Elena Semander

popular name: Velma Barfield

date_of_death: November 2, 1984

age: 52

cause_of_death: Execution by lethal injection

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Velma Barfield was an American female serial killer and is remembered for being one of the first women to be executed in the United States after the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Barfield was 1 of 9 children born in South Carolina into abject poverty. As the eldest girl, she was expected at a young age to cook, clean and mend clothes for the entire family (no easy task in a house with no electricity, no running water and no toilet facilities). A childhood marked by abuse and a difficult relationship with her family, she met and married Thomas Burke in 1949 and had two children. It was during her marriage to Burke that she developed a debilitating addiction to narcotics to treat depression and pain from several surgeries. Over a period of 16 years, Velma Barfield poisoned several victims when they discovered she was forging checks to fund her drug habit. Those victims include her own mother, her fiancé, and her mother-in-law, among others. She used arsenic to kill them, often claiming they had died from natural causes. After the death of Stuart Taylor (Barfield's boyfriend and a relative of victim #6 Dollie Edwards) the local police were tipped-off by Barfield's sister in 1976, thus investigators were able to link the deaths to her through forensic evidence. Upon her arrest and without a lawyer present, she confessed initially to 3 of the murders. In 1978 she was convicted of the death of her fiancé, Stuart Taylor, and sentenced to death. After 2 appeals and 6 years on death row, the "Death Row Granny" Velma Barfield was executed on November 2, 1984, by lethal injection in North Carolina. Her execution was notable because she was the first woman to be executed in the U.S. since 1962 and one of the few women executed in the 20th century. She was buried next to her first husband in a grave that remains unmarked in Parkton Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina.

popular name: Frank Sheeran

date_of_death: December 14, 2003

age: 83

cause_of_death: Cancer

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Frank Sheeran was a truck driver, corrupt labor union official and alleged mafia hitman. Sheeran is thought by some to have murdered Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, (among dozens of others) and was the subject of the 2019 film "The Irishman" starring Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. The truth of the matter is that Sheeran, near death struggling with cancer, dictated his life story to writer Charles Brandt who created a book that was adapted into the movie "The Irishman." In the book Sheeran told Brandt that he had committed one of the country's most infamous unsolved crimes: the murder of Jimmy Hoffa, a powerful onetime leader of the Teamsters Union with ties to organized crime. Sheeran also took credit for killing "Crazy Joe" Gallo, a mobster who was taken out at his own birthday party in 1972. Sheeran's claims got even wilder. He portrayed himself as a peripheral character in JFK's assassination, and a minor player in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Somehow, this previously low-profile thug was the lynchpin in every major unsolved, mob-linked hit. In the end, he claimed to have killed more than 25 people yet the FBI has not been able to link Sheeran to a single killing. Upon his death, he was interred at Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon, PA.

popular name: Charles Stuart

date_of_death: January 4, 1990

age: 30

cause_of_death: Suicide by drowning

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: “My wife’s been shot! I’ve been shot!” screamed Charles "Chuck" Stuart into his cell phone as he drove through the Mission Hill area of Boston. Paramedics responding to the call for help found that both Charles and his wife had been shot. Chuck initially pinned the blame on a robbery by a black male, however his story began to unravel and authorities soon realized that he shot his wife in the head and then shot himself in the stomach. Facing two counts of 1st degree murder, Charles Stuart drove to the Tobin Bridge over the Mystic River, and jumped to his death.