Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Velma was desperate. Unable to pay for her prescriptions, she began to steal blank checks from Lillie and cashing them. It was not long before Lillie discovered this. She told her son Tyrone about it and showed him the cancelled checks. But Lillie decided not to confront Velma directly. She told Tyrone that her relationship with Velma had become very strained and she did not want to make it any worse. Instead she and Tyrone drove to the bank and made sure that from then on the bank confirmed the authenticity of Lillie’s signature on the checks from her account. From then on Lillie kept her checkbook hidden in a locked drawer.

  Early in 1974, Kim found her mother overdosed again in convulsions. Again she was taken to a hospital by ambulance. When Velma came home, she showed no interest in going back to work. She seemed in a vegetative state, concerned only with getting her prescriptions filled.

  In August, Velma went to meet with Al at a motel near Fayetteville. Late that night, Al attempted to cross the highway to get some beer at a convenience store and was run down and killed by a truck in the dark. Velma was a beneficiary in Al’s life insurance for the amount of $5,000.

  Kim and Dennis married on November 23 and moved into a trailer park in Lumberton. Velma again was sober and functioning the day of the wedding.

  Since Velma had moved in with Lillie, everybody had noticed that there was a brittle tension between Velma and her mother. That Christmas in 1974, the family had gathered for a traditional dinner that Lillie had prepared. Velma rushed around helping her mother in the kitchen—just as she did when she was a little girl. Everybody, including Velma, seemed to have a good time.

  On December 28, 1974, the Saturday after Christmas, Tyrone dropped by with his family to visit his mother. Lillie discreetly took him aside to show him something strange. It was a notice from a finance company advising her that her payment for a thousand-dollar loan was overdue, and if it was not made promptly, her car would be repossessed. But she had not taken out any loan. Tyrone told her not to worry about it. It was probably a mistake. If another notice arrived, he would look into it for her.

  By then everybody noticed that things were very volatile between Velma and her mother. One day when visiting, Ronnie saw his mother explode in rage when Lillie told her she needed to do the laundry. Velma threw the clothes across the room and cursed her mother. Years later, Ronnie would comment, “I think there was more anger in my mom then than I had ever seen. And it was a different type than I’d seen before, all directed at my grandmother. She just seemed to have a lot of resentment. She resented having to depend on her mother.”

  Ronnie got the anger part right, but he did not understand the real source of Velma’s rage.

  Velma Murders Her Mother

  According to Velma’s death row account, she resented being treated by her mother as she had been when she was a child. Velma felt she was ordered around and treated like a slave. Being told to do the laundry only reminded her of being taken out of school every Wednesday afternoon to scrub the family laundry all day.

  Velma said that her aging mother liked to talk about the past and how great it had been. “Almost every day she started on the same things again. I heard it over and over until I couldn’t stand it anymore,” Velma said.

  “But they were such good times. The best days I ever had in my life,” her mother would insist.

  “They weren’t my best days,” Velma would reply to her mother. But her mother would never listen or ask her why—she would just prattle on about how wonderful all their lives were back then.

  “I never could scream, ‘Shut up!’” Velma said.

  According to Velma, by the autumn of 1974 she was running out of money for her prescriptions, bills were piling up, and with Kim’s upcoming wedding, as the mother of the bride, Velma needed to cover the expenses. Velma said she went down to a loan company and got a one-thousand-dollar loan in her mother’s name using her house as collateral. She told them her mother was too sick to come in and took the papers home for her signature, which she forged. Velma makes no mention of the five-thousand-dollar insurance payment she received after Al’s accidental death, but she does say she paid back the first loan she took—presumably from that payment. “Maybe that’s why I didn’t think too much about it when I took out a second loan for another thousand dollars,” recounted Velma.

