Judy Banuano was executed in 1998 for killing three men, including her two husbands and her son, all for insurance money.  It’s the morning of March 30th, 1998. The place is Florida State Prison. The time is 7:02 in the morning. A 54 yearear-old woman is walked into a small room. Guards hold her arms.

 She looks weak. She is strapped into an old wooden chair. People call this chair Old Sparky. A guard asks her one last question. Does she have any final words? She answers with two words. No, sir. Her eyes close. They stay closed. This woman’s name is Judy Buenoano. Some people call her the Black Widow. Before this morning, she poisoned her husband.

She poisoned her boyfriend. She even took her own son out on a canoe and he never came back home. But one man did not die. He survived a car explosion. and his survival is the reason Judy Buenoano is sitting in this chair today. So, here is the question. What connects a canoe accident, a car bomb, and a bottle of vitamin pills? The answer is impossible to believe.

 Stay with me to the end of this video. Before we continue, hit that subscribe button and drop a like. You will not want to miss how this story unfolds. Her name was Anna Louu Welty. She was born on April 4th, 1943 in Quana, Texas. Her mother died when Anna Louu was only 4 years old. After that, she was sent to live with her grandparents.

 Later, her father remarried. Annaloo moved again, this time to Roswell, New Mexico to live with her father, her new stepmother, and two stepbros. Life in that house was hard. Anna Louu later said she was abused. She said she was starved and forced to work like a servant. When she was 14 years old, something snapped.

 She attacked her stepmother. At that time, there were no youth courts or youth prisons in New Mexico. So, Annaloo was sent straight to an adult prison. After her release, she went to a reform school. She graduated in 1960. She then trained to become a nursing assistant. This gave her knowledge of medicine and the human body. In 1961, she gave birth to a son.

His name was Michael. She was not married at the time. The next year, in 1962, she married a man named James Goodyear. James was a sergeant in the United States Air Force. He was a decorated serviceman. He adopted Michael as his own son. James Goodyear seemed like a good man with a good family. But there was one strange detail.

 Later in life, Anna Louu changed her name. She called herself Buenoano. In Spanish, it sounds like Goodyear. That name would soon connect to something far darker. In 1971, James Goodyear came home from a tour of duty in Vietnam. At first, he seemed fine, but soon he started feeling sick. He had nausea. He had vomiting.

According to court records, he told doctors these symptoms had lasted for weeks. By September of that year, his condition had gotten so bad that he was hospitalized. But instead of getting better, he grew weaker. On September 16th, 1971, James Goodyear died. Doctors gave the cause of death as renal failure.

 That means his kidneys had failed. Since he died in a hospital, no one ordered a toxicology test. No one checked his body for poison. There was no reason to. He was a soldier who had just come home from a war zone. Sickness was expected. Death sadly was not shocking. No one tested for poison. No one had a reason to. Yet at the time, nobody connected his illness to anything strange.

 Nobody thought about his wife, Anna Louu, who was now going by the name Judy Goodyear. Nobody looked twice at the timeline. His symptoms were treated as just another sickness, not a warning sign. This would become a pattern in Judy’s story. Sickness, suffering, death, and each time, very few questions asked.

 But James Goodyear would not be her last victim. James Goodyear’s death had no partner in crime. Judy acted alone. After he died, she collected $33,000 from his life insurance. She also received $62,000 in veterans benefits. That is a large sum of money for the early 1970s. A few years later, Judy moved on. She began living with a man named Bobby Joe Morris in Trinidad, Colorado.

 She told people she was his wife, even though the two were never legally married. Just like before, she secured a life insurance policy on him. In January of 1978, Bobby Joe Morris died. At the time, no one suspected poison. His death was not investigated as a murder. Judy walked away once again, financially better off. Years later, her own son, James Goodyear Jr.

, would be pulled into her darkest plan yet. Prosecutors said he helped wire a bomb into the car of a man named John Gentry, one of Judy’s boyfriends. This bombing would eventually be the reason her past crimes came to light. James Goodyear Jr. stood trial for his alleged role in the bombing. He was tried separately from his mother.

