Episode 521: Velma Barfield

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at a high school in upstate New York. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast. What's the answer, and what do you do if they tell you it's all in your head?

Hysterical, a new podcast from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Hey Weirdos, I'm Ash and I'm Alayna.

And this is morbid.

This is morbid with Covid, but almost without almost so close to being without so close.

She sent her test this morning and it had the faintest line. And I said, Well, we're related anyway. And we've got to get back to work and I need to come in. I've done a good job. We isolated the hell out of me right away.

I still don't know where I got Covid, by the way, I don't go anywhere, so there's that. And like, you could, like, we were saying, like, with the stomach bug, you couldn't even get it off like a Starbucks cup, I know.

That's why I'm like, what the fuck? But the good news is, no one else got it. Yeah, that's like, no one else got it. I think we're good at this point, but I think no one else got it. We isolated the hell out of me right away.

Smart, Thank goodness for John, shout out to John, shout out to John, shout out to John and to my mother-in-law for being the greatest people ever.

Yeah, we love, because goddamn, I know I felt so bad for you. I was in the pool at my all inclusive resort. When you texted me and I was, I sent you a little picture like, Oh, that sucks, and I was like, Yeah, I'm dying.

Yeah, I felt really bad. You were like, Yeah, I just broke my hundred and three degree fever. I was like, Oh, I'm drinking a pina colada. Not relatable watching a lizard run by.

Oh my God, there are so many cute little lizards in Aruba. It's true Honeymoon herb is beautiful.

Oh my God, so much fun. take me back, take me back. It was fun, but that was like the longest vacation.

No, that was like one of the longest vacations I've ever gone on and the first we've gone on in a long time. Um, and it was amazing and like, a lot of fun. But by the end of it, I think like, we got there on Friday and I feel like by like Wednesday, Thursday. We were like, OK, I want to go home now, yeah.

Like, all right, we're such homebodies we are, too. Yeah, so it's like I can have a little bit of of it.

And then I'm like, All right, I want to be home in my pajamas, on my couch with my kids. Yeah, me too, with my kids. You're watching them on the cameras. Oh yeah, the cats on the cameras are like cat kids.

I miss Remy and Franklin and Locke, and I really missed your kids. I know they missed you. Yeah, it was a wild week it was.

But I'm back, you're almost Covid free and here we are, here we are, so we're going to start off 2024 strong.

Yeah, ending 2023 really strong. Yeah, for real. Wait, you had Covid right around this time last year, not last year.

Was that two years ago? Yeah, it was like two years ago, oh God, what is time? I think it was like 2021..

Yeah, oh, ok, um, yeah, we got it, like in like, Oh yeah, you're right, you're right, you're right. And it was around the same time.

Yeah, around this time last year you had that crazy stomach bug and you couldn't do Thanksgiving. Oh yeah, I got the stomach bug on Thanksgiving. But we got to do Thanksgiving this year, which was nice we did.

I waited until after, and that's that's. What's even funnier is, I waited only about a week after Thanksgiving to get Covid, so I really not even a full week.

Barely, barely made it happen. But, you know, apparently Thanksgiving is tough for me, but I don't know what it is. Well, I feel like you do a lot, like you put a lot on your plate. And at the end of the year, we're, like your kids already probably brought home something nasty.

That's very true. So you're run down and so I just get it all tacky, you know, that's it. But I got to say John is like the greatest human ever because he just kept the house running, yeah.

Kept the kids running, yeah, like, just they had their teeth were brushed, their hair were brushed.

That's the thing like they were washed, they were washed. You posted that video. But I see it all the time of, like, millennial dads, just like being like, way more hands on than dads of past generations, being parents instead of a babysitter.

Oh my God. I was just going to say, like, like, just raising their kids instead of babysitting. Because he always hates when somebody will be like, Oh, is dad babysitting? and he's like, I'm not babysitting my fucking kids.

Like these are mine, they're dad, like I'm raising them alongside this other human. Drew said that the other day he was like, I hate when, like, dads will say that.

And I was like, Yeah, that makes me want to have like 5 million babies with you. That is a good thing. But yeah, he's kept this whole shit afloat. So shout out to John and you're so close.

I'm so close, I can feel it, I feel I feel great. Yeah, you look great, you don't even look bad.

Yeah, I feel great, so I'm really just waiting for that little little line to disappear. I do like your hospital socks. Thank you, I do have.

I do have grippy socks, like straight up hospital socks. yeah, they're straight up hospital socks, with like the little feet on the bottom, they're comfy.

I fall a lot.

I slide, I can't have bare feet, like walking around, like, that's fucked up. Disagree? Yeah, just in my own head, that's fucked up.

I just hate when my toes feel like too bunched together. No, my toes can't touch, but no, like, no, thank you. I'm a I'm a free, free foot ladies, but I have hardwood floors everywhere and I will fall.

In a sock, and it has happened before, so you broke your tailbone. Just like my kids need to have grippy socks, I need to have grippy socks, so grippy socks out here.

Grippy socks forever, but moving away from grippy socks, yeah, to someone, this is going to be like, real depressing.

I just want to put that out there, like, ahead of time, we're going to talk about Velma Barfield. OK, she's a poisoner, she's a extreme poisoner. Oh, but my goodness.

She has the most depressing life. Oh, ever, like, it's just you're like, welcome back. Yeah, welcome back, it's.

But my, she was, she's cold as ice, but her, her, I like her. Life just makes you be like, Whoa. Like nothing good was happening here at all, like there's just no good nothing.

So really not good. I mean, it looks like she, you know her, she loved her kids, and her kids seem to love her, and honestly, I feel I feel very much for her kids. She has a son and a daughter.

They seem to love her and I don't think they got the same person that that did these things. So it's like, I really feel for them because I'm sure they're still trying to reconcile that. Yeah, that's like a lot to digest, and that's a lot.

And again, she has a really fucked up like childhood, and she has a fucked up just life. That you're just like, damn, like, how were you handed so many bad cards? damn, but some of the bad cards she took on herself, so.

All right, let's get into this, let's talk about Velma, so when Velma Barfield's trial came in the late 70s, which, trust me, we'll get to the 70s, it was like late 70s, early 80s. It was the time in the United States when Americans were really just beginning to even deal. Or grapple with the concept of a serial killer at all, like even a male serial killer, any serial killer?

Never mind the idea that a woman could commit anything like that, right? And although women had been sentenced to death for murder before in the U..S, none had confessed to methodically killing multiple people. In such a cold blooded, callous way and for such a seemingly trivial reason. As Velma, OK, so let's talk about who Velma is.

Let's Margie Velma Ballard Margie was born October 29th, 1932, in Cumberland County, North Carolina. I think she's a libra.

She was, oh, she was a libra like Mikey, I think, right. October 29th.

Look at that, I'll double check, but I'm almost sure, No, no, fuck me, he said. That's a nor.

Hold on, wait, don't tell me what's after Libra, I know, just don't tell me for a second.

I won't. Sagittarius I don't know right where am I?

Mikey's just gone nope, October 29th. Oh, she's a scorpio. Oh, all right.

OK, there it is, yeah. She was the second of nine children, OK, and her parents were Lily and Murphy Ballard.

Unfortunately, she had the displeasure of entering the world during the worst part of the Great Depression, so her early life was tough in many ways. Her father was a farmer, so the collapse of cotton prices hit him hard, financially, very hard. And it became next to impossible for him to earn enough money to support his very much growing family and also support his aging parents, which he had been doing for some time.

So in 1935, he gave farming up and went to work for a logging company for a bit, and then he found work at a textile mill in Fayetteville. Now, in Velma's memoir, she wrote a memoir, she wrote I was afraid of my daddy even while still a small child. He had a violent temper and none of us wanted to be around when he blew up.

Oh, wow. According to Velma, nearly anything could set that temper off, no matter how little. And there was no way of knowing what or when it would happen, like, what was going to happen and when it was going to happen. No rhyme or reason. And she said quote He usually took out his anger on u.S. kids, as well as the furniture.

So fucked which like, can you imagine being such a tiny little person to take your anger out on a small child? No, or tiny person?

Or even, like, on furniture in front of your kids like to create such a violent home like that, like, What are you doing? Just grow up. Besides being an asshole, Murphy was not good at managing the family's finances even before the depression hit hard, really.

So that made things worse. He had a strong work ethic and wasn't afraid of a full day's work, but he also really wanted to impress people. He was a keep up with the Joneses kind of guy, and he would spend money on trivial things for himself instead of things the family needed.

So he was already setting them up for failure, selfish as well, even before the depression happened. A relative once said he bought what he wanted instead of what he needed. His pocketbook was always too small for his operation. If you know what I mean.

So Lily, the mother, would try to do whatever she could about Murphy's explosive anger and violence. She would try to like, intervene, try to smooth things over, to try and stop him from reacting to everything with anger. And she would hide incidents or any accidents that happened that would lead him to abusing the kids. So if they had an accident, like knock something over, she would be like, that was me.

You know what I mean, like, she would just take it on now. Unfortunately, she was rarely successful. And Velma came to resent her mother for the way she tolerated and catered to her father. What she thought was catering to her father, and for what she saw as failing to protect her children from his wrath.

Which obviously, that's tough. And honestly, it's like, I can't imagine being in Velma in the children's place, and I can't imagine being in Lily's place. No, it's impossible. One day, when Velma was 12, she asked her mother, Mama, why do you put up with him? why do you stay with him like this?

When she was 12.

Wow. And the answer, of course, was that Lily had nowhere else to go right, and she definitely didn't have the resources necessary to raise nine children by herself.

And that was the story in a lot of these households that we come to, especially in this time period. It was just a matter of, I can't do this by myself, couldn't do it alone. But to Velma, who was 12, she thought that excuse was insufficient. She said. I'd sure find someplace else to go, and I will, too, when I get older.

Unfortunately, that's not true. Yeah, and it's one of those things where it's like, you just don't have the life experience to know the position that your mom is in. At that age. Of course, not, you're 12. You just look at it as this is a terrible situation.

Why would you deal with it? And you can understand she's 12, she has no fucking clue how hard it is to do anything else. Yeah, you know, to get out of that situation and how dangerous it is.

Right now, as a child, Velma sought to escape in school, and she was a very good student. Oh, that's good, but she didn't do well being grouped in with many other children.

She didn't do well with team things, huh, which I feel that as well. I saw a little glimmer in your eye there, I was like, same.

Even though she was a good student, the teachers would often kind of like, chastise her or punish her for her boisterousness and unruly behavior. And noted her tendency to have angry outbursts when things didn't go her way, even as a young girl, yeah, so she's learning.

Setting the groundwork, Murphy is teaching her. When you don't get your way, you beat the shit out of the furniture or someone else around you, that's what you do. Use outbursts.

So it's like you teach your kids how to react, and it's like, this is a perfect, you know? And it's like, also, who knows if it's like a genetic component there? That she's just got anger in her blood, that she's going to have to figure out how to control or not. And Scorpios are fiery, there you go.

So, to make matters worse, many of Velma's classmates came from families that were much better off than her own, and this was made apparent to everyone. Because she would come to school in secondhand clothing or handmade clothing. And she always brought a very small, very kind of sparse lunch with her, that's so sad. And in order to try to, you know, minimize this bullying that she was facing. Velma started stealing coins from her father's pants pockets and using it to buy candy and other things for classmates.

