Margie Velma Bullard was born in South Carolina on October 29, 1932, one of nine children of a violent father. She married at seventeen, and after her first husband died in a house fire in 1969 she developed a dependence on prescription tranquillisers and painkillers that lasted the rest of her free life and that she funded partly by forgery.
Between 1969 and 1978 she killed at least four people with a rat poison containing arsenic, mixed into food and drink. Her mother Lillie Bullard died in 1974. Dollie Edwards and Record Lee, elderly people she was paid to look after, died in 1977 and 1976. Her fiance Stuart Taylor died in February 1978. In each case she had been forging cheques on their accounts and the victim had begun to notice. The American press called her the Death Row Granny.
Taylor's family asked for a post-mortem. It found arsenic, and she confessed to four killings and was charged with his.
She was convicted in December 1978 and sentenced to death. In prison she became a Christian, worked with other inmates, and attracted a substantial campaign for clemency including Billy Graham; the governor, James Hunt, refused it during a Senate election. She was executed by lethal injection at Central Prison in Raleigh on November 2, 1984, the first woman put to death in the United States since 1962 and the first since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976. She asked for a last meal of Coca-Cola and Cheez Doodles and donated her organs.