STARKE, Florida — At 7:02 on the morning of March 30, 1998, two guards carried a woman weighing less than 100 pounds into a small, windowless room at Florida State Prison and strapped her into an oak electric chair that inmates had nicknamed Old Sparky. Judy Ann Buenoano, 54, her head partially shaved and her right leg wrapped in a wet sponge and metal electrode, closed her eyes and refused to look at the witnesses behind the glass partition. When a prison official asked if she had any final words, she answered in a voice witnesses described as barely audible: “No, sir.”
Seven minutes later, at 7:08 a. m. , the switch was thrown.
Smoke curled up from her right leg for 38 seconds as the current passed through her body. At 7:13 a. m.
, she was pronounced dead. Florida had just executed the first woman in the state in 150 years — the last execution of a woman in Florida having been a hanging in 1848, long before the Civil War. She was only the third woman executed anywhere in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
But the woman who died insisting she had never hurt anyone had, according to prosecutors and forensic investigators, spent more than a decade poisoning the men who trusted her most. She was convicted of three first-degree murders and one attempted murder, and investigators believed her reach extended even further. Over the course of her adult life, she collected an estimated $240,000 in life insurance payouts from the deaths of those closest to her.
The pattern that defined her life began in Orlando, Florida, in the summer of 1971. James Goodyear, a United States Air Force sergeant who had survived a tour in Vietnam, came home to his wife, Judy, and began suffering from nausea, vomiting, and stomach pain that his wife seemed reluctant to treat. According to later testimony, she told doctors she didn’t want to bring him to the hospital and told nurses he would get better on his own.
When he was finally admitted to the Naval Hospital in Orlando, his organs were already failing.
Goodyear died on September 16, 1971, three days after admission. The official cause of death was recorded as cardiovascular collapse and renal failure. No toxicology screen was performed for poison.
No one suspected the grieving young widow sitting in the waiting room. Judy Buenoano, then going by Judy Goodyear, collected $95,000 in military death benefits and life insurance payouts. The case was closed.
Within a year, she had moved on to a new relationship with Bobby Joe Morris in Pensacola. In 1978, Morris fell ill with symptoms that mirrored Goodyear’s almost exactly: nausea, vomiting, a slow and agonizing decline. He died on January 28, 1978.
Judy collected on three separate insurance policies connected to his death, totaling roughly $23,000. No one connected the two deaths. They occurred in different states, years apart, to men who had nothing in common except the woman who had outlived them both.
That same year, Judy did something that would later be seen as a chilling act of vanity. She legally changed her last name to Buenoano, a name she constructed to sound like the Spanish translation of Goodyear. She was, literally, wearing her dead husband’s name as a trophy while presenting it to the world as a tribute.
She would carry that name through the rest of her life, and the press would eventually use it to brand her the Black Widow.
The next tragedy struck in 1980, and it was the one that would later horrify the nation most deeply. Michael, Judy’s eldest son, had enlisted in the United States Army but was struck by a mysterious paralysis that left him fitted with heavy metal braces on his legs and one arm. On May 13, 1980, mother and son went out in a canoe on the East River near Milton, Florida.
The canoe capsized. Michael could not swim, and the 15 extra pounds of metal braces that were supposed to help him stand worked against him, dragging him beneath the surface.
Judy survived. Her son did not. She collected $20,000 from his military life insurance policy.
At the time, the death was ruled a tragic accident. No one connected it to the deaths of her husband nine years earlier or her boyfriend two years before that. She had now received more than $100,000 in total payouts across three deaths, and she remained, in the eyes of everyone around her, simply an unlucky woman who kept losing the people she loved.
She opened a beauty salon and continued her search for the next relationship. In the early 1980s, she began dating John Gentry, a Pensacola businessman in the wallpaper and home decorating trade. In October 1982, she convinced him to take out life insurance policies on each other.
Not long afterward, she began giving him what she described as vitamin capsules. He promptly fell ill with the same nausea and vomiting that had preceded the deaths of her husband and Bobby Joe Morris.
But a crucial difference emerged this time. While Gentry was hospitalized, away from Judy and away from the capsules, he began to recover. He was released and continued the relationship, unaware of what had almost killed him.
In June 1983, Judy told him she was pregnant with his child, and the two became engaged.
On June 18, 1983, Gentry walked to his car in downtown Pensacola, planning to buy champagne to celebrate. He turned the key in the ignition. The car exploded.
Gentry survived, badly injured, and in surviving he did something none of Judy’s previous victims had been able to do. He talked.
Investigators tested the vitamin capsules he had been given. They contained paraformaldehyde, a toxic compound capable of producing exactly the illness Gentry had suffered. A search of Judy Buenoano’s home turned up wire and tape matching debris recovered from the bomb that had torn through Gentry’s car.