Kind of like trying to buy herself into like people liking her, and it seemed to work a little bit. But it's not a great way to, you know, find friends. I guess she's not learning a lot of really great lessons here now. When she reached her teenage years, Velma started dating Thomas Burke, who was a boy she met at church, and he was a boy her father greatly disapproved of.

Uh-oh. For the most part, they seemed to, you know, like, just hang out, do some mundane activities like drive around, go to the movies, like normal teenage stuff. But Velma often had a difficult time enjoying herself. She later said As much as I like being with Thomas and going places with him, I was bothered by thoughts that I should be home instead. Hmm.

I think Velma had, like, the weight of the world on her shoulders at too young of an age. Probably depressed. She was thinking about too many problems. Because she was probably thinking about, you know, like her brothers and sisters, and you know, her father's an angry, scary guy, and her mom, yeah.

And she probably feels some kind of responsibility at a way too young of an age to be in the home to try to intercede things. That's that's just really tragic.

She struck him with her motor vehicle, she had been under the influence, and then she left him there. In January 2022, local woman Karen Reed was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O'Keefe. It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location. What happens next depends on who you ask.

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Now she's felt this strange pull, which I understand in these situations, to live up to her father's expectations, no matter how unreasonable they were. She just didn't want to disappoint him because he was scary. And her relationship with Thomas started to become a kind of a welcome escape from the violence at home. And you know, she had the violence at home and then the kind of challenging environment at school that she was still trying to navigate. And one evening, about a year into their relationship, Thomas and Velma were driving home from a movie.

When he turned to her and said, Velma, let's get married random now. Immediately she panicked because she knew her father would lose his mind and would definitely not allow it, and would probably react with violence if it was even brought up to him. But the question caused her immediate anxiety, and she was like, You know what, I enjoy being with Thomas.

This is a nice escape. So she's like, you know what? I might not know if I love him or not, or I don't love him the way that he loves me. But I kind of want to do this. So a few days later, while they were driving, Velma brought up the subject because she didn't immediately answer him, and she reminded Thomas that her father would definitely not approve. And this time, however, there were additional complications.

Her father had found a new job and would be moving the entire family to Wade, which was about an hour away. Oh, okay, and so Thomas said, Then let's get married right away, So Thomas said, before your daddy leaves, let's just elope. Now. Though, she wasn't exactly sure again whether she really loved him or just the thought of, you know, losing him was upsetting her.

She didn't want to lose him, and she figured, you know, being uprooted from her current life, no matter how distressing it is, would kind of stress her out more. Because she's kind of used to this awful routine. So it's kind of like choosing the less of two stresses, exactly. But she ended up agreeing to his plan, and the two began making plans to run off and get married.

On December 1st, 1949, Velma's friend Alvie Pender, came by the house to pick her up for what she told her parents was going to be just a night out. Then the two of them picked up Thomas, and the three of them drove to nearby Dillon, South Carolina, where Velma and Thomas were married, and Alvie was their witness. Once they were married, they returned to their respective homes and didn't say a word. They planned to spring the news on Lily and Murphy just before they moved. So they figured that that would mitigate, like, some of the negative reactions, but I don't know about that.

Or probably just like they would have less time to take it out on you, yeah, now. That plan only lasted a little more than a day. Because Thomas convinced Velma that they needed to tell their parents, but Thomas was like, We can't do this, yeah, now Velma decided to start with her mother.

Hoping she could convince Lily to tell Murphy. But her mother was like, Uh, no. And she was essentially like, you did this, you tell them like you decided. I can't say I blame her. I'd be like, Girly, you're a married woman now.

Yeah, she was like, and she literally was like, you got married, this is your stuff to tell. So the next day, Velma told her father about the marriage, and he reacted slightly. As expected. He yelled, he threw things, he demanded they get the marriage annulled.

But then, all of a sudden, he sat down, put his head in his hands and started sobbing, What the fuck. This was obviously very unexpected. She had never seen her father sob, very unnerving.

And he was usually violent and angry, so this was just not. She was like, what the fuck? So immediately she felt overwhelming guilt, and she was like, I shouldn't have married Thomas. What the fuck did I do?

And she actually never learned why he reacted that way. But she said, from that moment on, there was a drastic change in her and her father's relationship. I wonder if it was a moment of self-realization for him, of like, it was so bad that she saw this as her ticket out and like, what does she see in this guy? That's exactly what I think.

I think he did violently disapproved of this guy, which, as we will find out, Thomas ends up being not a great husband and he violently disapproved of this guy. And so he's looking at this guy like, there's no fucking way in hell, you're gonna marry this guy. And she goes and does it. And he probably is sitting there, like you said, being like, she had no other option to get away from me.

But to marry this guy who, like I know, is not a good guy. It seems like it really was a moment of clarity. And it's like, I wonder if he was just like, What the fuck have I done? Like? I think I really do think that was a moment, which it's like, I'm glad it came, but my God dude, it came too late.

Too little, too late, like it's like, and it also looks like, and you know, like, spoiler alert later, it looks like Lily and Murphy end up really loving being grandparents, like they fall really hard into the grandparent role. So I do wonder if this was the moment that Murphy just said, Fuck, what have I done? And then his grandkids, like, really brought that like fatherly thing out in him.

Right, which you hear about that sometimes where like, somebody's a fucking shit parent, and then they become a grandparent. And you're like, and the kid is like, why weren't you like this for me? But you're like, which is great that you're like this for my kids? Like, I'd rather my kids having this, but like, I would have loved this, yeah.

And like, obviously the side of you was there, it's there, somewhere in there, so why didn't you give it to me, you know? Like, but it's strange.

It's a strange phenomenon. Family trauma. Yeah, exactly. But Velma wrote Oddly enough, after that night, when I told daddy about my getting married, he wasn't mean to me ever again. Wow.

I just got chills. Yeah, isn't that a wild one now? Days later, Velma left her parents house to live with Thomas and his parents a few miles away. And finally, free of all the, you know, abuse, the violence that had basically dominated her life for 17 years, Velma, you think would feel relieved, you know?

But she couldn't shake the feeling that she had fucked up and she had hurt her family deeply. And she, that was. What kept sticking to her was. I feel like I did something wrong, I hurt my family now. In retrospect, Velma remembers the first few years of her marriage to Thomas as quote, the happiest years of her life.

Okay, so there was good times. Shortly after the wedding, they both dropped out of school. Thomas got a job at the cotton Mill in nearby Red Springs, and they spent most of 1950 and early 1951 living with his parents.

Things were generally good, that's great. Unfortunately, though, the job at the mill was tough, Thomas fucking hated it, so he ended up quitting in early 1951..

They then moved in with Velma's oldest brother, Olive, and Thomas found work as a salesman with Double Cola Bottling company. Now, Thomas's job with the Cola company. Paid enough that they were able to actually get a house of their own, a small house of their own. A few months later, and soon after, Velma became pregnant and gave birth to her son, Ronald, who they called Ronnie.

Cute on December 15th, 1951. And she later wrote about this I was thrilled beyond words. I cried. I was so happy.

Now, bless his heart. He was ugly, but I thought he was the prettiest baby I had ever seen. What the fuck, Velma, you just called your kid ugly Velma girl? I thought parents weren't even capable of realizing that their kids were ugly.

I know I was like, Damn, I thought it was other people that realized that. damn. But bless his heart, he was ugly.

He was ugly, but I thought he was the prettiest baby. And it's like, maybe he was then, but it's like, Well, did you? Maybe he was just straight up the prettiest baby, like you thought he was? Damn Velma.

But two years later, Velma gave birth again on September 3rd, 1953, to a daughter they named Kim Cute. Now in one in the book, we are going to link on here the Bledsoe Book we. He refers to her as Pam because she is referred to as Pam sometimes. Is that a nickname for Kim?

I don't know if it's for Kim. Oh, I was like, why, why? but I'm thinking, Tell me if I'm wrong in the Great Gatsby. Doesn't she call her daughter Pammy? At one point, I think it was like a like, a nickname of endearment.

I don't know if I'm making that up, though, because I know her daughter wasn't named Pam, but I feel like she does call her Pammy. Or maybe it's in another book that I read, I can't remember, I'm going to look it up.

Back then, it might have been like a like, Oh you little cutie, like you little Pam. I think I don't know if I'm just like having a moment of delusion. The Bledsoe book is just like about this case. So I don't know why he would refer to her as that unless, like, she wrote about her in that way.

Well, she refers to her as Kim. That's the thing. It doesn't. It's like, it's strange. Maybe later in life, she started going by Pam, Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know, I don't really know, but I want to look it up. Because now I'm like, am I delusional or is that a thing that I've heard before? I'm sure it's a thing. I have faith in you.

Thank you, I'll interrupt you in a minute. This is me having faith in you. Oh, wait, hold on. oh, you just filled in the rest for me.

No, I don't know. you're like, No, I'm just kidding. I've never heard that, but I don't doubt you. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.

I thought I heard that at one point in life, I don't know. Email me if I'm right. you know, let's see, email me if I'm right.

If I'm wrong, don't say anything, if I'm wrong, just shh.

But yeah, she had a daughter named Kim, who is referred to as Pam and some other sources. But at the time, the birth of a second child really only brought more joy into what was feeling like a right life. At that point, I'm like, where did it all go wrong, I know?

Well, Velma later said, I loved my children, and somewhere in those first two or three years, I learned to love my husband. Hmm, now. Even though even their relationship with Velma's parents, Lily and Murphy, like I said, had been better, and, like I was saying before, both Lily and Murphy loved being grandparents.

Yeah, loved Ronnie and Kim, and it sounds like the relationship with Tom's Thomas's parents was good because they were living together. Yeah, so Velma didn't just love being a mother.

She was, by all accounts, very good at it. Wow, Ronnie, her son later said. I wouldn't say I was a mama's boy, but I was close to it. I really loved my mama to death. I a real adoring type love.

Oh, which breaks my heart for these kids, cause I'm like, they saw someone different than the rest of the world saw. And I don't want to ever like, take that from them.

No, you know what I mean, like, it's like, and you can't. This story is a rough story. And she did some fucked up shit.

But I feel for them that they got that different side of her, because what a what a mind fuck that is. That's always so interesting to me, too. Like we've talked about murderers before, where, like, their family at home had no idea what was going on, like their wife never knew, their husband never knew. And it's like, it's so interesting to me how you can hide your that part of yourself from other people.

Compartmentalize these pieces of you and give love, or what you, what you think. I don't even know, I don't know how to classify it, cause it's like, I believe she loved her kids.

Like, from all accounts, they loved her, and she seems to have loved them. So it's like, how do you compartmentalize, like, evil and love inside of you? That's, I don't know, but people do it.

People do it all the time, it's well, it's even like Israel Keyes. Like he was one of the most terrifying people we've ever spoken about, but like, loved his dog. Yeah, so much.

Yeah, so you are, cause a lot of times you hear like, Oh, sociopath, not capable of love whatsoever, but I don't know how true that is, yeah.

Cause he had strange. Well, not every killer is a sociopath. That is true, that's the thing.

So I think that's the that's one of the issues is it gets, it gets to be a blanket thing for everybody. And it's like, So there's so many variables in all of these cases. That's why even entering into this like podcast in the beginning, I was unaware how many variables lie within each different case. Like you think, like, I went in, thinking like, you're a psychopath.

