Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Shortly after the funeral, Stuart Taylor reappeared in Velma’s life. He would be her last victim—at least her last to die.

  Velma said that after two months of taking care of Record Lee, she left the job because it reminded her of what she had done to John and that she was tired of living with other people. She was feeling “the pressure” again. In early September, Record Lee was taken to the hospital emergency ward, ill with vomiting and stomach cramps, but Velma would always deny poisoning her. In any case, by the time Record returned from the hospital, Velma gave notice and moved into a rented trailer by herself. She got a job on the night shift in a nursing home as a nurse’s aid. Every night, as everyone slept, Velma padded about the halls of the nursing home virtually unsupervised. It probably would have been just a matter of time before the predictable would have happened, but for now, Velma focused her attention on Stuart, with whom she was engaged.

  In November the incident with Velma being bound and gagged in her trailer park occurred and Velma then moved in with Stuart. He was dead by the beginning of February. It was only one doctor’s curiosity to understand precisely why his patient died that led to the discovery of arsenic in Stuart’s body, and a distraught sister’s phone call to the police that led them quickly to Velma—relatively quickly. Velma would not be arrested until the middle of March. During their investigation, police found a three-hundred-dollar check payable to Velma on Stuart’s account written on January 31, the day he fell ill, and cashed on February 2, the day before his death. The writing and signature on the check did not belong to Stuart.

  After the funeral of Stuart, Ronnie could only sadly shake his head and say, “You know, it’s the saddest thing, but it seems like everybody my mother ever gets close to dies.”

  In the weeks between Stuart’s death and her arrest, Velma began writing bad checks again and the police paid her a visit. When Ronnie confronted her about this she assured him that she had planned to cover the checks by her next payday at the nursing home, but Ronnie knew better than that by then.

  Velma’s Last Victims

  Velma struck one more time before her arrest. After Stuart’s death, she moved back in with her daughter and Dennis and their little girl. They noticed that Velma was back into her drug habit again, taking pills in great quantities. One afternoon, when they returned from work, Velma asked if she could use the car.

  Velma had wrecked several cars while driving under the influence of pills, and Kim was reluctant to lend her the car. Moreover, she knew that Velma’s wanting the car probably had something to do with getting prescriptions filled for more pills. Kim offered to drive her mother wherever she needed to go. Velma went into a rage, insisting that she did not need to be taken anywhere. She sulked the rest of the evening.

  That night Kim and Dennis woke up with severe abdominal pains and vomiting. By morning, they were so sick that they went to the hospital emergency ward. They were diagnosed with flu, but Kim later would recall that she never had flu like this. It felt like she was dying. They were so sick that they stayed off work for three days. When they got home, Velma showed concern. It had to be the flu, she told them. The next day, while they were still sick at home, Velma told them she had found a new place to live and, taking her things, she moved out.

  It was only after Velma’s arrest, as the details of her murders began to leak, that Kim and Dennis remembered the evening they got sick. Velma had made dinner that evening and served them ice tea that had a slightly strange aftertaste. They had even commented on it, and Velma responded that it was saccharine because they had run out of sugar. It had to be the tea, Kim and Dennis concluded, because their daughter drank milk that night and did not get sick. And that is how serial murders like Velma’s unfold invisibly, camouflaged by the transparent routine of normal daily life. Nobody thought twice of the tea Velma had served or the “flu” that made them sick that night, until Velma’s human, grandmotherly mask was torn away revealing the monster that lurked beneath. It is truly mind-boggling when one thinks what Velma might have gone on to do had she not been exposed.

  The Trial and Sentencing of Velma

  Velma Barfield’s bad luck was to have committed her crimes in Robeson County, which until 1974 was among the counties with the highest murder rate per capita in the U.S. Her bad luck was compounded by District Attorney Joe Freeman Britt, who was convinced that the death penalty was the solution for the problem. He would be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s deadliest prosecutor, having won twenty-two death sentence prosecutions. Velma would be one of them.

