True Crime Campfire - Lady Judas: Serial Killer Judy Buenoaño

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

We’ve seen it a hundred times by now—evil comes in many different forms. Sometimes, you can see it coming a mile away. But sometimes it’ll look like a million dollars, dressed to the nines and fluttering its eyelashes at you, making you feel like you’re the only guy in the room. Stay frosty out there, fellas. Evil comes in many shapes, and sometimes they’re extra pleasing. Join us for the story of one of America's scariest female serial killers, a woman whose sophisticated exterior hid a heart of blackest darkness. Sources:Chicago Tribune: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1985-11-14-8503180695-story.htmlMichael Newton, An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers: Hunting HumansInvestigation Discovery's "Diabolical," Episode "The Devil Wears False Eyelashes"https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/state/2019/08/23/last-meals-of-gary-ray-bowles-danny-rolling-and-others-executed-by-state-of-florida/4395061007/https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1998-03-31-9803310252-story.htmlhttp://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/US/buenoano450.htmhttps://murderpedia.org/female.B/b/buenoano-judy.htmhttps://law.justia.com/cases/florida/supreme-court/1988/68091-0.htmlhttps://casetext.com/case/buenoano-v-state-1https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1671479/state-v-buenoano/?Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. We've seen it a hundred times by now. Evil comes in many different forms. Sometimes you can see it come in many different forms. Sometimes you can see it come in. a mile away, but sometimes it'll look like a million dollars, dressed to the nines and fluttering its eyelashes at you, making you feel like you're the only guy in the room. Stay frosty out

there, fellas. Evil comes in many shapes, and sometimes they're extra pleasing. This is Lady Judas, serial killer, Judy Bueno Anio. So, campers, for this one, we're in Milton, Florida, on the sunny East River, a fun spot for families to go boating and swimming. On May 13, 1980, a couple of fishermen were hanging out on the shore, getting their boat ready to go out on the water when they saw a panicky woman slogging out of the river. She was soaking wet, screaming bloody murder for somebody to help her. She was almost hysterical at first. They had to spend a few minutes just getting her calm enough to tell him what was happening. And when she did, it made everybody's blood run cold.

I was out with my son on the water, she told him, and the canoe tipped over, and we fell in, and my son Michael just sank. I couldn't find him. He must have drowned by now. By the time the police got there, the woman was a little calmer. Her name was Dr. Judy Bueno anew, she said, and she thought her 19-year-old son, Michael had been in the water for about an hour now. Michael was recently disabled, Dr. Judy told them, partially paralyzed in the arms and legs. He needed heavy leg braces to balance. They weighed like 60 pounds. So even though he had on a life jacket in the canoe,

when it tipped over, he just sank like an anvil. She tried to find him, but she quickly realized that the best thing she could do was swim back to the shore and find help. It took police divers a few hours to find the drowned body of U.S. soldier Michael Goodyear. How sad for a mom to lose her oldest son all to a freak accident like this on a bright sunny day.

The story Dr. Judy was telling seemed to me. makes sense to the investigators at the scene, so as tragic as it was, they closed the case quickly as an accidental death. If they'd looked a little closer, though, they might not have been so sure about that. As everybody would realize later, Michael wasn't the first person in Judy's life to die in unusual circumstances. So the local cops were willing to write off Michael's death as an accidental drowning, but the U.S. Army wasn't. Michael had a sizable military life insurance policy with his mom as the beneficiary, and they wanted to do their due diligence. And it didn't take the Army investigators long to find something that seemed askew.

In addition to the military life insurance policy, there were two civilian policies on Michael, too. Very strange for a 19-year-old kid. And when they got a handwriting expert to look at Michael's signature on the policies, he thought it looked fake. Interesting. But none of this was proof of anything sinister, and Dr. Judy Buenoanoano was. doing her best to put her life back together without her boy. With some of the life insurance proceeds, she opened her own beauty shop and nail salon and Gulf Breeze. Judy was always

meticulous about her looks, and now that she owned her own salon, she could have all the best treatments, not to mention the best gossip in town. That cliche exists for a reason, y'all, you hear the best shit at the beauty shop. So anywho, as the military quietly went about investigating her son Michael's death, Judy got on with her life. Poor girl, she deserved to. I mean, I mean, before Michael, she'd already lost two husbands in a row to sudden strange illnesses. Young, healthy guys, you'd have every expectation would be around to grow old with you, and then poof. Gone. Judy'd really been through it. Yeah, well, she'd been through it even before that.