You kill people, you're a psychopath, that's it. And it's like, like, that is indeed the case in many cases. But it's like, there's so many other things at work, it's fascinating and horrifying.

Like it really is, it is an interesting study, though, just like the psychology of it. Yeah, and I don't know if we'll ever fully grasp it.

I think there's more to it than just science, there's a lot to it, there's a lot to it. Like this is a perfect example, because when you see how cold and callous she is about what she does.

Yeah, it's really hard to reconcile this. The mother in there, but I mean, I'm glad the kids got, you know, a loving mother, I suppose, out of it. But they didn't have an easy life, that's for sure.

These kids did not have an easy childhood.

A lot was going on to get bad with Thomas at some point and things started, you know, it was tough. They unraveled a bit, but again, like he, like Ronnie, said, he loved his mother.

Um, and actually on occasions where he. She had to be separated for her from her children for any kind of period of time. Uh, she said that she would feel physically ill when she would, um, only be able to feel better once again when she was with them. And this became a bigger problem when Ronnie entered the first grade and Velma took a job at a textile mill. Because she was working the overnight shift, so there would always be someone home for the children, so, like Thomas, would work the day shift.

She'd be home, she would work at night and he would come home. But then that means she probably missed out on a lot of seeing the kids because they were at school during the day. Exactly now, a few years later, in 1962, Velma began having significant health problems and was eventually diagnosed with fibroid tumors tumors on her uterus.

Oh wow. This caused intense pain, anybody who has had to deal with that and heavy bleeding, uh. Velma's doctors said they strongly recommended a hysterectomy to take care of this, and they said it was really the only way to eliminate the problem completely.

Her brother, John later said After she had that hysterectomy, seemed like she was never the same again. That's interesting. And later, Velma would acknowledge that this period was a major turning point in her life. I feel like I've heard that with other women, too that undergo hysterectomy. Well, the hormonal changes are significant.

Vast, Yeah. And after the surgery, the doctors warned her of this, the hormonal changes that could very much be disruptive. But she, she said lately, like there's no way to prepare for it. The shift in your moods and emotions in the weeks and months that followed. And she wrote later I didn't know how to handle my nerves.

From my early childhood, when anything upset me, it made me nervous and afraid. All of that got worse after my hysterectomy. That's really fun, and I think that's part of the issue here. Is like, she grew up in such a tumultuous and traumatic childhood that she's already got a lot to contend with. And then you throw hormonal like....

Imbalance, wildness in there, just like that you can't control and can't even conceive of. I can't even imagine what that will do, right.

And back then, they didn't have the medicine that could regulate that. That's the other thing that's the problem here is. There wasn't a lot to do. And she found that her emotions were much stronger after the surgery, and she had a lot of intrusive, negative thoughts.

And they were being harder and harder to combat. And she said, I had hidden my feelings and kept so much inside me that I had built up over the years. As I got older, I still didn't know how to do anything about the anger and the guilt. In the 1960s, like, we were just saying, talk. therapy, as we know it today, was in its infancy, to say the least, and mental and emotional health care was still a very taboo subject.

It was, and this was particularly true for the average American housewife. Oh yeah, in the mid-1960s, it was a different kind of situation. They were undergoing, a kind of identity crisis at this point.

There was a huge shift in the meanings and identities of women and mothers in Western culture. So, without any professional help, or even just like a social network that she could turn to for any of these problems. She attempted to do what she had always done, which is just keep things to herself. Push all the negative feelings down and just hope they go away right, and that's not gonna happen. Recipe for disaster?

Yeah, and before long, her fluctuating moods and instability started taking a toll on her marriage, which by 1965 had already kind of hit a rough patch. Yeah, Thomas's father had passed away and he received some minor injuries in a car crash. Oh, wow.

And as a result of the car crash, he had been in pain, so he had started drinking more than usual as a means of escape. Oh, no. This was soon exacerbated by him joining a civic organization in which the members were also heavy drinkers. Velma said. As Thomas started to drink more, his whole personality changed. And that was probably really triggering for her from her childhood.

Exactly, and now she's trying to protect the kids, too, from this whole thing. She's become her mother, who she resented so much. Wow, it's a real, real cycle of sadness in this episode.

It really is now already stressed out by her own issues going on. And you know, the emotional stuff, the lingering effects of surgery, which she's still trying to get over, that's like massive surgery. Oh yeah, Velma struggled to understand or even tolerate her husband at this point.

Well, she had already had to learn to love him exactly, so having this happen was like, No, that can unravel something. So their relationship was reduced to little more than her losing her patience and starting arguments with him and him, drinking heavily and starting arguments back. She said We had so much good in the first years of our marriage that I couldn't accept the difference.

And that's the other thing. It's such a slap in the face. Because it's like the beginning was so good and now it's just shit. And it's like, and it seems like it happened, like, boom, it's like, where did we veer off here?

Now Velma blamed.

One thing we will find out about Velma, she's been through a lot. Yeah, she's been dealt a lot of shitty cards. But Velma is one of those people that has trouble taking any kind of responsibility for her own stuff, too.

She only blamed Thomas and his drinking for and anything that was going on in that household or that marriage, but she was also going. She had an explosive temper. Yeah, it takes two, you know what I mean? It's not like they were, you know, getting along and then, like, he started drinking and everything went south.

It's like, you know, and obviously the hysterectomy happened, and that's not her fault, that's her dealing with those hormonal, you know, fluctuations. But when she's already going into it with an explosive temper and no patience, yeah, it's like, this is all a recipe for disaster.

Big time. In the mid-1960s, they had fallen on hard times financially. Oh, God. And Velma started writing a number of bad checks that, once discovered to be fraudulent, she was told she had to pay the money back. I always wonder why people think that's a good idea.

They always go to bad checks because you're always going to get caught, always like, don't fuck with the bank. It's a legitimate paper trail.

Yeah, I don't get that. It's physical paper. Like, you're not going to get away with that. In the end, it's just going to cost you more that you don't have, because it's just like desperation.

Yeah, usually, and it's get me out of it. It's the mindset that a lot of these people have, which is fix it right now, fix it now, deal with it later.

Like, I'm not going to, you know what I mean? I'm not going to try to come up with an actual plan, I'm going to just get it out of my way. Right now, it's like the worst possible way to deal with it. Don't fucks with the bank.

Don't do it, man, they're rough. To make matters worse, Thomas had a falling out at the cola company and impulsively quit his job. Oh, with nothing lined up. Yeah, which is bad.

Bad. And it was several months before he found another job, so there was a big lack of time. So she was desperate. This was desperation time.

Finally, and probably more importantly, Velma began having severe back pain in 1964, and it led to a doctor prescribing her pain-relieving tablets, which Velma quickly grew addicted to. And God only knows what was in those back then. And I can tell you right now, this pill addiction that she has becomes the basis of a lot of her bad decision-making. By 1968, Velma and Thomas's relationship was just deteriorating. She was becoming increasingly reliant on pain medication for basic functioning, and he was retreating deeper into alcoholism.

So this was just really sad. And at the same time, the children are now teenagers, so they become more independent and kind of defiant at that time, and just defiant. In a way that normal teenagers can do. Especially teenagers in a home that's unstable and that they're dealing with a lot. So the whole family dynamic was very strained.

By then, Velma's personality had changed in a lot of ways. And like her father, she was becoming much quicker to anger. I didn't read anything that said she was much quicker to anger with the children. It was Thomas, she said. Anything that my husband would do to agitate me, she said. The slightest inconvenience, or the slightest anything she perceived as a slight or annoying, she would lose her mind.

Um, and I guess the children would try to deescalate the situations a lot and try to separate them. Wow, Ronnie, her son said. She wanted to stay and fight and yell. She was very combative. So that's even him saying like this, this was a different person.

Yeah, this was somebody who wanted to just fight now. Throughout the later part of the 1960s, Velma had done her best to try to fix things. She tried to get her Thomas in, Um, into a rehab program. She actually checked him into one for drinking.

What about you, girl? And I was, well, that's the thing. She paid virtually no attention to her own right physical and mental health.

Right, she was kind of just which you don't know what, that what? The thought process there was if she was in denial, thinking she didn't have the issue, or if she was just like, I'm going to suck it up and deal with it. But he needs to, let's get him fixed.

Okay, I don't know which one that was. I'm not, I'm not. Velma No, uh. But she really ignored her own.

Well, and it seems like she already resented him so much and had so much against him. That it's one of those things where it's like, he's the problem, not me. She, she has a she has a nasty habit of blaming everybody else. And it seems like this is one of those things where Velma just said, Well, he's the fucking problem, right?

Like, once he's better, I'll be fine. yeah, everything will be fine, he's the problem. And she, I'm sure, and this is just me guessing. But like, she would probably get irritated with him and that would lead her to using more in her own addiction, exactly.

Cause it was the stress and the frustration, all that. So maybe she figured if I get him taken care of, then I won't be so annoyed all the time. Yeah, now. By 1968, the stress and anxiety she'd been pushing down for decades did finally come up. It came to head.

Oh no. She collapsed in her kitchen, where the last thing she remembered was getting up to make breakfast for the kids. Wow, uh, Thomas was too drunk to help her in this situation. Oh no.

And so it was Ronnie, her son, who had to call his grandfather Murphy, oh wow, and Murphy drove Velma to the hospital. This is what I mean with, like, Lily and Murphy really turned around.

Turned around and became like the lifeline here. But then they saw, like, look, what, look, what happened, look, what's happened? Because of everything that's, you know, like, they're. They're in the same situation that we've been in and it's worse.

Yeah, it's just it's. It's such a cycle. Generational trauma is wild, it is, it's horrifying.

Now she ended up being admitted for what she would later be told was a nervous breakdown. Wow. Velma remained in the hospital for observation and treatment for about a week, and then she was discharged with a prescription for tranquilizers. Oh, no.

And a strong recommendation that she seek mental health treatment and get professional help with her marital issues as well. Getting out of the hospital, she didn't take any of that advice. She, basically, the marriage just continued to disintegrate. She just kept on keeping on, and she turned to the tranquilizers, now relying on them to make life more bearable.

She said I found I could cope better if I took it and then not just one, I knew that two would be better than one. I could feel that now. As 1968 came to a close, there wasn't much of a relationship between Velma and Thomas left. He was really losing a battle with alcoholism.

It had consumed him so much that he was he ended up losing his job. He was unemployed for much of that year and that just added more stress financially. And although he would try and occasionally get better, he would go short periods without drinking. Like it really never lasted long, and he would fall right back into it.

It takes your whole life. I can't imagine, I really can't. And the more Thomas drank, the stranger his behavior became, according to Jerry Bledsoe, the book I was talking about before. He said at times he would sit in the car in the carport drunk, revving the engine at full speed, sometimes until the car ran out of gas.

Strange. And when Velma or one of the kids would try to intervene, he would become physically or verbally abusive until passing out inside the house. So it's just awful, yeah, it's just like an awful.

Now, by the winter of 1969, Thomas had managed to find work at the mill. The mill was his first job. That he had. The one he fucking hated, and he had to go back to it, yeah.

In this shape, yeah. And at first, Velma was like, you know what, maybe after so long, and after being unemployed for so long, maybe this is what's going to do it. It's going to snap him into like a routine.

