Original subtitles

[narrator] It was a case of twisted greed.

She wanted something she didn't have.

She wanted to be somebody she wasn't.

She found a way to do it.

And she was not going to quit until she was stopped.

Welcome to Very Scary People.

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

Those who knew Judy Buenoano describe her as larger than life.

She had a beautiful home, thriving business, and a taste for the finer things in life.

But there was a dark side to Judy's story.

terrible things seemed to happen to those closest to her.

In 1971, her husband died from a mysterious illness.

Seven years later, her live-in boyfriend suffered the same fate.

Then shortly after, her oldest son fell ill.

But it wasn't until her fiance was nearly killed in a car bombing,

that authorities started to suspect these tragedies were no accident.

Here is part two of The Black Widow.

[Simmons] I was working in the Sheriff's department.

And I heard that there was this bombing of this car that happened downtown Pensacola.

[explosion]

[Rick] It was at the parking lot next to a restaurant called The Driftwood.

I got there and I saw the car bombed out.

Police, fire, everybody was there.

Checked in with the first officer on the scene. Asked him what happened.

He told me the victim was John Gentry.

John Gentry was a man who was successful. He had his own business.

And he was in real bad shape.

I remember my mom coming in and saying, "Hey, I need you to wake up. Get dressed.

We gotta go to the hospital."

My uncle. He's been hurt.

[Mike] My uncle was a happy person and brought everybody else to a happy mood.

Just an all around good guy to me.

[Paula] We couldn't imagine anybody that wanted to hurt him.

The investigation determined it was two sticks of dynamite.

It was placed right behind the left side of the rear backseat.

And then wired to the tail light.

So that when he turned the lights on, the bomb would explode.

This was done to kill this guy.

The first time I met John Gentry,

I met him when he was with Judy Buenoano.

She also owned a successful business.

A nail salon called Fingers 'N Faces.

She had children, she had a family.

[Belvin] They started dating. He was smitten by her.

And from all indications, he fell madly in love with her.

[Paula] She was really super nice.

Kinda ritzy. She had money.

She had money and she wasn't afraid to throw it around.

[Mollye] She carried herself like a queen.

Seems like she had a need to prove herself.

She was the one in control. She was the important one.

[Ted] It was her attitude. High and mighty, "I'm better than everybody else."

So I too, right off the bat, I said,

I'm gonna look into her.

[Mollye] The police are now taking a closer look. This isn't an isolated event.

[reporter] People around her kept dying or being injured.

[Rick] It was really strange that she had so many men in her life die,

under such strange circumstances.

Her first husband, James Goodyear was in the Air Force.

[Belvin] James Goodyear.

He loved his wife, he loved his children.

And he was a caring man.

[Mollye] When he married her, he was in it for the long haul and then Vietnam came.

He was sent off to war.

[Belvin] He came home perfectly healthy.

And within days of his arrival,

Sergeant Goodyear got sick.

[Rick] It was in three months he was dead.

And the doctors never could figure out what was wrong with him.

[Simmons] He got sick and he died and she got the insurance money.

And then, a boyfriend got sick and died.

And she got the insurance money.

[Belvin] Bobby Joe Morris was a very successful person in Pensacola.

Met Judy, and Bobby fell in love with her.

[Meghan] She was with Bobby Joe for six years.

But they didn't get married.

[Mollye] They lived here in Pensacola for a couple years,

then he moved out of state to Colorado.

And I often wondered if it wasn't, like, to get away from her.

She immediately follows him up there.

And it's not long before he dies.

It was so unusual. So unusual.

[Ted] The doctors up there felt there was something wrong.

They felt it was something wrong with this case.

Two years after Bobby Joe's death,

Judy's son Michael begins to get very sick.

[Belvin] There's, like, a pattern here going on.

Michael Goodyear was a child that was born out of wedlock.

[Meghan] This was her first born and it seemed like she

always just thought he was baggage.

He was unwanted baggage for her.

She did not like that child.

[Nancy] He wasn't perfect. And he wasn't bright.

And she just didn't want him so she began trying to get him in the army.

To get him away.

[Ted] Michael gets into the army.

He gets out of basic training. And he goes home for two weeks

and all of a sudden, he starts getting real sick.

[Meghan] Michael, he was experiencing the nausea, the headaches, the vomiting.

And nobody can understand why.

[Ted] He got medical care in the military that determined he was poisoned by arsenic.

