Deadly Dames, Part 1: Brutal Brides & Wicked Widows

They baked the pies. They nursed the sick. They wept at the funerals. And, in a handful of cases, they quietly arranged for those funerals to happen in the first place.

 In this episode of Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South, we’re pulling back the black lace veil on six women history has branded Brutal Brides and Wicked Widows. From a teenage axe murderer in 1831 Burke County to a Florida poisoner who ran out of luck on death row, these women weaponized the very roles society handed them, whether grieving wife, devoted mother, or doting caregiver, to devastating effect.

Were they cold-blooded predators? Victims of impossible circumstances? Products of a world that gave them no other option? The answers, as always in the South, are complicated. What isn’t complicated is the body count.

Six women. Multiple states. Arsenic, revolvers, a fireplace, and one very suspicious canoe trip. Some were executed. Some walked free to applause. And at least one vanished into the backwoods and was never quite the same again.

Grab something warm. You're going to need it.

Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South is the podcast for anyone who yearns for stories of haunted plantations, of deals made at midnight crossroads, of creatures lurking in moss-draped cemeteries. But where did these tales actually start? Turns out, the real history behind Southern folklore is wilder, stranger, and a whole lot darker than the stories themselves. With each episode, Liam uncovers the true tales hiding underneath the myths of the Gothic South.

Subscribe now and never miss a tale. And whatever you do tonight, be sure to lower the lights, lock the doors, and pull up a rocking chair. . . things are about to get interesting.

Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South is the podcast for anyone who yearns for stories of haunted plantations, of deals made at midnight crossroads, of creatures lurking in moss-draped cemeteries. But where did these tales actually start? Turns out, the real history behind Southern folklore is wilder, stranger, and a whole lot darker than the stories themselves. With each episode, Liam uncovers the true tales hiding underneath the myths of the Gothic South.

Subscribe now and never miss a tale. And whatever you do tonight, be sure to lower the lights, lock the doors, and pull up a rocking chair. . . things are about to get interesting.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