He's going to have to go to work, he's going to have to get it together. But, she said, having to go back to the mill was a real blow to his pride. And he seemed to drink even more now as that got worse. So did the fights that they seemed to have every single night. One evening in March, Thomas came home drunk and the inevitable fight happened.

And Velma was telling her husband that she couldn't put up with her drinking and this fighting anymore. And Thomas passed out on the couch, and Velma packed a suitcase for herself and for Kim, her daughter, and they went to stay with her parents. While Ronnie, who is now almost an adult at this point, stayed behind because he told his mother someone needs to take care of dad. Oh my god. So their whole family just got fractured and it's like these kids.

Too much responsibility, so much responsibility. And it's like, Ronnie, just, especially because I don't. We don't find out a lot about Kim, yeah, but I'm sure she was the same way.

But we see that Ronnie, like, just loved his parents, and you can tell that. He just like, wanted to be a good son, and like, wanted them to be better, like, wanted to help them be better. Yeah, he just wanted to take care of them, he wanted to be a good son.

That's so sad. Like, looks at his mom as like, someone needs to take care of dad. I will stay here to take care of him. And it's like, you shouldn't have to take care of your parents. It just breaks my heart.

It really breaks my heart. But like, what a good son, yeah. And when Thomas came to the next morning, Ronnie told him about the whole thing was like, Yeah, do you remember any of this?

And he was like, he was like, you know, mom left and is fully intending on divorcing you. So like, you've really done it this time, like you fucked up. And Ronnie blamed his father's drinking because he was like, This is your fault, and Thomas blamed Velma's pill addiction.

And he was nonetheless remorseful, though, and he was like, I don't want this to happen. This shouldn't be what ends everything. And he told his son, I want to get sober, I want to bring this family back together.

Wow, and he said, like it was when you were younger, like, I wanted to be like that. And later that afternoon, Ronnie told his mother this, like what his father had said. And everybody was very hopeful at this moment.

So Velma came home. That's like the worst I know, the hope, yeah. And for a few days, there was like an uneasy like chillness, like peace in the house.

But everybody was probably so trepidatious, yeah. And Thomas managed to make it about a week without drinking, and Velma did her best to take her pills as directed, right?

But then it was just too late, too much damage had been done to the relationship. And honestly, neither of them knew how to fix it, and neither of them knew if they really wanted to fix it at this point. So after a couple of weeks, things in the house, unfortunately, returned right to the way they were before Velma left.

And it was pretty clear to everybody that, you know, like. It was clear to her that Thomas wasn't going to change. Thomas knew she wasn't going to change and that marriage was over damn now. Several weeks later, on the weekend of April 19th, Ronnie and Kim decided to go. You know, they needed to get away from their parents endless fighting.

And this whole thing that had turned into. So they went to stay with Lily and Murphy, their grandparents, for the weekend. They're like, we need to get away from that, so we're going to go to Lily and Murphy, who are like, super chill now, exactly.

And I'm like, Damn, you should have known. But Velma was home alone that morning when Thomas stumbled in after getting off of work, clearly drunk. They exchanged, like, very, at this point, they were barely speaking to each other if they weren't fighting.

They're like roommates, so they were like, just hello. And Thomas sat down on the couch and lit a cigarette, but then he started passing out so the lit cigarette was still in his mouth.

And Velma noticed that it fell out of his mouth and rolled down his shirt, so she ran to grab it before it. Like, burned a hole in him. And she basically yelled at him and was like, You know what, like, you're burning? And she literally said, Burn yourself up for all I care.

Like, Jesus Christ, right? I feel like she was just she had enough. And so when she yelled this. Thomas woke up. And he got off the couch and went into the bedroom, where he lay down on the bed and went back to passing out. Now, Velma was fucking frustrated at this point.

So she left the house, went to her parents house and picked her mother up to take her out shopping for the afternoon. Later that afternoon, she came back to her house and she came in to find it filled with thick smoke. Oh no, couldn't find her husband, so she ran outside, just as Thomas's sister, Frances, happened to be driving by the house.

And Velma was shouting for her to call the fire department. The volunteer fire squad arrived minutes later, made their way through the house and they hadn't been in there for more than a minute or two. When they came out to get a stretcher, they came back out and they were carrying Thomas on a stretcher. Velma was begging them to tell her what the fuck happened, and she said, I kept begging, but they wouldn't tell me anything.

Inside, I knew he was already dead. Oh, God now. Later that day, the fire inspector told Velma that Thomas had died from smoke inhalation. It appeared as though he had fallen asleep in bed with a lit cigarette, but at some point he must have woken up because it looked like he had tried to stomp on the rug, trying to put the fire out. And according to the investigator, there was very little damage from the fire, only a small part of the mattress and the pile of clothes on the floor.

And the floor underneath appeared to be ruined, but otherwise everything was pretty much unharmed. The official cause of death was listed as smoking in bed and the case was closed. And they think like, he was, you know, he was really drunk, so he couldn't get out of the house.

Right, like, what a way to go. And Thomas's death was a tragedy and it hit the family, the children and Velma really hard. And no matter what, this was not the outcome anyone was looking for, obviously.

Now, in the months after Thomas's death, Velma came to rely even more on the tranquilizers to get her through the day. The life insurance policy on Thomas barely covered the funeral or any of the other costs associated with his death. And that meant that Velma didn't have the luxury of taking any moment off from work to grieve, right? Go through any of it.

He was still her husband. Yeah, as much as that whole relationship had disintegrated, and it was, shit, that's the father of your children, you were still living with him.

You hadn't divorced yet? Yeah, there's always some kind of love there, I'm sure. Yeah, there's something, there's something there. That's just a shock.

And so Velma pushed herself to stay focused on work, which was at Belk's department store. Okay, and she'd been employed there for several years, and it gave her something to focus on. It filled her days up.

She was just really moving forward, and she also liked it because she could take rare moments aside to chat with her friend. Pauline Barfield, who worked in the store next to Velma's. And they had known each other for a while, they'd become very close, like Velma's closest friend, very much her confidant.

And had on several occasions introduced.

She had introduced Velma to her husband, Jennings, and they were just like best friends, like she told her everything. Now, just a few months after Thomas's death, Velma was dealt another blow when she received news that Pauline had died unexpectedly from a cerebral hemorrhage.

Holy shit, it was a shock. a shock. Oh my God, yeah.

And it was even more of a shock because one of the things that they always talked about was that. Pauline's husband, Jennings, had been disabled by emphysema and diabetes, and they honestly thought he was the one that would most likely pass away first. So this was like a real shock, and it was probably equally surprising when Velma found herself in a full-blown relationship with Jennings. So I was going to ask that because the barfield of it all.

Yeah, what? uh, that happens, though, like, I've heard of that more often, like, a lot.

Like, I've heard of that a lot, I don't understand it, I think it's some weird grief. Tie. Yeah, I would haunt the shit out of any of my friends.

Retweet I would poltergeist that shit all the way up, I'd ruin your fucking life. Oh, mark my words.

Yeah, I mean, that's right, it's just black and white for me. I'll ruin your fucking life, even if it's not my best friend. You can't move on.

Sorry, yeah, I'll become a demon. I'll become a demon specifically, so I can ruin your life. Yeah, exactly.

So just know that. But isn't that strange? It is? It's a strange phenomenon. I told a story like that recently.

Yeah, I feel like I can't put my finger on exactly who it was, but I have heard of that like multiple times. Didn't it happen with Stevie Nicks? Yes, it did, didn't she?

It's like we had, like, a come to Jesus moment, my girlie. Yeah, I mean, it's just. But that shows like it's a strange phenomenon. It is, it really is.

And I think a lot of it is tied up in grief. Oh, 100 it has to do with, because grief will fuck you up, like grief changes a lot of things. Well, and if you think about it like, you have a lot in common with your best friend. So I'm sure there are attributes that bring your partner that, like, remind the partner who's still alive of the partner that passed.

Yeah, that brings you even closer. Yeah, I mean, like, I don't understand it, but I'm not going to say that I could understand it.

Because, thankfully, you know, knock, knocks, I've never been in that position to understand that. And again, we'd haunt them, yeah, and I would turn into a demon, remember, yeah?

I won't even be human anymore. No poltergeist. Demone, Demone, Elena So yeah.

But, you know, yeah, so, and he's not in good health though. So I'm like, Belba, you're kind of setting yourself up for some more heartbreak here. Yeah, I don't think this is a great move.

And spoiler alert, it's not.

And honestly, this was just a couple of months after Pauline's death, they began a relationship. And that's usually what you hear, like, a couple of months. Yeah, it's always like, right then? And it's like, I don't get it, man.

But like you, do you. But she found herself, you know, liking the attention. It gave her something else to focus on. Besides, like, we were just saying the constant death in her life and the addiction that surrounded everything, and she later wrote The kids.

They didn't need me the way they had when they were young. I was grateful that he wanted to take me out, it made me feel good.

It's that's sad. Yeah, of course, that's sadly. But after dating only a few months, Jennings surprised Velma again. When one dinner, one evening at dinner, he asked her to marry him. This was only after dating a few months.

And after his wife has just died, I don't think that's a good idea. I think that's very impulsive, I think it's very impulsive. I think any therapist would be like, I think we should talk this through a little longer.

Well, and she said, I agreed to marry Jennings Barfield even though I wasn't in love with him. Which it's like, stop marrying people you're not in love with my friend, like you've got to stop doing that, only marry people you really, really, really love.

But what she said was I knew that Jennings didn't drink and that he wouldn't treat me bad. I just wanted someone to be with me and to talk with me. I wanted someone so badly to fill the emptiness in my life. Wow, that's gut-wrenching.

So fucking sad, because you, that's all anybody wants. It's somebody to talk to you and comfort you and accept you. And just like, be a nice person. But like, add love into it.

You don't have to settle, man, and it's so much more magical. There's a lot going on with Velma. It's a sad story, it is.

But my God, does, she turn calloused, and.

I'm waiting for it, yeah. On August 23rd, 1970, a little over a year after the death of Thomas Burke, Velma married Jennings Barfield, but very little changed. She said I was as unhappy married as I had been alone.

Of course, you are, you don't love him, right? And she found also that Jennings health problems were quite a bit more complicated than Velma had realized and required a high level of care and attention. Diabetes alone is a lot to manage.

Diabetes mixed with emphysema, and she was ill-equipped to provide these things. And as a result of the increased stress, she began relying more on Valium to get through the day valium. And it didn't take long for Velma to realize. Jennings health problems, while certainly not his fault, were at least partially worsened by his refusal to follow any doctor's orders to make any kind of life improvements.

Oh no, he had bad emphysema, but he wouldn't quit smoking. The same was true of his diabetes, He wouldn't change his diet or exercise. And the only things worse for Velma was, he said. The more obstinate he became, the more medicine I took.

The more exasperated I grew, the more desperate woof. And these are the things, though, where it's like, Velma, you're just blaming everyone else, you took the action here, you married this man you don't love.

Right, you knew he had health problems, right? And now you're blaming his health problems on your stuff, you're blaming your stuff on his health problems.

Right, when you knew what you were entering into, you knew it, Pauline told you, Yeah.

You were best friends, you were confidants. She told you what he needed. Yeah, so it's like you went into this knowing he was going to have a lot of things that he needed.

And you probably knew that he was pretty stubborn and he wasn't going to change shit. Because I'm sure Pauline told you that shit. Yeah, you're best friends, that's what you tell your best friend, 100%.