Born Judaius Welty in Texas in 1943, she grew up poor and never felt like her family loved her. Yeah, I guarantee you they didn't, because they named her Judas. That's child abuse. Very close to Judas, too, which is interesting given what we're going to learn about her. I don't blame her for changing it to Judy. No. She had a tough childhood. Her mom had died of TB when she was just a toddler, so she never had any nurturing.

At first, she and her brother Robert got sent to live with their grandparents, and two of the other kids were put up for adoption. But when Daddy Welty married again and there was a stepmom to help raise the kids, the grandparents sent Judy back. Fun fact, by then, Judy's dad had moved to Roswell, New Mexico, home of the famous UFO crash of 1947. And it's actually home to the International UFO Museum, of which I have been once, and I wish I could go again. It was very cool. And by cool, I mean... Hilarious? Yeah.

I don't want to insult anybody, but it was funny because it's painted. It's like, oh, it's an international museum. museum with UFOs and literally there is just articles pinned to cork board all over the place and like oh bless their hearts there's one of those like there's one of those neon blow up aliens like there and then they have like one of the fake um dissections it's it's if you have the chance to go absolutely worth every single penny absolutely like they're very like self-consciously can't be like they're trying to that's the impression i got yeah yeah that's awesome all of roswell they're uh Their street lights, like the street lamps, are alien heads.

So they know. That's great. It's good. But alas, that is the last fun fact I've got to give you because it was bad in that house. The stepmom wasn't so much the kind loving type. She was the kind you read about in the Grim Brothers fairy tales. And Judy's dad wasn't any better. Yeah, it's too bad the damn UFO didn't land on top of them.

Definitely. We won't go into too much detail, but let's say Judy pretty much went through hell on earth. Worked around the clock, beaten, and never given enough to eat. When she was 14, she finally snapped. Flew into a blind rage and beat the living shit out of both parents. She also threw hot oil over two of her stepbrothers. Despite the fact that she was 14 with a long history of abuse and neglect, Judy's moment of catharsis cost her two months in jail. Adult jail.

At the end of the 60 days, a judge gave her a choice. She could go home to her parents or she could go to reform school. Guess which one she picked? Yeah, I don't blame her. She ended up at a girl's reform school called Foothills High in Albuquerque, and classmates from her years there later remembered how much she hated her family. One time, somebody asked her how she felt about her brother and she said, I wouldn't spit down his throat if his guts were on fire.

Damn. Ooh, I got to use that one. Right. Right? After she graduated from foothills at age 16, she went back home to Roswell and started working at a hospital as a nurse's aide under the name Anna Schultz for some reason. And when she was 17, she got pregnant. We don't know who the father was, possibly an Air Force pilot, but we don't know for sure. Maybe it was one of the crashed aliens at Area 51, because, you know, we all know they're there. No, yeah. Let's not even pretend. For some reason, Judy never wanted to say who the dad was. Michael was born in 1961, and for a while, Judy was juggling two jobs to keep a roof over their heads.

My guess is she wanted a better life for Michael than her asshole parents had given her. And it didn't take her long to score one. Around Christmas time in 1961, Judy was waitressing at a restaurant when she met a handsome Air Force man named James Goodyear. James had his shit together. He was 27. He was a pilot. Judy zeroed in on him like a heat-seeking missile. Dude never had a chance. Judy might have been a little rough around the edges, what with the barely repressed rage and all, but she could be charming, too. And she was very conscious of how she looked, one of those women who won't go to the mailbox without a full face of makeup and every hair in place. She seemed sophisticated, sexy in a kind of understated way, glamorous, maybe a little bit mysterious. What dashing young pilot could resist? He married her within a couple of a couple of months, which, o'y, y'all know how we feel about that, but he must have been a good guy to take on a single mom in 1961. He ended up adopting Michael later and always treated him

like his own. Four years into their marriage, they had a son together, James Jr., and then a daughter Kimberly. They ended up in Orlando, Florida, from aliens to Mickey Mouse, seems like a lateral move, and Judy decided to open a child care center down there, which is terrifying. The idea of this woman taking care of children is just yeah but as far as anybody could tell judy was pretty much on top of the world i mean she was a business owner and an air force wife but of course appearances don't always tell the whole story as anybody who's ever seen one episode of date line can tell you the marriage wasn't going well they were at each other's throat all the time and soon james started fantasizing about ways he might escape from judy for a while and then in 1970 he got sent to vietnam not exactly the

break he was hoping for, I'm sure, but it did get him out of the house. And it must have been kind of scary for Judy. I mean, plenty of people didn't make it out of that war alive. And there she was in Orlando with three kids to raise by herself and a daycare to run. So while James was away, Judy found herself a little distraction in the form of a car salesman whose name I don't know. I'm just going to call him Carl. For pretty much James's entire tour in Vietnam, Judy was nail an old car salesman Carl, right there in her and James's bed. She was lonely. See? Aw. James' tour of duty wasn't super long, though.