[Meghan] They did determine he was suffering from arsenic poisoning.

This might've raised red flags.

But Michael had been working in a water purification lab.

[Russell] Where they use arsenic in water purification.

It was considered, then, maybe an accident.

[Nancy] That didn't kill him but instead,

it paralyzed him.

[Joey] Doctors fitted Michael with heavy metal leg braces.

So that he could steady himself and walk with crutches.

[Ted] He ended up being discharged from service.

[Mollye] By the time he is discharged, he goes

immediately back to live with his mom.

And sadly, he didn't ever get a chance to recover.

[Meghan] The day after Michael comes home, Judy suggests a family outing.

She suggests that they take a canoe on the river close by and they go fishing.

[Simmons] Judy thought it would be a good idea to take Michael,

get him out, and take him for a canoe trip.

[Mollye] And by all reports, he was excited about it.

Northwest Florida is a beautiful place.

So we have a lot of natural streams and bayous and rivers.

And a lot of places where people like to fish and canoe.

She picked a spot that was North of a community called Navarre.

Back then, it was relatively remote. Very woodsy.

The weather was nice and it's gonna be Judy and Michael and his younger brother, James.

[Ted] James was in the canoe with her.

Kimberley, she leaves on the bank, by herself.

Now, Michael, he's got leg braces.

He couldn't walk well and he couldn't use his arms well.

Judy actually gets a lawn chair and finds a way to wedge it into this canoe.

So he could sit there and be comfortable.

[Meghan] I think she's suggesting it to lift Michael's spirits.

The family will be together, everything's gonna be okay.

But it wasn't.

They're not in that canoe for very long at all and suddenly,

an accident happens.

[water splashing]

[telephone ringing]

My dad got a phone call at our business.

and all I could hear was

a voice screaming and crying and it was unintelligible.

And then I remember,

Daddy got off the phone and I said what's going on?

He said, "Just get in the car and drive.

Drive fast."

I said where are we going? He said Novar.

We get there and I saw a lot of chaos going on.

And I could see Judy pacing on a pier.

I didn't know what happened.

Judy had taken her family, her sons Michael and James,

and her daughter Kimberley to the East River so that they can all go canoeing.

[Nancy] Michael had been discharged from the military,

He was back home with his mom.

And she says, "Hey, let's go for a canoe ride."

[Ted] It's a winding, winding river. Like a snake.

It's really a nice place to go visit.

[Meghan] Michael's got 15 lbs leg braces on both of his legs.

And he was in the canoe with his mother and younger brother

while his sister was kind of sunning herself on the shore.

And all of a sudden the canoe capsizes.

[water splashing]

Judy says that she's frantically searching for her younger son, James.

[Ted] She said that James had hit his head when it overturned.

[Meghan] She's able to rescue him.

[Ted] They ended up in this one spot when this motorboat pulls up.

And this young man that was in the boat, put him in his boat and took him to shore.

[Mollye] She and James make it to shore, but somehow Michael is trapped underwater.

There's no attempt to save him by any account.

I was the lead diver for Sheriff's county search and rescue at the time.

That day I was told there's a boy in the water.

And he fell out a canoe.

We got dressed.

Put our gear on.

And we found glasses.

Somebody said they came from the boat.

So we decided there's the point we gon' start from.

We was in the middle of the river and I backed into something.

And I go take a deep breath,

reach over there, and that's when I felt the braces of the foot.

Michael drowned.

[Joseph] I pulled Michael in.

I was thinking it's a tragedy.

But I had questions.

It doesn't make any sense.

[Joseph] Michael was in a patio chair

and he had two leg braces on.

And the canoe overturned and he fell out.

Anybody deals with a canoe,

if you put center of gravity above the level of the canoe, it's gonna turn over.

It's just inevitable for that stuff to happen.

You don't take someone in a canoe, put him in a lawn chair up a river,

who can't swim.

Judy was telling me, it was just a terrible tragedy.

[Judy speaking]

It was a terrible tragedy that the canoe tipped over, that they tried to help him,

that they couldn't get him, that the water was too swift.

Those are all the things she told me.

But it couldn't have happened the way that Judy said it did.

Judy gave these explanations for what had happened when the boat capsized.

She told some people that a snake got in the boat.

I was told that they were by a bank and a snake fell into the boat,

and they caused the boat to turn over.

But something didn't sound right to investigators.

