She Devils Around the World

by Sylvia Perrini

  The police then exhumed the bodies of her first husband James Goodyear and her son Michael Goodyear. The police also alerted the police department in Trinidad, Colorado, who exhumed the body of Bobby Joe Morris. All three bodies were found to contain traces of arsenic.

  On the eleventh of January in 1984, Judias was arrested again: this time for the murder of her son Michael and for grand theft of life insurance.

  The murder trial for Michael’s death began on March 22nd. The prosecution alleged that she took her partially paralyzed 19-year-old son up the river in a canoe and pushed him out with 15 pounds of braces on his legs and without a life jacket. The jury found Judias to be guilty on all counts.

  On June 6th, 1984, Judias was sentenced to life imprisonment with no parole prospects for twenty-five years.

  On October 15th, 1984, Judias went on trial for the attempted murder of John Gentry II. The trial lasted three days, and the jury took less than two hours to find her guilty. The judge sentenced her to twelve years.

  On October 22nd, 1985, Judias stood trial for the murder of her husband James Goodyear. The trial lasted a week and ended with the jury finding her guilty.

  On November 16th, 1985, Judias stood with chains around her waist, wrists, and ankles and sobbed to Judge Emerson Thompson Jr., ''I didn't ever kill anybody, Judge Thompson. I ask the court to spare my life. I just ask you for mercy''.

  Judge Thompson followed the majority recommendation of the jury that Judias die for the unlawful murder of James Goodyear. He said to Judias, ''On the day designated, the death warrant authorizing the execution shall be read to you immediately before execution, and you shall then be electrocuted until you are dead. May God have mercy on your immortal soul''.

  In the rare chance that she would be freed, the Colorado authorities were ready to prosecute her for the killing of Bobby Morris.

  Throughout all three trials, Judias proclaimed her innocence.

  Following her sentencing, Judias was transferred to Death Row at the Broward Correctional Center. Here in a 6ft x 9ft x 9.5ft cell, she spent the next thirteen years proclaiming her innocence and appealing her sentence. Prisoners on death row are allowed visitors every weekend between 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. They are escorted everywhere in handcuffs and counted at least once an hour. They are allowed cigarettes, snacks, black and white televisions, and radios in their cells. The death row prisoners are kept in their cells almost 24 hours a day and only allowed out for showers, exercise, medical reasons, social visits, legal visits, or authority granted media interviews. They are all dressed in orange t-shirts and blue pants. It is a brutal regime. Judias spent her time crocheting baby clothes and blankets and maintaining her innocence.

  Judias’ execution date was finally set for March 30th, 1998 at 7.00 a.m. Judias had said of the electric chair that it was, "barbaric.... It belongs in Frankenstein's laboratory”.

  Judias’ final appeal was turned down on March 29th, 1998, and Lawton Chiles, the state Governor, signed her death warrant.

  All executions in the state of Florida are conducted at the Penitentiary in Starke. Before the year 2000, all executions were by the electric chair. Prisoners built the three-legged oak chair in 1923. On May 4th, 1990, during the execution of Jesse Tafero, smoke and foot-long flames spurted from his head.

  A similar scene happened in March of 1997, when a prisoner, Pedro Medina, was electrocuted. During this electrocution, smoke and a foot long high flame erupted from the headpiece atop of Pedro’s head, and the death chamber was filled with smoke. Pedro Medina’s body was also mutilated by the electrocution. Florida state officials were forced to examine whether using the electric chair was a cruel and unusual punishment. Later, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the chair was not a cruel or unusual punishment.

  Judias was the next inmate scheduled to be electrocuted in the chair after Pedro Medina.

  Judias’s daughter, Kimberly, who was sixteen when her mother was arrested, begged Florida lawmakers to allow her mother to be executed by lethal injection instead of the chair. She said, "I'm fixing to watch my mom die in the electric chair. People have burned alive in it. I don't want to see her burned alive in it. I accept the punishment that she has to die, but we can choose a better way for her to die”.

  Kimberly Buenoano's, then 30 and a married mother, believed her mother to be innocent. She said, "I love her letters. They cheer me up”.

  Judias’s son James said; “My mother has always taken care of and looked after people. She's not angry. She's ready to die. She would rather die than spend the rest of her life in prison”.

