Bodies of Evidence

They thought they knew her well, the men who loved her. It was a fatal assumption. She was born Judias Anna Lou Welty to impoverished parents in Quanah, Hardeman County, Texas, in 1943. To her first husband, she was Ann Schultz of Rosalind, New Mexico, a nineteen-year-old nursing student with a six-month-old illegitimate son. The husband died under mysterious medical circumstances after returning home from a tour of duty in VietNam in 1971. To her common-law husband, she was Judy Goodyear a veteran's pensioned widow and mother of three from Orlando, Florida. He died of unexplained medical complications in 1978. To her first-born son, she was the mother he could never please. Paralyzed by unexplained toxic exposure while home on leave from the Army, he drowned at the age of nineteen  in a family canoe outing in 1980. To her fiancé, she was Dr. Judias Buenoano, a wealthy Gulf Breeze, Florida, beauty salon owner who enjoyed expensive clothes, fancy restaurants, and Caribbean cruises. On a June night in 1983, he left her dinner party early and barely survived when his car mysteriously exploded. To a shrewd Pensacola, Florida, police detective and a conscientious assistant DA, she was a serial killer who profited from the painful deaths of her insured “loved ones.” It took over two years of intensive local state and federal investigation and the exhumed bodies of her long-buried victims to prove it… Judias Buenoano sometimes referred to herself as “doctor,” sometimes as “nurse.” But it was a fact that she was the attractive owner of a chain of nail salons in Pensacola, Florida. In addition to running a successful business, she believed murder could be profitable. And for a long time it was, as she was the beneficiary of hundreds of thousands of dollars collected from the deaths of her “loved ones.” In March, 1984, a Santa Rosa County, Florida jury convicted Judias Buenoano of drowning her nineteen-year-old crippled son as well as grand theft insurance fraud. In October, 1984, a Pensacola jury convicted her of the attempted murder of her fiancé by bombing. In November, 1985, she was found guilty by an Orlando jury of the murder of her first husband by arsenic poisoning and sentenced to die in Florida's electric chair. In 1998,   Judias  became the first  white female to be executed in the state of Florida in seventy years and  one of the last  to be executed in Florida’s defunct electric chair. Chris Anderson and Sharon McGehee, a husband and wife team,  collaborated together as a writing-producing team since 1978. A veteran New Yorker and experienced producer and director of plays on and off Broadway, Mr. Anderson established the first outdoor theater in Central Park  in 1957.   He  was deceased in 1999. Ms. McGehee, a native of Pensacola, Florida, where she was a columnist for the Pensacola News Journal, received her master’s degree in education from Hunter College.  She  worked with autistic children as a dance  therapist in Manhattan before  her writing collaboration with Chris Anderson.   She continues her artistic  collaboration  with  her husband  French artist Lio Mag at their home  in Woodstock, NY.