[Nancy] Her description of where Michael went under

and where he was found were so totally different.

Couldn't have happened the way that Judy said it did.

[Ted] Where the body was found was up river,

about half a mile, in the middle of the river.

Wasn't on either side what she said,

the snake dropped in the boat and the canoe overturned.

No. The body was right in the middle of the river.

Somebody with braces on, gonna sink straight to the bottom.

They're heavy. You can't move. They lock in place.

If you're in the middle of the river,

if you fall in there, you're gonna stay there.

I'm suspicious.

All of the debris of the canoe was in an area where she was found,

half a mile from where her son was found drowned in the river.

Judy Buenoano said that she was pushed downstream by the current,

very strong current.

Yet, there was no current that day.

Could not have happened the way she explained it.

[Mollye] When the police arrived, she was sitting on the shore,

I believe, drinking a beer.

I don't know why that didn't alert them to maybe something strange.

Within couple of years, after Michael died,

somebody finally started asking the right questions.

And I believe, it was Assistant State Attorney, Russ Edgar.

[Russell] I looked at the reports and I realized that, Judy Buenoano

had a very poor relationship with her son.

And he had become sick while he was at home on leave.

And at that time, she obtained an insurance policy on him.

But there was something wrong with the insurance policy.

[Russell] I reviewed Michael Goodyear's military records.

I reviewed all the records that I could find on him.

And I noticed one thing was very peculiar about him.

He always misspelled his first name.

Instead of Michael, M-I-C-H-A-E-L,

he put an E on the end.

The insurance policy did not misspell his name.

Why all of a sudden did he spell his name correctly?

I'd knew there was something wrong there.

[Ted] And when the guy come over with the insurance policy,

Michael was never there.

The guy never saw Michael.

Never saw him sign anything.

But the forms get signed.

[Russell] It's not his signature.

And a expert concluded that she had forged it.

When we obtained the insurance policies,

I knew it was a murder.

He came home and she drowned him for the insurance.

And that's just chilling.

[Mollye] Judy and Michael, and his younger brother, James,

they were in this remote place

at the tip of then Florida Panhandle.

It's a beautiful place.

And suddenly something horrible happened.

That sadly, the canoe turned over, and Michael drowned.

But Judy made it out alive.

[Russell] They ruled it accidental.

But, the circumstances were so obviously suspicious.

We found out, she's had all kinds of insurance policies on Michael.

For Judy, Michael's death meant $125,000 in insurance money.

[Ted] She had an opportunity to get a lot of money from it.

And benefits from the military, and she took it.

[Pam] My dad said, she used him like a boat anchor.

That's what she thought of Michael. He's her boat anchor.

[Russell] It was only after the bombing attempt,

we then began to look at all the insurance records.

And, discovered that there were multiple policies on him,

and multiple policies on the others.

James Goodyear,

Bobby Joe Morris,

and John Gentry.

It was in multiple states, multiple years.

[Rick] She kept moving her locations around, Colorado, Florida.

Different insurance companies.

Nowadays with the technology they have,

most insurance companies will probably pick up on that pretty quick.

Back then, we didn't have that.

[Russell] When we obtained the insurance policies,

we realized that we had a pattern of killing.

[Belvin] You got three separate men,

and you had a motive.

Insurance money.

[Meghan] The difference usually between female and male serial killers,

is their purpose for killing.

Male serial killers usually kill for some type of

sexual gratification or power and control.

Whereas female serial killers,

usually there is a utilitarian purpose.

Meaning, they're gaining something,

and that's usually money.

She's looking at these people as income.

[Pam] She tried to buy life insurance, not only on my dad,

but on me and my two sisters.

I mean, it was just so bizarre.

[Russell] She funded a nail shop.

She bought a house in Gulf Breeze.

She bought cruise tickets.

Various gifts for friends.

[Nancy] I didn't know back then.

But, I attended a cruise,

because her son died, and she used the money,

from his insurance to pay for that cruise I was on.

I don't like that.

[Ted] She loved money.

Money was a big thing to her. That was a main thing.

She had to have money, and she had to live that lifestyle.

The only one that knew that there was insurance at all on her, was Gentry.

The other folks had no idea.

[Meghan] With John Gentry,

they had decided to get insurance policies on each other.

But their insurance policies were for about $50,000.

But Judy went ahead and changed that policy,

increasing it from $50,000 to $500,000.

