BLACK WIDOWS:  Women who kill their mates

 

The black widow spiders are renowned for biting off the heads of their mates after they have mated with them. The black spider widows didn’t eat their husbands but they have killed them. Here are some of the black widows in the United States and Canada. First, I will tell you of five of the black widows in the United States.

 

Betty Lou Beets

 

In 1972, this woman pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge for shooting and wounding her second husband Bill Lane. Thirteen years later, the bodies of husband number five, Jimmy Don Beets, and husband number four, Doyle Barker, were found buried in the yard of Betty Lou Beets' mobile home in aptly-named Gun Barrel City, Texas. Both men had been shot in the head several times. Prosecutors alleged that Betty Lou Beets had killed Jimmy Don Beets to steal his insurance and pension money, and she was convicted and sentenced to death. She also initially was charged in Barker's murder, but that case never came to trial. This 62-year-old woman was executed in Texas in 2000, one of the 12 women executed in the United States since 1976 when the death penalty in the US was re-instated.

 

Judias V. ‘Judy’ Buenoano

 

In 1971, this dark-haired, bespectacled nail salon owner murdered her husband, Air Force sergeant James Goodyear, by poisoning him with arsenic. She used the same poison to paralyze her 19-year-old son Michael, so she could push him out of a canoe which caused him to drown. Her motive, prosecutors later contended, was to collect $240,000 in insurance money.

She might have gotten away with those two killings, except that in 1983, she attempted to murder her new fiancé, John Gentry, twice — first by bombing his car and then by providing him with ‘vitamin pills’ that actually contained arsenic and formaldehyde. Gentry went to authorities, and they exhumed the bodies of Sgt. Goodyear and his son, which both showed traces of that same poison.

In 1998, at age 54, Bueonoano was executed in the electric chair, becoming the first woman put to death in Florida since 1848. She is suspected of killing at least two other men with whom she was romantically involved.

 

Laura Christy

 

Stout and matronly, with a Clara Bow haircut and owl-shaped eyeglasses, Christy seemed like an unlikely femme fatale. But looks can be deceiving. In the 1910s and 1920s, the woman who lived in Lima, Ohio, the small-town newspaper headline decried her as a ‘modern Bluebeard’ (a husband who kills his wives)  and said that she was married eight times, and that six of her spouses died suddenly under mysterious circumstances.

In 1926, police persuaded Christy to confess that she'd given arsenic to her seventh husband, a pottery worker named John Ebert, and to her eighth, the Rev. William Christy, who was the attache of the Christian Missionary Alliance. She continued to insist that the others had died of natural causes.

According to a contemporary newspaper account, Mrs. Christy explained that she'd substituted an arsenic capsule for Ebert's prescribed medication because as she said, “John treated me ill at the time.” Because Rev. Christy “treated me mean, too,” Mrs. Christy slipped him arsenic powder under the pretense that it was bicarbonate of soda to help his indigestion. They'd only been married for three weeks.

Mrs. Christy, who reportedly celebrated her final husband's demise by withdrawing $200 from his bank account and spending it on cheap trinkets, was deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial, and instead was sent to the state hospital for the criminally insane in Lima, where she spent the remainder of her days.

 

Jill Coit

 

Jill Coit might have spent years manipulating others, but she failed Friday to sway 12 people from putting her behind bars for life. A Grand County District Court jury found Coit, 51, guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder for the October 21, 1993, slaying of Steamboat Springs, Colorado hardware store owner Gerald Boggs, her eighth husband. This woman was a former beauty queen who once won the title of ‘Miss Eskimo Pie.’ She wasn't the most-married woman in U.S. history, but she was close. She married 11 times to nine different men. It was her union to hardware store owner Gerald Boggs that led to her undoing.

Suspecting his wife wasn't telling him the truth about her marital history, Boggs hired a private investigator and discovered Coit was still technically married to her eighth husband. In 1993, after Boggs' and Coit's marriage had been annulled, and the couple was embroiled in lawsuits over money, Boggs was found beaten and shot to death in his home.

In 1995, Coit and her boyfriend, Michael Backus, were arrested and convicted of first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. But even after going to prison, it is suspected that Coit may still have sought to add another husband to make it an even dozen. In 1998, authorities discovered a Web personals ad with Coit's picture, seeking an immigrant who would marry her in order to obtain U.S. citizenship. “I just don't seem able to make a marriage work,” she once admitted in a newspaper interview. “But before this, you could ask any of my husbands, and they would tell you that I was an excellent wife.” Does that include asking the one she murdered? Coit and Backus were both sentenced to life in prison.