  James, like his sister, believed his mother was innocent in all cases. He felt that she was a victim of overzealous prosecutors, an unjust system, and incompetent lawyers.

  A few days before her execution, after her move to Starke, Judias gave a televised interview in which she said; "I would like to clear the record for my grandson. I would like for him to know that his grandmother was not a murderer. I have eternal security, and I know that when I die I will go straight to heaven, and I will see Jesus. I'm ready to go home."

  Judias also said that she wanted to be remembered as a good mother. She adamantly maintained her son's drowning was an accident.

  Judias spent her last day alive with her children Kimberly and James, a few other relatives, religious advisers, and legal advisers.

  The following morning at 4:30 a.m., Judias showered and got dressed. A spot on her head was then shaved to allow the highest electrical conductivity and to ensure that her hair would not catch alight during the electrocution. For her last meal, she ordered asparagus, broccoli, hot tea, and strawberries.

  Judias, at the age of 54, at 7:00 a.m. barely able to walk due to fear, entered the execution chamber. The guards strapped Judias’s frail looking body down into the chair with eight leather straps. Electrodes were fitted to her head and to the calves of her leg each containing a moistened sponge to minimize any burning of the flesh. When asked if she had something final to say, she simply stated “No, sir”. Judias squeezed her eyes tightly shut and did not look at the forty-six witnesses through the glass partition. The guards placed a mask made of leather over her head and face, and the electrocution began. Five minutes later, as smoke arose from her bare right leg, officials pronounced her dead.

  BETTY LOU BEETS

  On March 12, 1937 Betty Lou Beets was born to parent’s who were poor tobacco farmers and heavy drinkers in Roxboro, North Carolina.

  When Betty was three-years-old, she caught measles which affected her hearing and speech. Her parents were too poor for medical help and consequently Betty never had hearing aids or any training or help with her disability.

  According to Betty, when she was five-years-old, her father raped her and following this traumatic event she was continually sexually abused throughout her childhood years.

  When Betty was twelve, her mother was institutionalized, and she had to drop out of school to care for the home and her younger brother and sister.

  When she was just 15 in 1952, Betty married Robert Franklin Branson. They had their first daughter in 1953. The marriage was not always a happy one, and Betty attempted to commit suicide in 1953. Possibly, she was suffering from postnatal depression. Betty and Robert had five more children and remained together until 1969. Then Robert walked out on the family, which left Betty devastated emotionally and financially.

  In July of 1970, Betty married Billy York Lane. The marriage was an abusive one, and they soon divorced. However, it did not stop the pair fighting. In 1971, Betty and Billy were still arguing and fighting. Billy threatened to kill her and broke Betty’s nose which led to Betty shooting Billy. She was arrested for attempted murder. However, the charges were dropped when Billy admitted that he’d threatened her life. Betty and Billy remarried in 1972. This marriage lasted a month.

  In 1973, Betty, at the age of 36, began dating Ronnie Threlkold, and they married in 1978. This marriage seemed as dysfunctional as the last had been. Allegedly, Be
tty attempted to run Ronnie over with her car. In 1979, Betty and Ronnie divorced.

  Within a couple of months, Betty married Doyle Wayne Barker. She claimed he walked out on her in October of 1981, and no one saw him again.

  In August of 1982, Betty married Jimmy Don Beets, a retired Dallas fireman. On August the 6th, 1983, Betty reported Jimmy Beets missing from their home, which was near Cedar Creek Lake, in Henderson County, Texas. On August 12, 1983, Jimmy’s boat was discovered drifting on Cedar Creek Lake near the Redwood Beach Marina. In the small boat, the police authorities found Jimmy’s fishing license, his nitroglycerine tablets (heart medication), and a life jacket. His body was not found for two years. The lack of the body puzzled the authorities.

  Betty told her friends and neighbors that at least she had the wishing well he had dug for her in the yard of her trailer to remember him by. The insurance payout she’d claimed almost as soon as he disappeared also helped her to come to terms with her loss.

  In 1985, a confidential source passed information to the Henderson County Sheriff's office indicating that Jimmy Beets was most likely murdered. The information the Sheriff received was deemed reliable enough to search Betty’s home.

