The canoe went over on May 13, 1980, on the East River near Milton, Florida. The water was dark and warm. In the boat with Judy Buenoano were two of her children: her younger son James and her nineteen-year-old son Michael, who wore heavy metal braces on both his arms and legs. He wore no life jacket. When the canoe capsized, James made it to the bank. Michael sank.

The official finding was accidental drowning. It would take three more years, a car bomb, and a determined Pensacola detective to unravel what had actually happened on that river. By then, the bodies were already in the ground.

Judy Buenoano was born Judias Welty on April 4, 1943, in Quanah, Texas, the third of four siblings. Her father was an itinerant farm laborer. Her mother, also named Judias Welty, died of tuberculosis when Judy was somewhere between two and four years old. She and her younger brother Robert were sent to live with their grandparents. When their father remarried, the children were moved again, this time to Roswell, New Mexico, where Judy would later claim she was starved, physically abused, and forced to work as a servant by her father and stepmother.

Whether those accounts were wholly accurate is difficult to say. Judy had a complicated relationship with the truth. She later told people her mother had been a full-blooded member of the Mesquite Apache tribe, a group that does not exist. But the documented record of her childhood suggests something genuinely brutal. At approximately fourteen years old, she attacked her father, her stepmother, and two stepbrothers with scalding grease. With no juvenile facility available in New Mexico at the time, she served two months in an adult prison.

She came out of it, seemingly, with resolve. She chose to attend reform school upon her release. She graduated in 1960. She trained as a nursing assistant. In 1961, she gave birth to an illegitimate son, Michael, born on March 30 of that year. The date would carry a grim irony she could not have foreseen.

In 1962, she married Air Force Sergeant James Goodyear. The couple settled in Orlando, Florida, near McCoy Air Force Base, where James was stationed. He adopted Michael. They had two more children together: James Jr. and Kimberly. From the outside, the picture looked ordinary. A military family. Three children. A home in Florida.

James Goodyear shipped out to Vietnam. He came back in 1971. Within months of his return, he was sick. His symptoms were vague at first, the kind of thing that gets attributed to stress or something picked up overseas. Then they worsened. He was admitted to the hospital and died on September 16, 1971. The cause of death was recorded as natural causes, consistent with complications from something he might have encountered during his service. Judy collected approximately $28,000 in life insurance and $64,000 in benefits from the Veterans Administration.

No one looked closely. Why would they? A Vietnam veteran, back home not even a year, died of illness. It happened.

By 1972, Judy had a new partner: Bobby Joe Morris of Pensacola. In 1977, Morris relocated to Trinidad, Colorado, and Judy followed with her children. In January 1978, Morris was dead. Later toxicological analysis would confirm arsenic poisoning, with some reports also noting massive concentrations of Thorazine in his remains. Judy collected on multiple life insurance policies as his common-law wife.

No charges were filed.

On May 3, 1978, Judy went to the courthouse and legally changed her surname, and those of her children, to Buenoano. It was a corrupted rendering of the Spanish phrase buen año, meaning good year, which is also what Goodyear means. She had, in a sense, translated herself.

Around this same period, her son Michael began deteriorating. He had enlisted in the Army, but his health collapsed before he could complete his service. He developed severe weakness, partial paralysis, and difficulty controlling his limbs. Physicians would later attribute these symptoms to chronic arsenic poisoning. By the spring of 1980, he was in metal braces on both arms and both legs.

On May 13, 1980, Judy took Michael and James Jr. canoeing on the East River. The canoe capsized. James Jr. survived. Michael, nineteen years old, armored in heavy metal and stripped of any flotation, drowned. Judy collected his life insurance. She used the proceeds to open a beauty salon in Gulf Breeze, Florida.

She was, by then, practiced at this. The pattern is almost businesslike in retrospect: relationship, insurance policy, illness, death, collection. Then a new chapter, a new name, a fresh start financed by grief she had manufactured.

In 1983, she was engaged to a Pensacola businessman named John Gentry. Gentry sold wallpaper. He was trusting, affectionate, and devoted to Judy. She persuaded him that they should each take out life insurance policies on the other. His policy grew, incrementally, to between $500,000 and $510,000. She gave him capsules she described as vitamin C supplements. They contained arsenic and paraformaldehyde.

Gentry grew ill but did not die. Judy adjusted her approach.

On the evening of June 25, 1983, Gentry walked out of the Driftwood Restaurant near downtown Pensacola and got into his car. The pipe bomb planted beneath it detonated. Gentry was badly injured. He survived.

He survived, and that changed everything.