He came home in 71, and Judy broke up with poor Carl. For a while, it seemed like absence had made the heart grow fonder, because the fighting stopped, and they had kind of a honeymoon phase. But by August of that year, James wasn't doing so great. He started feeling nauseated all the time and weak. At first, they thought it was a stomach bug, but it didn't get better. It got worse. Eventually, he couldn't get out of bed, and he started hallucinating.

Judy walked in one afternoon to find him sitting up in bed, grabbing at the blankets. He was seeing rabbits all over the bed trying to catch them. Yeah, that cannot be good. Within a few months of coming home from Vietnam, James was admitted to the U.S. Naval Hospital, where doctors were totally baffled by his symptoms. It was just a weird combination of stuff, and they did test after test but couldn't figure it out. One theory was Agent Orange and herbicide the U.S. military used in Vietnam, basically to strip the leaves off the trees that the Viet Cong soldiers were using for cover.

Stuff is loaded with this nasty chemical called dioxin, which can wreak all kinds of havoc on the human body. It's carcinogenic, it's been linked to birth defects and diabetes, and all kinds of other bad stuff. And a lot of people who were in Vietnam at the time fell victim to it. So maybe it was that? Nobody knew for sure. Of course, Judy was a total angel of mercy for James during this time.

She was always bringing him his favorite drinks and stuff. hovering over him to make sure he drank enough. What a trooper. Hmm. Sadly, though, James never got better. He died on September 15th, 1971. The official cause of death was listed as pulmonary congestion and renal failure. It was really bizarre. James was young and healthy before he left for Vietnam, but Judy confided in a few friends and family members that she knew what had happened. James had gotten addicted to drugs in Vietnam, she said.

and the military gave him some kind of antidote for the addiction, and James was allergic to it. That's what would kill him. Okay. Hmm. Hmm. At James's funeral, Judy chewed the scenery like she was going for a golden globe, weeping and hugging on people.

At least she'd weep when people were looking. She seemed pretty good at turning it off and on at will. At one point, she collapsed in a beautifully dressed heap on the floor. saying she was overwhelmed with grief, at which point she left the church on the arm of Carr Salesman Carl, who escorted her there for, you know, support. Support of that dick.

She told everybody he was her business associate. Is that what they're calling it these days? Judy's friend Connie took one look at her in salesman Carl at James' funeral and thought back to a weird conversation she'd had with Judy a few months earlier. Connie had been confiding in her about her own failing marriage, and Judy was like, yeah, sometimes marriage just doesn't work out. You know what we should do? Put a little arsenic in their coffee. Connie had just stared at Judy, who seemed to think this was a hilarious idea. They never test for it, she said. It's an undetectable poison.

No, it's not, bitch. But anyway, at the time, Connie just thought this was, like, just a really dark joke. Now, watching Judy saunter out of James' funeral on the arm of another man, she wasn't so sure. Judy waited a whole five days before she cash in on James' life insurance. That's some Herculean patience. He was really well covered. She got a nice fat nest egg, about half a million dollars in today's money. And just a few months later, she got another one when their house mysteriously burned down.

Not bad for a man she didn't love in a house she was getting tired of. Judy loved having money. To her, it was everything. Money meant freedom, and freedom meant Judy got to do whatever Judy wanted. And mostly what she wanted was to buy fancy stuff and be the center of attention. As the prosecutor later put it, the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. James's life insurance money no sooner hit her bank account. then Judy started buying pricing new stuff, including a nice new home in Pensacola,

fancy cars, and designer jewelry. And she was generous when she felt like it. Anytime she bought herself a new car, like if a bug splattered on the windshield or something and she didn't feel like going to the car wash, she'd give the old one to a friend. Image was everything to Judy. She was always making up stories to make herself look cooler than she was. Like she was a black belt in karate. She was the heiress to the Goodyear Tires Fortune.

