Nobody Suspected Her For 12 Years. Until Her Last Victim Survived
On May 13th, 1980, 19-year-old Michael Goodyear went out on the East River in Santa Rosa County, Florida with his mother, Judy Buenoano, and his younger brother, James Jr.
It was supposed to be a fishing trip.
By the middle of the afternoon, Michael would be dead and the way he died would eventually become the foundation of a murder case.
Michael was not a typical passenger for a canoe.
He had spent the first months of 1980 in treatment and rehab ilitation.
3 months at Walter Reed Army Hospital, beginning in late January, and then a transfer to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Tampa.
The condition, described in court records as profound heavy metal neuropathy, is a degeneration of the nerves outside the spinal column.
It had left him with no nerve or muscle function below his knees and elbows.
He walked on braces that ran down both legs, each weighing about 3 and 1/2 lb.
On his right arm, he wore a Robin’s hook, a 2-lb device that let him hold objects.
His doctor at Walter Reed, a Dr. Barry, had been blunt with the family.
Michael could not walk without the braces, could not cast a fishing line, and could not swim.
If he ever went out on a boat, Dr. Barry said, serious precautions would be needed because if it overturned, he would be unable to save himself.
On May 12th, Judy traveled to the Tampa hospital to collect Michael and bring him home to Pensacola, where his long-term rehabilitation was supposed to continue.
She told people she was spending nearly $40,000 on alterations to the house for his return.
The next morning, she took him fishing.
The party that went to the East River that day was Michael, Judy, her younger son James Jr.
, who was 14, and her daughter Kimberly, who was 13.
Kimberly was left on shore at the East River bridge.
The other three went out in a two-seater canoe with a folding lawn chair set in the middle for Michael.
The chair’s legs were about 8 in high.
Michael sat in it wearing both leg braces with leather shoes and his hook.
According to James, he was also wearing a ski belt, a flotation device that fastens around the waist.
They started fishing between 10:30 and 11:00 in the morning, working their way upriver along the shore.
About 2 hours in, according to James’s later testimony, they were 6 to 8 ft from the bank when a snake fell into the canoe.
In the confusion, he said, “The canoe struck a submerged log and capsized”.
James said he was knocked unconscious and remembered nothing more until he was in an ambulance.
The person who actually pulled Judy and James out of the water was a stranger.
Ricky Hicks had been fishing on the East River since about 2:00 in the afternoon.
About an hour later, he found Judy and James in the river, roughly 600 ft from the bridge.
An overturned canoe, an ice chest, a flip-flop, and a plastic lunch bag were floating nearby.
Hicks testified that Judy told him she had lost the other boy.
She said a snake had gotten into the canoe and that it overturned as she tried to hold the snake down with a paddle.
She told him it was useless to go back for Michael.
Hicks later described what he noticed about her.
Her first concern seemed to be for James.
She asked Hicks for a beer and she drank it.
Hicks drove her car to a nearby phone and called the county rescue squad.
Then, he and the county sheriff went back to the capsized canoe to look for Michael.
They gathered up the debris, including two ski belts.
30 minutes had gone by since Hicks had pulled Judy and James out.
During that time, he said, “The canoe and the debris had barely moved because the river’s current was very slow that day”.
About 3 hours after the canoe went over, a rescue squad diver named Diamond found Michael’s body in the middle of the river.
It was still weighed down by the braces.
It lay roughly a quarter of a mile upriver from the place where the canoe had been recovered and where Judy and James had been found.
Upriver, in a river the diver described as moving very very slowly with no real current to fight if you wanted to swim against it.
The location of the body was not the only problem.
The accounts of what Michael was wearing kept changing.
Judy first reported that Michael had been wearing a life jacket.
Later, she said it was a ski belt.
James said ski belt, too.
But when Michael’s body was recovered, there was no ski belt on it and no life jacket.
Dr. Berry testified that a secured ski belt could not have simply slipped off Michael, given the braces he was wearing.
The defense had an answer available and the jury heard it.
Two ski belts had been picked out of the debris on the river.
But a belt in the debris was not the same as a belt on the body.
And a belt that had been secured around a man in leg braces, the doctor said, should not have come off.
Then, there was the question of how the canoe had capsized.
To Ricky Hicks, Judy had described a snake.