  Britt, who claimed that the Christian grandma serial killer was his toughest case, chose to prosecute Velma Barfield on only one murder charge—that of Stuart Taylor. If something went wrong, he could have brought additional charges on the other cases.

  Velma’s defense was that she did not intend to kill Taylor, but only to make him sick. If the jury had accepted that argument she would have been convicted of second-degree murder and would not have faced the death penalty. The defense attorney thought it might be a good idea to put the sweet, pious grandmother on the stand. She testified to her addiction to painkillers and tranquillizers, and how muddled she was at her age. She admitted poisoning Taylor, but only to make him sick.

  But when the prosecution cross-examined Velma, she quickly lost her temper, snapping and growling at the prosecutor with steely eyes and visible anger. Velma even challenged him on the type of poison she had used on some of her victims, whose murders the judge allowed into evidence. The courtroom was shocked by the nasty edge that emerged from the sweet, grandmotherly defendant. It was a disaster.

  In December 1978, Velma Barfield was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. There would be appeals, campaigns for commutation, publicized visits from her grandchildren, and a spectacular born-again experience, although it is hard to discern the difference between Velma’s Christian piety during the period in which she murdered and the period in which she sat on death row. She wrote a book with a pastor describing her crimes and her death row born-again experience. In it, she admitted to the poisoning, but insisted that she wanted to make her victims temporarily sick and that she was under the influence of drugs and irrational rage.

  On November 2, 1984, the 52-year-old grandmother’s time ran out. Barfield was the first woman to be executed in the U.S. since the restoration of the death penalty. She died by lethal ejection, and unlike her victims, she went quietly and painlessly in a state of serene unconsciousness, fully convinced that Jesus had forgiven her and paradise was waiting. She left letters to Ronnie and Kim, telling them she would be waiting for them in heaven and reminding them, “Jesus was the answer.”

  Velma Barfield was buried next to her husband Thomas, whom she had murdered. The grave stands literally yards away from the house where Ronnie and Kim lived their early lives in familial happiness. Ronnie and Kim wanted it that way.

  It is difficult to assess Velma Barfield’s history. In the first thirty years of her life, she went from a suffering daughter to a loving mother of two happy children. It all appeared to change so drastically after her hysterectomy. The raging seeds to her madness, however, were planted long before the hysterectomy, way back in her difficult childhood. The drugs became the facilitators of her aberrant, homicidal behavior.

  Velma typifies the problem of categorizing female serial killers. Her motives are a complex, intertwined matrix. On the surface, she appears to be a Black Widow in the sense that she financially exploited most of her victims, even though the sums were ridiculously small. At the same time, her rage was so strong that she could be categorized as a vengeance killer—similar to Aileen Wuornos. In Velma’s obsessive fixation on her son, Ronnie, and her need for his presence in the wake of her “troubles,” there are elements also of Munchausen by proxy syndrome, associated with a category of female serial killers who murder their children or other intimates to gain sympathy from others around them. Or maybe she was just plain, o
rdinary evil, hiding behind a Bible and a grandmotherly sweetness with arsenic in her hand.

  The next case study is much less ambiguous in its profit motive. What is compelling is how long it took before this offender began to kill—unless there were some earlier murders she succeeded in concealing.

  Dorothea Puente Montalvo—Making Crime Pay

  It was around the Thanksgiving holiday in 1988 on one of those bright, clear, and relatively cool Los Angeles November midafternoons on 3rd Street near Highland Avenue, when Charlie Willgues, a retired carpenter, decided on his way home that he would stop in for a beer at the Monte Carlo, a small, dingy, local bar. It was a Wednesday and Charlie had just bought a glass cutter—essentially the weekly highlight of his lonely, nothing-to-do life. Not that Charlie minded anymore. After a lifetime of work and obligations, misfortune, loss, and broken hearts, Charlie now lived alone contently in an apartment two blocks away in the depressed, lowlying area of small stores and low-rent housing. It was one of those faded, nondescript L.A. neighborhoods one never goes to but only passes through on the way to somewhere else.

