In the winter of 1938, the life of John Woodward, a 36-year-old Black man, came to an untimely and mysterious end in Atlanta, Georgia. His death on December 4, 1938, would later be viewed as the first in a string of suspicious fatalities connected to one woman, his common-law wife, Roberta Elder.
Living at 519 Bedford Place N.E., Woodward was admitted to Grady Hospital on December 2, 1938, suffering from a severe illness. Two days later, he was dead.
The official cause of his death was recorded as possible chronic nephritis and uremia. However, years later, as a pattern of death surrounded Elder, authorities would come to suspect that Woodward was, in fact, the first of her many victims, poisoned with arsenic for a small life insurance payout.
At the time of John Woodward's death, there was no immediate suspicion of foul play. It was only after a series of deaths of her husbands, children, and other relatives in the years that followed that an investigation into Roberta Elder began. In 1952, after the death of her then-husband, Reverend William Elder, an autopsy revealed lethal doses of arsenic. This discovery led investigators to re-examine the deaths of others who had been in Roberta Elder's care.
Though she was only convicted for the murder of Reverend Elder, authorities suspected her of being responsible for as many as fourteen deaths, with John Woodward being her first. The motive in many of the cases, including Woodward's, appeared to be the collection of small life insurance policies she had taken out on her victims. Roberta Elder was ultimately sentenced to life in prison, leaving the full truth of John Woodward's demise to be pieced together from a grim history of repeated tragedy. No one was ever formally charged or brought to trial specifically for the murder of John Woodward.