  During the search of the property, the shot bodies of Doyle Barker and Jimmy Beets were found. Jimmy Beet’s body was found wrapped in a sleeping bag at the bottom of the well and Doyle Barker’s body was found wrapped in a matching sleeping bag underneath the patio.

  A gun that was discovered in Betty’s house matched the type of gun used to shoot three bullets into Doyle and two into Jimmy.

  Betty Beets was arrested and taken into custody on June 8, 1985.

  During the ongoing investigation, Betty’s children were interviewed. Betty’s son Robbie Branson told the investigating detectives that his mother had told him on the evening of Jimmy’s death that she intended to kill Jimmy Beets because he owned the trailer that they lived in, and she was nervous that if they were to divorce, he would get it.

  Robbie claimed that Betty instructed him to leave the property while she carried out the murder. Robert said that he returned home roughly two hours later to find Jimmy shot dead. He then described how he had helped Betty hide Jimmy’s body in an ornamental "wishing well" in the yard in front of their house and plant evidence to make it appear that Jimmy had drowned fishing in his boat.

  Betty’s daughter, Shirley Stenger, told the detectives that she had helped her mother bury the body of Doyle Barker in October of 1981 after Betty had shot him dead for insurance money and his pension benefits.

  Betty went on trial for the capital murder of Jimmy Beets. Her two children Shirley Stenger and Robbie Branson both testified against her.

  Betty’s reaction to her two children was that they were the real killers not she.

  The jury at her trial found Betty guilty, and she was sentenced to death.

  After over ten years of appeals, on February the 24th of 2000, Betty was executed by lethal injection.

  Betty Lou Beets achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the 21st century's first female executed in America when she was injected with a cocktail of lethal drugs at Huntsville Prison, Texas.

  At the time of her death, Betty was sixty-two and had five children, nine grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

  DOROTHEA HELEN PUENTE-

  SOCIAL WORKER’S SAVIOR!!

  Dorothea Helen Puente, nee Gray, was born in Redlands, California on January 9th, 1929. Her parents Jesse James Gray and Trudy Mae Yates were cotton pickers, and Dorothea was their sixth child. Her father became terminally ill shortly after her birth and was in and out of hospital. Trudy Yates turned to drink and prostitution.

  For the children, it was a living nightmare. Her father would suffer from serious suicidal depression and would threaten to kill himself in front of the children. In 1937, when Dorothea was eight years old, her father died of tuberculosis, and the mother’s drinking spiraled out of control. She would often disappear for days leaving the children to fend for themselves. Social Services finally intervened in February of 1938. Dorothea and two other siblings were sent to an orphanage, the Church of Christ Home in Ontario, California until relatives from Fresno, California, took her in. While at the orphanage, Dorothea was sexually abused. They lived at the orphanage until Dorothea’s eldest brother James and his wife Louise took them to live with them. In 1938, her mother died in a motorcycle accident.

  When she was older, Dorothea lied about her childhood, saying that she was one of three children who were born and raised in Mexico. She lied rather than admit the truth of her appalling childhood, and lying became second nature to her. She claimed at one point in her life that she had been an American prisoner of war during the Second World War, had survived the infamous Bataan Death March (at the age of 13), and had witnessed the Hiroshima bombing. She also had claimed to others that the Swedish ambassador was her brother and that Rita Hayworth, the Hollywood actress, was a close acquaintance. These were just a few of the many fabrications she made up about her life.

  In 1945 when Dorothea was sixteen and a particularly attractive girl, she married twenty-two-year-old Fred McFaul, a soldier who had just returned from the Philippines. The marriage produced two daughters. One daughter went to live with Fred’s mother, and the other she had adopted. In 1948, Dorothea had a miscarriage. Shortly after this, her husband, much to her humiliation, left her. Fred had become weary of Dorothea’s constant lies and fabrications and her expensive tastes in clothes and silk stockings. Rather than admit the truth, Dorothea lied to friends and family that he had died of a heart attack.

  Dorothea, now single, attempted to forge checks to help fund her expensive taste in clothes and silk stockings. This career move was not a success as she was arrested and sentenced to a year in prison. After six months, she was paroled, became pregnant by a man she hardly knew, and gave birth to a daughter whom she gave up for adoption. In 1952, Dorothea married Axel Johanson, a Swedish merchant seaman. This was the beginning of a turbulent 14-year marriage. Axel would be away at sea for long periods of time and on many occasions when he came home he would find other men residing with Dorothea. Axel and his wife would then fight, separate, and then make up in a pattern that lasted throughout their marriage.