In other statements to an Army investigator and to others, she said the canoe hit a submerged object with no mention of a snake at all.
James’ own story shifted.
At trial, he described the snake and the log.
Before a grand jury, he said he was unsure how the canoe capsized.
In a written statement for an Army investigator, he mentioned the log but not the snake.
And he was unable to say whether the handwriting on that statement was his own or whether the signature was.
And Judy placed the capsizing in a different spot than the physical evidence suggested.
She said it happened about a mile upstream from where Hicks found her.
She said she surfaced, saw James face down in the water, cleared his airway, and revived him, then swam downstream with him until Hicks arrived.
She said the current was too strong to swim any other way.
Michael, she said, was thrown into the water when the canoe went over, but the state’s witnesses described a river barely moving.
If that was right, then a young man in heavy braces who could not swim found a quarter of a mile upstream of the overturned canoe in the middle of the river was not in the place where the capsizing alone would have left him.
Sometime later, in November 1980, Judy’s former sister-in-law, Peggy Goller, spoke with her twice by telephone.
In the first call, Judy said nothing about Michael’s death.
In the second, she told Goller that Michael had recently died during Army maneuvers.
Michael’s death was not treated as a murder at first.
It was ruled an accident, and nothing about the case would change for years.
But in 1984, Judy Buenoano was tried in Santa Rosa County for his murder and for stealing more than $20,000 from the Prudential Life Insurance Company by claiming insurance on her son’s life.
The state’s theory was simple and cold.
Prosecutors argued that Judy did not love Michael, that she saw him as a burden, and that she set out to kill him in a way that would look like an accidental drowning so that she could collect the insurance.
The defense’s position was that this was exactly what it appeared to be, a tragic accident on a trip intended to give a disabled young man something he had longed for.
The jury heard from people who had seen the household.
Constance Lang, a former neighbor and later housemate who had worked as a live-in babysitter, testified that Judy was ashamed of Michael.
When visitors were coming, Judy would have Lang take Michael out of the house.
Lang said Judy was distant to him while close to James and Kimberly.
A neighbor, Ken Barnes, said he saw James and Michael did not have a good relationship and that Judy had an obvious bond with James, but not with Michael.
Judy’s daughter, Kimberly, testified for the defense that her mother and Michael had a loving relationship, but she admitted that during an argument she had once told her mother, “Just like you killed Michael”.
In rebuttal, the state called Kimberly’s boyfriend who testified that Kimberly had told him her mother drowned Michael to collect insurance.
The court later noted that this testimony appeared to have been introduced mainly to impeach Kimberly’s earlier account.
The money was in the record.
At the time of his death, Michael was covered by several policies.
Two small policies issued in 1962 and 1964 were for $1,000 each with double indemnity for accidental death.
On April 5th, 1980, a request signed by Judy and Michael asked for duplicates of those policies.
A third, a $15,000 policy with an additional 30,000 for accidental death, had been purchased in March 1978.
A fourth, for $20,000 with a double indemnity provision, was bought in October 1978.
As a soldier, Michael also carried $20,000 in servicemen’s group life insurance.
After his death, Judy collected more than $100,000.
Bank records showed returned checks from June 1979 through July 1980, and employment records showed she was working as a licensed practical nurse at $3.
50 an hour.
Judy did not testify, but the state introduced the statements she had made to Hicks, to the Army investigator, and to others, and the jury could compare them.
The jury convicted her of first-degree murder and first-degree grand theft.
She was sentenced to life in prison.
In October 1985, the first district court of appeal upheld both convictions.
The court wrote that the jury was entitled to reject the idea that Michael simply drowned in the capsizing, in part because of the substantial distance between where his body was found and where Judy and James were found, given the testimony that the current was so slow.
The court also said the jury had a right to conclude that her statements were not those of an innocent person.
That was one conviction in 1984.
It sounds like the end of a story.
It was not.
Prosecutors alleged that Michael’s paralysis was itself the result of arsenic, but the conviction was for drowning.
And the case that had put Judy Buenoano in front of that jury had not started with Michael at all.
It had started with a bomb in a different county a year earlier.
To understand that, we have to go back to 1962.
Michael was born in 1961, before Judy met the man who would become his adoptive father.
In 1962, Judy married James E.
Goodyear, a United States Air Force sergeant.
They lived in Orlando.