And it's like, and you married him, knowing you didn't love him well, and I think that's the root of the whole issue. Because if you loved him, these things wouldn't be as big of a deal. If you loved him, you could sink your heels in and you'd be like, let's go right.

But you didn't love him, so this didn't hit the same. But you're not recognizing that you're doing this shit to yourself. I can't imagine walking down the aisle to a man that I didn't love, no?

To know because you hear that people are like, Oh, on my wedding day. Like, I knew it right before I walked down the aisle, I was like, Am I doing the right thing? and it's like, damn.

Why did you go through all of that? Yeah, it's a lot now. Velma had been married to Jennings for less than a year, and she already felt more trapped than she ever had before. And to make matters worse, Robbie had graduated from high school that spring and began working at the Cola company, where his father was once employed.

But in the fall, he was going off to the University of South Carolina, which is good for these kids for getting into college. Hell yeah, good on you for all the shit that was going on in your lives. Good job.

That's huge. But Velma was going to lose one of the few constant sources of happiness and support that she had left in her life. This is horrible. Yeah, so, and yeah, and so she was already worried about Ronnie graduating, you know, going to college.

But then he was drafted into the army a few months later, with plans to be sent to Vietnam during one of the biggest troop surges. Oh my God, now. By the winter of 1971, life had become unbearable. Yeah, just suffocating for Velma, who was, honestly, in this awful cycle of depression, addiction, hopelessness.

Yeah, and also self-sabotage that she was just constantly cycling through. She was full of regret. She was now very resentful of Jennings. That's not fair.

She felt that he trapped her in the marriage, that she didn't really want girly pop. You said, Yes, yeah, and then those feelings turned darker. Oh, no, not Jennings.

Now, all the death, abuse, depression, addiction, disappointment she had cycled through, she found herself wishing Jennings was dead. She's gonna kill her best friend's husband after she married him months after she died.

She was really wanting to be free of what she considered to be a burden. There's this thing, it's called divorce. Yeah, you know of it, like, you just go for it, girl. I know it can be messy, but you know, what is messier?

Murder, and you know what, everything's messy at this point, like, let's go now. In late March of 1971, fueled by anger and you know, whatever else she was dealing with, Velma bought a bottle of arsenic poison.

Where do you buy arsenic? I always wonder that. I'm like, it's just like a bottle with a skull and crossbones on it at the grocery store, and you're like, I'm gonna grab this.

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like, at my locker and she came up to me and she was like, stuttering, super bad. I'm like, stop around, She's like, I can't.

A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast, like doubling and tripling. And it's all these girls with a diagnosis. The state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back.

Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, no, it's hysteria, it's all in your head, it's not physical.

Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since the Witches of Salem, or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here, something's not right.

Leroy was the new dateline, and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.

And she wrote Part of me cried that it was the only way, it's not, another part of me begged to stop. And she had said she wanted to make him sick as punishment for what he'd put her through. He already is sick, girlfriend.

Like, super sick. And she said, Then he'll be sorry, he's caused me so much trouble and he won't do it again. He'll start acting right and he won't bother me anymore. So do you see the little switch that's sadistic?

Yeah, wow, because it's like, up until this point, you're like, Fuck Velma, like, what a sad life and like, Damn, I'm feeling bad for you. And then at this point you're like, Oh, look at that.

Damn shorty look at that. I don't feel bad at all anymore. No, I don't. And this man, this man who has had chronic health problems.

And he just lost his wife and lost his wife, your best friend. Yeah, that is beyond now. What's worse is, and maybe she didn't know this, or maybe she didn't care.

Maybe she knew, and she didn't care, Oh what? But Jennings had come to the same conclusion He was going to kill her, he wasn't going to kill her.

Oh my God, I was like, what? That their marriage had been an impulsive mistake, yeah, and that it had been done out of grief, right?

He came to that, he was like, You know what, what do we do here? And, in fact, just days before his death, Jennings had contacted his lawyer to discuss a divorce. What the fuck?

He was a devout Christian and he cared very much about how he was perceived by others. And he had become embarrassed by Velma's, you know, he had become embarrassed by Velma's, you know what her addiction was doing to her, her erratic behavior. It had certainly become subject of gossip around town at this point. And he was like, And you know, she doesn't want to take care of me, she doesn't really love me.

Like, I can see this. I'm like, why am I probably bickering? And he's basically sitting there going. Why am I making her take care of me when she doesn't love me? Yeah, she's not happy.

I'm not happy. Let's move on. So he went, he went about this the rational way because he was like, you know what, let's separate and we'll move on with our lives.

Like, it'll be fine. We did this impulsive thing. Oops, let's move on. Yeah, that's great. Unfortunately for Jennings, his relation came too late.

Because on the afternoon of March 21st, Velma put the poison in Jennings food. She put a lot of poison in people's food. She didn't do the slow arsenic poisoning that you hear about.

The arsenic took effect almost immediately. It's unclear whether she felt, I mean, it's pretty clear to me, but it's unclear whether she felt guilty or was trying to, you know, cover her tracks. But when it became apparent that Jennings couldn't breathe, she rushed him to Cape Fear Hospital. But doctors there weren't hopeful that he would make it through the night.

And they were correct because Jennings Barfield died the following morning from heart failure, but did they think it was because of the emphysema? That's the thing she picked, people who this would not be shocking that they died.

And they wouldn't look into it, and they wouldn't look into it. And arsenic poisoning is a very tough one to. Unless you are getting an autopsy because you think something happened, then you're not going to know. I mean, one of the things that I read about was, You can smell garlic breath. Yeah, I read that before, too.

That's an arsenic thing, and you know, there's some other things like, we'll get into it.

So I don't know what kind of arsenic that Velma was utilizing here, but upon further research, there's trivalent. Arsenic is the worst kind. I didn't realize that there was even different kinds, so trivalent arsenic has the added harshness of having a corrosive effect.

So it will leave oral sores in someone's mouth as well, and it will cause GI bleeding and dysphagia, which is when somebody has trouble swallowing. Trivalent, basically, like the way the reason it's called that it has to do with the molecular structure of the arsenic molecule itself. Trivalent means there's three valence electrons. I'm going back to organic chemistry.

It dominated me, but I actually liked organic chemistry. That's a wild thought. It means there's three valence electrons. Valence electrons are the electrons on the outermost shell of an atom. These electrons take part in a chemical reaction that will follow.

They can form a chemical bond with another atom to make this happen, trivalent atoms can form three covalent bonds, which is just sharing electrons between atoms to form electron pairs. Sure, they can, they do this so they can be more stable, okay?

So the reaction becomes more stable, more, you know, it does more damage now. Arsenic poisoning, especially in such a large and focused dosage like Valmo is using on her victims, right, is fucking violent. This is not, it's an awful death.

This isn't, oh, no, I don't feel well and then you pass out. It's hours, sometimes days, of excruciating pain and agony. Oh man, it is awful. You will be vomiting, extreme stomach pain to the point of like, like, just not even being able to breathe.

You will be vomiting uncontrollably, diarrhea you will have. It's just agony, so she's causing and watching these people in the worst pain you can possibly imagine. It's fucking awful because it causes like GI bleeding and shit, so it makes you really fucked up.

Does she ever say why she picked that, like why she wanted to poison? No, I know, like women are more likely to poison by statistics. I think some of it is probably because she wouldn't be caught.

Yeah, they weren't gonna, she picked people who they weren't gonna. Probably ask for an autopsy because it'll eventually cause cardiac arrest. Because your body goes into shock, right? Because there's so much happening to your body, it's that bad that your body literally goes into shock and you have a heart attack and die.

Right, like, that's how they all died, like their bodies went through fucking horror in front of her to, like, take a deep breath.

And then their bodies all went into such shock that they all had a heart attack and died. And then most of them are older, as we'll see, so they don't question it. And did she do that with everybody? Give them like a huge amount.

Oh yeah, she, like, at one point she said she watched it and she felt nothing wow, like she watched them go through the aftereffects and felt nothing wow.

So she's a real monster. That is unbelievable. Okay, keep going now. Despite having caused Jennings Barfield's death, Velma was depressed still, because, you know, she's alone now again.

Do you think any part of her felt guilty? No, I think to me, I don't think she feels guilty. I think she just realizes that she puts herself back to square one. And then she's depressed again. Now, as she'd done so many times before, she turned more to her addictions to dull these difficult emotions.

And she had this thing she would do, where she would try to soothe her guilt by telling herself, well, he was in poor health anyways. So she just speeded it along. And she would tell herself that a lot, like, Oh, that person was going to die anyway. Like, who cares if they went out in excruciating pain, shitting and throwing up all over themselves?

Like, that's what was going to happen anyways, right? Like, No, I don't think that was going to happen, but thank you. Following her second husband's death, she once again found herself shockingly in financial difficulties. Because she didn't plan for that, so she rented out the house she had been living in with Jennings.

And she and Kim moved back into the home she and the kids lived in when she was still with Thomas. With the fire, it had been twice damaged by fire. But she later said I couldn't stand being back in that house. I redecorated and bought new furniture, I tried, but I just couldn't feel good in it. Being in that house that Thomas had built made me think I was drowning and didn't know how to swim.

Now things only got worse as 1971 came to a close because Ronnie had tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to get a deferment for his enlistment. And Kim's impending graduation meant that one more of her constant companions was going to be taken away. And the stress of everything collapsing around her caused Velma to lean much harder into her addictions, and by the end of the year, she experienced another drug overdose. Oh, another one.

Yep, she had already had a couple, oh, I don't know when they were, so I didn't want to name them because they happened at different periods. But this one, she claimed, was she later recognized as a half-hearted attempt to end her own life. Wow.

Um, eventually, the, you know, the drugs and depression began affecting her performance at work, and she was showing up late constantly and just not showing up at all. And after seven years as one of the more reliable employees at Belk's department store, her boss had to fire her in December of 1971. Wow. Now completely depressed and unemployed, she entered 1972, living off what little insurance money she got from Jennings death and running out of money. Velma moved in with her parents in early 1972, and this was just as her father, Murphy's health had begun to decline due to respiratory problems.

Oh man. Later, he it was diagnosed as lung cancer. Now, by the time it was diagnosed, his cancer was too advanced to treat, so he was checked into the hospital with no plans for a discharge. He was basically in hospice.

Really sad now. During this time, Velma found work at a knitting plant in nearby Rayford just to help her mother with the bills. And she was able to maintain that employment for a little over two months. And then her father died in May, and it sent her hurtling back into her bad habits.

And by January 1973. Velma had now overdosed twice in as many months and had begun stealing any pills she could find in her neighbor's houses. And.

You know, anybody's medicine cabinets. She was really in a place where she needed a lot of help.

And it was basically to stave off withdrawal at this point now. She couldn't function without it, and she also couldn't maintain employment because of it. Isn't it crazy how you can't function with it? And then it becomes such a big part of your life that you can't function without it? Yeah, it becomes a never-ending, what feels like a never-ending cycle that you can't get off if you don't get the help.

Just an escalator that just keeps going round and round. It's just so crazy how your body is meant to function. Obviously without drugs most of the time, but then you can become so dependent on them that you have to have them. It's such a weird thing to reconcile in your brain, it's really scary. But she ended up kept living with her mom after her dad passed away.