She was a trained psychologist. She was Geronimo's great-great-granddaughter. Oh. Yeah, boy, that last one's extra cringe. And to maintain the image she wanted, Judy was going to need a steady stream of cash. Enter Bobby Joe Morris. Now, we tried to find out what Bobby Joe did for a living,

but the only thing we could find was, I shit you not, a 1985 article in the Chicago Tribune that lists him as a beer drinker. Like, competitively, professionally? We have no idea. But apparently Bobby Joe had money and charisma, and that was the perfect combination to make him a sitting duck for our girl.

Their romance moved fast, just like her romance to James had years before, and within six months they were living together in a fancy-smancy neighborhood. Judy set about playing the doting, devoted housewife for Bobby Joe. She tried to come off all genteel around their old money neighbors, but she couldn't quite pull it off.

She was a little too brash, a little too loud, a little too prone to say and stuff, she probably shouldn't. Like, when one of our neighbor friends confessed that she was having marriage troubles. Judy sympathized, she said. She'd had problems with her first husband, James, but they were easy enough to solve. All you have to do, Judy told her friend, is take out a life insurance policy on your husband

and then get hold of some arsenic and poison him. It'll change your life, she said. It changed mine. It's fascinating to me that she did this again. She didn't have any fear of getting ratted out. I think it shows that she really didn't have any concept of right or wrong. She really believed she was the main character in life, and she could say and do whatever she wanted and get away with it.

Oh, it's beyond fascinating. I know. And Judy didn't stop there. She also told her friend that if she was going to do this, she'd need to have a strong stomach. It's a slow, painful process, she said. You have to be able to handle C in that. So, obviously, this friend was incredibly creeped out by this conversation, and she actually went and told her husband about it later that day.

But the husband said, eh, she must have, you know, just have a warped sense of humor or something. Don't take it seriously. It was just a joke. Jesus Christ, people. Jokes aren't real. Stop telling people it's a joke. Nobody's ever told me a joke like this in my life.

Yeah, I mean, like you might say it like, oh, you know, I'll kill you for the life insurance money to your husband at a party. And it's like, obviously, obviously a joke. But you don't say to your friend, oh, you should. kill him. I killed my husband and it changed my life. Like that's way too specific. Yeah. No, no, no. And I'm actually surprised the husband wasn't like, well, shit. It was his ass she wanted poison. But, you know, we've seen this again and again, haven't we? It's really hard for people to accept that this kind of talk might be serious. And that's great for the killers. I mean, I think, you know, for them, it's just gravy. And I honestly think this is a theory I have, okay, just from reading and watching documentaries about so many of these people.

and by these people, I mean, serial killers, you know, people with psychopathic leanings. I think they like giving people a little glimpse under that mask sometimes, just a quick little peek. And then if it starts to get them in trouble, they can say, psych, I was just kidding, and people will usually buy it. And if you think about it, like, if you're somebody like Judy, you must realize at some point that you're very different from most people. You don't feel emotions the same way everybody else does. You thrive on risk.

You don't get scared. and you don't really feel empathy for other people. You don't cry at sad movies. You know, you sit there in the dark theater and you see everybody else crying around you and you think, I don't get it. Why don't I get it? So I suspect that this sense of difference

or wrongness or whatever you want to call it, I suspect it's kind of like poking at a loose tooth. You know, it's like it might hurt you if you mess with it too much, but you kind of can't resist. You just got to keep poking at it. Even people with psychopathic tendencies must want some kind of human connection sometimes.

And to see if there's anybody else, else out there like them. Yeah. So when she tells her friends these things, I wonder if she's expecting maybe one person is going to say, yeah, I actually was thinking about that. And then she knows like, okay, I'm not alone in this. Yeah. You know?

You know, in season one of True Crime Campfire where we discussed the mainline murders, which if you haven't listened yet, campers, it's a wild ride. It is wild. We did talk quite a bit about how the two perpetrators in that case, Dr. J. Smith and Bill Bradfield knew who each other were and what each other were. Yeah, they recognized each other's typopathy, basically. Yeah. And I'm wondering if it was something like this, like, oh, let me take off the mask for a bit. Oh, you have a mask too. Great. We can now be real with each other. Yeah, absolutely. It's like their warped way of reaching out for some human contact now and again. Yeah.

