by Ray Black
Velma Barfield was arrested and subsequently confessed to the murder of Stuart Taylor and several others. Her son was totally dumbstruck and couldn’t believe that the caring, loving woman that had looked after him as a child, was now a cold-blooded killer.
LIFE ON DEATH ROW
When her case came to trial, Velma’s defence was a plea of insanity. At the hearing she showed no signs of remorse or caring for her victims. She told the court that she had mishandled money from her victims, not meaning to kill them, but just to make them ill so that she could nurse them back to health whilst looking for another job. Throughout the trial she was cold and callous.
Some of the physicians who had been treating Stuart testified that they had also treated Velma and prescribed medications for her. Their testimony showed that she was on drugs that could have badly impaired her judgment and were addictive.
Velma took the stand in her own defence. Her attorney thought it would be a good idea to let her explain her own confused thinking to the jury. She did well on direct examination, saying that she had given her boyfriend poison to make him sick but did not intend to kill him. She also admitted to extensive use of various medications, of combining a wide variety of drugs, and that she was totally dependent on them. She also admitted forging cheques because she was addicted to drugs and could not pay for them out of her own limited resources.
The jury were not impressed by the evidence provided by the defence and they came back with a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder. Then it found the “aggravating circumstances” to recommend the death penalty. Judge McKinnon then said that due to the ‘aggravating circumstances’ her punishment would be execution.
While on death row at Raleigh, Velma managed to come off the drugs she had been addicted to for so many years. She expressed remorse for the years that the drugs had blurred her judgement and destroyed her moral reasoning. She was, however, unable to explain exactly why she had killed.
She became a ‘born again’ Christian and during the six years she was on death row took to counselling other female inmates. There were many appeals to try and save her life, but these were all declined. Gradually Velma began to accept her fate and told her attorney to drop all appeals and that she wanted to ‘die with dignity’. She believed that when she was finally executed it would be her ‘gateway to heaven’.
Velma Barfield, a serial killer, was executed by lethal injection and pronounced dead at 2.15 a.m. on November 2, 1984.
CONCLUSION
So can we say without doubt that Velma Barfield was a monster and a serial killer with no remorse for her deeds? Or, was she just a poor demented soul whose brain had been so completely bewildered by drugs that all she could think about was how to get the money to finance her addiction? Probably the answer is somewhere between the two.
Only two women, Rosanna Phillips in 1943 and Bessie May Smith a year later, have ever been executed in North Carolina. There are currently four more women waiting on death row there.
Mary Ann Cotton
Mary Ann Cotton is regarded as Britain’s greatest female mass murderer. She murdered four husbands, a lover and several children.
Mary Ann Robson was born in October 1832 in the small English village of Low Moorsley, County Durham. Mary’s parents were both under twenty when they were married, and her father hardly earned enough money to support his family as a miner. Mary herself had rather an unhappy childhood, being a shy girl who found it very difficult to make friends. When she was only eight the family moved home, and, along with her brother Robert, had to start at a new school. Mary found this really hard due to her shyness, and to make it even worse her father was killed in a mining accident shortly after the move. Mary was only fourteen at the time and lived with her mother for a further two years. Life in Victorian times was never easy unless you had a good income, but it must have been especially hard for a widow and two young children. The shadow of the workhouse and the separation from her mother must have had a lasting impact on the young Mary, and it is around this time that she started to suffer from nightmares. Mary’s mother eventually remarried in an effort to remain out of the workhouse and probably to put a roof over her family’s head. Mary did not like her new stepfather but she did like the fact they he had a good salary and they could afford things that they had never had before.
When she reached the age of sixteen, deciding that she no longer wanted to put up with the harsh discipline inflicted by her stepfather, Mary took up an apprenticeship as a dressmaker.
At the age of twenty Mary married William Mowbray at St. Andrew’s Church in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. William was a timekeeper whose work took him to various faraway towns. After a couple of years in Newcastle-upon-Tyne the couple moved south to Cornwall where Mowbray took up a job as a nanny. William already had four children by a previous marriage and Mary produced another five. By the time they had returned to County Durham just five years later, four sons had died in infancy, victims of gastric fever – or so it was believed. The fifth child, this time a girl, succumbed to the same sickness and died a short while later.
Next the family moved to Sunderland where two more children were to die, as did William Mowbray himself. He died quite suddenly from an unexpected bout of diarrhoea, having only just taken out a sizeable life insurance. He had insured himself and all his children with the Prudential, and as a result, Mary Ann collected the sum of £35. No-one seemed suspicious about all the family deaths and this was probably due to the fact they moved around and the deaths happened in different areas. Also infant mortality in the nineteenth century was commonplace and it would not be unusual for a child to die of gastric fever.
Mary moved on again and made a fresh start at Seaham with another new husband, George Ward. She took a job as a nurse at Sunderland Infirmary which is where she met George who was one of the patients. It wasn’t long before George died prematurely of gastric fever at the age of thirty-three and Mary Ann helped herself to another insurance payout.