Partially to help her mom, just to be there for her, but also she didn't really have any other option. Now. Her father, I guess, ended up later in life kind of acting like a buffer between her and her mom. Her mom were fine, like her mom wasn't abusive or anything like that, but I think her and Lily just didn't get along that much. They kind of butted heads well, and she had resented her, even from a child.

I think that's what it is, because it sounds like Lily wasn't really doing anything outwardly wrong or anything. I think she just rubbed Velma the wrong way. Velma doesn't seem to have a whole lot of patience. As we can see, it's probably like Emily and Gilmore Lorelai.

When you watch the series back, a lot of the times you're like, she's really not doing anything. There's times when you're like, Fuck you. Emily Yeah, a hundred percent, I think that's kind of what Lily is, it's like.

There's times you're like, all right, Lily, Yeah, but most of the time you're like, I think you just don't like you're being a petulant child.

Now it got worse. So Velma said Mama liked to sit and talk about the old days when we were kids. She was getting old and maybe that's why she kept talking like that. That pissed her off. She's not going to kill her mom, is she?

And, for whatever reason, her mother's, you know, nostalgia and what she saw as her complete disregard for the unpleasant memories of her childhood. She didn't want to talk about it. Like, she was like, you're only focusing on the nice things, which is like, she's old, so I think that's just let her have that.

She lost her husband like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I can't.

I was going to say, I can't speak for it, I'm not going to if you're an abused child and somebody's only focusing on the wonderful times. I'd be like, Yeah, get your fucking face on the lava. I was going to say, like, I went to say, like, I don't know. Just let her, like, hang out and like, talk about the nice things. If it makes her happy, which like, like, from my point of view, I look at it that way, like if it makes her....

But I'm like, I'm not an abused child, so I can't understand the trauma that comes along with that. And how angry you would be. I would say, try your best to let her do that, but I can see where it's bigger than you. Yeah, it's hard.

You got?

Sometimes, like it's every once in a while, I have to make sure I put myself in a different position. Yeah, instead of looking at it only from my right.

My happy position over here, like, you know what I mean, like, I didn't have that, yeah, ceaseless, unending trauma.

Yeah, growing up, so it's like an abuse and shit like that. So it's like, I can sit here and say that because I can't imagine sitting with like them.

I mean, my mom was a single mom, but I can't imagine if, like, my stepdad, was still a part of my life. And hearing him be like, remember all these awesome times? I'd be like, you shut the fuck up, Kyle. Yeah, you'd be like, really, shut the fuck up, Kyle. His name is not Kyle.

But it's like, but so I can understand that, yeah, like, I can see it, because at first when I read it, I was like, girl. And it's also, I think, because Velma is a fucking serial killer that I'm like....

Your first thing is to disagree with her, of course, but there's times when you're like, all right, I guess no. I see this traumatized child, I suppose, yeah.

But yeah, it pissed her off, she was not happy with it, I could definitely see that. And her anxieties were further inflamed by the fact that Kim, now graduated from high school and out of the house, was engaged to be married. Oh man.

Oh wow, the way that just came full circle. Shit, yeah, exactly. And she's out of money.

At this point, she can't pay for any kind of wedding, she can't help with any of that, and Velma went to the bank and took out a loan. Okay?

And she used her mother's house as collateral, unbeknownst to Lily. Yeah, yeah. She told the bank that Lily was too ill to come and fill out the paperwork herself.

And they just let her. Banks were wily back then. That's the thing you don't fucks with the bank, but sometimes you do fucks with the bank and they're like, Yeah, it's fine.

Sometimes the banks fuck with you. But in early December 1974, notices began arriving from the bank addressed to Lily, and they were demanding payment on a loan that Velma had taken out on her behalf. Wow, so Lily is older now, and she's assuming, oh well, like, the bank made a mistake.

So she's just throwing them out, not even thinking about it, like, just do-do-do. And. But Velma was seeing the notices and she's panicking, and she's sure her mom's going to find out that she's going to be caught.

And then she's not going to know what to do. One day in mid-December, Velma had gone to the pharmacy to pick up her prescription and purchased another bottle of arsenic before leaving the store. Her own money. She said I don't remember thinking about what I would do next, but somewhere inside me, I must have already conceived of the plan. I had done it once, even though I had blotted that from my conscious memory.

Later, Velma would claim that she had only planned, and this is her constant claim, constant. Every time she does this, she claims this. And I'm like, Girl, we don't believe you. What did she say? Velma would claim that she'd only planned to make her mother sick for a while. Just long enough to give her time to find a job and pay back the loan and stop the notices from coming.

No, whatever the plan had really been, it didn't happen that way. Velma poisoned her food, and not long after she ate it, Lily began uncontrollably vomiting, complained of agonizing stomach pains, and Velma's mother. Velma called her mother's doctor. But her doctor assumed that she had the flu, which was going around at the time. So he declined to see her and was like, Oh, I'll just call her in her prescription.

It's okay now. The medicine obviously didn't help her mother because she did not have the flu, right? So she called her brother Olive. And they both arranged for an ambulance to bring Lily to the hospital while Lily was in ICU. Velma kept repeating to everyone that the doctor told her there were a lot of people dealing with this kind of illness right now.

So that's what it was. She just had to convince herself that what she had done to her mother was not what was causing this illness. It was secondary now. Later that afternoon, her mother died of a heart attack because her body went into shock from arsenic.

Yep, and she later said that she kept repeating to herself Mama died because of her heart trouble. It had nothing to do with the poison. Did she even have heart trouble previously?

Now, since the death of Thomas Burke in 1969. Velma had descended deeper, deeper into this addiction that she was living in. Until her entire life was revolving around the pills she took just to get through the day, right? And before she knew it, the addiction had become a trap in which she was willing to do anything to avoid the panic of being cut off from it. Following her mother's death, mother's murder, Velma moved in with her daughter Kim, and her husband, her new husband, but her drug abuse immediately caused problems.

In an effort to help their mother, Kim and Ronnie would regularly round up all the pills and flush them down the toilet. But Velma always found a way to get more. And one day, while she was cleaning out some things at her mother's house. She found a checkbook from an old account she had opened when Jennings was still alive. So she had no money. And so she remembered the checkbook and wrote a bad check to the pharmacy, knowing, but really not caring, that she was going to be cut.

Because she was using it to get pills. Yeah, and it was a bad check, right? Just days after writing the check, two sheriff's deputies showed up at her door to discuss the bad check. At first, they went easy on her and were like, Listen, if you just repay the money, we're not going to cause you any trouble.

Right? But she didn't have the money to pay, and so Velma made another half-hearted attempt to take her own life by overdosing on pills again. But she woke up in the hospital later that day. Her collarbone actually broke from the fall that she took when she passed out.

Oh, wow. And it was while she was in the hospital that the two sheriff's deputies returned. This time they had a warrant for her arrest. She had no options to pay back the money, so she had to plead guilty and was sentenced to six months at North Carolina's Correctional Center for Women in Raleigh.

And while the time in jail seems like it would have been a great opportunity for Velma to get sober, there's more in jail than there is on the streets, you'd think. But instead, she spent most of her time just looking for what she thinking about, what she was going to do when she came out. And after receiving an early release for good behavior after serving four months of the sentence, she stole a check from her son-in-law's checkbook. The minute she got home and went straight to the pharmacy and filled the prescription, Wow.

Not long after Kim learned she was pregnant and with a baby on the way. She was like, There's not enough room in this house for all of us and I can't have a baby. Around all this dysfunction. I can't imagine what was going through her head.

She was like, No, I feel so bad for Kim. I know. To have to like, like, for lack of a better term, kick your mother out. Yeah, to have to be like, we can't. I need to focus on my family.

Oh, that's really sad. It happens to Ronnie, too. So she found a new arrangement with an elderly neighbor and she was going to live with her.

But unfortunately. But fortunately for her, there is no shortage of elderly people in need of care, so she found herself in a new live-in care position. With an elderly couple named Montgomery and Dolly Edwards. Shut your face right now, I know the cutest names.

Montgomery and Dolly, Yeah, I love them forever. They were made to find each other. Yeah, they were.

Right in November 1975, Dolly Edwards had decided she wanted to bring her husband, Montgomery, home from the hospital. Okay, but they were older. She had neither the energy nor the strength to meet the demands of his care.

It was the county nurse who had recommended Velma to Dolly Girl Bye. She had met her a few months earlier when Velma was hired to care for her elderly sister. That other person, Okay, okay. After just one brief conversation, Dolly was like, Sounds good to me.

And she offered the position to Velma, and she would get room and board, and also would get a salary of $75 a week. Now, like so many of the relationships in her life, it didn't take long before she was just fucking annoyed by these people. That's the thing with Velma. It's like, get the fuck over yourself, yeah, what is wrong with you?

Like, don't be around people if you don't like them, but she has to, don't take care of people if you don't like them. Like Jesus Christ, these are older people, they're just like living their lives.

Yeah, but they have things that she wants. She came to resent them. How do you resent Montgomery and Dolly? Exactly? Fuck you, Velma.

She was very quick to become irritated and hated the way which this annoys me. Hated the way that Dolly always hovered around her when she was tending to Montgomery's needs and criticizing the way she did things. Bitch, you better bet that I'm gonna criticize the way you're taking care of my mans. Well, that's what I'm like, you think Dolly is not gonna give a fuck what you're doing to Montgomery over there? You just got out of the hospital also.

She wants to make sure that he can stay home. Yeah, fuck you Velma, are you kidding me? I would I will fucking micromanage what you do to my elderly husband.

Like, fuck that shit, that's mine.

That's love, I heard that, and that's the thing I'm like. She doesn't understand that, she doesn't understand that kind of love, that kind of devotion, that kind of caring.

Because she never was with a man that she loved. Get it. So she doesn't understand why Dolly has to sit there and see everything she's doing. That's wild. And then she claims that, she says. At times I felt I saw flashbacks, as if I'd gone back home again.

She acted like my mother, always telling me what to do and never pleased with the way I did things. And it's like, Well, no, that's grow up, because that's her guy, you know? And but then even Ronnie would later say that he overheard several arguments between his mother and Dolly. That reminded him very much of the arguments she would have with Lily before she died.

Oh, wow, and I'm like, I think this is Velma's problem, yeah. Velma also greatly disliked the way Dolly talked about her nephew, Stuart Taylor. Velma had met Stuart a few times while she was working for the Edwards, and he always seemed like a perfectly nice guy to Velma.

Oh, I bet he's not which I was like, Velma, you're not one to have, like your taste is not is not killing it. Yeah, you know, I don't think you are the end. All be all of Who's a good guy? But Dolly always made a point of speaking very ill of him, criticizing him for his drinking.

Uh-huh, but it's her fucking family, she knows. And also like, I'm sorry you've seen what, drink, what? Like, you know, somebody who, like, prioritizes that over everything, like, you know, that doesn't work for you. I was going to say you didn't like it.

Now that fall, Stuart asked Velma if she would like to have dinner with him, and she happily agreed. Man, you're hearing what he's like, dude like, this is what I mean. I'm like, come on.

But it's like, it's one of those things where it's such a cycle for her because she went after Thomas after her parents disapproved. Look, what happened? And now this woman who's like her mom disapproves of this guy. Exactly, she's one of those people where you disapprove, and it makes her go after it harder.

And she's living the same lives. So like moving in with Dolly in Montgomery, Dolly, she says, reminds her of her mother. And then she's like, going against her now. Stuart and Velma went out a couple of times a week for about six weeks, until he stopped coming by the house completely out of nowhere. Oh, he ghosted her, yeah.