  Charlie was an old man in his late sixties who suffered from arthritis and emphysema, and had had two strokes. He got by with the help of a monthly Social Security check. Nobody was expecting him, nobody was waiting for him, and nobody was going to say anything if, in the middle of the afternoon, Charlie had a beer or two. Especially since, although Charlie was set in his daily loneliness, on some days—his birthday, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and a handful of other special days he once shared with others—the loneliness would come up on him. And this Thanksgiving he felt it.

  It took Charlie a few minutes before his eyes adjusted from the sunny, bright afternoon light outside to the murky dark of the bar’s interior. It was a typical, low-end, horseshoe-shaped bar where Charlie was a regular and knew most of the other raggedy-assed loners, pensioners, and disability jockeys who, like him, had nothing else to do at this time of day. So when the door came open and she came into the bar with a momentary flash of bright afternoon light and a shower of reflected sunny sparkles from passing traffic in the street outside, Charlie looked up.

  It wasn’t that she looked good—she did—dressed in a fashionable, bright red overcoat and sexy purple pumps, but that she was so poised and ladylike as she settled onto a bar stool across from Charlie. She was younger than he, clearly in her late fifties, early sixties. With carefully coiffured gray hair, she was a bit grandmotherly, yes, but still there was a sexy edge to her as she threw off her elegant coat. Sometimes it’s just a gesture that gets you going, and when she crossed her legs, for a split second dangling one of those purple pumps, Charlie felt something move in him. Still good to go, Charlie thought, not sure if he meant himself, the woman, or them both.

  A female patron sitting a few stools down later recalled, “She looked really cute. She had her hair real pretty and her makeup real nice.”176

  She ordered a vodka and orange, and when her eyes met with Charlie’s, her face lit up with a warm and giving smile. Charlie was pretty sure of himself and his loneliness when he politely said to her, “The fan over there blows right at your back, so why don’t you move on down here out of the draft.”177

  She smiled sweetly, thanked him, picked up her drink and purse, and moved to a bar stool closer to Charlie. She moved so nicely—so gracefully. It wasn’t all sex—it was more that Charlie immediately liked her and fell into a comfortable conversation with her. She said her name was Donna Johansson and that she was staying at the Royal Viking Motel, an L.A. landmark about a mile and half east on 3rd Street near MacArthur Park and Alvarado.

  Charlie found her bright intelligence and sophisticated air attractive, but what really moved him deep down was this woman’s hint of vulnerability, perhaps even naïveté—she was beautiful in an older, angelic kind of way, and her story was sad. Her husband had died a month ago in Sacramento. She had just arrived in Los Angeles with plans and hopes to start a new life.

  Her vulnerability really came through when she described how the taxi driver, who took her to the motel, drove off with all her luggage. She was left with only her small overnight bag and the clothes on her back. She daintily extended a slim leg and pointed out the damage on one of her shoes. She had worn them down walking all this way from her motel in search of a place to live. Charlie gallantly offered to take her shoes to a local shoe repair shop he knew. She thanked him for his kindness, giving him three dollars for the repair. She sat quietly drinking at the bar while Charlie ran her shoes over to the shop.

  When Charlie returned, she gratefully slipped her pumps back on and the two strangers fell into an easy flowing conversation. Charlie ordered another beer while Donna had yet another screwdriver. “If you are retired, how do you support yourself?” she asked.

  Charlie told her about his sickness and his monthly Social Security check of $576. Donna told him she had lots of experience with social service programs back in Sacramento and that he could easily get $680. She could help him with the paperwork to file a request for an increase. The two settled into a friendly hour-and-a-half conversation. She seemed so intelligent, competent, and sweet, but it was her vulnerability that touched Charlie the most. When she offered to go over to Charlie’s apartment the next day and cook a big Thanksgiving dinner, Charlie had no problem agreeing. She claimed to be a terrific cook.

