USA

Velma Barfield cared for the elderly and the infirm, and one by one they fell ill with the same wrenching symptoms: vomiting, diarrhoea, stomach pains that would not ease. She was dosing their food and drink with arsenic-laced rat poison, chasing insurance payouts and covering forged cheques. Her mother died of it in 1974, two elderly patients in 1977, and finally her boyfriend Stuart Taylor in 1978, even as Barfield nursed him through his final days. She confessed to six murders but was tried and convicted of only one.

On death row she became a devout Christian, ministering to fellow inmates, and her lawyers argued for clemency on the strength of it. A second defence claimed she suffered a split personality named “Billy,” who insisted he alone had killed her abusers; the judge was unmoved, reportedly saying, “One of them did it, I don’t care which one.” North Carolina’s governor refused clemency, and on this day in 1984 Barfield was executed by lethal injection, the first woman put to death in the United States since 1962 and the first ever killed by that method.

She abandoned her final appeals, wanting to “die with dignity,” and left a statement before her death: “I am sorry, and I want to thank everybody who have been supporting me all these six years.”

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