When Velma mentioned it, Dolly said Stuart and his wife had reconciled and were hoping to get back together. Velma was disappointed but was like, Whatever, damn, moving on now. By January 1977, Montgomery had passed away at the end of the month.

Under normal circumstances, yes, okay. So now, Velma was left alone with Dolly in the house, without Montgomery to care for. Dolly found new chores and responsibilities for Velma. Because she was like, you still want to be paid?

You still want somewhere to live, which Velma interpreted as new excuses for Dolly to criticize her. It's like, Girly, she's putting a fucking roof over your head of money in your pocket, and, Velma said. Over the last few months, the pressure had built up so much that every time Mrs Edwards started to complain, I wanted to scream at her.

I began to hate Mrs Edwards, I wanted to hurt her in some way, then leave, that's not normal.

No, of course it's not. That's not normal thought patterns. You want to hurt people like, I want to hurt this elderly woman, that's terrifying.

You leave like, go get another job with another elderly couple who you can decide to hate right now. After a little more than a month alone with Dolly, she couldn't stand it any longer, and poor Dolly is also probably depressed after Montgomery just died.

And on February 28th, what did Velma do? She poisoned the elderly woman in the same way that she had done the others. Wow. Dolly was in excruciating pain for about a day, until she passed away the following morning. With Velma so out of it that she was oblivious. So Dolly for a whole day was in excruciating, torturous sickness and pain, while Velma just sat there.

And used just disassociated.

This poor, elderly woman by herself, who just lost her husband, just torturously, excruciatingly dying in her own house. It's just that's a horrible thing to think about. I just thought of this, too.

Those last couple months for Edward were probably awful, too, because there was such dysfunction in the house. Yeah, for Montgomery, you mean? yes, maybe for Montgomery? yeah. It's just like the last parts of their lives were dysfunctional. Velma just made awful.

It seems to be what she does, she sucks now. Under most circumstances, the amount of tragedy and death that seemed to follow Velma would have been suspicious. But remember, she's picking sick and elderly people, so their deaths are like, not, they're shocking, but not shocking.

You know what I mean, like, they're not unusual. And in the beginning of April, she sat wondering what she was going to do now.

The Edwards were dead. So she received a call from a woman who was looking for someone to provide live-in care services for her parents. These people were John Henry and Record Lee. Mrs Lee had recently broke her leg, and at 80 years old, her husband was unable to take care of her.

80 years old, you live your whole life and then fucking Velma moves in with you. Yep, she was going to get room and board, she would get a small salary, so she agreed to work with the Lees in late April.

Now, just as before, Velma immediately found the job annoying. She found her employers intolerable. It's like, get another fucking job then. And she said, They argued a lot, constantly bickering over things of no importance. I'm like, Yeah, they're old.

Yeah, like, that's what you do, isn't that what old people do a hundred percent? And after a few months, Velma's undue resentment of the couple had gone right into what it normally does a hatred that's wild.

That's the thing I'm like, your hate and temper and anger is evil, like that's evil shit. So she spent her days just seething and dreaming about how she could. Just. She was like, I just wanted to walk out and abandon them.

And it's like, then do that. I was going to say, go for it. But she figured if she quit her job, she would have no money. And so things changed in late summer, when Velma needed to see a new doctor for her to her prescriptions. And this required a sum of money she just didn't have.

So to cover the cost, she stole a check from John Henry's checkbook and wrote out the amount of $50, forging his name at the bottom. What a piece of shit. The doctor accepted the check without question, which I'm like, everybody, everybody else needs to check themselves here too, like, what's wrong with all of you? And Velma was able to get the medicine. But just as in the case of the loan taken out on her mother's house. She immediately began to panic that John Henry was going to get his bank statement and discover what she had done.

Right? She said. In a state of panic, I again bought poison, she said, telling I don't think that she really was in a state of panic. No, she liked doing this, yeah.

It's just she got the added bonus of getting some money out of it. She said, telling myself that I only wanted to make him sick so that I could leave, get a different job and replace the monies I had taken by forgery. And that's not true. She is full of shit, because that's it.

You make him sick for a little bit, he's still going to go over his bank statements when he gets better. And you know that you didn't want to make him sick, you wanted to kill him.

You know, you've seen that the amount of arsenic you're putting in food is killing people. It's not just making people sick. You're not changing it up, and also that's also fucked up. I love that.

She's like, I just wanted to make people have GI bleeds. I don't understand why that was a problem. And it's like, you fucking like, that's, that's wild, Yeah, she's evil.

That she's literally saying, like, what? I just wanted to poison them a little and it's like, they're 80 years old, you fucking asshole, that's wild. So a few days later, Velma served John Henry the poisoned food, and the arsenic immediately went to work. She said he went through the same kinds of pain that the others had gone through.

Again, I watched in a detached way, feeling no connection between my actions and his pain. Wow, so she watched this poor old man in excruciating pain. 80 years old John Henry died on June 4th, 1977, with the medical examiner listing the cause of death as a heart attack.

That's horrible now. And to think that these people could have lived longer and, like, gotten more out of life than just Velma. But she just takes it because she's annoyed.

Now, just days after John Henry's death. Velma was shocked when she answered the Lee's front door to find Stuart Taylor, what he tracked her down standing before her hadn't seen Stuart in over a year.

And Velma didn't understand why she was seeing him now. But he quickly explained that he was in the process of divorcing his wife and he wanted to check on Velma to see how she had been doing. After you just fucking walked out of her life. Velma invited Stuart in, and they spent hours catching up. Following John Henry Lee's death, the Lee family convinced Velma to stay on to take care of record they, that's even sadder.

Right? They convinced her to stay to take care of their, you know, the wife. Yeah, because they had no idea, and Velma agreed. But it didn't take long before she started getting that feeling again.

Suddenly, she was feeling resentment, anger, irritability, and the only thing that made those months tolerable, she said, was that. Stuart had become been coming by for visits regularly. And before long, they'd become a proper relationship, picking up where they had left off the year before. And Velma spent a few months in the Lee home after John Henry's death. But eventually, that anger and feelings came too much, so she found a job as a nurse's aide at a nearby nursing home, where she worked third shift.

And the salary was higher than anything she had made in recent years. So she was able to move into a trailer home by herself, which seemed to improve her mood a little bit. Now. After a while, Velma began to notice a pattern in Stuart's behavior that made her a little uneasy. He would come around for a few days in a row and then disappear for a week, binge drinking.

With No, you nailed it, yes. And then he'd just show up again like nothing had happened. And on one of these occasions, Velma had become concerned and called Stuart's stepmother, who told her not to worry. He's been on one of his drinking binges again, exactly.

By late summer, Velma and Stuart were spending nearly all their free time together. You know, going on short trips, like, you know, really going for it. For a time, it seems the rage and numbness was kind of keeping at bay, you know? She was feeling a little happiness with Stuart, I guess, which only? or what she thought was happiness. I was just going to say, Does she know what that is? I was going to say? Which only increased in the fall of 1977, when Stuart asked Velma to marry him.

Now the kids, her kids, Ronnie and Kim, were very immediately concerned. They were like, I think you're rushing into marriage again, and I think you're rushing into marriage with another alcoholic again. Like, why would you do this? And like, I don't think this is great. And he could be potentially violent, yeah.

Like, we've seen how this happens. So Velma assured them that Stuart was working on that, working on that. Okay, and besides, you know, they couldn't get married until Stuart's divorce was finalized in May. So they, you know, there was time to make everything work.

Oh my God, can you imagine having to deal with this with your mother? I literally can't now. Years later, Velma would acknowledge that a marriage to Stuart would have been a bad idea. Oh, okay.

So she doesn't do it, she said. I never felt close to him at all. Yes, you did, which is like, Damn, you really are cold as ice, because it's like you pretended.

Like, what the fuck? I don't believe that she didn't feel close to him. I can't comprehend why I wanted to be with him. Sometimes we're just lonely somebody to talk to, you know?

I think that is who she is at her core. Damn, it's like this callous, cold as ice person now. Regardless of how she claimed to feel about him later at the time, Velma seemed to go out of her way to get Stuart's attention. That's the thing.

And like, and she went out of her way to get her previous husband's attention, and this one's even wilder because she went to extremes to get his attention here. In one incident in November, police were called to her trailer when a friend stopped by to check on her and found Velma duct taped by her hands and feet with another piece across her mouth, she claimed she had entered the bathroom that morning about to take a shower when a man entered her trailer, threw a towel over her head and forced her back into the bedroom, where he secured her to the bed.

She claimed she never saw her assailant and certainly couldn't identify him by voice alone. She, of course not, and she had been taped to the bed, but she hadn't been assaulted by anybody in any way. And there was nothing missing from the house, in fact, nobody had even gone through the house.

Like there was, nobody had clearly opened anything to look for, valuables, nothing. And although they didn't say it at the time, the officers at the scene were like, I think she did this to herself. How do you tape yourself to a bed? And they said they think she did it to get sympathy from Stuart.

And it worked. When Stuart arrived at her house a short time later, the officers quote, noticed how solicitous and reassuring he was being. And he demanded Velma wasn't gonna stay another night alone and insisted she move in with him immediately. I've gotta go like, I've got to go.

Yeah, now. If Velma had thought that moving in with Stuart would be like a positive step in their relationship, she was probably disappointed. Cause it made it harder. Yeah, Stuart became very suspicious of Velma, cause she's a suspicious motherfucker.

Well, she has an addiction as well. Like Stuart, began going through her things while she was out and found several letters from people she'd met in prison. What Velma had never mentioned to her fiance that she had gone to prison? Oh my God.

So that was a big revelation to him. Oh, my God, which is something you should probably tell someone. And from there, the relationship just began to deteriorate. Velma and Stuart spent more time fighting than anything else.

They just could not get along. So no longer happy with that life, Velma fell right back into her old habits. Started forging checks stolen from Stuart's checkbook, so it was stealing checks from him. You're with a con woman, baby. And he received his bank statement in December and noticed the forged checks used to pay the pharmacy and confronted Velma.

And he was like, Listen, if you don't return the money, like, I'm going to have you arrested. Yeah, this is fucked up. And with the relationship effectively over, she Velma ended up going to her son Ronnie's house hoping she could move in with him. But Ronnie was like, You can't like.

I'm living with my wife. And he was like he had an infant child at that point and he was like, the way you are is not conducive to me. Having a happy family life with my little family like, I need to take care of my child and my wife. So hate that both of her kids were put in that position.

But also good for them, good for you guys for putting your family first, like those boundaries and those putting your own little families first is sometimes necessary.

Yeah, and you did the right thing. absolutely absolutely so. like, well done.

But I'm sorry you had to go through that. I can't imagine how distressing that is. Because no matter what, like, it's your family, it's your mom. And then you have to choose, like another part of your family over her. And she should have never put them in that position.

But like, really good for them for recognizing that like that would be starting a cycle. Yeah, that could really turn out bad. And especially to realize that, like in that time period, too, where again, talk therapy wasn't like the biggest thing, yeah.

So that's like, good for them, yeah, but this, you know, this rejection was a big one. Especially her son, which her son that just seems to be a different thing for her.