 

Brenda Andrew

 

It was a case reminiscent of the classic movie Double Indemnity — but with a dark-haired beauty named Brenda Andrew in the Barbara Stanwyck role. Brenda Andrew, 50 in 2013, of Oklahoma City in Oklahoma, who was married to advertising executive Rob Andrew, started an affair with an insurance salesman named Jim Pavatt, whom she'd met at church. The boyfriend, in turn, sold Andrews" husband an $800,000 life insurance policy, with Andrew as the beneficiary.

When the Andrews separated, Brenda Andrew and her lover conspired to kill her soon-to-be ex-husband for the insurance money. In October 2001, Rob Andrew received several anonymous phone calls telling him that his estranged wife had been in an accident. The calls were a ruse to lure him out onto the highway in a car with severed brake lines, but Rob Andrew didn't take the bait.

Less than a month later, when he showed up at his estranged wife's house to pick up their two children for the Thanksgiving weekend, Brenda Andrew asked him to come inside and help her light the pilot on her furnace. When he knelt down in the basement, her boyfriend Pavatt blasted him with a shotgun. Brenda Andrew then took the gun and shot her husband a second time, killing him.

The couple then fled to Mexico, but they were arrested when they re-entered the United States a few months later. In 2004, Brenda was convicted of murder and is now on death row. Pavatt, who also was sentenced to death, has filed a lawsuit challenging Oklahoma's lethal injection method on grounds that it is cruel and unusual punishment. That plead won’t succeed.

 

There doesn’t appear to be any black widow murderess that were convicted of murdering their spouses or boyfriends in Canada since the Nineteenth Century but there is one in this century who is currently on trial in Nova Scotia for attempting to murder her husband.

 

Melissa Ann Shepard

 

This 78-year-old woman infamously known as the “Internet Black Widow” and who is also known to use several aliases was just recently found guilty of poisoning her husband. That is because she pleaded guilty to administering a noxious substance and failing to provide the necessities of life. Prosecutor Gerald MacDonald said outside court that an attempted murder charge was dropped because the prosecution couldn't prove that Sheppard intended to kill her former husband, 75-year-old Fred Weeks.

In October 2010, she had mixed in tranquilizers Lorazepam and Temazepam into her former husband’s drinks while they were aboard a ferry from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia on their way to Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland for their honeymoon. A ferry employee told investigators that when Weeks came aboard the ferry bound for Newfoundland, he was spry enough to easily walk 200 meters (220 yards) from his car to an elevator and was cracking jokes when he and Shepard were escorted to their cabin on September,26, 2010. However Weeks was “a totally different person the next day,” the employee said, adding that Weeks was unable to walk, couldn't put on his sneakers, didn't know where his car keys were and required the use of a wheelchair to get to his car. When he was finally in his car, he put it in reverse instead of drive when he wanted to drive his car off the ferry.

Within a day, he suddenly became ill while staying at a Cape Breton, Nova Scotia inn. He was then taken to a hospital in Sydney, Nova Scotia where he was treated for the drugs his wife had given him

Years earlier, Weeks was sentenced in 2005 to five years in prison on seven counts of theft of US$20,000 from Alexander Strategos, a man in Florida she had met online. Between 1970 and 1985 this woman had been charged with over thirty counts of fraud and forgery while in Ontario and Prince Edward Island. She was convicted and spent over five years in jail,        

She was also convicted of manslaughter in the death of her previous husband, Gordon Stewart, who she had drugged him and then drove her car over him twice in 1991 outside of Halifax. In Canada, a person who is sentenced to prison can apply for parole after serving on third of the sentence except for murder. She served only two years of a six-year sentence for that crime.

If you look at her history with men, you can see that she has a history of preying on them for financial gain. She is a psychopath because she has no conscience or empathy for others. The judge at her recent trial warned the public to be very cautious of this woman.

 

She faces a maximum sentence of two years for the charge of administering a noxious thing and 18 months for failing to provide the necessities of life. Those sentences can be given to her consecutively if the judge chooses to do so. If he decides that the sentences should be served concurrently, then she will serve at most, two years in prison and could apply for parole after serving only 8 months. If the sentences are consecutive, then she would serve at most 42 months but she could apply for parole after serving 14 months. As soon as I learn how she was sentenced, I will place that information at the bottom of this article as an UPDATE.