She Took Her Paralyzed Son Out in a Canoe and Flipped It — and That Was Just One of Her Family Murders

In 1971, after a tour of duty in South Vietnam, Air Force Sgt. James Goodyear began feeling sick shortly after he returned to his Orlando, Fla., home. On Sept. 13 of that year, after vomiting due to stomach pains, he went to a naval hospital, per the Associated Press.

His condition deteriorated, and three days later, he died of cardiovascular collapse and renal failure, leaving his 28-year-old wife Judy, then a mother of three children, a widow.

In the years following Goodyear’s death, Judy who subsequently changed her last name to Buenoano, settled in Colorado in 1977 with her boyfriend Bobby Joe Morris, according to the Florida Sheriff’s Association. But not long after, Morris began showing the same symptoms as Goodyear, and died the following year, on Jan. 28, 1978.

Another tragedy soon followed: Buenoano’s partially paralyzed son, Michael, drowned on May 13, 1980, after a canoe they were in capsized in Florida, CBS News reported.

Buenoano soon found comfort in the arms of businessman John Gentry.  However, Gentry’s health soon began to deteriorate as well, and he was temporarily hospitalized because of nausea and vomiting. He landed in the hospital again in 1983 after a bomb planted in his car exploded outside a Pensacola restaurant, per the AP.

The bomb blast triggered an investigation into Buenoano — and authorities soon discovered she had previously tried to poison Gentry with the disinfecting agent paraformaldehyde to collect a $500,000 life insurance policy, per the AP.

Other law enforcement agencies took note of the strange deaths linked to Buenoano — and the payouts she received after their deaths. She collected around $28,000 from a life insurance policy and more than $80,000 from the veteran’s administration after Goodyear’s death in 1971, as well as $77,000 in insurance money after Morris died and more than $100,000 after the death of Michael in 1980, the AP reported.

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Authorities exhumed the body of Goodyear in 1984 and discovered he had died from lethal amounts of arsenic poison, the AP reported. 

Authorities also concluded that Morris and Michael also had been poisoned, and that he had been pushed out of the canoe. As Buenoano’s case became widely-known, she was dubbed “The Black Widow” in the media.

Buenoano was sentenced to 12 years in prison for the attempted murder of Gentry in 1984. That same year, she received a life sentence for Michael’s murder, according to CBS News.

In 1985, Buenoano was sentenced to death for the first-degree murder of Goodyear.

On March 30, 1998, the 54-year-old grandmother, who at one point had owned a salon, was executed via the electric chair and became the first woman put to death in Florida since 1848, per CBS News. 

Buenoano’s grandson Alex Hawkins tells PEOPLE that Buenoano was cremated and some of her ashes were scattered in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her remaining ashes were kept in an urn and buried under a gardenia bush where he later lived.

“When she was buried, we had a manufactured home on the property,” Hawkins says. “And then Hurricane Ivan came through and when Ivan hit, we rebuilt our house. And when we rebuilt, the exact spot where Judy’s urn was right under my bedroom. I had grandmother with me, and grandmother was always watching. She was under me basically.”

Hawkins, 23, is currently working on a documentary about his grandmother’s case and wants people to keep an open mind about her life and crimes.

“I am not trying to sugarcoat this documentary,” he says. “I’m not trying to say that she didn’t do all these things. She did all these terrible things, but at the same time, she also helped the community out at large in her area of Pensacola. Everybody knew her in the community as this really nice philanthropic woman.

“I just want people to know that yes, she did what she did, but at the same time, also look at not just her being a killer, look at her and the people that have been directly affected by her.”

If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.