Killer Of Spouse, Son Executed ‘Black Widow’ First Woman Put To Death In Florida Since 1848

Her frail-looking body barely filling the seat of the big oak electric chair, the “Black Widow” went to her death Monday in Florida’s first execution of a woman since 1848.

Judy Buenoano, 54, was executed for fatally poisoning her Air Force husband with arsenic in 1971 after his return from Vietnam. She also drowned her paralyzed son, tried to blow up her fiance and was suspected of killing a boyfriend.

Her head shaved and coated with conducting gel, Buenoano was barely walking as guards led her into the death chamber. Asked if she had a final statement, she answered weakly, “No, sir,” squeezing her eyes shut and keeping them shut, not looking at the witnesses on the other side of the glass.

Buenoano (pronounced bwain-oh-AN-yoh) collected about $240,000 in life insurance after the deaths of her husband, son and boyfriend but maintained her innocence.

In her final days, the former cocktail waitress and nail salon owner crocheted blankets and baby clothes, said she wanted to be remembered as a good mother, and got a third of the way through “Remember Me,” a murder mystery by Mary Higgins Clark.

“Seeing the face of Jesus, that’s what I think about,” she recently told a TV station. “I’m ready to go home.”

Buenoano was convicted of drowning her 19-year-old son, Michael Goodyear, in 1980 by pushing him out of a canoe into a river. He was paralyzed from arsenic poisoning and was wearing heavy leg and arm braces. Monday would have been his 37th birthday.

Buenoano was not a suspect in the death of her husband, James Goodyear, or her son’s drowning until she tried to kill her fiance, John Gentry, and collect on a $500,000 insurance policy by blowing up his car in 1983.

She had changed her name - “buenoano” means “good year” in Spanish. After the attempt on Gentry’s life, investigators made the “Goodyear-Buenoano” connection and exhumed his body. It contained lethal amounts of arsenic.

Prosecutors in Colorado also found evidence Buenoano poisoned a boyfriend in 1978 but did not charge her because she had already gotten the death penalty in Florida.

Only two other women have been executed since the Supreme Court lifted the ban on the death penalty in 1976. Both died by injection. In 1984, Velma Barfield was executed in North Carolina for poisoning her boyfriend. Texas put Karla Faye Tucker to death on Feb. 3 for two pickax murders.

Florida last executed a woman in 1848, when a slave named Celia was hanged for killing her former master.

The last woman to be executed in the electric chair in the United States was Rhonda Belle Martin, who was put to death in 1957 in Alabama for poisoning her mother, three daughters and two husbands.