 In the end, he was acquitted. So far, we have a husband, a boyfriend, and a possible bomb plot involving her own son. Comment below which victim in this story has shocked you the most so far. There is still more to come, and it only gets darker from here. In 1979, Judy’s son, Michael Goodyear, joined the army. But something went wrong.

 Michael became sick. His illness caused symptoms that looked like paraplegia. He could barely move his own arms and legs. The army discharged him. He went back home to live with his mother, Judy. Doctors fitted him with heavy metal braces for his legs and arms just so he could try to move. Before his health worsened, Judy had already taken out a life insurance policy on her son.

 On May 13th, 1980, Judy took Michael out on a canoe. The location was Milton, Florida. It was supposed to be a simple trip on the water, just a mother and her disabled son. But partway through the trip, the canoe tipped over. Michael had no life jacket. His arms and legs were locked inside heavy metal braces.

 Those same braces that were supposed to help him walk again pulled him straight down. He sank beneath the water and drowned. At the time, authorities saw it as a tragic accident. A disabled young man, a flipped canoe, no life jacket. It seemed to make sense. Judy walked away from the scene as a grieving mother.

 But years later, after suspicion grew around Judy and other cases, Michael’s body was exumed. Doctors tested his remains. What they found changed everything. Arsenic. His body was full of arsenic. Michael’s paralysis was never a mystery illness. It was poison. His own mother had been slowly poisoning him before she ever put him in that canoe.

 The drowning did not create a helpless victim. It finished one that she had already made. While all of this was unfolding, Judy had moved on to another relationship. His name was John Gentry, a man she began dating in 1983. She gave him pills that she called vitamin C capsules. He grew sick, was hospitalized, then improved.

 Once he was released, she gave him the pills again and he grew sick once more. Then in March of 1983, his car exploded in Pensacola, Florida. But this time, something different happened. John Gentry survived. His survival would become the turning point of this entire case. Because for the first time, someone Judy had tried to kill lived long enough to tell the truth.

 After Michael’s death, Judy used the insurance money to open a beauty salon in Gulf Breeze, Florida. Life seemed to move forward for her. Court records show no unusual public displays of grief, only the routine mourning expected after losing a child. Years later, when she began targeting John Gentry, Judy made a strange move before the car bombing ever happened.

 She told friends that Gentry was terminally ill. She spread this story in advance long before anyone else suspected he was in danger. Investigators would later flag this detail as important. Why would she tell people he was dying weeks before an explosion nearly killed him? To them, it looked like she was preparing an excuse in advance, a story ready to explain his death before it even happened.

 But her plan did not go as expected. Gentry did not die quietly of an illness. His car exploded in front of witnesses in Pensacola. He survived, though badly injured. Instead of staying quiet, Gentry did something Judy did not expect. He cooperated with police. He answered their questions. He gave them a reason to look closer at the woman he had once trusted.

 For the first time, someone connected to Judy Buenoano was alive to speak, and his voice would soon help unravel everything. For the deaths of James Goodyear and Bobby Joe Morris, years passed without a single question raised. No toxicology tests were done. No suspicion followed either man to his grave.

 Both deaths were accepted as natural. Everything changed after the Gentry car bombing. Police searched Judy’s home. Inside, they found wire and tape. These materials matched the fragments recovered from the bomb that had exploded in John Gentry’s car. Investigators also began asking Judy about the story she had told friends, the one where she claimed Gentry was terminally ill.

 Her answers did not add up. The timeline did not match his actual medical condition. Something was wrong. As police dug deeper into her background, they came across an odd detail. Judy’s chosen name, Buenoano, was a twist on Spanish words that meant goody year. That connected her directly back to her first husband, James Goodyear, a man who had died more than 10 years earlier under circumstances no one had ever questioned.

 This single detail was enough to change the direction of the entire investigation. If she had once been married to a man named Goodyear, and he had died of a sudden illness, could that death also be connected to her? Investigators requested something rarely done in a case that seemed closed for over a decade.