Goodyear adopted Michael, and together they had two more children, a son, James Jr.
, and a daughter, Kimberly.
In June 1971, Sergeant Goodyear came home to Orlando from a tour of duty in South Vietnam.
Soon afterward, he began to feel unwell.
Weakness, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea.
The symptoms did not go away.
A woman named Deborah Sims, who was living in the household, later described him growing steadily sicker and said she saw him hallucinating.
She also said that Judy hesitated to take him to the hospital when his condition worsened.
He was hospitalized in September.
He told his doctor, Dr. R.
C.
Akenbaugh, that he had been sick for about 2 weeks.
Dr. Akenbaugh could not determine what was wrong.
Goodyear kept deteriorating, and on September 16th, 1971, he died.
The predominant causes of death were recorded as cardiovascular collapse and renal failure.
No one suspected poisoning, so no toxicology tests were run.
There was no murder investigation.
A sergeant who had come home from a war had died in a hospital after a mysterious illness, and that was how it was recorded.
Judy collected about $33,000 in life insurance and $62,000 in indemnity compensation from the Veterans Administration.
Those payments were not evidence of a crime, and no one treated them that way in 1971.
Their significance would only emerge years later in a courtroom, where they would be weighed against everything else.
After Goodyear’s death, Judy lived with a man named Bobby Joe Morris, and by the late 1970s, the two of them were in Colorado.
According to later accounts, she bought a life insurance policy on Morris while presenting herself as his wife, a detail you will want to hold on to.
In 1978, Morris became ill and died after symptoms that resembled the ones Goodyear had suffered before his death.
Judy collected about $23,000 in life insurance.
Morris’s death was, like Goodyear’s, not treated as a poisoning.
It would not be examined as one for years.
By 1979, her son Michael had joined the army.
He fell ill with the condition we met at the start.
He was discharged into his mother’s care.
Then came the canoe.
None of this, on its own, established a pattern.
A husband’s death in 1971, a boyfriend’s in 1978, a son’s in 1980.
Spread across nearly a decade and two states, these could easily have been three separate sadnesses.
Nobody was lining them up.
That would take something that could not be explained as misfortune.
By the early 1980s, Judy was living in Florida with a new partner, John Gentry.
They had become engaged.
She ran a beauty salon called Fingers and Faces.
Gentry would later testify that Judy was the beneficiary on his life insurance and a 50% beneficiary under his will.
She also held a separate life insurance policy on him worth $510,000.
And according to testimony at trial, she had been telling her associates that Gentry was dying of terminal cancer.
He was not.
But in November 1982, Gentry caught a cold and Judy began giving him capsules she described as vitamin C.
The brand was Vicon C.
Gentry began to suffer convulsions, nausea, and vomiting.
On December 15th, 1982, he checked himself into a hospital.
He recovered, was released, and returned home.
That same day, Judy gave him Vicon C capsules again.
The symptoms came back.
When Gentry stopped taking them, he returned to good health almost immediately.
Judy then suggested that he take a double dose.
He did not.
He began saving the capsules and eventually he turned them over to the police.
The capsules passed through several hands.
A Pensacola police officer, Gwendolyn Pate, took them into evidence and sent them to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
A chemist there, Marion Estes, could tell that the container held Vicon C-type capsules, but he could not determine what was inside.
The capsules were forwarded to the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.
C.
where a chemist named Roger Martz examined them.
His conclusion was that the capsules contained paraformaldehyde, a class three poison.
Hold on to Martz’s name.
It matters later.
On June 25th, 1983, Gentry got into his car in Pensacola and it exploded.
He survived the blast, but he was seriously injured.
Investigators determined this was no accident.
A bomb had been placed in the car.
In July 1983, police served search warrants on Judy’s home and on her business.
The prosecution would later connect wire and tape found in her home to remnants recovered from the bomb.
There is one more detail from those searches and it came from a stipulation that both the state and defense agreed to in a later trial.
No paraformaldehyde and no arsenic were found at either her home or her salon.
Judy’s son, James Jr.
, was also charged in connection with the bombing.
The prosecutor contended he had wired the car.
A jury acquitted him.
Judy was tried in Escambia County for the attempted first-degree murder of John Gentry.
The insurance policy, the capsules, and the bomb were all part of the case the prosecution built, though each was a separate strand.