So one thing that kept Judy from living her best life is a pampered Pensacola housewife. was her oldest son, Michael. He was, as people so sensitively called it back in those days, slow. It sounds like he had maybe a learning disability and some behavioral issues. To quote Michael Newton's encyclopedia of modern serial killers, Michael was raising hell in school. And he was socially awkward. You had trouble making eye contact with people and carrying on conversations. And Judy, champ that she was, was ashamed of him.

She often told people he was her stepson. I can only begin to imagine how much that hurt Michael. I really wish just for this alone that I could go back in time and slap the taste out of her mouth. Yeah. Maybe. In 1974, Judy took Michael to a local hospital for a psych evaluation. After that, she put him into a foster care program that promised to get him some psychiatric health. For the moment, Michael was out of sight, out of mind, and Judy liked it that way.

After a while, things started to sour between Judy and Bobby Joe. I don't know why exactly, but I can guess. I mean, we're talking about a woman whose idea of given friendly advice to a neighbor is, you should just poison your husband. Bobby told his mom he was starting to suspect Judy might have killed James Good Year. There's a very good reason for that, but we'll get to that in a minute.

And in 1977, Bobby Joe noped the fuck out. He moved to Colorado without Judy and the kids. He thought he was leaving her in his rearview mirror for good, but no such luck. After collecting a tidy insurance payout on yet another house fire, Judy scooped Michael up out of foster care and followed Bobby Joe to Colorado with the kids.

Well, shit. And Bobby Joe, very much against his better judgment, caved in and let him all moved back in. Judy got a job as a nurse's aide at the local hospital, and they settled in for a while. But then, on January 4, 1978, Bobby Joe gotten violently ill. Vomiting, hallucinations, horrible pain. They rushed him to the hospital,

where they had to tie him to the bed to stop him thrashing around from the pain. Over the next few weeks, he started feeling a little better, despite the doctors having no idea whatsoever what had caused his symptoms. We've set up before campers, and we'll say it again. We need true crime nerds in hospitals. Somebody to yell, talk, scream in a situation like this. Yes, absolutely. Of course, Judy had a ready explanation for Bobby's symptoms,

just like she had with James. Bobby was a heavy drinker, she told the doctor. this was most likely alcohol withdrawal. Bobby Joe was in the same hospital where Judy worked, and she impressed the hell out of all her colleagues with how loving and solicitous she was of her sick man, and on the 21st they sent him home with her. She assured them she'd take excellent care of him.

Two days later, Bobby Joe collapsed at the dinner table. Judy rushed him back to the hospital, and they admitted him to the ICU. Once again, Judy had full access to Bobby's, room. At one point one of the nurses came in to see Judy holding a cup up to Bobby's mouth. It looked like he was trying to refuse the drink, but Judy was forcing it down him. It gave the nurse a strange feeling. This time, there was no getting better. Within a week, Bobby Joe Morris was dead. Judy immediately tried to take charge, claiming she was his common law wife and

insisting he be cremated. Fortunately, Bobby's mom got wind of this in time to assert her power of attorney and demand an autopsy. Unfortunately, the autopsy didn't include a test for arsenic, and Bobby Joe was buried with the listed cause of death as cardiac arrest and metabolic acidosis. A few days later, Judy filed three life insurance claims. Bobby never knew the policies existed. She'd forged his signature on all three of them. Bobby Joe's family immediately suspected Judy had murdered him, partly because of how fast she

cashed in those life insurance policies and partly because of this. As he deteriorated in the ICU, Bobby Joe had started raving a lot. Sometimes he'd hallucinate. But at one point, a couple nights before he died, he grabbed Judy's wrist as she sat beside his bed and he seemed totally lucid. He said, Judy, we should never have done that terrible thing. This made Bobby's mom's blood run cold. She remembered a visit from him and Judy a few years before when a local man had turned up in a hotel room, shot in the chest with his throat cut. Somebody had made an anonymous call for the cops to go and find the body. It was all over the local news, and in the midst of all that, Bobby Joe's mom had overheard

Judy say to Bobby, the son of a bitch shouldn't have come here in the first place. He knew if he came up here he was going to die. The killer or killers hadn't left any evidence behind, and the case went cold. But Bobby Joe's mom was left to wonder. Not long after Bobby's death, Judy took her $90,000 and which, the kids back to Pensacola, Florida for yet another fresh start. She changed her and the kids' last name, too, to Bueno anio. A tricky choice, and I'll tell you why.

