This Day In History

November 2: Thelma Barfield Executed

Velma Barfield was born in rural South Carolina, but grew up near Fayetteville, North Carolina. Her father reportedly was abusive and she resented her mother who did not stop the beatings. She escaped by marrying Thomas Burke in 1949. The couple had two children and was reportedly happy until Barfield had a hysterectomy and developed back pain. These events led to a behavioural change in Barfield and an eventual drug addiction.

Thomas Burke began to drink and Barfield's complaints turned into bitter arguments. In April 1969, after Burke had passed out, Barfield and the children left the house, returning to find the home burned and Burke dead. Only a few months later, her home burned once again, this time with a reward of insurance money. In 1970, Barfield married a widower, Jennings Barfield. Less than a year after their marriage, Jennings died from heart complications, leaving Velma a widow once again.

In 1974, Barfield's mother, Lillian Bullard showed symptoms of intense diarrhoea, vomiting and nausea, only to fully recover a few days later. Approximately two months afterward, a man whom Velma had been dating was involved in a fatal car accident. During the Christmas season of the same year, Lillian experienced the same illness as earlier that year, resulting in her death only hours after arriving at the hospital. In 1976, Barfield began caring for the elderly, working for Montgomery and Dollie Edwards. In the winter of that year, Montgomery fell ill and died. A little over a month after the death of her husband, Dollie experienced identical symptoms to that of Velma's mother and she too died, a death to which Barfield later confessed.

The following year, 1977, Barfield took another caretaking job, this time for 76-year old Record Lee, who had broken her leg. On June 4, 1977, Lee's husband, John Henry, began experiencing racking pains in his stomach and chest along with vomiting and diarrhoea. He died soon afterward and Barfield later confessed to his murder. Another victim was Stuart Taylor, Barfield's boyfriend and a relative of Dollie Edwards. Fearing he discovered she had been forging cheques on his account, she mixed an arsenic-based rat poison into his beer and tea. He died on February 3, 1978, while she was trying to "nurse" him back to health; an autopsy found arsenic in Taylor's system.

After her arrest, the body of Jennings Barfield was exhumed and found to have traces of arsenic, a murder that Barfield denied having committed. She subsequently confessed to the murder of Lillian Bullard.  During her stay on death row, Barfield became a devout born again Christian. After a Federal court appeal was denied, Barfield instructed her attorneys to abandon plans to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Barfield was executed on November 2, 1984 at the Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina. She released a statement before the execution, stating "I know that everybody has gone through a lot of pain, all the families connected, and I am sorry, and I want to thank everybody who have been supporting me all these six years."