  Velma said that her mother showed her the first notices of due loan payments, but that she did not seem to be troubled about them, assuming it was a mistake. Velma, however, was in a panic. Every time the phone rang or there was a knock on the door, fear and anxiety would grip her. She knew she had to find work quickly and start paying down on the loan, but she felt paralyzed with anxiety and guilt and rage. She said, “All different kinds of feelings struggled inside of me—panic and anger and worry about not having any more medication.”

  According to Velma, about a week after Lillie got the notice of overdue payments, she went into town to pick up some medications. She wrote:

  While I waited for my prescription in the drugstore, I walked around and looked at things. I saw some ant and roach poison in a clear plastic bottle. I don’t remember thinking about what I would do next. But somewhere inside me, I must have already conceived of the plan. I had done it once, even though I had blotted that from my conscious memory.172

  Again, Velma insisted that she only wanted to make her mother sick while she paid off the loan before Lillie discovered her deception. She served her mother lunch and a soft drink laced with the arsenic. A few hours later, she gave her a second arsenic soft drink.

  Velma said once again the doctors misdiagnosed her victim’s condition, this time attributing it to stomach flu. She stated:

  While waiting, I kept thinking of what the doctor had said. The poison hadn’t done this to her. It’s something that’s going around, like the doctor said. A lot of people are going through the same thing, not just Mama. That’s how I worked it out in my head.173

  The medicine the doctors prescribed only made her mother worse, according to Velma, just as when she had poisoned Jennings. Velma’s revelations in her death row memoir, both sincere and insincere, give us a frightening insight into the thought process of a homicidal psychopath. How does a wife kill her husband, a daughter her mother, a mother her children? What in the world were they thinking? What did they think they were doing? It is unimaginable to us, but only if we impose our own emotional matrix and thought process on these kinds of acts. Psychopaths like Velma think in different ways—they feel and think in different dimensions that we cannot perceive or comprehend with our ordinary minds. In the world of criminal psychology, theories on the mind of a serial killer are the equivalent of quantum physics’ black holes and string theory: Aside from corpses, it’s anybody’s guess what lies on the other side.

  We do not know what happened that weekend after Christmas when Tyrone had visited his mother and Lillie had shown him the loan company letters. Did Lillie confront Velma about the loan company notices? Would she not shut up about past good times? Did she ask Velma to do the laundry again? Did Velma feel Ronnie was not paying enough attention to her or visiting her frequently enough? All we know is that on Monday after lunch, Lillie began to suffer severe stomach pains; she vomited blood and had diarrhea. That afternoon she was taken to the hospital and by the late evening she was dead. As the family gathered at the hospital and questioned Velma about what had happened, she would only repeat, “I did everything I could for her. Everything I could.”

  Velma Is Arrested for Forgery

  Broke, unemployed, and addicted to tranquillizers and painkillers, Velma had no place to go after her mother’s funeral. Tyrone settled Lillie’s affairs, including the outstanding loans that Velma had taken in her mother’s name. He did not bring up the subject with his sister.

  Even though Kim and Dennis had married only weeks earlier, they took Velma in to live with them in their trailer. Kim and Dennis did their best to monitor Velma’s drug addiction, but she always managed to get more prescrip
tions behind their backs and kept hidden stashes of drugs. They returned one day from work to find Velma on the floor, unconscious after yet another overdose. Again she was hospitalized and again she returned home with prescriptions for the same drugs.

  A week after she returned home from the hospital, Velma paid a visit to Ronnie’s home. Ronnie and Kim were on their way out to play golf and they invited her to wait for them inside their house. When they returned, they found Velma unconscious on the floor with her collarbone broken, protruding through her skin.

  Several weeks earlier, Velma had begged Ronnie to give her money to make good on bad checks she had recently written. Ronnie was surprised—Velma had gotten five thousand dollars from the life insurance benefit on Al. Where had all the money gone? Remembering that his mother had given him seven hundred dollars, he took out a bank loan and gave her the money back. As Velma was in the hospital recovering from her latest overdose, police arrived at Kim’s trailer looking for Velma. She had written more bad checks. If she did not pay them off, she would be charged and arrested—and her suspended sentence would probably be revoked. In her memoir, Velma justified passing bad checks by pointing out that Kim and Ronnie were constantly finding and flushing down the toilet her secret stashes of drugs. She would think to herself, Don’t they realize how much those pills cost? It was their fault she had to resort to passing bad checks—another typical psychopathic thought process that lays blame everywhere but on themselves.