On January 11, 1984, she was arrested.
Once she was in custody, investigators went back through her history with fresh eyes. They petitioned to exhume the bodies of James Goodyear and Bobby Joe Morris. Both bodies, despite years of burial, showed evidence of saturation with arsenic.
Arsenic does not occur in the body by accident. Someone had been administering slow doses of poison designed to mimic ordinary illness — the kind of slow, deniable poisoning a trained nursing assistant would know how to administer. Judy had trained as a nursing assistant as a teenager.
Her legal reckoning came in stages across 1984 and 1985. She was convicted of attempted murder for the car bombing and poisoning of John Gentry and sentenced to 12 years. She was convicted of first-degree murder for the drowning death of her son Michael and sentenced to life.
And for the 1971 death of her husband, James Goodyear — the case that had started it all — a jury convicted her of first-degree murder. On November 26, 1985, she was formally sentenced to death.
Throughout every trial, Judy Buenoano maintained complete composure. Courtroom observers described her as controlled and unreadable, almost detached from the enormity of the accusations. She never confessed.
She never broke down. She held to a single position through every stage of the proceedings: she had done nothing wrong. The men in her life had simply, tragically, one after another, died.
She was transferred to Broward Correctional Institution to begin serving her sentences, and for 13 years she fought the death sentence through a grinding series of appeals. During that time, she professed to be a born-again Christian, a transformation that echoed the claims of other female death row inmates of the era, including Velma Barfield and Karla Faye Tucker. But her profession of faith never translated into confession of guilt.
Her final day began quietly. On March 29, 1998, her last appeal was formally denied, and Governor Lawton Chiles signed her death warrant. The United States Supreme Court refused to hear further appeals.
The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta and the Florida Supreme Court had already turned her down. She was transferred to Florida State Prison in Starke and placed in a 12-by-7-foot cell on death watch, just steps from the execution chamber.
In her final hours, she watched a small black-and-white television through the bars and received one last visit from her two surviving adult children. Her final meal request, served early on the morning of her execution, was startling in its simplicity: steamed broccoli, steamed asparagus, tomato and lemon wedges, fresh strawberries, and hot tea. No steak.
No indulgence. No final act of excess for a woman whose entire life had been defined by extremity.
After the meal, she was showered. Her head was partially shaved, along with a section of her right leg, to allow direct contact with the execution equipment. She was dressed in the clothes she would be buried in, hours before her death.
At 7:02 a. m. , guards helped her walk into the execution chamber, though multiple accounts described her as frail and needing physical support.
By at least one account from someone who had worked the case from its earliest days, this was the only time anyone in law enforcement had ever seen Judy Buenoano display visible fear.
She was strapped into the same 75-year-old electric chair, built by inmates in 1923, that had taken the lives of more than 200 men before her. When asked for her final statement, she said only: “No, sir.” She closed her eyes and kept them shut.
She made no confession. She offered no explanation. She went to her death exactly as she had lived every day since September 1971: giving nothing away.
Her body was cremated. According to her grandson, some of her ashes were scattered in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the rest were buried beneath a gardenia bush on family property. Officially, her body count stands at three confirmed murders — James Goodyear, Bobby Joe Morris, and her son Michael — plus one attempted murder of John Gentry, the man who survived both poisoning and a car bomb to become the witness who finally ended her decade-long pattern.
Unofficially, investigators believed her reach extended further. A 1974 death in Alabama and the 1980 death of another boyfriend, Gerald Dossett, were examined after her arrest. Dossett’s body was exhumed and tested for arsenic, but no charges were ever filed because Florida had already convicted her and sentenced her to death by the time that investigation caught up with the timeline of her life.
In total, across every insurance claim connected to her name, Judy Buenoano is believed to have collected roughly $200,000 or more over a period of more than a decade. The money was paid out because people trusted her enough to name her as their beneficiary, never suspecting that trust was the last mistake they would ever make.
What makes the Buenoano case so difficult to comprehend is not simply the number of victims, but the method. She did not 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 in a single act of rage or panic. She used arsenic, a poison that works slowly, that mimics ordinary illness, that allows a caregiver to appear devoted and heartbroken while being, invisibly, the reason the person she loved was dying.
She used the exact skills she had trained for as a teenage nursing assistant and turned them into a weapon that took the legal system more than a decade to finally recognize.
It took one man surviving — John Gentry, walking away from a car that should have killed him — to break a pattern that had already claimed three lives and gone completely undetected for more than a decade. Judy Buenoano died insisting she had never hurt anyone, but arsenic does not lie. Two exhumed bodies, saturated with poison, told the truth that three separate death certificates never did.
The case remains one of the most studied in American criminal history precisely because of how long she operated in plain sight, protected by nothing more than the assumption that grieving widows do not lie.