  In 1960, Dorothea was arrested for prostitution in a downtown, seedy, Sacramento house of ill repute and was sentenced to 90 days in the Sacramento County Jail. Following her release, she was arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to another 90 days in jail. Following her release from her second 90 days Dorothea found work as a nurse's aide, caring for disabled and elderly people in private homes.

  In 1966, Dorothea divorced Axel Johansen. On February 23, 1968 when Dorothea was thirty-nine, she married a man nineteen years her junior, Roberto Puente. The marriage barely lasted two years. Following the marriage, she began operating "The Samaritans,” a half-way house for alcoholics. Dorothea was married for the fourth and last time in 1976, at the age of 47, to Pedro Angel Montalvo, one of her tenants. Pedro was a 51-year-old laborer from Puerto Rico. This marriage lasted only a few months. He soon became unhappy with Dorothea’s spending and incessant lying. They had married in Reno, Nevada; on the wedding certificate, she had written her father’s name down as Jesus Sahagun and her mother’s maiden name as Puente. Dorothea had told him that she was a Mexican doctor and that she owned property in Mexico. After a month, he walked out on her but like her earlier marriage to Axel Johanson, they would argue, separate, and make up, a pattern that continued even after the divorce. The halfway house closed down after she accrued a $10,000 debt on the business and was found to have forged thirty-four checks she had taken from her alcoholic tenants. Dorothea was sentenced to five years probation. The judge also ruled that she should receive counseling; one psychiatrist who examined Dorothea thought that she was schizophrenic and in his opinion a "highly disturbed woman." While on probation, she continued to commit the same fraud by spending time in local bars looking for older men who were receiving
benefits. She would then forge their signatures and steal their money. On occasion, she would drug their drinks and fleece them for what she possibly could.

  Dorothea took over a three-story, spacious, 16-bedroom care home at 2100 F Street in Sacramento, California. The neighborhood had, at one time, been the fashionable area of the state capital. Just two blocks away stood the former governor's enormous mansion. Since then, the area had depreciated and many of the once-fine and luxurious homes were now flophouses or boarded up. Here, Dorothea took in elderly and mentally disabled boarders and stole their social security checks. Sometimes she had as many as 30 boarders. Dorothea projected to her neighbors’ an air of respectability and of a hard-working landlady. Her house was clean with well-polished floors and efficiently well run.

  In late 1981, when Dorothy dressed to the nines and in her high heel shoes, dropped into one of her regular watering-holes the “Round Corner” she befriended Harold Munroe and his wife Ruth. During the course of the ensuing conversation, Ruth told Dorothea that she was seeking employment. Dorothea inquired whether she might be interested in investing in a restaurant with her. Dorothea explained that the owner of the “Round Corner” wanted to rent out the restaurant part of his bar at lunchtimes. Dorothea had said she wanted to take it over but needed a partner who could drive, as she didn’t. Ruth was excited and at the age of sixty-one said she wanted a new challenge. After hours of discussion, they agreed to go into business. Dorothea would run the kitchen, and Ruth would take care of handling supplies and transportation. Ruth withdrew the funds for her share of the partnership and handed it over to Dorothea.

  Dorothea worked hard in the restaurant every day at lunchtime but within a short amount of time told Ruth that more funding was needed. Ruth handed over thousands of dollars to Dorothea. Ruth was distracted from the business as her husband Harold had become seriously ill. Early in 1982, Harold was diagnosed with terminal cancer and was confined to a hospital. Dorothea generously offered to let Ruth come and stay in her boarding house for free rather than fret at home on her own. Ruth leapt at the offer and on April 11th, 1982, with the help of her son’s, moved into Dorothea’s house. Just two weeks later, Ruth Monroe became sick with a mysterious illness. Her children came to visit her and were aghast at her appearance. Dorothea reassured them that she would take excellent care of their mother, telling them that she used to be a nurse. Then Dorothea, on the morning of April the 28th, phoned them to tell them their mother had died. The coroner’s report put the cause of death as an overdose of codeine and acetaminophen and judged the death a suicide.