Roger Martz testified there about what he found in the capsules.
In 1984, she was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Gentry was alive and he could say what had happened to him.
And a woman who had told him that her first husband died in a plane crash in Vietnam and that Bobby Joe Morris had died of alcoholism had now been placed under a microscope.
Both stories were false.
James Goodyear had died in a hospital in Orlando.
Morris had died in Colorado.
And now investigators had reason to ask what had actually happened to the people around Judy Buenoano.
In 1984, authorities arranged for James Goodyear’s body to be exhumed.
This time, specialists could test for what no one had thought to look for in 1971.
A forensic toxicologist analyzed tissue samples from Goodyear’s remains.
The arsenic levels he found in the liver, kidneys, hair, and nails indicated chronic and acute exposure.
The medical examiner who performed the autopsy, a Dr. Thomas Haggard, concluded that Goodyear had died of chronic arsenic poisoning.
In August 1984, Judy Buenoano was indicted for the murder of her first husband 13 years after he died.
Bobby Joe Morris’s remains were exhumed as well.
The tissue analysis showed acute arsenic poisoning.
Michael Goodyear’s body was also exhumed, and according to later accounts, it too showed arsenic, which is why prosecutors would say that Michael’s paralysis was not an illness at all.
What this meant, in legal terms, requires care.
Morris’s exhumation did not produce a murder charge.
Colorado prosecutors, according to news reports, found evidence that Judy poisoned a boyfriend in 1978, but did not charge her because she had already been sentenced to death in Florida.
As far as the courts are concerned, Bobby Joe Morris was a victim of arsenic poisoning whose death was never put before a jury as a murder charge against her.
He did, however, become evidence.
In the trial for James Goodyear’s murder, his death would be presented to show a pattern.
The charge Judy Buenoano now faced in Orange County was the first-degree murder of her first husband, James Goodyear, who had been dead for 14 years.
Her trial opened in the fall of 1985.
Her lawyers were a Pensacola attorney, James Johnston, and his wife, Rebecca.
The prosecution’s task was to prove a poisoning that no one had examined at the time, using a body that had been in the ground since 1971.
It began with the medical evidence.
Dr. Aukenbach, who had treated Goodyear in the hospital, testified that his symptoms were consistent with acute arsenic poisoning.
Another physician, Dr. Leonard Bednarczyk, also said he believed the death was related to arsenic.
The toxicologist, and Dr. Haggard, who had performed the autopsy, then took the jury through the exhumation findings.
The state then called people who had known Judy.
Deborah Sims, who had lived in the household, told the jury what she had seen.
Constance Lang, the same witness who had testified in Michael’s case, said she and Judy had become as close as sisters, and that Judy joked about solving their problems with their husbands by putting arsenic in their food.
Mary Beverly Owens testified that after an upsetting phone call between Owens and her husband, Judy suggested she take out more life insurance on him, and then poison him.
Owens said Judy told her insect poison could do it, and that no one would ever find out because an autopsy would not show it unless someone was really looking.
Owens also testified that Judy confessed to her that she had killed James Goodyear with arsenic.
The last of these witnesses was Lodell Morris.
He was the father of Bobby Joe Morris, the man Judy had lived with in Colorado.
He told the jury that Judy told him she had killed her husband, and he described how his son died after symptoms similar to the ones Goodyear had suffered.
Now, the jury had to decide how much to believe.
These were people recalling conversations from years before.
The medical evidence and the testimony were separate strands, and the jury was asked to weigh them together.
The state also put in evidence about money.
The jury saw the payouts described earlier on Goodyear and on Morris.
The jury heard that Judy had either collected on or been the beneficiary of policies on all three of the men she had lived with.
Gentry testified about the engagement, the policies, the capsules, and the double dose, and about the stories she had told him of how her first two partners died.
Then, a stipulation agreed to by both sides was read to the jury.
It summarized the capsules’ path to the FBI laboratory and Roger Martz’s conclusion about their contents, and it recorded the empty searches of her home and salon.
Roger Martz did not appear before that jury.
Only his conclusion, summarized in the stipulation, did.
After it was read, Dr. Haggard testified that the symptoms recorded in Gentry’s medical records could be consistent with paraformaldehyde exposure.
This is a point that gets lost in simplified retellings.
So, it is worth being exact.