  Kim had just discovered she was pregnant. Ronnie was exhausted. Together they decided that perhaps forcing Velma to face the consequences of her actions might serve as a wake-up call for her. They could not even afford to help Velma if they had wanted to. Together they decided to let Velma be arrested. Velma had managed to smuggle her pills into jail, and she overdosed there. After a brief stay in hospital, she was sent back to jail after her cell was carefully searched.

  On March 21, Velma appeared before a judge who reinstated her six-month prison sentence for forging a prescription. She began serving it at the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women in Raleigh. Velma was 42 years old. Kim could not visit her mother in Raleigh because she was pregnant and feeling sick every day. Ronnie was busy with his new job.

  After serving four months, Velma was released on probation. She moved back in with Kim and Dennis. Eleven days after her release, she was in hospital with an overdose again. Velma had apparently stashed a number of prescription refills before she went to prison. That was the only thing on her mind as she served her sentence. She paid for the pills by writing checks on an old bank account she no longer had.

  When police arrived with the checks there would be new charges pending—forgery this time. Unlike Velma’s previous charges for bad checks, forgery was a felony. Velma wept and begged Kim and Ronnie to help her; she promised to change her ways and kick her habit. Her son and daughter gave in and paid off the checks. No charges were pressed.

  In October 1975, Kim gave birth to a daughter. Velma was in attendance at the hospital and the birth of her granddaughter appeared to have contributed to a change for the better. She also learned that Ronnie’s wife was also pregnant. She doted on her grandchild, which reminded her of when Ronnie was an infant. Kim and Dennis moved into a house with their newborn baby. Velma, who appeared to be off the drugs for the first time, told them that she would remain living in the trailer. She had found a new line of work—caring for elderly sick people.

  Velma Becomes a Home-Care Worker

  Velma’s first client was an elderly woman who lived in the same trailer park. Eventually the woman was put into a nursing home, but the nurse who cared for her recommended Velma to an elderly couple—94-year-old Montgomery Edwards, who was suffering from the effects of diabetes, and his 84-year-old wife, Dollie, who could no longer care for him by herself.

  During this period, Velma seemed to be improving, although there would be occasional lapses. Once Dollie had Velma taken to Kim’s house because Velma appeared intoxicated. Kim and Ronnie had another talk with Velma, who promised not to relapse into her drug habits. She became a regular member of a local Pentecostal church and was regularly attending their services. Ronnie’s wife gave birth to a baby boy and now Velma had two grandchildren with which she would regularly visit. Sometimes she would even babysit them. While it did appear that Velma was greatly improving, in reality she had only mastered new ways of concealing her drug addiction.

  Velma Barfield worked for Montgomery and Dollie Edwards for nearly a year without any major incident. During this period, she met Dollie’s nephew Stuart Taylor and briefly went out with him until he reconciled with his wife. The only thing wrong was that Dollie was getting on Velma’s nerves. According to Velma, Dollie was bossy and stingy, constantly telling her how and when to do things. She watched everything Velma did, nagging her that she was using too much talcum powder or baby oil on Montgomery. He frequently soiled himself in bed, but Dollie insisted that Velma not run the washing machine more than once a week and instead spread rubber sheeting over the mattress.

