In 1979, a young U.S. Army recruit named Michael Goodyear became mysteriously ill. The 19-year-old Male was diagnosed with arsenic poisoning, which soon led to a debilitating paralysis affecting his upper and lower limbs. Discharged from the military and fitted with heavy metal leg and arm braces, he was sent home to Milton, Florida, into the care of his mother, Judias “Judy” Buenoano. The tragedy that had befallen the young veteran, however, was only just beginning.
It was a prelude to his murder at the hands of the very person entrusted with his care.
On May 13, 1980, Buenoano took Michael and his younger brother for a canoe trip on the East River near their Santa Rosa County home. In a sequence of events she would later portray as a tragic accident, the canoe capsized. While she and her younger son made it to safety, Michael, weighed down by his heavy orthopedic braces, was helpless. He could not swim and quickly sank, drowning in the river. His death was initially accepted as an accident, allowing his mother to collect on his $20,000 military life insurance policy.
For years, Michael’s death remained an unexamined tragedy. The truth only began to surface in 1983 after Buenoano’s then-fiancé, John Gentry, survived a car bombing in Pensacola. During the investigation, Gentry told police that Buenoano had been giving him "vitamin C" capsules that made him violently ill. The capsules were found to contain poison. This attempt on Gentry's life, for whom Buenoano had taken out a $500,000 life insurance policy, cast a dark shadow of suspicion over her past. Investigators began to unravel a horrifying pattern of death and financial gain that surrounded the woman one prosecutor would later dub the "Black Widow."
The investigation led authorities to re-examine the deaths of other men in Buenoano's life. Her first husband, U.S. Air Force Sergeant James Goodyear, had died in 1971, just three months after returning from Vietnam with mysterious symptoms that doctors could not explain. A boyfriend, Bobby Joe Morris, died in Colorado in 1978 after exhibiting similar symptoms. In 1984, investigators received permission to exhume the bodies of Michael Goodyear, James Goodyear, and Bobby Joe Morris. Autopsies revealed that all three men had significant amounts of arsenic in their systems. It became clear that Michael’s paralysis was not a random illness but the result of his mother slowly poisoning him. The canoeing trip was not an accident, but a deliberate and final act to end his life.
Judias Buenoano's web of deceit and murder, motivated by greed for insurance money totaling over $240,000, finally collapsed. In 1984, she was tried and convicted for the murder of her son, Michael, and received a life sentence. She was also found guilty of the attempted murder of John Gentry and sentenced to 12 years in prison. The following year, in 1985, she stood trial for the 1971 murder of James Goodyear. A jury found her guilty of first-degree murder and recommended the death penalty.
Buenoano maintained her innocence to the end, but her appeals were denied. On March 30, 1998, Judias Buenoano was executed in Florida's electric chair for the murder of James Goodyear. She was the first woman executed in Florida since 1848. While she died for the murder of her husband, the life sentence for the cold-blooded drowning of her disabled son, Michael, stood as a chilling testament to her capacity for cruelty. The case of Michael Goodyear serves as a harrowing reminder of a mother's ultimate betrayal, a young life cut short not by illness or accident, but by calculated greed.