In Spanish, Bueno anio means good year. If... If you remember to put an accent mark over the end. If you don't, good year becomes good anus. Bueno ono is good anus. Yeah. So not much margin for error there, you guys. got to really trust people to get it right.

Though my guess is Judy probably didn't realize this, and that makes it five times funnier. Kind of like Dyson Koft and Rabbit Head, you know. I love it. Anyway, this was also around the time Judy started telling people she was a doctor, often a psychologist. She started going by Dr. Judai's Buenos Hanno. In 1979, Judy's oldest son, Michael, decided to drop out of high school. He joined the Army that summer and headed off to basic training. and the first time he got leave, he went home to visit his mama.

I sure wish he hadn't. He was with duty for a few weeks, and by the time he got back to Fort Benning, he was feeling like death. Throwing up all the time, tingling in his arms and legs. Apparently, army doctors have seen an occasional episode of 48 hours because they figured out what was up pretty quickly. Arsenic poisoning. Michael had seven times the normal amount in a system, and it was tearing him up from the inside out. By the time you've been poisoned that badly, there's nothing.

you can really do to reverse the damage. Within two months of arriving home to visit his mom, Michael's muscles had atrophied so badly that he could no longer walk. He couldn't use his hands. He was paraplegic. He needed big, heavy braces on both legs and another one on his arm. Sixty pounds of extra weight. As she had with the other men in her life,

Judy had an answer for how Michael had ingested the poison. He had pica, she told his doctors, a disorder that made him want to eat inedible objects. PICA is a real thing. Michael didn't have it, though. She was just making that part up. Some of Michael's army training had required him to be around stuff that contained arsenic. He probably ate some of it, Judy said.

He swallowed weird stuff all the time. He had to watch him like a hawk. So Michael had survived his mother's first attempt to murder him, but it disabled him to the point where he could no longer serve in the military. He had to come back home, to live with her instead. Everyone expected her to take care of him, and he needed a lot of care. well well well dr judy if it isn't the consequences of your actions of course to judy consequences were the kind of thing that happened to other people she wasn't about to have the sun she'd always hated ruin her brand new freewheel in life which of course brings us back to where we started at the beginning of the episode the canoe trip and michael drowned and dead judy told the responding officer she was a doctor of course and i'm sure that didn't hurt her any it might have been part of why they didn't look any deeper into the case before we ruling in an accidental drowning.

Despite the fact that her story was a mess, she told one investigator that they must have hit a tree stump, and that's why the canoe flipped over. But she told another that a snake had come into the canoe, and Michael panicked and fell over the side. I'm sorry, a snake came into the canoe? Do snakes do that? Because I love the nope ropes.

Like, I really do. I love snakes, but like from a distance. If they can just come into the canoe, I'm going to have to reevaluate. maybe it fell out of a tree I don't know like it could have been like a water magous in I know those suckers swim

it's a weird lie regardless and that wasn't even the last one she told a third investigator that they'd been fishing and somebody's hook got caught on a tree branch and the canoe flipped over as they were trying to yank it free

for God's sake why can't these people ever tell everybody the same cock of duty lie they do this shit all the time it's just so sloppy Despite the massive flaming red flags, the sheriff's office was just kind of like, eh, it's probably fine. And close the case. But as we told you earlier, the military started digging around behind the scenes, and they quickly discovered that in addition to Michael's military life insurance policy, Judy had collected on two civilian policies, too.

All told, Judy had collected over a hundred grand from her oldest son's death. and Michael's signature appeared to be forged on both the civilian policies. When they told the sheriffs of office about that little detail, they perked up their ears. They weren't alone. Some of Judy's neighbor suspected right away that she'd murdered Michael. I mean, her feelings about her older son weren't really a secret. Judy wasn't great at hiding her disdain for him, and people wondered, if your son has to wear 60-pound leg braces to get around,

why on earth would you put him on a canoe in the first place? Right. Although there was no hard evidence to make an arrest, at least now there was a discreet investigation brewing. But Judy had no idea about any of that. She bought a hot little corvette, and she opened her nail salon, which quickly became a hot spot for the ladies of Gulf Breeze. And campers, what did she call it?