[Ted] Gentry thought it was originally $50,000.

And then, she ups it to $500,000.

And then she tells him, that the policies, she cancelled them.

She's not making payments on 'em.

So that's why he didn't think she had anything to gain.

She had intended to kill him for the insurance.

Judy was crafty in getting people to sign over insurance,

and when they didn't, she would just do it for them.

She had taken out three life insurance policies on Bobby Joe Morris.

[Ted] In Bobby Joe Morris' case,

every time the insurance guy would come to get the things,

she'd say he's working, he's busy.

"You give 'em to me.

I'll have Bobby Joe sign 'em, and I'll bring 'em back to you."

That's what she did.

And Bobby Joe Morris had no idea.

[Meghan] She was with Bobby Joe for about six years.

She had invested all this time in him.

She was gonna make sure she got something

out of the relationship before it ended.

The people in Judy's life, they're just... they're disposable.

Judy's being discovered at this point.

It's being revealed piece by piece,

that she is likely the person who is responsible

for murdering her family members.

It appeared that we had an investigation that needed to be done.

[Joey] Proving that these cases were murders

and not just accidental deaths,

could be very challenging,

particularly since it had been a number of years.

Investigators knew that Michael Goodyear

suffered from arsenic poisoning,

which they originally thought was just an accident from work.

So they decided to see

whether any of Judy's other alleged victims

had arsenic in their system.

And that meant exhuming the bodies,

literally digging up evidence.

[Belvin] Arsenic is a chemical.

You can't find it in just a routine toxicology screen.

You had to specifically test for arsenic back then.

It's gonna remain in hair.

It's gonna remain in your organs.

So, we had to exhume Sergeant James Goodyear.

Because we had to find out whether or not

was he poisoned.

We need the evidence to prove the case.

[reporter] James Goodyear's death certificate

says he died of heart failure in 1971.

But law enforcement authorities don't believe that anymore.

James Edgar Goodyear was exhumed from his grave,

so investigators could look for arsenic.

[Belvin] Sergeant Goodyear died in 1971.

The autopsy was in 1984.

So that's approximately 13 years.

[Russell] The longer it gets, the more difficult it is.

You do not have that sort of evidence that you need.

[Belvin] We didn't think there was nothing left in that casket.

That the body had just totally disintegrated.

And, I was totally surprised

when the medical examiner opened the casket up.

And, there was a fully intact body.

It showed arsenic levels that were lethal.

[Belvin] He was so well preserved,

because of the amount of arsenic that he had in his body.

[Nancy] He escaped Vietnam, but he couldn't escape Judy.

She was evil.

She was evil.

Welcome back to Very Scary People.

It looked like the walls were finally closing in on Judy Buenoano.

Twelve years after her husband's death,

the body of Sergeant James Goodyear was exhumed.

Massive amounts of arsenic were found in his remains.

The medical examiner changed his cause of death

from natural causes to homicide.

It was one more piece of the puzzle

that authorities needed to try and bring

the suspected Black Widow to justice.

Sergeant James Goodyear died of arsenic poison.

[Ted] They were able to get the body exhumed.

And, I think that he was in the ground for, like, I think, 12 and a half years.

Then they found arsenic levels of lethal amount with him.

[Joey] When Sergeant Goodyear came back from Vietnam,

Judy was making all of these home-cooked meals.

So it's believed that the arsenic found in his body

is connected to all those meals that Judy was preparing.

Arsenic is a good poison, because you can't taste it or smell it.

So you can put it in any drink.

You can put it in any food.

And it is undetectable to the person who is ingesting it.

[Belvin] And no one had any reason to suspect

that his loving wife,

the mother of his children,

would just sit there,

and watch him suffer and die.

Now you have to ask yourself,

what type of human being is that?

That led to investigations

of the homicide of Bobby Joe Morris.

[Russell] We were able to exhume Bobby Joe Morris and get the samples from him.

And it showed arsenic levels that were lethal.

He was loaded up to killing at least 12 people, they say.

James Goodyear, Bobby Joe Morris,

all of 'em, every single one, even Michael,

it was arsenic poisoning.

And they were put through really so much pain

and anguish before they died.

They were dealing with a cold blooded killer.

[Belvin] The one mistake that she did make,

was she didn't have any of them cremated.

There was one of Judy's alleged victims that survived,

John Gentry.

Investigators found wiring in her house,

connecting Judy to the car bombing.

