Velma Margie Barfield

Velma Margie Barfield was a woman with extremely bad luck when it came to marriage. She had been married twice, however both of her marriages ended with the death of her husbands. In 1977 Barfield met Stuart Taylor, who was a widower and tobacco farmer; they began dating short after.  For many years, Barfield had been forging check on Taylor's account to pay for her addiction to prescription drugs. Barfield feared that Taylor had found out, so she began mixing 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 it was not accepted and she was convicted. The jury recommended the death sentence. Velma appeared cold and uncaring on the stand and surprisingly 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 been stealing money from her victims and then according to her, tried to make them ill so she could nurse them while finding another job to help her to repay the money. Velma Margie Barfield was executed by lethal injection on November 2, 1984.

Meet Kelly Renee Gissendaner

Kelly Renee Gissendaner and Doug Gissendaner had an extremely complicated relationship.Over the course of their relationship they’d been married, divorced, remarried, separated, and reunited between 1989 and 1997. Gissendaner had been in a relationship with Gregory Bruce Owen. On the evening of February 7, 1997, Gissendaner drove Owen to her home, gave him a nightstick and a large knife, and left him inside the home to wait for her husband. Gissendaner then drove to a friend's house, and, upon Gissendaner's insistence that the group keep their plans for the evening, she and her friends went out to a nightclub. The victim arrived home shortly after 10:00 p.m. Owen confronted the him from behind, held a knife to his throat, forced him to drive to a remote location, forced him to walk into the woods and kneel, and then killed him by striking him with the nightstick and then stabbing him repeatedly in the back and neck with the knife. As instructed by Gissendaner, Owen took the victim's watch and wedding ring before killing him to make the murder appear like a robbery. Gissendaner returned home from the nightclub at about the time the murder was being carried out, paged Owen with a numeric signal, and then drove to the crime scene. After asking if her husband was dead, she took a flashlight and went toward the body to inspect it. Owen burned the victim's automobile with kerosene provided by Gissendaner, and the pair returned to their respective homes in Gissendaner's automobile. After her arrest, Gissendaner called her best friend and confessed to her active and willing role in the murder, although she then called a second time and claimed that she was coerced into participating. Gissendaner also wrote a letter while in jail in an effort to hire someone to give perjured testimony and to rob and beat witnesses. Gissendaner was convicted in 1998 of recruiting her lover to kill her husband. Gregory Owen, testified against her as part of a plea bargain that landed him a life sentence but spared him from the death penalty.  Kelly Renee Gissendaner was executed by lethal injection on Tuesday, September 29.