I have no doubt that they cried at the funerals. They might even risk a little smile behind the handkerchief as they dabbed away their tears. To their friends and family, these women were model wives and the pictures of devoted love. To history, however, they are remembered as something far more chilling. These widows operated in the shadows of a world that never suspected them, and to their credit, they successfully weaponized domesticity. They used the very roles that society assigned them, and that could be caregiver, cook, or even grieving widow, as a cover for something far darker. Were they calculating predators or just victims of their time? The answers, as we'll uncover, are rarely that simple. One thing I can assure you though, when these women promised till death to us part, they were not kidding around. Welcome to Haunts and Hollows, True Tales of the Gothic South. I'm your host, Mystery Author Liam Ash. In this episode, I'll be taking a look at the first six of an even dozen deadly dames. These women, and today it's going to be brutal brides and wicked widows because I love alliteration, have found their place in history for their crimes, and some of them even got away with it. This episode of Haunts and Hollows is sponsored by my friends at Arcanoctus. They encourage you to unlock your curiosity with their collection of the odd, the unusual, and the obscure. History buffs really hold a special fascination with women who kill. When we think of women from earlier centuries, our brains often go back to the feminine ideal of shows like Downton Abbey and the Gilded Age and so on. Women could kill, but they almost always had a perfectly respectable reason for doing so. More often than not, it was an unfaithful or abusive husband, or as a last resort to protect her or her family's honor. The sad reality is that women, and that's either now or then, and just like men, kill for less lofty reasons too. When they do, folklore tends to build up the crimes, fleshing out their backstories to make these perpetrators either look justified and saintly or downright demonic. On the one hand, think of Roxy Hart from the musical Chicago. In the musical, she killed her lover and then convinced her faithful husband to take the fall. Her attorney successfully portrayed her as a hapless victim of a dangerous man, and she's acquitted. Okay, it's true Roxy is a fictional character, but her story is actually taken, and this is literally beat for beat, from the true life 1924 trial of a woman named Beulah Mae Annan. The narratives of the crime, the trial, and her release are identical. Now, on the other hand, you've got the more notorious killers, women like, and this is allegedly, Lizzie Borden, with 81 whacks of an axe, and that's if you believe the children's nursery rhyme, but according to the medical examiner, it was more like 30 whacks divided between the two. She offed her father and her stepmother on a quiet afternoon in August of 1892. Over the past 150 years, her tale has turned from what was really just a sensational local crime into what one historian actually calls portrayed as a tragic romance or a feminist quest. I think the key to both of these stories is the search for a cause. In earlier centuries, men killed. It was just what we did. It was part of the masculine mental state. When women killed, society needed a rationale. What happenstance and horrors forced God's most perfect creation to take another life? There must have been an underlying reason. While the folklore and urban legends surrounding women killers like these may make for an entertaining read, the true stories are often just as fascinating. Let's start with three true but decidedly lesser known stories of these brutal brides. Now, these are young ladies who, for reasons we may never truly know, opted to, allegedly, kill their husbands. Now, the first case may not have been all that unusual. At the ground level, it's a trial of a woman convicted of killing her husband over rumors of abuse. Born in 1850, Frances Stewart was raised in a fairly unremarkable family. So while her first several years were nothing to really talk about, she is now always remembered as the first white woman executed in North Carolina. Right around 1820, Frances, who was also known as Frankie, moved to Burke County with her family. Now her neighbor was a man named Jacob Silver. He was an older widower, and his son Charlie was perhaps a year or two Frankie's senior. Well, by the time she was 16 or 17, Frankie became Francis Stuart Silver. Then she and Charlie moved into a small cabin that was paid for by her father. On December 22nd, 1831, neighbors began to worry about Charlie after he failed to return home from a hunting trip. Now this was made worse by all of the bloodstains that covered the couple's cabin floor and the human bones they found in the hearth. Some also reported that there were more bones hidden beneath the floorboards, but those may have just been rumors. None of this suggested that Charlie would be coming home anytime soon. All of this seems fairly cut and dry. It does appear that Frankie killed an abusive husband with an axe, and, by her own account anyway, rolled him whole into the fireplace. But it turns out it wasn't quite that simple. The trial was quick as it often was in those days, and despite several family members being arrested, only Frankie was charged with the crime. She was found guilty and sentenced to execution. Now, about this time, rumors were circulating that the murder had actually been a group effort, that the whole family had been in on it. At the same time, others were circulating petitions to have her released as a victim of domestic violence. That petition, however, was denied by Governor Stokes. Frankie's tale took another odd turn while she was awaiting her hanging in the Burke County Jail. Someone, and everyone is quite sure it was a family member, entered the jail through a basement window, unlocked her cell, and helped Frankie flee. About a week later, she was caught in nearby Rutherford County. She had cut her hair short, and according to local legend, she was now going by Tommy to escape identification. Obviously, this didn't work. On Friday, July 12, 1833, she died on the gallows at Damon's Hill in Morganton. In one last bit of mystery, when she was asked for