And a poisonous substance at her nail salon,

that tied her to John's mysterious illness.

[reporter] Of all the people Judy Buenoano was accused of poisoning,

John Gentry is the only one who lived.

He became ill from some pills she gave him.

She told him they were vitamin C tablets.

[John speaking]

[Mollye] John Gentry was complaining of a little bit of a cold,

and she started giving him these vitamins.

And instead, it made him feel worse.

[Rick] So he just quit taking 'em.

He put a couple aside. He said,

"Well, maybe one day, I'll have 'em checked. It's just to see

maybe if I'm... if it has something in it that I'm allergic to."

He put 'em in his briefcase,

and we got 'em, and we actually send 'em off to the FBI.

And they came back a few weeks later.

Said it was a substance called paraformaldehyde.

Comes powdered.

And it's a disinfectant.

But it's poison.

The pills were supposed to contain Vicon-C,

which is a very strong vitamin C.

She had emptied the pills,

put the paraformaldehyde in the pills,

and given those to him.

We feel it was with the intent of killing him over time.

Judy, obviously, she got tired of waiting on the end result,

and speeded it up with the dynamite.

[Mollye] Finally investigators had this piece of hard evidence

that they could use to potentially...

show what her intentions were.

[Rick] I think what bit her in the end was

not killing Gentry.

If he had died,

there would've been some suspicion

but he was the key.

[Meghan] It was July 27, 1983 in Pensacola, Florida

when Judy Buenoano was arrested

for the attempted murder of John Gentry.

[Ted] The very first time that she was arrested

was for the attempted murder

with the Vicon-C tablets on Mr. Gentry.

She got out on a $50,000 bond.

And then we turned around and we arrested for, uh,

the murder of her son.

That's something she didn't expect.

[Nancy] When we had gone to arrest her,

she pretended like she passed out.

She acted like she was paralyzed.

[Nancy] You can't believe that.

She wasn't sick.

[Pam] I think everything was a game.

I found out real fast

everything was for her benefit.

[Meghan] Judy was an experienced liar.

She lied easily at will.

She told many stories about her, her background

and her accolades.

So she told people

that she was the heir to the Goodyear throne.

[Mike] Her name when she was married was Goodyear.

Then her name,

at some point, changed to Buenoano,

and which is Spanish for... for good year.

[Russell] She claimed that she was

the great-great-granddaughter of, uh, Geronimo.

She told people that she had doctorates

in multiple disciplines.

She told everybody she was a doctor.

A doctor, they don't do nail salon.

[Pam] When you addressed her professionally,

it was Dr. Judias Buenoano.

[Nancy] Judy said she's also a forensic pathologist.

I think pretty quickly I knew she was lying to me.

She did not know I was a police officer at the time.

So I said to Judy,

"I hear you're a forensic pathologist.

Well, I'd love to talk to you about that.

I'm a crime scene officer."

And she immediately avoided me from that time on.

[Meghan] But also, remember, Judy lied about

every one of the deaths in her family.

She had to lie to cover up everything she had done.

So she told people that

James Goodyear died of cancer.

And she said, you know,

that Bobby Joe Morris died of heavy drinking.

She said Michael got killed

in a training accident in military

when he didn't.

She lied through her teeth

every time she talked to somebody.

[Nancy] She told me, "I would never hurt my son.

I would never hurt anyone."

But the truth was she did.

[newscaster 1] Judy Buenoano walked into court today

looking calm and relaxed.

But when prosecutors talk about

the 42-year-old's murder charges,

it's like something out of Hitchcock.

[Joey] Judy's first trial was for the death of her son, Michael.

She was accused of poisoning him with arsenic,

and then when he was paralyzed from the arsenic,

of drowning him on the canoe trip.

Judy said, "This was terrible. Oh, my poor son.

I was just trying to take him out for a canoe ride and...

and this terrible thing happened."

And it was all an accident.

And... I have never met a person who believes that.

But Judy sticks to, maintains

that she is a respectable woman

and that she is absolutely innocent.

[Russell] When I looked at the military records of Michael Goodyear,

he had lines on his fingernails,

and you can use those to trace back or relate back

to the time which a person might've ingested arsenic.

And these lines showed that

he would've ingested poisoning about the time he was home.

So my conclusion was that...

she had him come home for leave,

she poisoned him, poisoned to kill him.

It did not work.

He survived.

