2 cases tagged “attempted murder”
Convicted: Valerie Jean Solanas
On the afternoon of June 3, 1968, Valerie Jean Solanas rode an elevator to Andy Warhol's Manhattan studio, pulled two firearms from a paper bag, and opened fire. She shot Warhol three times, hit art critic Mario Amaya in the hip, and attempted to execute Warhol's manager before her gun jammed. Then she walked out, hailed a cab, and waited. That evening, she surrendered to a Times Square patrolman, handed him both weapons, and offered nine words of explanation: 'He had too much control over my life.' Warhol survived, barely, after five hours of surgery during which he was briefly declared dead. He never fully recovered. Solanas, a woman with an IQ of 131 who authored one of the most provocative feminist texts of the twentieth century and held a psychology degree with honors, spent the rest of her life cycling through psychiatric wards and welfare hotels. She died alone in a San Francisco flophouse in 1988, her body undiscovered for days. What drove her to The Factory that afternoon, and what her life reveals about genius, mental illness, and the violence that festers at society's margins, remains as unsettling now as it was then.
Convicted: Judias Anna Lou 'Judy' Buenoano
At 7:08 on the morning of March 30, 1998, a correctional officer at Florida State Prison threw the switch on the electric chair. The woman strapped into it, asked moments earlier if she had any final words, had answered only 'No, sir,' and closed her eyes. She was pronounced dead at 7:13 a.m. Her name was Judy Buenoano, and she had spent the previous evening watching a hunting and fishing show, eating chocolates, and reading a Mary Higgins Clark murder mystery. The neatness of that detail feels almost unbearable: a woman convicted of poisoning her husband, her son, and her boyfriend with arsenic, spending her last hours absorbed in fiction about someone else's crime. Prosecutor Russell Edgar had a name for her. He called her the Black Widow, a woman who 'fed off her mates and her young.' The evidence bore him out. Across nearly two decades, Buenoano is believed to have poisoned at least three people and built a life on their insurance payouts. She never confessed. She maintained her innocence to the end, eyes shut, silent in the chair. This is the story of how she got there.
