2 cases tagged “convicted murderer”
Convicted: Celeste Beard Johnson
At 3:00 in the morning on October 2, 1999, Tracey Tarlton crept into a sleeping man's bedroom in the affluent Westlake Hills neighborhood of Austin, Texas, and pressed a 20-gauge shotgun against his abdomen. Steven Beard, a 76-year-old retired Fox Broadcasting executive worth millions, never heard her coming. His much younger wife was asleep in a separate wing of their lakeside mansion. Or so she claimed. Celeste Beard Johnson was beautiful, charming, and seemingly devoted. She was also, investigators would discover, spending at a pace that defied grief: more than $670,000 burned through in the months surrounding her husband's wounding and death. When Tarlton was arrested six days after the shooting, police found a shrine of Celeste's photographs in her home. When Tarlton finally broke her silence, she described a calculated manipulation, a manufactured love affair, and a cold-blooded plot to collect an inheritance. Celeste's own twin daughters took the stand against her. A phone call, recorded by one of those daughters, captured Celeste screaming that she had 'hired somebody' to have Tarlton silenced. In March 2003, a Travis County jury found Celeste Beard Johnson guilty of capital murder. She is currently serving a life sentence at the Lane Murray Unit in Gatesville, Texas, with parole eligibility not until 2042, when she will be nearly 80 years old. She has always maintained her innocence. Her daughters disagree.
Convicted: Nancy Agnes Hazel Doss
She sat across from Tulsa police Captain Harry Stege in November 1954 and giggled. She giggled when she described stirring rat poison into her husband's coffee. She giggled when she confirmed she had poisoned four of her five husbands. She giggled when the officers pressed her about the grandchildren, the sisters, the mother. The laughter never quite left her face. Nannie Doss was 49 years old, soft-featured, grandmotherly, and by the time she was arraigned on November 29, 1954, the prime suspect in at least eleven deaths spanning four states and nearly three decades. Her weapons were domestic and unremarkable: stewed prunes, corn whiskey, a slice of prune cake, a cup of morning coffee laced with arsenic. Her victims were the people closest to her, the ones who ate at her table and slept in her bed. Investigators called her 'The Giggling Granny.' The press added 'The Black Widow,' 'Lady Bluebeard,' and 'The Lonely Hearts Killer.' Each nickname captured a piece of her; none captured all of her. Because behind the laughter sat something more complicated and more chilling: a woman who had dreamed her whole life of storybook romance, and who killed, methodically and repeatedly, every time reality fell short of the fantasy. This is the story of Nancy Agnes Hazel Doss, born in rural Alabama in 1905 and buried in a prison cemetery in Oklahoma in 1965. In between, she made sure a great many people never made it out alive.