her final words, her father called out and cut her off. He begged her to, in his own words, die with it in you, Frankie. Observers offered this as more proof that the crime had been a family effort. With her death, Frankie went down in history as the first white woman executed in North Carolina. The state of Georgia has always had a flair for headline crimes and big trials. Let's see, you have the Wolfo family murders, the trial of Wayne Williams in 1982, the case of Giggling Granny Das, who we will talk about in the next episode, and several many more. One of the first of Georgia's trials of the century involved a murderous wife. This was in 1806, which was a few years before Frankie had her turn on the stand. Like Frankie, the woman at the center of this case, a beautiful and now widowed woman named Polly Barclay, is remembered as the first white woman executed in her state, and that's a dubious claim at best. Her tale starts back in 1805. Polly's, well for now, husband had just returned home from selling a crop of cotton in nearby Augusta. That Saturday evening there was a commotion outside the Barclay home. Sounds like someone's trying to steal the cotton, Polly is said to have exclaimed, and she begged her husband to investigate despite the late hour. So Mr. Barclay is on his way to the cotton house when a shot rings out. That shot killed my husband, Polly was reported to have said with an unusual degree of certainty. Well, it turns out she was only mostly right. Barclay had been shot and he was not in good condition. Usually this is the part of the story where the dying man whispers the name of his killer. In this case, no such luck, unless of course you're Polly Barclay. That one shot had severed his tongue, leaving him mute until his eventual death a few hours later. According to eyewitness reports, the commotion was caused by two men, Polly's brother William and her lover, Mark. Some said it was a murder for money, and that large sum that he had just returned with from his trip to Augusta, and others said that she and Mark just wanted her husband out of the way. Whatever the reason, for her part, Polly denied everything. She played a really strong victim card, and her beauty certainly helped her sway public opinion a bit. Well, it swayed until, that is, a neighbor boy came forward and said that he had seen the widow offer his older brother$200 to shoot her husband. And that is not a good look. At this point, William and Mark wised up fast. William testified against Polly, claiming that she was the ringleader and that it was all her idea. He went on trial and was acquitted. Mark simply left town and he was never seen again. Polly wasn't so lucky. She was tried and convicted in a single day. The jury did recommend mercy, and some even noted her magnetic looks and polite manner. The judge, however, disagreed, and he sentenced her to hang. On May 30, 1806, she was brought from the jail dressed in her nicest gown. She had told those around her that she wore it in anticipation of her imminent release, and she truly believed this. She even lunged at the officer that was escorting her to her execution, and she pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. She was certain it was a pardon from the governor. And it turns out she was wrong. For reasons never explained, she wasn't hung from a rope at the county gallows like most criminals. Instead, Polly was hung by a chain from a great white oak just north of Main Street. For years, that spot became a place the locals avoided. It was best known for the sound of a phantom chain clinking at midnight. Our third blushing bride that I have been researching perhaps got a slightly better shake than the other two did. More than a century after Polly was sentenced to hang, an already widowed once woman from Philadelphia named Daisy Ulrich married an eligible Atlanta contractor named Eugene H. Grace. I bet you can guess where this is going. In March of 1912, Eugene was found shot by a 32-caliber revolver in his bed. It didn't kill him, but it did leave him paralyzed from the waist down. The police detectives were an astute bunch, and they noticed that his bed was clotted with blood, which suggested that hours had passed before help arrived. So, what had his wife been up to in the interim? It turns out she'd been up to quite a bit. Now, according to prosecutors, Daisy, who was now going by Daisy Grace, had drugged Eugene with chloral hydrate and then shot him around midnight, obviously to kill him. She then stuffed the telephone and doorbell with cotton, hoping to slow down his discovery. She locked the door to their bedroom and the house and then hightailed it to nearby Noonan, Georgia, where her mother lived. They also pointed to one heck of a motive. Two days before the shooting, she had taken out a life insurance policy on Eugene for$27,000. That's about a million dollars today. Despite Daisy's best planning, Eugene simply refused to die on schedule. And from his hospital bed, he told anyone who would listen that Daisy was the shooter. Absolutely no doubt at all. So things were not looking great for Daisy. Before the trial, Daisy fell back on a favorite trope. It was an unnamed black man who had broken in and shot Eugene for no reason at all. Then, by the time she went to trial, she swore it was an accident after the couple had fought over his abuse and infidelity. All of this was done through what was called an unsworn statement, which was a popular defense tool at the time. Since it wasn't sworn, Daisy could give her side of the story and at the same time avoid cross-examination. But what about Eugene? And here is where Daisy got very, very lucky. Georgia law at the time prohibited spouses from testifying against each other. Every day of the trial, Eugene was carried into and out of court on a stretcher. All he could do is lay there, or is it lie there, and stare daggers at his wife. Without his side of the story, Daisy was quickly acquitted. She got off scot-free. According to reporters, the crowds in the packed courtroom even cheered when the non-guilty verdict was handed down. Even though Eugene lived less than 24 months, he did get the last laugh. From his dying bed, he was able to write Daisy out of his will. He also changed the beneficiary of that life insurance policy, not that it really