 They asked for James Goodyear’s body to be exumed. They wanted answers buried for years. What they would find next would tie every piece of this case together. The exumations became the turning point of the entire case. When James Goodyear’s remains were tested, doctors found lethal levels of arsenic in his body.

 He had not died from renal failure. He had been poisoned. Bobby Joe Morris’s remains told the same story. Arsenic enough to kill him, hidden for years behind a diagnosis that no one ever questioned. Then came Michael’s results. His body confirmed what investigators feared. He had arsenic in his system before he ever stepped into that canoe.

 The paralysis that put him in metal braces was never a mystery illness. It was poison slowly breaking down his body long before the water finished the job. One survivor, one bomb, and a trail of bodies going back 12 years. In 1983, Judy Buenoano was arrested. She faced charges across multiple cases at once. The attempted murder of John Gentry, the murder of her own son, Michael, and soon the murder of her first husband, James Goodyear.

 For over a decade, Judy had moved from state to state, from relationship to relationship, leaving behind insurance checks and unanswered questions. Now, for the first time, the woman behind all of it had a name attached to a set of handcuffs. The investigation that started with one exploded car had uncovered a pattern stretching back to 1971, and this was only the beginning of her time in a courtroom.

 In 1984, Judy Buenoano faced her first trials. A jury convicted her of the murder of her son, Michael. She received a life sentence for that crime. In a separate trial, she was convicted of the attempted murder of John Gentry. That conviction added 12 more years to her sentence, but the most serious trial was still ahead.

 In 1985, Judy stood trial for the murder of her first husband, James Goodyear. The jury found her guilty. This time the sentence was death. Alongside these major convictions, Judy was also found guilty of grand theft. These charges connected directly to the insurance policies she had collected after each death. Prosecutors argued she had built a pattern of profiting from every person she killed. Her son, James Goodyear Jr.

, faced his own trial for his alleged role in wiring the bomb used against Gentry. His case was heard separately from his mothers. In the end, the jury acquitted him. Judy did not accept her fate quietly. Her legal team filed appeal after appeal. They argued that FBI lab tests used as evidence were flawed.

 They argued that her jury had been tainted and unfair. Florida courts reviewed each of these appeals. Time after time, the courts rejected her claims. There was no evidence strong enough to overturn her convictions. By the end of these trials, Judy Buenoano was no longer just a suspect.

 She was a convicted killer sentenced to death with a decade of appeals still ahead of her before she would ever face the final consequence of her crimes. Judy Buenoano spent 13 years on death row at Broward Correctional Institution. During this time, she claimed to be a born-again Christian, a claim shared by other women executed during this same era in American history.

 On March 30th, 1998, her time ran out. Guards helped her walk into the execution chamber. She looked frail. She needed their support just to reach the chair. She was strapped into the electric chair known as Old Sparky. A guard asked if she had any final words. “No, sir,” she said, her eyes closed. They stayed shut through the entire process.

 She never looked toward the witnesses watching from behind the glass. At 7:08 in the morning, the power was turned on. Smoke rose from her right leg. The execution lasted 38 seconds. At 7:13 in the morning, she was pronounced dead. Her execution marked two historic moments. She was the first woman executed in the state of Florida since 1848.

 She was also the first woman electrocuted anywhere in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. 13 years of appeals, 13 years of denials, and in the end, 38 seconds decided it all. The woman who once called herself Goodyear met her end in a chair with no name attached to mercy. Let’s count the final tally.

 A husband, a son, a boyfriend. Each one turned into a life insurance payout by the same woman, but one man broke the pattern. John Gentry survived. He lived to see Judy Buenoano convicted for what she had done. In the end, the woman who called herself Goodyear brought nothing but death to the people closest to her. A husband who trusted her, a son who needed her, a boyfriend who barely escaped her. Her name meant good year.

Her life proved the opposite for everyone around her. So now I want to hear from you. What moment in this story hit hardest for you. Was it the canoe, the vitamin pills, or the final no sir in that execution chamber? Drop your answer in the comments below. If this story kept you watching until the end, hit that like button and subscribe for more true crime cases like this one.