Mary did not remain on her own for very long before she took up a new responsibility as housekeeper to a man named John Robinson, a shipyard foreman, and his five children. Mary quickly became pregnant by John and six months later they were married. But somehow tragedy seemed to follow Mary around because three of John’s children had died, as well as Mary Ann’s remaining child by her first husband. She had two children by John Robinson, one of whom died at birth, and she suggested to her husband that it might be a good idea to take out a life insurance. However, he told her that he thought her motives were sinister as he already suspected that she had been poisoning the children. Not only that he told her he was fed up with her running up huge debts and Mary, fed up with being castigated, helped herself to his savings and fled. She left behind one child, who had luckily survived her murderous ways.
She went to stay with her mother for a while, who died very suddenly shortly after Mary’s arrival, and her daughter inherited all her furniture.
In 1870 Mary was introduced to a man named Frederick Cotton by his sister, Margaret. Some months later Mary was again pregnant, and she married Frederick at St. Andrew’s Church, Newcastle. This marriage was bigamous as John Robinson was still alive at the time and their marriage had not been annulled. She now bore the name which was to become notorious – Mary Ann Cotton. However, shortly afterwards Margaret Cotton, Frederick’s sister, went down with gastric fever and died shortly before her brother’s wedding. Luckily for Margaret she had left her savings to Frederick and his new wife. Next door neighbours of the Cottons owned some pigs, and mysteriously one by one they began to die. The farmers were suspicious of Mary and started to accuse her of foul play and made their life very uncomfortable in the village of Walbottle. Frederick, Mary, two children from Cotton’s earlier marriage and the new baby thought it wise to leave the area and moved to West Auckland.
Resettled in the new home and hoping that life would be a lot more peaceful, tragedy struck again. Frederick died on September 19,
1971. The Cotton’s had also taken a lodger named Joseph Nattrass who had unwisely become Mary’s lover and even more unwisely made a will in her favour. Unfortunately for Joseph, Mary was asked to take care of a Mr. Quick-Manning who was suffering from smallpox. Mr. Quick-Manning was a real gentleman and worked as an excise officer, who lived in a house in Brookfield Cottage, which was far superior to anything Mary had been used to. This was a real climb up the social ladder for Mary. They became lovers and over a period of three weeks Mary Ann disposed of Frederick Cotton’s eldest ten-year-old-son, her own baby, Robert, and, of course, Joseph Nattrass.
This only left little Charles Edward, Frederick’s remaining seven-year-old son who had actually managed to survive the mystery illness. By now Mary was pregnant again by Mr. Quick-Manning but this gentleman, while he didn’t mind sharing his bed with Mary, had no intention of allowing her to live in his house. Mary stayed in her own lowly home and took in lodgers to help pay the bills. It was not easy for Mary had very little money, a small allowance for Charles Edward, and a paltry amount left to her by her lover Nattrass. She could barely look after herself let alone look after a child that didn’t even belong to her.
Thomas Riley, who was the overseer of the village, called on Mary and asked her if she would be prepared to take care of another smallpox patient. She told him she was unable to do that as she had to look after Charles Edward, and asked if it was possible for the boy to be put in the workhouse. He told her that it was only possible if she went as well, and she told him quite curtly that it was out of the question and no place for a woman like her to be. Charles Edward never saw his eighth birthday, he died on July 12, 1872.
Riley was very suspicious about the death of the child, especially as he had seen him healthy a few days before. He went to the police station and told Sergeant Tom Hutchinson of the Bishop Auckland police of his suspicions. The attending doctor, Dr. Killburn, refused to issue a death certificate until he had made further examinations, but even after all this time it was only down to sheer chance that the truth actually emerged.
True to form, Mary went off to the Prudential to collect the insurance money on the death of her stepson, a princely £4 10s. However, they would not hand over the money because they said that with no death certificate the claim was not valid. Mary downtrodden returned home.
The coroner ordered a post mortem on the body of Charles Edward, which was carried out the following day by Dr. Kilburn, amazingly on a table in Mary Ann’s house. The inquest was held on the same day in the pub next door, but without the time and proper equipment the doctor was unable to ascertain the true nature of the boy’s death and the verdict was that he died from ‘natural causes’. Mary heaved a sigh of relief, she had got away with it again.
Dr. Kilburn, however, was still not satisfied with the outcome and decided to take some of the organs home with him for further research. He removed the stomach and some other organs and placed them into a closet. The next day he poured the contents of the stomach into a jar and then buried the remainder of the organs in the garden. Then he tested the stomach contents by using the Reinsch test, which was a method of tracing arsenic. He must have been totally dumbstruck when the results proved to be ‘positive’. He immediately reported to Superintendent Henderson and at last the game was up for Mary Ann Cotton.
She was arrested and then it came to light that she had sent her stepson to the local chemist to buy some arsenic and soft soap. The chemist had refused to sell the items to such a young boy and so a woman called Mrs. Dodds had purchased them for him. This was not an unusual purchase at the time because arsenic and soap were often used to rub down bedposts to kill or deter bed bugs.