She called it, fingers and faces. No, no, it's fingers and faces. The mm-hmm is important It's cutesy Kind of says I'm just plain folks You know You can come on in here

And get your nails done And I'm not even gonna try And poison you or nothing Fingers and faces There's just something Vaguely disturbing About that name And I can't even put my finger on why

Or your face Yeah I can't put my face on it either I don't know It just feels a little Ed Geany Especially from a woman Who's chosen last name is one tilda away from good anus. And the weirdest thing is she was still telling people she was a doctor.

Doctor slash nail salon owner, Judias Good Anus. Slash serial killer. Okay, she wore many hats, are Judaius. So, as you've probably noticed, Judy is not a lady who likes to be by herself. And by early 1981, she was on the prowl for a new victim. I mean, man. and she met him I shit you not in a mud wrestling bar

How delightful is that detail I just can't even stand it Mud wrestling bar His name was John Gentry He was a Pensacola businessman And he later told the Chicago Tribune About the first time they met He said

I was gonna get drunk Raise some hail and go down and see the mud wrestling Judy was standing at the bar All dressed in black She wore black quite a lot In fact psychologically I think that says a lot about her Word to that Of course, I wear a lot of black, too. What does that say about me?

I'm a goffy bitch. But mine is covered in cat hair, which shows him a caring person, so it's all good. Yeah. Despite being in a mud wrestling establishment, Chudy was dressed to the nines, as always, with her false eyelashes on and everything, and she batted her eyes at him, and he was a goner. Of course, she fed him a big old wevel eyes about herself. She'd been to nursing school.

She had her doctorate in psychology and biochemistry. She'd been head nurse at this hospital, that hospital, blah. blah, bullshit, blah. It was all lies. Gentry bought it all, because why wouldn't he? And soon, he was spoiling Judy Rotten, taking her on Caribbean cruises, buying her jewelry and clothes, and treating her to fancy champagne.

Ugh, I hate this bitch. Eventually, possibly in an attempt to lock it down in case our boy was having any second thoughts, Judy told him she was Preggs. She was 40 at this point, which doesn't mean it couldn't be true, of course, but it makes it a little bit less likely. And I mean, obviously it wasn't true, because nothing this hoes beast ever

says is the fact was she'd had her tubes tied in 1975 but gentry bought it bless his heart and asked judy to marry him and a few days later judy suggested charmingly i'm sure that they each buy a life insurance policy on the other gentry said sure honey whatever my little biscuit wants and they each got a fifty thousand dollar policy on each other later behind gentry's back judy upped his policy to five hundred thousand dollars which in 82 is just bananas money like i can't even imagine what that would be in today's money, but like a lot, like millions and millions. And within a month or so of that, gentry began feeling ill. He was dizzy all the time. Throwing up. Sound familiar? Yeah.

He ended up in the hospital for about two weeks, and he couldn't help but notice that while he was there, away from Judy and the new vitamins she'd been insisting he take every day, he was rapidly getting better. Unfortunately, though, it didn't make him suspect Judy so much as it made him suspect the vitamins. So he got out of the hospital and went right back home to her. Shortly after that, Gentry and Judy got invited to a dinner party at a fancy restaurant. Somehow, Judy convinced him to drive there separately from her, and she told him to park in a specific spot around the side of the restaurant, because it was safer there, she said, look, what? Okay. And as the party was starting to wind down, Judy whispered in Gentry's ear,

Hey, honey pie, if you'll go stop off at the liquor store for some champagne on the way home, we can have a little celebration of our own tonight. My, my. Well, what red-blooded man could resist that? So poor Gentry kissed Judy on the cheek, said his goodbyes to their friends around the table, and headed out. He got into his car, parked exactly where Judy had told him, and when he turned the ignition key, it exploded. Incredibly, though, John Gentry survived. Firefighters managed to get him out of the burning, destroyed car, and rush him to a nearby trauma center where surgeons got to work on him and saved his life. But he was horribly injured. He lost a kidney, his colon was severed, and he ended up more shrapnel than man.

Judy, of course, was right by his side at the hospital. Aw. When they greeted her as Ms. Buenoanoano, she corrected them. It's doctor. Wow. Investigators found two sticks of dynamite hooked up to the car's taillight, rigged to explode when the lights came on. Holy shit. And as soon as Judy's friends and acquaintances heard news about John's injuries, they started calling and telling the police to look into Judy's past. And wow, did that open up a can of worms? James Goodyear's mysterious death.