Pensacola police detective Ted Chamberlain caught the bombing case. It looked at first like a standard investigation into attempted murder: who had planted the bomb, who had a motive. The answer, quickly, pointed to Judy Buenoano. Investigators found wire and tape in her home that matched materials recovered from the blast site. But as Chamberlain dug into her background, something else emerged. The history of dead men. The insurance policies. The son who drowned.

Autopsies were ordered. James Goodyear's body was exhumed. Michael Goodyear's body was exhumed. Bobby Joe Morris's body was exhumed. In all three cases, toxicological testing confirmed arsenic poisoning. James Goodyear, dead since 1971, had been carrying it in his tissues for more than a decade.

Buenoano was arrested in 1983. In March 1984, a Santa Rosa County jury convicted her of first-degree murder in the death of her son Michael. She was sentenced to life in prison. Separately, she was convicted of the attempted murder of John Gentry in Escambia County and sentenced to twelve years. Her surviving son, James Jr., was charged as an accomplice in the car bombing; he was acquitted.

The James Goodyear trial followed in 1985. It began on October 22 in Orange County. The prosecution laid out the arsenic findings, the insurance payouts, the pattern that stretched across fifteen years and multiple states. On November 26, 1985, Judy Buenoano was convicted of first-degree premeditated murder and sentenced to death.

She was transferred to death row at the Broward Correctional Institution for women. Her Florida Department of Corrections number was 160663. On paper, she was a white female, brown hair, hazel eyes, five feet seven, one hundred and seventy pounds. In practice, she was the woman Prosecutor Russell Edgar had taken to calling the Black Widow: someone who, in his words, fed off her mates and her young.

Investigators suspected her involvement in additional deaths. A 1974 murder in Alabama. The 1980 death of another boyfriend, Gerald Dossett, whose body was exhumed and tested for arsenic after her arrest. No additional charges were ever filed. The full accounting of what Judy Buenoano may have done across her lifetime remains, in certain corners, unresolved. What was established, across three separate trials, was enough. She had collected an estimated $240,000 in insurance proceeds from the people around her.

For thirteen years, she appealed. Federal habeas corpus petitions. State courts. The Eleventh Circuit. All denied. On March 29, 1998, both the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals and the Florida Supreme Court rejected her final filings. Governor Lawton Chiles signed her death warrant.

She spent her last day quietly. She watched a hunting and fishing show on television. She ate chocolates. Her surviving children, Kim Hawkins and James Goodyear Jr., came to say goodbye, along with a cousin named Jeanne Eaton. Her final meal was steamed broccoli, asparagus, strawberries, tomato wedges, and hot tea with lemon. She had been reading a Mary Higgins Clark murder mystery, "Remember Me," though she did not finish it.

At 7:02 on the morning of March 30, 1998, correctional officers escorted Buenoano into the execution chamber at Florida State Prison in Starke. Witnesses described her as frail, barely walking under her own power. She was strapped into the electric chair with eight leather restraints. Her head had been shaved. Conducting gel was applied. When the warden asked if she had any final statement, she said: "No, sir." She kept her eyes shut.

The current was switched on at 7:08 a.m. The electrocution lasted thirty-eight seconds. She was pronounced dead at 7:13 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

The date was March 30. Her son Michael had been born on March 30, 1961. He would have turned thirty-seven that morning.

Judy Buenoano was the first woman executed in Florida since 1848, when a formerly enslaved woman named Celia was hanged for killing her enslaver. She was the first woman ever executed in Florida's electric chair. She was the first woman electrocuted anywhere in the United States since Rhonda Belle Martin was put to death in Alabama on October 11, 1957, and only the third woman executed in the country since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, following Velma Barfield in 1984 and Karla Faye Tucker just weeks earlier, in February 1998.

Her body was cremated. She never confessed. She maintained her innocence through every appeal, every interview, every day on death row, and into the chamber itself.

What to make of that silence is a question without a clean answer. True believers in her innocence were few and found little support in the toxicological record. But her silence points to something else worth noting about the Buenoano case: the long years between each death, the distances between Florida and Colorado and Alabama, the way each tragedy was packaged as grief rather than crime. She operated in an era before computerized insurance databases, before prosecutors compared notes across state lines as a matter of routine. She counted on compartmentalization. For a long time, it worked.

The case is documented in Chris Anderson and Sharon McGehee's 1991 book "Bodies of Evidence" and revisited in the Investigation Discovery documentary series "Very Scary People" in 2023. Detective Ted Chamberlain, the man who pulled the thread that unraveled it all, began with a car bomb and ended with a death sentence. He did not set out to solve the murders of the 1970s. He set out to find who had tried to kill John Gentry. The rest followed, one exhumed body at a time.

The electric chair at Florida State Prison is nicknamed Old Sparky. At 7:13 a.m. on the thirtieth of March, 1998, Judy Buenoano became the last secret it helped keep.