mattered. By the time he died, the insurance company had canceled that policy. It turns out they were worried there might have been a slight chance of fraud. As for Daisy, no one is sure what happened to her. After the trial and their divorce, she just slipped from public view, and whatever her last years held, she kept those close to her chest. When you think about these three trials, it's important to catch that shift from the early 1800s to the close of the 19th century. In earlier cases, it was more about a little rough frontier justice. Trials were usually swift. Juries were always all male. In fact, Utah was the first state to include women on juries in 1898, and women couldn't even serve on federal juries until 1937. Once a conviction was secured, execution soon followed. Very little need to worry about long, drawn-out appeals. Well, the Victorian era ushered in new definitions of womanhood. Respectable women who were accused of murder, they were a curiosity. The rise of sensationalist journalism made these women media darlings. Think back again to Beulah Mae Annan or Roxy Hart. The trials were reported on in painstaking detail. Unsworn statements like Daisies were published with every scandalous accusation, and the reading public just ate it up. In fact, tactics like the unsworn statement were still used in Georgia as late as the 1960s. Speaking of the 1960s, I want to turn our attention to a later case and the trial of Candy Mossler. Now, this one was a gold mine for the tabloids. You had a dead Miami millionaire, his beautiful widow and alleged killer, her handsome nephew, and a brutal killing. This truly had it all. The story started in the 1920s when a Georgia girl named Candace clawed her way out of farm life with nothing but sheer ambition. She married young and had children and eventually landed in New Orleans. It was there that she reinvented herself as a modeling school entrepreneur, a patron of the arts, and, if you believe the rumors, something of an underground madam. She ran what were called dance lessons for returning soldiers. All of her hard work paid off when she met Jacques Mosler. He was a wealthy Romanian banker who was 25 years her senior. They married in 1949 and they relocated to a newly built mansion in Houston. Candace really became a fixture of Houston society. She was glamorous, generous, and by all accounts, utterly magnetic. Then came Mel Powers. Twelve years into their marriage, Candace invited Mel, who was Jacques's 22-year-old nephew, to stay with them in Houston. Okay, Mel was tall, dark, chiseled, and fresh off a conviction for fraud. Within two years, he and Candy were deep into a passionate affair, exchanging love letters and meeting secretly at the family ranch and the beach house. Whether Jacques suspected or not, no one is 100% certain, and in June 1964, the point was moot as he was found stabbed in his Key Biscayne apartment. Fortunately, and more than a little suspiciously for Candace, she had an airtight and very convenient alibi. She had been staying at the hospital for a series of mysterious migraines. Still, the detectives got too detecting, and she was soon charged with his murder. When reporters asked Candy about the lure details of her affair and the crime, she would simply reply, Well, nobody's perfect. The 1966 trial was an absolute spectacle. You had 40 different news organizations packed into that courtroom. Women would arrive at dawn just to get the best seats, and they soon learned that if they brought a sack lunch, they wouldn't have to leave and lose that spot. Every morning Candy would arrive dressed head to toe in white. She would make her entrance and she would blow kisses to the crowd. Her attorney's main defense was that Jacques had so many enemies who wanted him dead that 35 different attackers would still only scratch the surface of that list. In the end, both Candy and Mel were acquitted. None of this slowed Candy down. She took over Jacques's banking empire, donated to Martin Luther King Jr.'s cause, hosted Chuck Berry at Poolside Parties, and even started the launch of a record label with Judy Garland. Her third husband, Barnett Garrison, suffered a fall from the Houston mansion's third floor roof. If you couldn't guess, the conditions were considered deeply suspicious. Unfortunately, he was left with serious brain damage and spent the rest of his life in a nursing home. Candy died in 1976 in a Miami hotel room of an overdose of barbiturates that had been prescribed for her migraines. At her request, she was buried at Arlington National Cemetery beside Jacques, the man she always insisted she truly loved. Our second wicked widow spent her life in more modest means. Just like Candy, Judy Bueno started life with the deck stacked against her. She was born in Texas in 1943. Her mother died when she was four, and reports suggest she had a fairly brutal upbringing at the hands of her father and stepmother. At 14, she went to prison after attacking a family member. After graduating from reform school in 1960, she worked as a nursing assistant for several years. She then married a man named James Goodyear, a U.S. Air Force sergeant. But in September of 1971, he died in Orlando, Florida, of what was originally ruled a natural cause. Years later, as detectives followed Judy's trail, they realized that he had been slowly poisoned with arsenic. After James' death, Judy moved in with a man named Bobby Joe Morris, a Colorado fellow she lived with through the mid-1970s. He died in January of 1978, also, to no one's surprise, of what turned out to be poison. That same year, in what can only be called dark irony or a salute to her first husband, she changed her last name to Bueno, roughly Spanish for Goodyear. Judy's story got even darker in 1980. Her son, Michael, had been born out of wedlock, and by all reports, she absolutely resented him. That year he suffered a serious illness, so his mother did what I guess all mothers do in such a situation. She planned them a canoe trip. On May 13th, their boat capsized near Milton, Florida. Michael, who was wearing heavy arm and leg braces but no life jacket, never stood a chance. He drowned, and Judy used his life insurance money to open a beauty salon. All of this began to unravel in 1983 as Judy's newest boyfriend, a man named John Gentry, was nearly