And then she finished it

by taking him out in the canoe

and drowned him.

[Belvin] It's just mind-boggling,

to watch your son

sink like a rock

and drown.

Only an evil person would do that.

[newscaster 1] The Black Widow's case, as it came to be known,

rocked Pensacola, Florida.

Russell Edgar prosecuted Buenoano

for her son's drowning.

I likened her to a black widow who...

...fed on her mates and her young,

and the name stuck.

She took the life of her son,

she took the life of her husband

and the life of people who cared about her.

She killed for financial gain.

At one point, the defendant called the whole thing a witch-hunt.

[Russell] She started yelling at me.

She would just say, "I didn't do it. It's not murder.

I've been framed. You're on a witch-hunt."

And that was basically her mantra.

Defamation, assassination of character and the person.

They turn you into a vile monster.

There was no attempt

to assassinate anyone's character.

Uh, we deal with facts.

We deal with evidence.

[Meghan] Judy said she's never been anything

but a good mother.

The ten men and two women of the jury

will have a chance to make that determination themselves.

[Joey] Prosecutors showed the heavy metal braces

that Michael was wearing when he drowned,

and people could not believe

that a mother could possibly do that to her son.

The trial lasted nine days

before jurors came back with a verdict.

[juror 1] We, the jury, find the defendant

guilty of murder in first degree...

She was sentenced to life without parole

for 25 years.

She wasn't happy.

And in front of the jury, she lost it.

[Ted] She was walking out and I...

said "bye-bye" to her like that.

Well, actually, it was ta-ta and, uh...

she tried to come over the rail [laughs] after me.

Her and I didn't get along at all.

[Meghan] I think that the mask probably slipped,

the facade probably broke a little bit,

because she was actually convicted.

In the eyes of the law and everyone else around,

she's no longer a woman with status.

And that probably, really broke her.

It's almost like her face just changed

and she became the killer.

It was very interesting.

[Paula] Her outburst, her anger, her...

And that was a Judy I didn't know.

But once I saw those,

we knew that she was evil.

She was flat evil.

[Joey] Six months later, Judy was back in court.

This time, she was facing attempted murder charges

for attempting to kill her fiance,

John Gentry.

[Belvin] She had two counts of

attempted murder on Gentry by poisoning

and by trying to blow him up.

[newscaster 2] Judy Buenoano conferred with council several times

during the testimony of her former boyfriend, John Gentry.

A friend testified

that at that time Buenoano told her

Gentry was suffering from a terminal disease.

She was talking about taking her staff

on this cruise along with her family.

But Old John wouldn't be there

'cause John was dying.

Judy told me that John had cancer

and was going to die

and he really didn't want anyone to know that.

[newscaster 2] Gentry did not have cancer

but did come close to death.

[Joey] The jury deliberated for just two hours

and handed down a guilty verdict.

Another 12 years was added to her sentence.

And there was one more trial to come.

[Belvin] And then after that, we started the trial

for the murder of her husband, James Goodyear.

We sought the death penalty in that case.

It was not an easy case.

She had this ability to charm men.

[newscaster 3] Judy Buenoano greeted spectators with a smile this morning

as the first day of testimony in her murder trial got underway.

Authorities say she killed her husband

with arsenic poisoning in 1971

and they say they have autopsy results to prove it.

You know, you hear the phrase, someone is the "ice queen."

She was just a very cold,

calculating individual.

The evidence has shown

that this woman was unhappy in her marriage.

She... wanted out of it.

The case was built around the fact that

Judy made admissions that she had killed Goodyear.

She said he was no help to her so she killed the son of a bitch.

"He didn't deserve to live."

[Mollye] She told people that he got on her nerves,

that he wasn't a help,

that she was doing all the work

and he wasn't supportive of her.

But he had not been back very long

before she started poisoning him.

So I don't know how much of that was true

or how much of that was just justification in her own mind

to justify what she wanted to do.

[Meghan] We call it the techniques of neutralization.

When it comes to criminological theory,

people tend to neutralize their own guilt

by making excuses.

So there's justification.

She's denying that he's a victim,

and she is really the victim.

[Belvin] She told another young lady

that "If you wanted to leave your husband,

don't divorce him, kill him."

She went to the grocery store

and showed them where they could purchase the poison.

Judy said to me that what I should do

was kill the SOB.

She said, "If you want to do it,

we can get... get a poison

out here in the grocery store

in the fly bait department."

