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The following females have been executed in the United States
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Marilyn Kay Plantz
Summary:
Plantz hired her teenage boyfriend Clifford Bryson and his friend William McKimble to kill her husband for about ,000 in life insurance. Entering his home after work, he was ambushed by Bryson and McKimble and beaten with ball bats while Plantz and kids were asleep in bed. Plantz got up and instructed them to "burn him" to make it look like an accident. They drove him to deserted location, doused him and his pickup with gasoline and set it on fire. McKimble pled to Life and testified. Plantz and Bryson were tried jointly. Bryson was executed in 2000.
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Wanda Jean Allen
Summary:
Victim, who lived with Allen in a lesbian relationship, was picked up by her mother and taken to police station to file complaint against Allen. Allen followed and confronted them outside station, shot victim in stomach at close range. They had met in prison, where Allen was serving time for manslaughter after killing former lover Detra Pettus in 1981.
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Christina Riggs
Summary:
Riggs, a licensed nurse, was convicted of murder by smothering her two preschool-aged children in their beds at the family's Sherwood home. On November 4, 1997, Riggs obtained the anti-depressant Elavil from her pharmacist, the painkiller morphine and the toxic potassium chloride from the hospital where she worked. The heart-stopping potassium chloride is the same drug used in the lethal cocktail injected into condemned inmates in the death house. Riggs gave the children a small amount of Elavil to put them to sleep. Then she placed each of the children in their beds. About 10 p.m., she injected 5 year old Justin with undiluted potassium chloride. But unless it is diluted, the drug causes burning and pain. Justin woke and cried out in terror. She then smothered the boy with a pillow. Moving to her 2 year old Shelby, Riggs passed on the potassium chloride injection because of the pain it had caused Justin. She suffocated her daughter with a pillow. Riggs then placed the children side-by-side on her bed and covered them with a blanket. She wrote suicide notes, took 28 Elavil tablets, normally a lethal dose, and injected herself with enough undiluted potassium chloride to kill five people. The Elavil took effect, and she fell unconscious to the floor. The next day, she was discovered by her mother and rushed to the hospital. At her June 1998 trial, Riggs contended she was not guilty by reason of insanity, blaming chronic, acute depression, but the Pulaski County jury convicted her. During the penalty phase, Riggs would not allow attorneys to put on a defense, saying she wanted a death sentence. The jury obliged. Riggs was the fifth woman executed in the United States since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976.
She was also the first woman executed in Arkansas in more than 150 years.
Final Statement
"There is no way no words can express how sorry I am for taking the lives of my babies," she said. "Now I can be with my babies, as I always intended." She also said "I love you, my babies".
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Betty Lou Beets
Summary:
On Aug. 6, 1983, Betty Lou Beets reported her husband, retired Dallas fireman Jimmy Don Beets, missing from their home near Cedar Creek Lake, in Henderson County, Texas. Jimmy Don's boat was found drifting near the Redwood Beach Marina on Cedar Creek Lake on Aug. 12, 1983. In the boat authorities found Jimmy Don's fishing license, his nitroglycerine tablets and a life jacket. Almost two years passed before the Henderson County Sheriff's Department received information from a credible confidential informant that indicated Jimmy Don's death may have resulted from foul play. Beets's son, Robert Branson, told authorities his mother informed him that evening she intended to kill Jimmy Don; instructing him to leave the residence while she did so. Branson said that he returned approximately two hours later to find Jimmy Don dead from two gunshot wounds and that he helped Beets conceal the body in an ornamental "wishing well" in the front yard of their house. Branson also said that the day after the murder, Beets placed some of Jimmy Don's heart medication in his boat while he removed the propeller. The two then abandoned the boat in Cedar Creek Lake. A search warrant at the residence uncovered the body. Additionally, the remains of Doyle Wayne Barker, another former husband of Beets, were found buried under a storage shed in the back yard. Two bullets were found in Jimmy Don's remains, and three bullets were found in Barker's remains. All five bullets were identified as .38 caliber projectiles; the same caliber as a pistol seized from the Beets residence during an unrelated incident. Beets' daughter, Shirley Stenger, told detectives that she had assisted her mother in burying the body of Barker in Oct. 1981, after Beets had shot and killed him. Various other witnesses testified at trial concerning Beet's attempts to collect life insurance and pension benefits after Jimmy Don's death.
