by Ray Black
Judi wasted no time in finding herself a new lover, Bobby Joe Morris, and she moved into his home in Pensacola in 1972. She was happy for a while but her new life was being ruined by her son Michael, who was being very disruptive at school and was of below-average intelligence. Although Michael was refused treatment at the military hospital due to his father’s death, Judi managed to get an evaluation carried out at the state hospital in 1974, and for a while he was put into a foster care home while he received psychiatric treatment.
Bobby Morris invited Judi and her family, including Michael, to move with him to Trinidad, Colorado, in 1977. She stayed behind for a while, but before she left Pensacola she was once more the victim of a house fire which brought another hefty insurance payout. She waited until she had got the money, went and collected Michael from foster care, and then moved west with her family. She settled into life in Trinidad and now used the name of Judias Morris. Soon after she moved to Colorado, Bobby became sick and was admitted to hospital on January 4, 1978. Once again the illness was a mystery to the doctors and he was released into the care of Judi. Two days after arriving home Bobby collapsed again and was returned to the hospital, where he died on January 21. The cause of his death was put down to cardiac arrest and metabolic acidosis.
Before his body was barely cold Judi had cashed in three life polices on Morris giving her a nice healthy balance in her bank account. However, Bobby Joe’s family were suspicious that their son had been murdered and felt that he was not the only victim. In 1974, Judi and Bobby had been visiting Bobby’s hometown of Brewton in Alabama, where a man had been discovered dead in his motel room. The police had received an anonymous phone call from a pay phone which led them to the body. The man had been shot in the chest with a .22-calibre gun and his throat had been slashed.
After the news of the murder hit the headlines, Bobby Joe’s parents overheard a conversation between their son and Judi in which she said, ‘The son of a bitch shouldn’t have come up here in the first place. He knew if he came up here he was gonna die’. Bobby Joe admitted to his part in the murder when he was in a delirious state on his deathbed. However, the police were unable to come up with any fingerprints from inside the motel room, no bullet was ever recovered from the corpse, and consequently had no firm suspects.
Judi changed her name legally on May 3, 1978, to Buenoano, which is the Spanish equivalent of Goodyear, in an apparent tribute to her late husband and her Apache mother. Within a month the family had returned to Pensacola and set up home in Whisper Pine Drive.
Judi’s son Michael, now Buenoano, had continued to do badly at school and in 1979 joined the Army. After he had completed his basic training he was assigned to a post at Fort Benning in Georgia. Before leaving for Georgia he visited his mother in Florida, this turned out to be a very big mistake. By the time he reached Fort Benning he was already showing signs of being poisoned. Army physicians found seven times the normal level of arsenic in Michael’s body and said there was little they could do to stop the deterioration and he ended up wearing heavy metal leg braces and he was unable to use his hands. Unable to walk and do very little for himself he was discharged from the military hospital in the care of his ‘loving’ mother.
On May 13, 1980, Michael was out canoeing with his mother and younger brother, James, on the East River near Milton. Sadly the canoe capsized and although James and Judi were able to get out from underneath the overturned boat, Michael, weighed down by the heavy braces, didn’t stand a chance. The police accepted Judi’s account of what happened, but the military police were far more suspicious. Judi had received $20,000 from Michael’s military life insurance, but the Sheriff’s office started taking a keen interest when they discovered that there were an additional two civilian policies that had been taken out on his life. Experts studied the handwriting on the policies and it was suggested that the applications could possibly have been forged.
In the meantime, Judi carried on bravely after the loss of her eldest son, and proceeded to open a beauty salon in Gulf Breeze. Shortly after she opened the salon she started to date a Pensacola businessman called John Gentry II. To gain further credit with the wealthy businessman, Judi fabricated various bogus qualifications and that she had worked as a senior nurse at a West Florida Hospital. Of course the whole thing was nonsense, but John Gentry was taken in. He indulged her in the lifestyle she so craved, giving her expensive gifts, taking her on Caribbean cruises and drinking champagne. She persuaded John that they should take out life insurance polices on each other in October 1982. Judi later raised the amount of coverage on John’s policy from $50,000 to $500,000 without his knowledge, paying the additional premium out of her own pocket. She also persuaded him to start taking vitamin pills for his health, but these made him feel nauseous and dizzy. When he complained to Judi how he felt she told him to protect himself and double the dose. John felt so bad at one time he was hospitalized for a period of twelve days, but he soon noticed that his symptoms disappeared when he stopped taking the vitamins. Even with this realization, he was not suspicious of his girlfriend and saw no reason to end the relationship.
On June 25, 1983, Judi told John that she was pregnant and he went out to get some champagne so that they could celebrate. However, when he turned the ignition key his car exploded which left him with severe injuries. Fighting for his life he was rushed to hospital where trauma surgeons managed to pull him round. Four days later he was well enough to be questioned by the police, which led them to start examining Judi’s past with minute detail. Many inconsistencies came up about what Judi had told John and what was actually true and as if to confirm his suspicions he discovered that she had been sterilized in 1975 and so even her pregnancy was a lie. Then the detectives learned that Judi had been telling her friends about John’s terminal illness since November 1982, and that she had booked a luxury cruise for herself and her children – not however Gentry!
