The darker side of the human psyche: Serial killer 7 – Velma Barfield

Margie Velma Barfield (née Bullard) (October 29, 1932 – November 2, 1984)

An American serial killer convicted of one murder, but who eventually confessed to six murders in total. She was the first woman in the United States to be executed after the 1976 resumption of capital punishment and the first since 1962. She was also the first woman to be executed by lethal injection.

History

Velma Barfield was born in rural South Carolina, but was raised near Fayetteville, North Carolina. Apparently Barfield’s father was physically abusive and her mother Lillian never intervened. She escaped her horrible situation by marrying Thomas Burke in 1949 and the couple had two children. Reportedly they were happy until Barfield had a hysterectomy and started having chronic back pain, which led to a behavioural change, as well as an eventual drug addiction. Burke began drinking heavily and Velma’s complaints turned into bitter arguments. On April 4, 1969, after Burke passed out in a stupor, she and the children left the house. When they returned, the house was burned and Burke was dead. A few months later, her own home burned down, but it was insured. In 1970, she married widower Jennings Barfield, but less than a year later, he died (on March 22, 1971) from heart complications. In 1974, Lillian Bullard, Barfield’s mother, showed symptoms of intense diarrhoea, vomiting and nausea, but she fully recovered a few days later. In the Christmas season of 1974, Bullard once again experienced the illness, but this time died in the hospital a few hours after being admitted on December 30, 1974.

In 1976, Velma began caring for the elderly, working for Montgomery and Dollie Edwards. Montgomery fell ill and died on January 29, 1977. A little over a month after the death of her husband, Dollie suffered identical symptoms to that of Barfield’s mother and died on March 1. Velma later confessed to her death. The following year, she took another caretaker job – for 76-year-old Record Lee, who had a broken leg. On June 4, 1977, Lee’s husband, John Henry, had unbearable, racking pains in his stomach and chest and started vomiting and having diarrhoea. He died soon afterward and Velma also later confessed to his murder. Fearing he had discovered she had been forging checks on victim Rowland Stuart Taylor’s account (Barfield’s boyfriend and a relative of Dollie Edwards) Barfield laced his beer and tea with an arsenic-based rat poison. He died on February 3, 1978, while she was trying to ‘nurse’ him back to health. The autopsy confirmed arsenic in Taylor’s system and after her arrest, the body of Jennings was exhumed and once again found to have traces of arsenic. This murder Barfield denied committing. Although she subsequently confessed to the murders of Bullard, Dollie and John Henry Lee, she was tried and convicted only for the murder of Taylor.

Singer-songwriter Jonathan Byrd is the grandson of Jennings and his first wife. His song ‘Velma’ from his ‘Wildflowers’ album gives a personal account of the murders and investigation.

Prison and execution

Barfield was imprisoned at Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina, in an area for high-risk escape-prone prisoners and the mentally ill – there was no designated area for women under death sentences at the time and she was the state’s only female death row inmate. A death row unit for female inmates in North Carolina was subsequently established at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women. During her stay on death row, Barfield became a devout born-again Christian. Her last few years were spent ministering to prisoners, something she received praise for from Billy Graham. Barfield’s involvement in Christian ministry was extensive to the point that an effort was made to obtain a commutation to life imprisonment. A second basis for appeal was the testimony of Dorothy Otnow Lewis, Professor of Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine and an authority on violent behaviour, who claimed that Barfield suffered from dissociative identity disorder. Lewis testified that Barfield’s other personality ‘Billy had told her that Velma had been a victim of sexual abuse, and that it was Billy who had killed her abusers. The judge was unconvinced. “One of them did it,” Lewis quoted him as saying. “I don’t care which.”

After Barfield’s appeal was denied in federal court, she instructed her attorneys to abandon a further appeal to the US Supreme Court and she was executed on November 2, 1984 at Central Prison. She released the statement “I know that everybody has gone through a lot of pain, all the families connected. I am sorry and I want to thank everybody who have been supporting me all these six years.” before the execution. Her last meal was a bag of Cheetos and two 8-ounce glass bottles of Coca-Cola. Barfield was buried in a small, rural North Carolina cemetery near first husband Thomas Burke.

Sourced from Wikipedia

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