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Judias Buenoano
Summary:
Buenoano, known as the "Black Widow," was executed in Florida's electric chair following her 1985 conviction for poisoning her husband, Air Force sergeant James Goodyear in 1971. Goodyear had died barely three months after returning from Vietnam suffering from symptoms staff physicians never quite identified. His body was exhumed 12 years later after Buenoano became a suspect in another case and found to contain arsenic.
In 1984, a jury convicted Buenoano of killing her partially paralyzed 19-year-old son, Michael Goodyear, and sentenced her to life in prison. Michael wore heavy metal leg braces and he was unable to walk or use his hands. On May 13th, 1980 Judi took Michael and his younger brother James canoeing on the East River. Sadly the canoe capsized. James and Judi were able to get out from under the upturned canoe but Michael, weighed down by the heavy braces didn't stand a chance and drowned.
In 1984, a jury convicted Buenoano of attempting to kill her boyfriend, Pensacola businessman John Gentry, and sentenced her to 12 years imprisonment. On June 25th 1983 Judi announced she was pregnant and John went out to get some champagne to celebrate. When he started his car a bomb exploded and he was seriously injured as a result. John later said Judi had been giving her vitamins. In fact, she was not pregnant and had booked a cruise for herself and her children. She had also recently been telling her friends that John had a terminal illness. Several of the alleged vitamin capsules were recovered and found to contain the arsenic.
She collected more than ,000 in insurance money from the deaths of her husband, a son, and a boyfriend in Colorado, but was never prosecuted. Insurance benefits were also the motive in each of the Florida cases which resulted in conviction. Buenoano never admitted any of the killings. Buenoano was the first woman executed in Florida since 1848, and the third executed in the United States since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976.
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Karla Faye Tucker
Karla Faye Tucker died by Lethal Injection in Texas on February 3, 1998.She was pronounced dead at 6:45 pm. Karla was the first woman to be executed in the U.S. since 1984. She was on death row for the brutal pickax murders of Jerry Lynn Dean and Deborah Thornton on June 13, 1983.Karla never once denied her guilt and spent the next 14 years on death row turning her life around as a Christian and helping others along the way
Final Statement
"I would like to say to all of you, the Thornton family and Jerry Dean's family that I am so sorry. I hope God will give you peace with this.
Baby, I love you. Ron give Peggy a hug for me. Everybody has been so good to me. I love all of you very much.....I am going to be face to face with Jesus now. Warden Baggett, thank all of you so much. You have been so good to me. I love all of you very much, I will see you all when you
get there. I will wait for you."
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Velma Barfield
Summary:
After two marraiges ended with the death of her husbands, by 1977 Barfield was in a relationship with Stuart Taylor, who was a widower and tobacco farmer. As she had been doing for years, she forged checks on Taylor's account to pay for her addiction to prescription drugs. Fearing that she had been found out, she mixed an arsenic based rat poison into his beer and tea. Taylor became very ill and Velma volunteered to nurse him. As his condition worsened she took him to hospital where he died a few days later. Unfortunately for her there was an autopsy which found that the cause of Taylor's death was arsenic poisoning and Velma was arrested and charged with his murder. At the trial her defense pleaded insanity but this was not accepted and she was convicted. The jury recommended the death sentence. Velma appeared cold and uncaring on the stand and actually gave the District Attorney a round of applause when he made his closing speech.
Barfield later confessed to the 1974 murder of her own mother (in whose name she had taken out a loan) and of two elderly people, John Henry Lee (by whom she was being paid as a housekeeper/caregiver) and Dollie Edwards (a relative of Stuart Taylor). Velma always attended the funerals of her victims and appeared to grieve genuinely for them. The body of her late husband, Thomas Barfield, was later exhumed and also found to contain traces of arsenic. Velma denied that she had killed him. Her motives for these four murders were the same. She had misappropriated money from her victims and then according to her, tried to make them ill so she could nurse them whilst finding another job to enable her to repay the money. Needless to say, the jury was less than impressed by this defense.
Barfield gained notoriety as the "Death Row Granny," becoming the first woman to be executed in the U.S. since 1962, and the first since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976.
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