Case of Judias V. Buenoano

[Mohamed Pauzi <mpauzi@yahoo.com>]

http://agitator.com/dp/98/judibuen.html

Title: Execution of Judias V. Buenoano

Case of Judias V. Buenoano Name: Buenoano, Judias V. Race: White State: Florida Executed: Mar 30, 1998 Method: Electrocution Crime: murder Victim: her husband James Goodyear

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Judy Buenoano was the 1st woman put to death in Florida since 1848, and only the 3rd woman executed in the nation since 1976.

She was pronounced dead at 7:13 a.m. (eastern time)

Buenoano, 54, a former nail salon owner, was executed for the arsenic poisoning of her husband in 1971. Prosecutors said she committed that murder for the same reasons she killed her son in 1980 and tried to kill her fiance in 1983 -- insurance money. She also was suspected of killing a boyfriend in 1978 but was never charged because she had already been sentenced to death.

The last woman executed in Florida was a freed slave who was hanged for killing her master.

Only 2 other women had been executed since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the ban on the death penalty in 1976, and both were by injection.

In 1984, North Carolina executed Velma Barfield for poisoning her boyfriend. Last month, Texas put Karla Faye Tucker to death for a double-pickax murder. Tucker was a telegenic, avowed Christian who ministered to her fellow inmates, expressed contrition for her crimes and even received support from the pope.

Buenoano crocheted blankets and baby clothes in prison and said she wanted to be remembered as a good mother. She adamantly maintained her son's drowning was an accident.

"Seeing the face of Jesus, that's what I think about," she recently told a Florida television station. "I'm ready to go home."

Until she tried to kill her fiance, John Gentry, in 1983 by bombing his car in Pensacola, Buenoano had not been suspected of the other killings. Gentry said she had given him pills that made him sick but told him they were vitamins.

When investigators realized Buenoano was Spanish for "Goodyear," and learned she had been married to Air Force Sgt. James Goodyear, they exhumed his body and found he had lethal amounts of arsenic in his body when he died in 1971.

There was also evidence she fatally poisoned a boyfriend, Bobby Joe Morris, in Trinidad, Colo., in 1978.

She was convicted of drowning Michael Goodyear, her 19-year-old son, by giving him arsenic -- which might have caused his paralysis -- and pushing him out of a canoe. Monday would have been his 37th birthday.

The motive for the murders was "twisted greed," because she was trying to claim about $240,000 in insurance money, said prosecutor Russell Edgar, who gave Buenoano her nickname.

On Sunday, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta and then the U.S. Supreme Court denied her last appeals, which claimed she was innocent and called Florida's electric chair "barbaric.... It belongs in Frankenstein's laboratory."

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Go To Executions In 1998

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This page is maintained by Kuno Sandholzer. Last updated 03/30/98.