killed when his car exploded in Pensacola. During his recovery, detectives started to piece together the inconsistencies in Judy's past. They also discovered that the vitamin supplements, and I'm using air quotes there, that she had been giving him were actually laced with arsenic and paraphernaldehyde. Authorities ordered the exhumation of Michael, James Goodyear, and Bobby Joe Morris. All three showed traces of arsenic. Judy had collected substantial life insurance payments after each of their deaths. She was finally arrested in 1983. This time the legal reckoning was swift, but it spread across multiple trials. In 1984, she was convicted of murdering Michael and the attempted murder of John. In 1985, she was convicted of murdering James Goodyear and sentenced to death. She also faced multiple convictions for insurance fraud and is believed to also have committed arson for a similar financial gain. Bueno spent years on death row at the Brevard Correctional Institution. She was finally executed on March 30, 1998, just five days before what would have been her 55th birthday. She died in the electric chair at Florida State Prison, becoming the first woman executed in Florida since 1848 and the first woman electrocuted in the United States since 1976. Her final words were simply no, sir. Well, while Judy was busy clearing her dance card in Florida, another woman was flexing her knowledge of poisons in nearby Alabama. The true story of Audrey Marie Hill. Reads like something out of a crime thriller. You've got a wily, calculating woman who's killing purely for financial gain. You've got long periods of evading the law, multiple pseudonyms, and a bizarre final act that plays out in the Alabama backwoods. Born Audrey Marie Frazier in Aniston, Alabama in 1933, Marie actually seemed respectable for much of her adult life. She married Frank Hilly in 1951. They had steady jobs and two children, it was all very Norman Rockwell. Underneath all this, however, she was something of a mess. She was financially reckless, habitually unfaithful, and, as it turns out, incredibly dangerous. It all starts in the mid-1970s as Frank is suffering from some mysterious illness. He dies in May of 1975, and the doctors say it was likely infectious hepatitis. They may have asked for a second opinion if they had known that Marie took out a generous life insurance policy on her sick husband that she cashed out soon after his unfortunate death. A few years later, Marie's daughter Carol showed really alarming symptoms as well. Things like nausea, numbness in her limbs, and nerve damage. To help her out, Marie was giving her regular injections of what she called her special treatment, and I'm using air quotes again, one that she told her daughter not to mention to her doctors. Well, the doctors missed the$50,000 life insurance policy Marie had taken out on Carol. They didn't miss, however, the lines on the girl's fingernails. These were one telltale signs of arsenic poisoning. These doctors tested Carol's hair and found arsenic levels more than 100 times the normal range. They dug up Frank's body and his corpse told the same story. It was no surprise that Marie was arrested in October of 1979 for both murder and attempted murder. They even found arsenic in her purse. I know all of this sounds bad for Marie, but she was not done yet, not by a long shot. The next month she was released on bail and just vanished. But she did take the time, though, to leave behind a cryptic note that suggested she might have been kidnapped. And you can probably guess that that was a lie. It turns out she traveled to Miami under the name Robbie with an eye, Hannon. Here she met an unlucky fellow named John Homan, and they married and moved to New Hampshire. Okay, this is actually my favorite part, and you'll see why in a minute. In 1982, Marie, who is now Robbie with an I, leaves town for a trip to Texas. Soon after, John Homan gets a call from Robbie with an eye's long-lost twin sister, Terry with one R and an I, and she tells him that tragedy has struck and that his wife is dead. So Marie, now inexplicably as Terry, returns to New Hampshire as her own twin sister. So we have our murderess disguised as the fictional twin sister of her already fictional and presumed dead assumed alias. As oddly genius as this may have seemed to Marie, her little play within a play within a riddle within an enigma didn't last that long. Her grand scheme actually unraveled when her husband's co-workers grew suspicious. They discovered that the medical research institute where Robbie with an eye's body had been donated simply didn't exist. Marie was arrested for a second time, this time in Vermont, and from there she was extradited to Alabama in 1983. Despite her wicked brilliance and penchant for theater, she was very quickly convicted of murder and attempted murder. This got her a life sentence. Now, for those first four years, Marie, it turns out, was a model prisoner. She even earned supervised furloughs. However, in February of 1987, she used one of those to vanish yet again. Four days later, she was found on a stranger's back porch. She was delirious and covered in mud. The details were obviously hard to come by, but it appears she had spent those days crawling through the freezing woods. She died very shortly after of hypothermia and exposure. In every way, it was a very bizarre ending for a widow who had spent her life pursuing the bizarre. Next up on Haunts and Hollow's True Tales of the Gothic South, we'll take a look at six more lethal ladies and fatal females. This is a half dozen iron-willed women who wouldn't let something as trivial as a little murder stand between them and what they want. Looking for more folk legends and true tales from the Gothic South? I invite you to subscribe to this podcast. You'll get a new episode every other week. In each, we will uncover the places, the people, the customs, and the stories that lurk in the shadowed histories of the South. You can also check out my latest book, Florida Coast, for a guided road trip to more than 80 of the darkest, most shadowed spots in the Sunshine State. If you want to see me in person, visit me online at hauntsonhollows.com for a list of my latest releases and a schedule of cons and events that I attend all around the South. Until then, safe travels.