During the trial the evidence of Dr. Kilburn was not holding up as he had disgraced himself by burying the boy’s organs in his own garden, not really the practice of a respectable doctor. But a more eminent doctor, Dr. Scattergood of Leeds, confirmed that there had been more than half a grain of arsenic in the stomach contents and that it undoubtedly caused the death of Charles Edward.
Mary Ann was duly charged with murder to which she replied, ‘I am as innocent as the child unborn’.With Mary locked away some of her victims’ bodies were exhumed, and all were found to have traces of arsenic in their stomachs. She was charged with four murders – her stepson, Charles Edward, Joseph Nattrass, Frederick Cotton (whose body they could not find) and Robert Robson Cotton. Mary continued to deny the charges and said that they had most probably swallowed arsenic by accident – a very lame excuse. Whether or not the trial was truly fair is a matter of opinion and right up to the end Mary continued to proclaim her innocence. But the jury thought otherwise and they found her guilty.
She was sentenced to death and put in prison to await her fate. While there waiting for the end of her life she produced a new life, her very last child, a little girl, named Margaret Edith Quick-Manning Cotton.
On March 24, 1873, at 8 a.m. Mary Ann Cotton was led across the yard at Durham County Gaol with two women warders on either side. Mary walked a little unsteadily but with determination, holding her head high and praying. There were about fifty people present, most of them press, to watch the execution, with around another two hundred outside the prison gates. Those that were present saw a frail woman wearing a black dress who met her maker at the end of a swinging rope.
Just before she died she said, ‘Heaven is my home’, but with all the callous murders she had committed I should think it is more likely to be Hell.
Her name will always be immortalized in the rhyme that children chanted in the streets after her death:
Mary Ann Cotton
She’s dead and she’s rotten
She lies in her hed
With her eyes wide oppen
Sing, sing, oh, what can I sing?
Mary Ann Cotton is tied up wi’ string
Where, where? Up in the air
Sellin’ black puddens a penny a pair
Florida’s ‘Black Widow’
Our final case study in the section looks at the story of Judias Buenoano who was the first women to get the electric chair in America since Rhonda Belle Martin in 1957. She may have given the impression of a successful business woman but she was also a charming seductress. With each man she bewitched she became richer as she benefitted from their agonizing deaths.
Like so many of the other criminals discussed in this book, Judias (Judi) Buenoano had a very difficult childhood. She was born Judias Welty, in Quanah, Texas, on April 4, 1943. Judi was the daughter of a travelling farm worker, but she took her mother’s name. She described her mother, also named Judias, as a member of a non-existent Mesquite Apache tribe, but in truth Judi hardly knew her, for she died of tuberculosis when her daughter was barely four years old. The family became parted after her death and Judi, along with her baby brother Robert, went to live with their grandparents, while the two older children were put up for adoption. For Judi life became a long uphill struggle from that moment.
Her father remarried and Judi and Robert were sent back to live with him and his new wife in Roswell, New Mexico. Judi was very miserable as she soon found herself to be the target of abuse from both her father and her stepmother. She was beaten, starved, burned with cigarettes and forced to work exceptionally long hours around the house. This was hardly a healthy environment for a growing adolescent. By the age of fourteen, the anger which had built up inside Judi, exploded. She attacked two of her stepbrothers with hot oil and flew at her parents with her fists and her feet, and in fact any object that she could get hold of. This outburst cost Judi sixty days in jail where she was confined with adult prostitutes and criminals. When she was released the Judge asked her if she was now ready to go back home, but rather than be subjected to the constant abuse she received there, she opted for a reform school. She went to Foothills High School in Albuquerque, a girl’s reformatory, and stayed there until her graduation in 1959. She despised her family and vowed that she would have nothing further to do with them, incl
uding her brother Robert.
HER LIFE OF CRIME
In the year 1960 Judi returned to Roswell where she worked as a nursing assistant, assuming the name of Anna Schultz. On March 30, 1961, she gave birth to an illegitimate son, Michael, but would never admit to who the father was. Rumours spread like wildfire that the father was in fact a pilot from the local air force base, but she refused to confirm or deny the allegations. On January 21, 1962, she married another air force officer, James Goodyear, who adopted Michael as his own. Four years later on January 16, 1966, Judi gave birth to their first child, James Jr. A year later they had a daughter, Kimberley, by which time they had moved home to Orlando, Florida.
Judi opened her first business in 1968, the Conway Acres Child Care Center in Orlando, with the aid of her husband’s finances. He was named as co-owner despite the fact that he was still serving with the Air Force. James was sent to do a tour of duty in Vietnam and barely three months after his return was admitted to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Orlando suffering from a mysterious illness. He never recovered and died on September 15, 1971. Judi waited for a discreet five days before she cashed in his three life insurance policies. Before the year was out Judi suffered a fire at her home, for which she received a further $90,000 from the insurance company. She felt she had had some rotten luck of late, but at least she had been well compensated.