1 case tagged “Florida”
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.
