1984, at Central Prison in Raleigh. UPI reported that she wore a pink nightgown and blue slippers. After she was pronounced dead, state troopers took her body to a medical school in Winston-Salem for the organs to be removed.
Her brother told reporters she was not afraid and that she knew she had done wrong and had to pay for it. Her son said she had hoped her death would help the victims' families rebuild their lives, and that he hoped people would remember her faith and her work with other prisoners. UPI reported that she was to be buried the next day in Parkton, where she had lived with her first husband and children.
She was the first woman executed in the United States since Elizabeth Ann Duncan was put to death in California in 1962, the first woman executed in North Carolina since 1944, and the first woman in the United States executed by lethal injection. A WLOS report in October 2026 said she remains the only woman executed in North Carolina since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
The journalist Jerry Bledsoe, formerly of the Greensboro News and Record, published a book about her, Death Sentence, in 1998. The Department of Correction's review says it drew on her son's struggle and the suffering of the victims' families, and on the strain that carrying out an execution places on prison staff.
The UNC Libraries hold the papers of Judge Dupree, which include material on the stay he granted in her case. Ingle published his account of her final weeks, Final Hours: The Execution of Velma Barfield, in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review in 1989.
North Carolina has not executed anyone since August 18, 2006. As of October 2026, WLOS reported, 122 people were on the state's death row, two of them women.
Proven by final judgment: the first-degree murder of Stewart Taylor, by arsenic poisoning, in 1978.
Confessed, never tried: the poisoning deaths of Dolly Taylor Edwards, John Henry Lee and her mother, Lillie McMillan Bullard. She described them in statements to Robeson County sheriff's officers on March 13, 1978, and the evidence was admitted at her trial only to show her intent and knowledge. She later told the jury she had meant only to make Taylor sick. The confessions were never tested as charges in any court; their voluntariness was upheld only as part of the Taylor case.
Denied, never charged: the death of Jennings Barfield in 1971. The State presented evidence at her trial that his exhumed body showed arsenic poisoning. She denied poisoning him.
Not established: whether she had any part in Montgomery Edwards's death. NCpedia and the UNC Libraries say she confessed to poisoning him, but the court opinions name only his wife among the deaths she admitted, and her statements to officers covered Taylor, Lee, her mother and Mrs. Edwards. She denied any role in Thomas Burke's death, and she was never charged with it.
Details that vary between sources: the spelling of Taylor's first name (Stewart in the court records, Stuart in news and library accounts); the year of Thomas Burke's death (1969 in NCpedia, April 1965 in the 1998 Department of Correction review); the time of Taylor's death (the court records place his final hospital visit on February 3, 1978, while NCpedia says he died in late 1977); and how many deaths are linked to her (four besides Taylor's in the court records; WLOS in 2026 said six).
October 23, 1932: Margie Velma Bullard is born in rural South Carolina, one of nine children.
At 17: she leaves school and marries Thomas Burke; they live in Parkton and have two children.
1965: Thomas Burke is badly hurt in a car accident.
1969 (NCpedia) or April 1965 (Department of Correction review): Thomas Burke dies in a house fire.
August 1970: she marries Jennings Barfield.
March 21, 1971: Jennings Barfield dies.
December 1974: her mother, Lillie McMillan Bullard, dies in the hospital.
1975: she serves a prison term for bad checks.
January 1977: Montgomery Edwards dies.
Late February 1977: Dolly Taylor Edwards dies.
June 1977: John Henry Lee dies.
January 31, 1978: a 300 dollar check is drawn on Stewart Taylor's account.
February 3, 1978: Taylor is taken back to the hospital by ambulance and dies there; an autopsy finds arsenic.
March 10, 1978: she denies involvement when questioned at the Robeson County Sheriff's Department.
March 13, 1978: she gives four statements about the deaths of Taylor, Lee, her mother and Dolly Edwards.
March 28, 1978: indicted for the first-degree murder of Stewart Taylor.
November 27, 1978: trial opens in Bladen County Superior Court after a change of venue.
December 2, 1978: sentenced to death by Judge Henry A. McKinnon.
December 4, 1978: received into the state prison system.
November 6, 1979: the North Carolina Supreme Court affirms, State v. Barfield.
June 30, 1980: the U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
November 26, 1980: Judge Braswell denies post-conviction relief.
October 19, 1981: the U.S. Supreme Court denies review again.
May 21, 1982: Judge Dupree denies federal habeas relief, Barfield v. Harris.
October 3, 1983: the Fourth Circuit affirms.
May 21, 1984: the U.S. Supreme Court denies review; rehearing denied August 16.
September 27, 1984: Governor Jim Hunt denies clemency.
October 26, 1984: she is reported to have chosen lethal injection.
October 30, 1984: Judge Craig Ellis denies a new trial; the state Supreme Court refuses a stay.
October 31, 1984: Judge Dupree denies a stay and allows an appeal.
November 1, 1984: the Fourth Circuit rejects her last appeal, Barfield v. Woodard.
November 2, 1984: executed by lethal injection at Central Prison, Raleigh.
1998: Jerry Bledsoe's book Death Sentence is published.
October 2026: still the only woman executed in North Carolina since 1976.