The jury did not hear, in the guilt phase, that Judy had been convicted of the car bombing.
It did not hear that she had been convicted of drowning Michael.
The capsule evidence concerned a different man and a different substance.
It was not the proof that James Goodyear died of arsenic.
That proof was the tissue, the hair, and the nails.
Judy took the stand in her own defense.
She said she was familiar with paraformaldehyde, and she told the jury it would take far more than one capsule holding about a gram and a half to cause death.
Asked on cross-examination whether she had given John Gentry paraformaldehyde, she said she had not and added, “If I did, it was an accident.
The jury found her guilty of first-degree murder.
It was only in the penalty phase when the jury had to decide whether to recommend death that the rest came in.
The state presented her conviction for the attempted murder of John Gentry in Escambia County and her conviction for the murder of her son Michael in Santa Rosa County.
Gentry testified that after he refused to keep taking the capsules, Judy was responsible for having his car bombed.
The jury recommended a death sentence by a vote of 10 to 2.
The trial judge followed that recommendation.
He found four aggravating circumstances, that she had been previously convicted of a capital felony or a felony involving violence, that the murder was committed for financial gain, that it was especially heinous, atrocious, and cruel, and that it was committed in a cold, calculated, and premeditated manner.
He found no mitigating circumstances at all.
After the evidence in the penalty phase had been presented on November 25th, 1985, Judy signed a contract with her lawyers, James and Rebecca Johnston.
It assigned them her rights to book, film, and media proceeds from her case up to $250,000.
We will come back to that contract because years later her appeals lawyers would put it at the center of an argument.
The next 12 years were a series of courtrooms.
In 1988, the Florida Supreme Court upheld her conviction and death sentence on direct appeal.
In 1990, after death warrants were signed, it rejected two post-conviction motions and denied her petition for a writ of habeas corpus.
She then turned to the federal courts.
In 1992, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals sent two of her claims back to a district court for an evidentiary hearing.
The first claim was that her trial lawyers had failed to investigate and present evidence about her background and mental health that might have persuaded the jury to recommend life.
The second was that her lawyers had a conflict of interest because of the media rights contract.
The hearing produced a fight over what her life had actually been.
Bueno Bueno argued that she had been physically, sexually, and emotionally abused, moved through foster homes, and unstable, and that her lawyers should have said so.
Her lawyer at trial, James Johnston, testified that he had known her for a long time and saw no sign of mental disturbance.
She had always maintained her innocence, he said, and in his view, presenting evidence of mental illness would have suggested to the jury a reason she might have committed the crime, which contradicted that defense.
The district court found that her testimony about her childhood was internally conflicting, contradicted her earlier statements, and was untruthful.
It found that relatives who spoke of abuse had no personal knowledge of it, and that experts disagreed about whether she had a mental illness at all.
On the contract, Johnston testified that the idea of paying him from the proceeds of her story had been hers because she could not pay him, that he never did anything with the agreement, and that he never received any money from it.
On January 25th, 1996, the 11th Circuit affirmed.
It held that even if some evidence of abuse could have been presented, she had not shown it would have changed the result given the weight of the aggravating factors.
It also held that the contract created at most a potential conflict, and that she had not shown it adversely affected her lawyer’s performance.
That would normally be the end, but the story took one more turn, and it began with the laboratory that analyzed a handful of capsules in 1983.
In April 1997, the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General released a report on practices and alleged misconduct in the FBI laboratory.
The investigation began with allegations made by a scientist inside the lab, Frederick Whitehurst.
The report was critical of several examiners, including Roger Martz, who had served in the chemistry toxicology unit from 1980 and became its chief in 1989.
The Inspector General concluded that Martz lacked the credibility and judgment needed for a supervisory role, that he had failed to perform adequate analyses to support some of his conclusions, and that he had not described his work accurately.
What the report did not do was discuss Judy Buenoano’s cases.
Her name does not appear in it.
Whitehurst himself did not join the lab until 1986, years after Martz examined the capsules.
Still, Buenoano’s lawyers saw an opening.
If Martz’s work could be questioned, so could the stipulation read to her jury, and in turn, her conviction.
Then, they found something else.
An assistant state attorney in Florida had told the Justice Department’s task force that Martz had not testified in her Escambia County trial.
That was wrong.
Martz had testified there in 1984.
