Judy Buenoano

What the record shows

Judias "Judy" Buenoano was a Florida woman convicted of two murders committed years apart for insurance money: the 1971 arsenic poisoning of her husband, Air Force Sergeant James Goodyear, in Orlando, and the 1980 drowning of her 19-year-old son, Michael. She was also convicted of attempting to murder her fiance, John Gentry, whose car exploded in Pensacola in 1983. Sentenced to death for Goodyear's killing, she was electrocuted at Florida State Prison on March 30, 1998, the first woman executed in Florida since 1848. She maintained her innocence to the end, CBS News reported.

She was born Anna Lou Welty on April 4, 1943, in Quanah, Texas, according to the Wikipedia article and the Florida Sheriffs Association. She married Goodyear in 1962, according to the federal court in the Middle District of Florida and the sheriffs association (the Wikipedia article gives 1963), and in 1978 legally changed her surname to Buenoano, a name investigators later learned was a Spanish rendering of Goodyear. According to the Florida Supreme Court, Goodyear returned to Orlando from a tour of duty in South Vietnam in 1971, fell ill with nausea and vomiting, was admitted to the naval hospital there on September 13 and died on September 16 of cardiovascular collapse and renal failure. No toxicology test was done at the time. She collected about $33,000 in life insurance and $62,000 from the Veterans Administration.

After Goodyear's death she lived with Bobby Joe Morris and moved with him to Colorado. Morris became ill with symptoms like Goodyear's and died; the Wikipedia article dates his death to January 1978 in Trinidad, Colorado, while CBS News gives 1977. She collected about $23,000 from three insurance policies on his life, the Florida Supreme Court found. When his remains were exhumed in 1984, tissue analysis showed acute arsenic poisoning. She was never charged with his death, which came to light after she had already been sentenced to death in Florida, CBS News and the Deseret News reported. The Wikipedia article and the sheriffs association also say she was believed to be involved in the 1980 death of a man named Gerald Dossett and a 1974 killing in Alabama; no charges were brought in either.

Her son Michael, who had been adopted by Goodyear, joined the Army in 1979, became ill and was diagnosed with arsenic poisoning, according to the federal court account. Fitted with heavy metal leg braces, he was discharged into his mother's care. On May 13, 1980, he drowned when a canoe carrying the two of them capsized on the East River near Milton, Florida, weighed down by his braces. Prosecutors argued that she had caused his paralysis with arsenic. She collected about $20,000 from his military life insurance.

In 1982 she was living with John Gentry in the Gulf Breeze area and engaged to him. According to the Florida Supreme Court, she began giving him Vicon C vitamin capsules in November 1982 for a cold; he became so ill that he was hospitalized on December 15, and the sickness returned after she gave him the capsules again. Analysis found they contained paraformaldehyde. She had been telling associates he had terminal cancer, and she held $510,000 in life insurance on him. In 1983 his car exploded in Pensacola, seriously injuring him. A search of her home found wire and tape matching the bomb remains, the federal court account says. The investigation led to the exhumation of Goodyear, whose body contained arsenic. Her son James Goodyear Jr., charged as an accomplice in the bombing, was acquitted at a separate trial.

In 1984 she was convicted of first-degree murder in Michael's death and sentenced to life in prison, and of attempted murder of Gentry, receiving 12 years. A grand jury indicted her on August 31, 1984, for Goodyear's murder. At her trial, where evidence of the Morris death and the Gentry poisoning was admitted as similar-fact evidence, two acquaintances testified that she had discussed killing someone with arsenic, and two witnesses said she admitted killing Goodyear. The jury convicted her and recommended death, and she was sentenced to death in November 1985. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed on June 23, 1988.

Her later appeals, including claims about FBI laboratory testimony concerning the Gentry capsules and an undisclosed juror conviction, were rejected by the Florida Supreme Court on March 26, 1998, and by the Eleventh Circuit on March 29, which found the remaining evidence of guilt strong. She was electrocuted the next morning and pronounced dead at 7:13 a.m., aged 54, the third woman executed in the United States after 1976, according to CBS News.