  The only thing that slightly put Charlie off was that near the end of their conversation she suggested that they move in together—think of how much money they could save sharing a place, she argued. Charlie was not comfortable with the idea. They had only met ninety minutes ago and besides, he had been living alone for years now and was quite used to it. He actually liked it. But he did not find it unusual, because people in the neighborhood looked for all sorts of ways to cut down on expenses. “It may have seemed weird, but it’s normal around here,” he later said. Charlie told her he had to think about it, but he would call her later that evening to confirm the Thanksgiving dinner date for tomorrow.

  Charlie urged Donna not to walk back to her motel but take a cab instead. Her shoes had just been fixed, why wear them down again? While she waited for the cab, Charlie bought her two takeout chicken dinners with money she had given him. She wanted the second dinner so she would not need to go out from her motel room later that night. She was too scared and nervous of the street after dark, she said. Charlie understood. He put her in the cab, opening and closing the door for her, and promised to call her later that night about the next day’s dinner.

  As Charlie watched the cab head out east on 3rd Street past all the little shops, low-rise apartments, and fast food joints, he felt a sense of exhilaration. It was nice to somehow suddenly “click” with somebody in this sea of derelict, low-cost loneliness. And somebody who seemed decent, respectable, and intelligent—a higher-class person than the broken-down, poor retirees among whom Charlie lived. Despite the differences between them, there was something almost familiar about the woman from the moment they met, Charlie felt.

  What Charlie did not know was that Donna had indeed walked a mile and a half along 3rd Street wearing down her shoes—not looking for an affordable apartment but for somebody exactly like Charlie. Donna should have been familiar to Charlie, but under a different name, Dorothea Puente. He had actually seen her on TV news on the weekend.

  Puente had been running a boarding home in Sacramento for alcoholic and disabled Social Security recipients, but one of her boarders had mysteriously vanished while his Social Security checks kept getting cashed. By some bizarre twist of fate, somebody in the social services office actually became concerned enough to look into the disappearance. After weeks of unsatisfactory responses from Puente, the police were finally called in. When they began to dig up bodies from under the flower beds in her garden, one corpse after another, including one without a head, Puente fled.

  Dorothea’s Bone Garden

  It took some time before the social workers called the police, bec
ause Dorothea Puente was well known in the Sacramento charity and social services community. She had a reputation for generosity and kindness toward orphans and the elderly at the end of their rope. She had taken in some hardcase alcoholics that social services could place nowhere else, and turned some of them to sobriety and health so effectively that they moved out of her boardinghouse to independent lives of their own—or so social services thought.

  She leased a huge Victorian house with numerous bedrooms on 1426 F Street in the heart of downtown Sacramento—blocks away from the Governor’s Mansion and some of the city’s historic sites. It was well kept and Dorothea planted and groomed a beautiful garden of flowers with lawn sculptures on the grounds surrounding the home. Unlike many of the dark, dingy residences where so many dead-end social services recipients ended up being housed, Puente’s boardinghouse was a paradise—more of a beautiful bed-and-breakfast, where Puente’s home-cooked meals were legendary.

  But when the police were contacted, they knew a little more about Puente than the social workers. She had a criminal record for fraud connected to Social Security payment recipients going back some eight years and there were some suspicions about a death she was connected to. Nothing conclusive, but it was enough for police to take a second look at Puente. Besides, running a boarding home for Social Security recipients was a violation of her probation. Several days of investigation and interviews finally led police to digging up Puente’s garden on Friday, November 11.

  Almost immediately police found a body, but not of the missing man—of a woman who was buried much earlier than the date of the disappearance. Police interviewed Puente that evening, but she denied any knowledge of the body. She had been cooperative with police and had no objections to their digging in her garden as long as they did not harm the flower beds. This was not easy for police—they did not know the identity of the woman nor did they have at that moment any evidence linking her to the victim. It was entirely possible the body was already there when she moved into the house. She was not arrested. She was allowed to return to her house that evening.