The prosecutor admitted his error in a letter dated February 19th, 1998.
By then, her execution had been scheduled for March 30th.
There was a second problem for the defense.
The capsules themselves.
They had been destroyed in 1992.
No one could retest them.
On March 26th, 1998, four days before the scheduled execution, the Florida Supreme Court rejected her appeal.
It reasoned that Martz did not testify before the Orange County jury, so there was no live testimony to have been false.
The new information, it said, did not show that Martz’s conclusion about the capsules was inaccurate.
At most, it could have been used to impeach him or raise questions about his conclusions.
The court also pointed out that until 1992, she could have had the capsules examined herself, and that her own side had agreed to the stipulation in the Orange County trial.
And even apart from all of that, it said, the stipulation said nothing about the arsenic found in James Goodyear and Bobby Joe Morris.
The jury had heard testimony from doctors, from witnesses who said she confessed, and about the insurance.
There was no reasonable probability that the result would have been different.
The court dealt with the rest of her claims the same way.
She argued that her death sentence rested on the Escambia conviction, which she was now challenging.
The court noted that she had not filed a challenge to that conviction until March 20th, 1998, and that the Escambia court denied it on March 26th.
And even if the Escambia conviction fell, it said, her Santa Rosa conviction for the murder of her son would still support that aggravating factor, along with three others that had nothing to do with Martz.
She also raised a juror who had failed to disclose that he had a prior conviction for involuntary manslaughter.
The court said the questionnaire was available years earlier, so the claim came too late.
It is easy to read this episode as a story of a flawed forensic lab and a conviction that should have fallen.
That is not what happened.
No court found that the capsules contained something other than paraformaldehyde.
No court found that the capsules had been retested and shown to be harmless.
The courts found that the information about Martz could have been used to challenge him, and that it would not have changed the outcome of a case built on tissue, witnesses, and money.
Her conviction and her death sentence stayed in place.
On the morning of March 30th, 1998, Judy Buenoano was 54 years old.
She had spent 13 years on Florida’s death row.
She had crocheted blankets and baby clothes, told reporters she wanted to be remembered as a good mother, and maintained to the end that Michael’s death was an accident.
She was known by then by a nickname that had followed her through the press, The Black Widow.
At about 7:02 am, guards helped her into the execution chamber at Florida State Prison.
She was strapped into the electric chair.
Asked if she wished to make a final statement, she answered, “No, sir”.
Closed her eyes and kept them closed as witnesses watched through a glass partition.
The current was turned on at 7:08.
Smoke rose from her right leg during the 38 seconds of the electrocution.
She was pronounced dead at 7:13.
She was the first woman executed in Florida since 1848, when a slave named Celia was hanged for killing her master.
She was the first woman ever to die in Florida’s electric chair, and only the third woman put to death anywhere in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
Prosecutors said she had killed for the same reason in each case, money.
The Associated Press estimated she collected about $240,000 in life insurance after the deaths of her husband, her son, and a boyfriend.
The day of her execution, March 30th, would have been Michael Goodyear’s 37th birthday.
So, what exactly was established? In 1984, a jury convicted Judy Buenoano of the first-degree murder of her son Michael, and she was sentenced to life in prison.
In the same year, she was convicted of the attempted murder of John Gentry and sentenced to 12 years.
In 1985, a jury convicted her of murdering her first husband, James Goodyear, with arsenic, and she was sentenced to death.
Those are the three things that were proved in a court of law, and each of them was upheld on appeal.
Bobby Joe Morris’s death is a different category.
The tissue showed acute arsenic poisoning, and a jury in Orange County heard about it, but she was never charged with his murder.
The capsules are a different category, too.
Two juries heard Martz’s conclusion, and no court has overturned it.
What stays with you, looking at the whole record, is how long it took.
Three deaths that no one questioned, an ordinary-looking illness in a returning soldier, a boyfriend who got sick in Colorado, a young man whose canoe went over on a slow river.
It took a bomb in a parking lot and a man who survived it to make anyone look back.
The pattern did not prove anything by itself.
What proved it in the end was a chemist’s analysis of ashes, a toxicologist’s tests on a body that had lain in the ground for 13 years, and a jury’s judgment of the people who said they had heard her talk.
Because in a case like this, the truth is not established by the pattern alone.
It is established by the evidence that can withstand scrutiny.