Said it has arsenic in it.

That's how Judy told me that she killed James.

And you had a motive, insurance money.

Prosecutors still have more witnesses to call,

and already Buenoano has a lot of explaining to do.

She took no responsibility.

She denied everything.

[Judy] We had basically a good marriage.

She had no reason to kill him.

She had loved him.

And they all basically had bad luck.

And I can vividly remember doing closing argument

and echoing the fact, "Yes, they did have bad luck."

And I wheeled around and pointed at her and said,

"And there sits their bad luck.

That's the bad luck."

[Joey] It was 1985 and Judy Buenoano

was facing a first-degree murder charge

for the death of her husband, James Goodyear.

She had already been convicted

for attempting to kill John Gentry

and for the first-degree murder of her son.

[newscaster 4] Judy Buenoano has already received

a life sentence for her son's death

and could receive the death penalty

if convicted this week.

[Belvin] If there was any case

that would warrant the ultimate sanction of death,

it was that case.

She showed no mercy,

and I submit to you that she deserves no mercy.

[Joey] Judy maintains her innocence throughout,

but the judge and the jury weren't buying it.

[juror 2] We, the jury, find the defendant

guilty of murder in the first degree as charged.

The jury convicted her

and the judge imposed a death sentence.

You shall be put to death by means of electrocution.

May God have mercy on your immortal soul.

Once they read sentencing, we were happy.

She was sentenced to death.

[Belvin] She murdered him,

all for the love of money.

[Russell] Judy killed at least three people

and tried to kill another one.

Nobody suspected any foul play.

[Russell] I think if she just stopped after her son,

she would've never been arrested.

I think she would've gotten away with it

if she hadn't, uh, tried to kill Gentry.

[Belvin] But for the miscue of John Gentry,

who knows the trail of death

that she would've left.

[Bob] For Judy, for many years, crime paid.

Kill somebody... get an insurance check.

And it seems like for her,

the lives ruined in the process

were just simply collateral damage,

'cause after all her life got better.

[Belvin] Cadillac, vacations.

And then when the money got low, another victim.

[Bob] As I recall, she collected

in the area of $250,000 for her crimes.

[Belvin] If she would've been able to kill John Gentry,

she would've added another half a million-plus.

[Bob] Her greed finally caught up with her.

That and her lack of a conscience.

[newscaster 5] Fifty-four-year-old Judy Buenoano

is a grandmother.

She is also inmate number 160663,

a convicted killer.

[Rick] She was never charged with Morris's murder.

I think if she hadn't been sentenced to death in Florida,

I think Colorado would've probably picked up on it.

But she would never get out of jail in Florida.

[Bob] She maintained her innocence

all the way to the very end.

...because I'm innocent.

There was no remorse.

[Nancy] It was not her fault.

I don't believe she ever accepted responsibility

for what she did.

If this state thinks I am guilty

and they wish to execute me

and that's the final judgement, then so be it.

[Mollye] To the end, she was the victim.

"I will not admit to this.

I've done nothing but build a life for myself,

and you've taken that away from me."

[reporter] After 13 years of maintaining her innocence on death row,

Buenoano wants to be remembered as a good mother.

So anything I want to be known for...

is a good mother.

Until we meet again.

[newscaster 6] Judy Buenoano was executed

just six days shy of her 55th birthday.

[Belvin] It was like writing the final chapter.

When she walked to the death chamber,

you could see the fright...

on her face.

[Bob] She was terrified...

being seated...

and then being asked, "Do you have any final words?"

And she closed her eyes and looked up and said,

very loudly, "No, sir."

And that was it.

We were all willing to turn our electricity off for the day

just to make sure they had enough juice if they needed it.

[newscaster 7] She was pronounced dead at 7:13 this morning.

[Joey] Judy was the first woman executed in Florida in 150 years.

As a born-again Christian,

I don't have any fear about where Judy is right now.

Judy Buenoano, she is going straight to hell.

Judy Buenoano was executed in Starke, Florida

on March 30, 1998,

on what would've been her son Michael's 37th birthday.

All told, she collected nearly

a quarter of a million dollars in insurance payouts

in the deaths of her loved ones.

Since this case, insurance laws have changed.

Today, if a life insurance policy is taken out on someone,

that person is alerted

to help prevent the type of fraud Judy committed

for more than a decade.

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

Thanks for watching.

Good night.

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