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.