John now realised that the Judi he thought he knew and the real Judi were not the same person, and he supplied the police with some of the vitamin pills that she had made him take. When these tablets were analysed it revealed that they contained paraformaldehyde – a poison with no medical uses. At this stage, however, the Florida state attorney felt there was not sufficient evidence to charge her with attempted murder, and so the matter was held over. The investigation continued, though, and on July 27, Federal agents searched Judi’s home in Gulf Breeze and found wire and tape in her bedroom that matched the car bomb in Gentry’s car. In James’ room they found marijuana and a sawn-off shotgun and he was subsequently jailed with possession of drugs and an illegal weapon. Judi was arrested at her beauty salon on charges of attempted murder. Later the police also traced the source of the dynamite and were able to link it to Judi through long-distance telephone calls made from her home. Judi was released on bail on the attempted murder charge, but was rearrested on January 11, 1984, when she was indicted with first-degree murder in the death of her son, Michael. There was an additional charge for grand theft and insurance fraud. On hearing the charges she staged a fit of convulsions and was taken to Santa Rosa Hospital under police guard.
The bodies of both Bobby Joe Morris and James Goodyear were exhumed, and both were found with traces of arsenic in their bodies.
THE CONVICTION
Judi was tried separately for each murder and for the attempted murder. She was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for the first twenty-five years on June 6, 1984 for the murder of Michael. Surprisingly, she was acquitted on the charge of attempted murder but was found guilty of first-degree murder of her first husband, James Goodyear. The jury took ten-and-a-half hours to reach a verdict, and she was finally sentenced to death by electrocution on November 26, 1985.
It is estimated that she managed to collect around $240,000 in insurance money from the deaths of her husband, son and boyfriend.
TIME ON DEATH ROW
Judi spent thirteen years at the Broward Correctional Center at Pembroke
Pines in Florida. She continued to appeal and had three death warrants handed down over those years. It is a harsh regime whereby they are confined to the cell for most of the time except when they are handcuffed to be taken to the exercise yard or for a shower. They are allowed visitors every weekend from 9 a.m. through to 3 p.m. Judi spent her time here writing letters, crocheting blankets and baby clothes, and teaching the Bible to other inmates. She was always described as a gentle and mothering figure.
Judias Buenoano was finally executed on March 30, 1998 with no explanation as to why she committed the crimes other than greed.
Part Four: Couples Who Kill
Torturous Teams
As if a single murderer is not bad enough, when two people decide to join forces, then you double the evil.
Murders committed by people working in teams are just as horrific as those committed by killers who work on their own — or perhaps even worse. It is just as much of a risk to accept a ride offered by a couple as it is to hop into a car driven by a single male. We all like to think that women are nurturing and motherly, in fact, when they participate in criminal activities their influence often heightens the cruelty and sadism.
Put in simple terms, couples or groups that kill are more often than not found to have perverted tendencies as individuals, but it is only when they come together that their combined personality becomes a lethal concoction. The French have an expression for this – folie a deux – which indicates a delusion shared by two emotionally-linked persons.
Team killers generally share some common characteristics, for example, they are usually Caucasian, have partial or complete high school education, generally around their mid-twenties, and more often than not are blue-collar workers. There are normally two offenders working together, with a male/male ratio of around one third. Around fifteen percent of serial murders are committed by teams, and more often than not the victims are strangers.
Sometimes one of the accomplices acts as the team leader or dominant partner sending the other one out to do what he wants, and on occasion he will participate himself. Sometimes the couple are related or married, and other times they’re strangers who just happen to spark off the right chemistry. When females are involved, it is generally the male who masterminds the homicides, that is unless the female is the dominant one, such as in a mother-son team. There is always one person who maintains psychological control.
As mentioned earlier the killer team will generally target strangers, that is, someone with whom they have had no prior contact. They tend to like the hands-on method of killing – strangulation or suffocation – and will often retain trophies or souvenirs from the victims, such as a video-recording or their actions, or personal items taken from the victim. They normally display extreme cruelty towards their victims, loving to torture or even dismember. In contrast to a serial killer acting alone, team killers are unique in that they share, or appear to share ‘two minds with one single psyche’ (Brady, 2001).
Another possible explanation is that males as a general rule are socialized to externalize their feelings of anger and/or rage through acts of aggression. In the case of male/female team serial murderers, however, it appears that the right of entitlement is transferred and traditional gender roles become somewhat distorted. In other words, the female offender participates in the traditional [male] acts of aggression. Particularly, married female and male team serial killers and where sexual acts of aggression are involved.
Generally you will find the opinion of the public is that they are not surprised by the male part of the killing teams, but when it comes to the woman they tend to make excuses, seeing her as the victim of her male partner. In truth, both the male and female have usually come from equally abusive backgrounds and are similarly full of both fear and hatred.
Why these people team up to kill is not a question I shall attempt to answer, but whatever the reason the result is totally sickening.
