FLORIDA:

She poisoned her husband with arsenic, drowned her paralyzed son, and

tried to blow up her fiance with a car bomb. Another boyfriend

mysteriously died.

It's no wonder that Judy Buenoano is called the Black Widow.

"When I was asking the judge in the drowning case to admit the other

killings (as evidence), I said 'Judge...she's like a black widow -- she

feeds off her mates and her young,'" prosecutor Russell Edgar said.

Buenoano, 54, a former nail-salon owner, is scheduled to die in Florida's

electric chair March 30. Her death would come weeks after Karla Faye

Tucker of Texas became the 2nd woman executed in the United States since

the Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in 1976.

Tucker's lethal injection drew worldwide attention, including a plea

from Pope John Paul II for clemency, because of her behind-bars religious

conversion. There has been no similar outcry for Buenoano, described as

one of the most infamous women in Florida's prison system.

Buenoano's daughter says she is innocent, but concedes little has

changed about her mother since she went to prison more than a decade ago.

"Even now she is the same," said Kimberly Hawkins. "I love her letters.

They cheer me up."

Investigators first became suspicious of Buenoano in 1983, after her

fiance, John Gentry, survived a car bombing in downtown Pensacola.

Gentry, who met Buenoano at a mud-wrestling match in the early 1980s,

told police she also had given him pills that made him sick. She told

Gentry they were vitamins.

That was the key to uncovering the other crimes in Buenoano's past,

Edgar said.

Investigators had plenty to find -- including the crime that sent her to

death row, the murder of Air Force Sgt. James Goodyear.

Goodyear died in 1971 of arsenic poisoning 3 months after he returned to

Orlando from a year's tour in Vietnam and 9 years after he married the

former cocktail waitress.

Buenoano -- who names is Goodyear in Spanish -- collected $85,000 in

life insurance and veteran's benefits after Goodyear died.

In each of the 3 cases -- that of her husband, her son and her

fiance -- she received or stood to collect insurance benefits,

Edgar said.

A year before being sent to death row in 1985, Buenoano was convicted of

the 1980 drowning of Michael Goodyear, the son she had as a teenager

before she met the Air Force sergeant.

Michael, 19, partially paralyzed and wearing leg and arm braces, was

pushed out of a canoe into a river by his mother.

Edgar said evidence also suggested that Buenoano poisoned boyfriend

Bobby Joe Morris in Trinidad, Colo., in 1978. Colorado prosecutors

decided not to file murder charges after she got the death sentence in

Florida.

The last known execution of a woman in Florida occurred in 1848, when a

freed slave was hanged in Jacksonville for the murder of her owner.

Hawkins said her mother would rather die than live her life in the

Broward Correctional Institution just north of Miami, where the 6 women

sentenced to death in Florida are housed.

"She's not scared because it's like she said, she goes to a better

place," said Hawkins, 30. "Because where she's at now is not fun."

Buenoano was born in 1943 in Quanah, Texas, a little town 200 miles

northwest of Dallas. Her mother died when she was 4, and Buenoano spent

her early years passed among relatives and foster families in Texas and

Oklahoma.

She told a federal judge during a 1990 hearing that she was sexually

abused in some homes, physically abused in others and many times went

hungry.

Buenoano's best hope to avoid becoming the next woman to be executed may

rely on Florida's means of death.

During Florida's last electrocution a year ago, a foot-long flame shot

out from the headpiece worn by the inmate, Pedro Medina. The state

Supreme Court upheld use of the electric chair last fall, but a federal

judge has scheduled a hearing on the constitutionality of the chair later

this month.

(source: Philadelphia Inquirer)