Bobby Joe Morris's mysterious death. Michael's mysterious death. Housefires, lies about our education and work history. It's a lot of worms. It's a lot of worms. Detective Ted Chamberlain, who got bad vibes off Judy, the first time he laid eyes on her, later told Investigation Discovery, it's like you open one door and go through and there's just another door and another door.

It just kept going on and on and on and on. Gentry told the investigators that Judy had had a life insurance policy on him, and he'd had one on her too, but they'd canceled them. When he found out that the policies were still active and that Judy had raised his to half a million dollars, it blew his mind. and when he found out about all the lies she told him, including the worst one, that she was pregnant with his child, he was devastated and furious and probably feeling lucky to have made it out alive. Apparently, she'd been telling people he was terminally ill for months. It didn't take the investigators long to get enough evidence to put the habeas gravis on Judy.

During a search of the house, they found a spool of the same wire that was used to attach the dynamite to Gentry's car. then they traced the sale of the dynamite to a friend of Judy's. The creepiest thing they found was an impressive collection of books about poisons. Oh, God, yeah, and when they tested some of those vitamin capsules she'd been given gentry, they were full of paraformaldehyde. Yikes. She was trying to poison him, clearly. I guess he just wasn't dying fast enough for her, so she went with Plan B, which was a bad move.

If she hadn't set that car bomb, I really think she might have continued getting away with this shit. Yeah, I mean, we talk about all the time. Poisoners don't usually change their poison, but it fucked her this time. Jesus. The investigators also got permission to exhume James Goodyear and Bobby Lee Morris, both of which were in shockingly good condition. Arsenic poisoning tends to do that, interestingly enough. It preserves the very body it killed.

Surprising no one, both Goodyear and Morris had enough arsenic in their systems to kill a whole team, and Morris was loaded up with Thorazine too. When they put the grabbis on Judy, she was indignant. She screamed and yelled and denied everything, then pretended to have a seizure on the ground beside the squad car. One of the detectives watched her thrash around for a few seconds. It was so fake. It was almost hilarious.

And then said, oh, get up already and get in the car. And here's the kicker. Judy did. That cracktap was like a kid throwing a fake tantrum, like, looking through their fingers at them. I'm like, are you buying this? Are you buying this? No? Okay.

Didn't Mark Twitchell do something similar? Oh, for sure. Yeah. You did. Judy took the stand in her own defense at her trial for the murders of James and Michael Goodyear. And oh, boy, what a fucking mistake. She was arrogant, furious, pissy, argumentative. She came across like a spoiled Roman empress who just can't believe.

These peasants had the nerve to accuse her. Yeah, is it not work out for her at all? When they asked her about Michael's death, she kept, like, jabbing her finger at the prosecutor's face going, you weren't there! You weren't there! Of course he fucking wasn't, Judy. The prosecutor generally isn't present at the actual murder.

Like, what's your point? No, I wasn't there. Can we move on? Their theory was that she'd pushed Michael out of the canoe, knowing he'd sink like a stone in his leg braces. The jury hated her guts, and rightly so. They convicted her on two counts of murder for James and Michael, and the judge sentenced her to death.

She didn't end up going to trial for Bobby Joe's murder because Colorado figured, well, they've already got her for the other two. For her part, Judy told everybody who would listen that she'd been railroaded. She didn't kill anybody, and she was planning on telling her whole story in a book. To the best of my knowledge, she never published that, though. Judy talked a big game during her years in prison, saying Florida would never carry out her death sentence,

and it's true that they hadn't executed a woman in over a hundred years. But as one appeal after another was denied, Judy seemed to finally realize what was coming. On March 30, 1998, she ate a last meal of broccoli, asparagus, strawberries, and hot tea. Weird combination. When asked if she had any last words, she said, No, sir. No apologies and no death day confession.

Witnesses said she looked small and scared as they sat her in the electric chair. I bet. Now, y'all know how we feel about the death. penalty, i.e. that we shouldn't be killing people because we have such an imperfect system, and you can't undo death. I'd rather have seen her live out every miserable day of her life in a cell personally. But for better or worse, that's the end of Judy's story. As for John Gentry, her one that got away, he told the Tribune, I think I'm the only man who ever got close to Judy and lived to tell about it. In fact, I'm sure of it. In fact, there's at least one other boyfriend Judy is suspected

of killing, but investigators were never able to prove it. Who knows what her final body count was. I hope her surviving kids are all okay, but I wonder how they possibly could be. If they're listening, as always, we're rooting for them. So that was a wild one, right campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now,

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