The Lonely Heart Killers
This is about a desperately lonely, overweight woman, who falls in love with a man who murders women for money. The story is intertwined with voodoo magic, kinky sexual activities and was to become one of the most sensational cases of the 1940s.
PLAYER NUMBER ONE
Martha Jule Seabrook was born in 1920 in the town of Milton in northwest Florida. As a young child, like many serial killers before her, she was abused by her mother. She was regularly beaten and verbally taunted, and to make matters worse when she was only nine years old she developed a glandular problem which made her exceptionally fat. She was raped by her brother when she was still quite young, but when she told her mother what had happened she was severely beaten and told not to tell lies. Even as she grew into her teenage years she was always the subject of jokes and ridicule which made her withdraw into herself. She became almost reclusive and withdrawn and had virtually no friends.
Undoubtedly this bad start to life had a lot to do with her longing for a life of romance and her eventual appetite for bizarre sexual acts. It certainly would have been the root of her increasingly callous view of her fellow human beings.
Martha was a highly intelligent girl and eventually gained top nursing qualifications. However, her weight (250 pounds) kept her from being accepted by the hospital boards and she ended up taking a job working for a mortician in a local funeral home. The job was ideal for her as she was a loner who found it difficult to interact with others, and so she may well have found solace working with bodies that could no longer criticize or ridicule her overweight body.
In 1942, Martha was desperate to improve her lifestyle and she moved to California, where she worked as a nurse at an Army hospital. In the evening she would spend her time hanging round the city’s bars and picking up soldiers who were on leave. She would frequently have sex with these soldiers and one of these liaisons ended up in pregnancy. When she told the soldier about the baby he attempted suicide by jumping into a nearby bay. Realizing that a man would rather die than actually marry her, Martha returned to Florida very depressed and all alone.
Back in Milton she needed to explain how she had got pregnant and so she devised a story that she had married a Navy officer and that her husband would soon be back from the Pacific to join her. Sadly she bought her own wedding ring and wore it proudly round the town. She even went as far as having a telegram sent to her home informing her that her husband had been killed in action and feigned hysterics when she read the news. The town mourned with her and the story even appeared in the local news. Eventually in the spring of 1944, the baby was born, a daughter, Willa Dean.
Several months after the birth of her baby, Martha met a Pensacola bus driver named Alfred Beck and once again she fell pregnant. Alfred, probably feeling guilty about the baby, reluctantly married her in late 1944. However, within six months they were divorced and Martha found herself on her own again. She now had two children, no income, and fell into the world of romance novels and afternoon movies. In early 1946 she took a job at the Pensacola Hospital for children, and she threw herself into the job to make up for the lack of any form of social life.
As a result of a practical joke by a co-worker, Martha ended up putting an advert in the ‘Lonely Hearts’ column of a newspaper and waited eagerly for the replies to come.
PLAYER NUMBER TWO
Raymond Fernandez was six years older than Martha, and was born on the island of Hawaii on December 17, 1914. His parents were both Spanish and were more than a little disappointed at their son’s frail and sickly appearance. His father criticized everything he did and took very little interest in his education. He was beaten regularly and forced to do manual work that he really wasn’t strong enough to handle. From the age of three Raymond was raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut until 1932, when he decided to move to Spain to work on his uncle’s farm. When he was only twenty he married a local girl named, Encarnacion Robles, and gradually Raymond blossomed into a handsome, confident, well-built young man. He had a very calm and gentle manner and was
very popular in the village where they lived.
During World War II Raymond served briefly with the British Intelligence Service. Although little is known of his war activities it is said he carried out his difficult and sometimes dangerous duties with distinction. In late 1945, when the war was over, Raymond decided to return to America to find work and then send for his wife and son to join him. He managed to get a passage on a ship headed for the Dutch West Indies, but while on board he was to suffer a severe head injury which would affect him for the rest of his life. An open steel hatch fell directly on top of his skull causing a severe indentation and could possible have damaged his brain in an irreversible way. When the ship docked he was transferred to hospital, where he remained until March 1946.
When he was released from hospital, it was obvious that the previously kind, calm man had undergone a personality change. Raymond became distant, moody and was quick to lose his temper – in short he was a changed man. He served a short prison sentence for stealing a large quantity of clothes and other items from a ship’s store room and it was while in prison that he befriended his cellmate, a Haitian man. This man introduced Raymond to the practices of voodoo and soon he was totally involved in the world of black magic. He believed that he had a secret power over women, that his sexual powers were now at a peak and he took to wearing a wig to cover his scar
After his release from prison Raymond moved to Brooklyn to live with his sister. She was initially upset by his appearance, because the once handsome young man was now practically bald with a large scar plainly visible on the top of his head. For most of the time Raymond locked himself away in his bedroom and complained of severe headaches. He started writing letters to ‘Lonely Hearts’ ads where, through the mail, he managed to seduce gullible females who were looking for a man. Once he had gained their trust he stole money, jewellery, or whatever he could get his hands on, and then he would become invisible. Most of his victims were too embarrassed to report it to the police and so Raymond realized he had found a way of earning money without having to work.