  Velma Murders Again

  Eventually Montgomery succumbed to his illness and died in hospital on January 29, 1977. Dollie decided to retain Velma to help her around the house. That lasted about thirty days. Velma said she began to have flashbacks of being home again. Dollie was acting like her mother, always telling her what to do and never being pleased by the way Velma did things. Velma said she began to hate her. She wanted to scream at her, but she never did. Then one day, while grocery shopping:

  I saw the same brand of ant and roach poison that I had bought before. I bought a bottle and took it home with me. That evening I poisoned her. The next day she went through a terrible period of pain, but I had so medicated myself I felt divorced from her suffering…I made no connection between giving her the poison and seeing her reaction. She is elderly and must not be well.174

  Velma is somewhat deceptive in claiming that she made no connection between the poison and Dollie’s suffering. She might not have felt any connection, but she made it. When she later confessed to the murders, she told police that she concealed the evidence by throwing the empty bottle of poison into the fields behind the house. Police found an empty bottle of Singletary’s Rat Poison when they searched the field.

  She was cross-examined during her trial and accused of murdering Dollie: “You made Mrs. Edwards sick with Singletary’s rat poison, did you not?”

  Velma arrogantly snapped back, “No, I thought it was roach and ant poison.” Velma stubbornly insisted on getting the last word.

  It took several days to kill Dollie. Velma began on February 26, and by Sunday night Dollie was in so much pain she was brought by ambulance to the hospital. They treated her and then sent her home back to Velma. Then Velma did her thing again on Monday. On Tuesday morning, March 1, 1977, an ambulance took Dollie back to the hospital. She died that night of what doctors diagnosed as gastroenteritis.

  “It’s the Saddest Thing, but It Seems Like Everybody My Mother Ever Gets Close to Dies.”

  Velma attended Dollie’s funeral and wept. Kim and Ronnie were at first worried that Velma might relapse into her old habits, but within ten days Velma found new employment. On the recommendation of her church, she was hired to care for 76-year-old Record Lee, who had fallen and broken her leg. Her 80-year-old husband, John Henry Lee, was not able to give his wife the care she needed and so their children retained Velma to care for them both.

  According to Velma’s memoir, the couple drove her crazy with their constant bickering. She said she wanted to shout, “Why don’t both of you shut up!” Their bickering increased the pressure on her to take more drugs, Velma claimed. She wanted to leave but could not because she needed the money to support her pill habit. This made her feel resentful and angry. Finally she cracked. Velma recalls, “I decided that the only way to get out of that place would be to poison Mr. Lee. He hired me, and he is the one who pays me. She is not important.”175

  Velma stated
that she stole one of John Lee’s blank checks and cashed it. She then says that she planned to make him sick so that she could leave, get a different job, and replace the money. John had already called the police when he noticed a cashed check for fifty dollars that he did not write. The investigator had immediately suspected Velma, but the Lees dismissed the idea. They insisted that Velma was a deeply religious woman—a good Christian who had been recommended by their church. The idea that she would steal from them was inconceivable.

  Through some kooky logic maybe Velma is telling the truth, because it took her a long time to kill John Lee. About two weeks after the forged check was discovered, on April 27, John began to experience abdominal pains and severe vomiting. He ignored the condition for nearly two days, until he became so ill that an ambulance was called. The medics could not even get a readable blood pressure. John spent four days in intensive care with the doctors puzzled by his ailment. On May 2, he was sent home. His daughters came by to visit him, and as they sat and talked with their father Velma served John ice cream and Coke. The doctors had instructed that John keep to a diet of soft food and drink lots of liquids.

  Throughout the entire month of May, John would recover his health and then suddenly fall sick again with stomach cramps, diarrhea, and vomiting. His daughters were grateful for the sweet care and attention Velma gave her father. But on June 3, 1977, John’s condition became so bad that he was again taken away by ambulance to the hospital. He died that night of what appeared to be heart failure.

  Again, Velma said that in her mind the poison did not kill John. It only made him sick. It was his heart condition that killed him, she convinced herself.

  Velma attended John’s funeral and sent a huge wreath. At the funeral, the Lee daughters gave Velma a bonus for the care she had given their father while he was sick. They told her they hoped that she would remain to take care of their mother. Velma agreed.