Yeah, and it was, she went from uncontrolled sobbing to a kind of rage that Ronnie said he had never seen in his mother. And he also was like, Hey, this is exactly why you can't live here, he said. It was a mean, mean look, real angry.

Unlike any I've ever seen before. Wow, and I even literally wrote in my notes, You did the right thing. Ronnie. Yeah, absolutely.

I was like, I need you to know you did the right thing. I would be like, you're proving me right. Yeah, I can't have you near my infant child and my wife doing this like you, you were the you were being the dad, you were taking care of your family.

Good for you, yeah, and Kim did the same thing, and good for Kim being the mom and taking care of her. Shit, hell yeah.

Now, by January 1978, Velma had quit her job and was hospitalized again for a brief period of time without money to pay for anything. She again stole checks from Stewart. Which triggered that panic that he was going to report her, and that familiar panic set in. She was only going to make him sick, she told herself.

Doubt it just long enough for her to replace the money, so he wouldn't find out about the checks. Of course, Velma did not just make Stewart sick she poisoned him with arsenic, just as she had the others. Stewart spent the evening of February 3rd in absolute agony.

And eventually, Velma took him to the hospital, but by then it was too late. Within a few hours, he was pronounced dead. So she killed three people within the same family. That's nuts.

Yeah, like, a couple months apart, yeah, wow, and all for the same reasons.

There's no.

Same trivial. You annoyed me and I stole your money and I was scared you were going to report me. She's fucked.

What is she up to, like? How many people has she killed at this point? She killed her second husband, then her mother.

Then?

Oh my gosh, Dolly, Dolly and Dolly's husband, not Montgomery.

She didn't kill Montgomery. Oh right, so she killed Dolly, she killed John Henry, oh my god, and she's killed Stewart.

Holy shit now. Until Stewart's death, Velma's victims, like we said, had all been kind of sick or elderly. Precisely the type of people you would kind of expect to die from an illness or an accident, or some kind of, you know. Stewart was only 56 years old at the time of his death.

I was just gonna ask. And he was in relatively good health. That's fucking wild now, under the circumstances like under the, you know, I guess, like relatively good health, all things considered about his lifestyle, okay?

Under the.

He wasn't on the pay, like nobody expected him to just drop dead. Yeah, now. Under the circumstances, the family was stunned and confused by his death.

And so they were like, Uh, yeah, we want an autopsy, right? And they were eager for a pathologist to perform one. In fact, they even included Velma in their decision to have the autopsy performed, which she agreed was a good idea. She said. I didn't expect them to find anything.

Besides, my mind was already convincing me that I had not killed Stewart. Girl, you dumped a plate full of fucking arsenic. But she's probably thinking, especially at this time period, how are they going to find it? He was vomiting and diarrhea, it's probably out of his system.

Like, they're not going to find that shit. And it's not like we're as advanced as we are now. So it's like, even now it can be tough to find. Do you know what I mean? Like it can be? It's a tough one.

So she's probably thinking like, what the fuck are they going to find? They're not going to find arsenic? Wow, yeah, I wonder if they wouldn't have.

Well, I don't know what happens. I'm assuming they do, and I don't know if they wouldn't have if she hadn't put so much. I know I'm interested to find that out.

She really goes now. Despite pressure from Stewart's family, the pathologist could only work as fast as his partners in the lab could turn around test results. So the results of the autopsy were delayed by several weeks because they were trying to go through all the strange abnormalities they were discovering during the initial exam. In fact, it wasn't until the pathologist was describing the results to the state's chief medical examiner, Paige Hudson, that things started moving again. While the technicians and pathologists had recognized suspicious elements of the autopsy, it was Hudson who immediately recognized Stewart Taylor's death as acute arsenic poisoning.

Damn Hudson's presumption.

Would take a little more time and a few more tests to confirm. Sorry, I was moving, that's why I was like. But in the meantime, he had called the police and the district attorney to let them know that they very likely had a murder on their hands. Now, following Stewart's murder, Velma fell right back into that cycle of working the overnight shift, then returning home to get lost. And just disassociation. And she did get the occasional visitor. But she was very surprised when the doorbell rang on March 10th. And she opened it to find a man she'd never seen before standing on her doorstep.

The man introduced himself as Benson Phillips, a detective with the Lumberton Police Department. Oh, bitch. And he asked Velma to come down to the station with him to talk about a few suspicious deaths, including that of her latest fiance, Stewart Taylor. Oh, shit.

Now, in the short amount of time since the abnormalities were discovered. In Stewart's autopsy, investigators had traced a path backwards from Velma and found that Stewart was just. The latest in a surprising number of weird deaths that seemed to involve the 45-year-old nurse's age she's only 45. The deaths included the recently deceased Stewart Taylor, Velma's mother Lily, and her former employers. They did include Montgomery and Dolly and John Henry Lee, all having shown signs of gastroenteritis.

Wow, yeah, now. In the interrogation room, Velma acted stunned when the detectives connected the dots between her and the other suspicious deaths. She said Y'all think I poisoned Stewart, don't you? And she started crying and was like, putting on a show.

And the investigators are like, Oh great, she's going to confess right here and there we got her, but she called their bluff and just maintained her innocence throughout the entire conversation. But fortunately, a few days later, the final results from the autopsy came back and confirmed that Stewart had died from arsenic poisoning.

Damn. Detective Phillips took the news to Stewart's family and inform them that they suspected Velma of having killed their father. Sorry, her children thought that that she killed their dad. No, so I should have said that a better way.

I'm sorry, no, that's OK. Stewart had children. Oh, ok, ok, I see.

With his ex-wife. Yeah, I should have stated that a little better, because that would have been confusing. No, that makes sense. And this prompted Stewart's daughter, Alice, to provide the investigators with all the information on the forged checks and Velma's other suspicious behavior in the weeks leading up to Stewart's murder. That's the thing.

It's like you created, like you were saying earlier, a paper trail. And on the evening of March 13th, 1978, Detective Benson returned to Velma's house, this time for a warrant for her arrest for the murder of Stewart Taylor. Yeah. And although investigators were tight lipped about the other deaths Velma was suspected of having caused. Lumberton. North Carolina is a small town and it wasn't hard for the press and locals to put the pieces together. Now, confronted with the evidence against her and the threat of revealing tests being conducted on the exhumed bodies now of her mother and Dolly and Montgomery Edwards.

Oh, wow. Velma confessed that she had indeed murdered Stewart by poisoning. On March 26th, District Attorney Joe Britt presented his case against Velma to the Robson County Grand Jury, who indicted Velma Barfield on one count of first degree murder. But Velma was absent from the courtroom at the time because she was admitted to Dorothea DiX Hospital for a few days for a psychological examination.

A month later, Dr. Bob Rollins, a psychiatrist from the hospital, completed and submitted the results of his examination of Velma, in which she determined that she was competent to stand trial. A month later, on May 5th, Velma was arraigned for the murder in a Robson County courtroom, where she pled not guilty by reason of insanity. As the pieces of the puzzle began coming together in the press. The residents of Lumberton grew increasingly shocked by the number of Velma's victims and the manner in which they were killed. Because, like we said, sometimes you hear poisoning and you think, I think your brain sometimes just goes to like, Oh no, I don't feel well.

And then somebody passes out and dies and it's like, Oh no, this is fucking gruesome. It is an awful, awful, awful way to die. She was a real monster. It's right up there with, like stabbing and like doing awful, like hand to hand.

Shit, be like, it's bad, and she just sat there and watched it happen. That's even worse. One resident told The Charlotte News You just don't expect to have a mass murderer in your town. Which, I mean, valid.

Yeah, accurate, I don't. A friend of Stuart's named Yates, Allen, agreed and told her reporters he was very angry at Velma. He said, for causing a friend of mine to go through what he went through. Certainly, he suffered the tortures of the damned, which I was like, Wow, shit.

But most people simply couldn't wrap their heads around the idea of what they knew as like a pretty kind, helpful woman. Yeah, because again, like she had gotten recommended to work with these elderly people, right? She was, by all accounts, a loving mom, even though like they had a tough childhood. Obviously, right?

I don't think she outwardly was showing a lot of things that would lead anyone to believe she could do this.

They just couldn't believe she had done it and Allen again, said Stuart. In all his life he wouldn't go to church. This one got him going two or three times a week. Wow, she was going to church.

That's the thing I was like, I don't know if that's the flex that you think it is. Because it's like, this serial killer got him going two or three times a week. Like, I don't know what that says about anything, but I feel like maybe we could just leave that to the Byrnes, you know?

I think he was like, damn, like, I don't know what, that this bitch was going to church two or three times a week, I don't.

I don't know, I don't have a comment, but I'm like, damn, damn. Indeed, they were sitting in pews with a serial killer.

That's wild and she's sitting there like talking up a big game, I mean, according to her. And you'll hear she gets saved later in prison. And it's like, I don't believe that, like, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, I think that's such bullshit. You sat and watched people in the most agonizing pain. Yeah, that's fucked. Vomiting up everything in their body, to the point where they were probably vomiting up like actual body fluids that they need to survive.

Crying, sobbing, begging for help, shitting themselves, grasping their stomachs in agony and excruciating pain. 80-year-old women, your own fucking mother, and you're sitting in a pew and telling me, Well, it's fine. Yeah, no, no, I'm sorry.

I don't buy that. And you took people's loved ones away in, like the last years of their lives, where they could have had them longer. You can't do, you can't do what you've done and then tell me that everything's fine. Now, it's like, No, it's not.

And like to kill Lily, too, who, when you were a child, would blame, like silly things that happened on herself, just to try to take it away. It's just, I don't, that doesn't make sense to me, which I'm like, okay, girl. Like, think what you want to think. But like, there's no way that you're getting out of this well, and I just don't understand the like, like.

You're supposed to live by a certain code and then you don't, and then it's okay, you live the furthest away from it. I don't get that, I just don't understand.

No, I don't understand it either. This doesn't make any sense to me. But like, go off. But while the locals struggled with the idea of one of their own having done any of this, the prosecutor's office and Velma's defense team began building their cases. For District Attorney Joe Britt, it was a pretty simple case, a slim dunk.

Velma Barfield was a confessed murderer of at least one, but possibly as many as six, who killed for reasons so trivial as they annoyed her. The victim annoyed her literally. In fact, Britt was so convinced the jury would only see Velma as guilty. He skipped his opening remarks altogether and went right into calling his first witness. He was like, I don't even need to do this from one witness to the next. Joe Britt laid out a narrative where Velma had stolen from her boyfriend in order to get her pills. And then killed him in order to prevent her him from discovering the theft.

It was pretty black and white. As evidence of her misdeeds, Britt produced the four checks Velma had stolen from Stewart, and the defense immediately objected, pointing out that, in order for the checks to be relevant, Britt needed to point out. To prove that Stewart didn't authorize her to sign on his behalf, which they were like, you can't do that, you can't prove that he's not here. And he said, I do not intend to introduce them to the I merely wanted them marked for identification.

And this actually turned out to be Joe Britt's most successful strategy in the courtroom, because he skirted dangerously close to prejudicing the jury. Oh, okay, just a little bit, but it kind of worked. Okay, I mean, in this case, you're like, God, what did you gotta do?

Now, Britt relied on this same tactic a few days later, when he called John Henry and record Lee's daughter Margie Pittman to the stand because she killed Record as well. Right, she did not. No, I don't believe so.

I think she did, I think she killed record after she killed John, because that was the one where they convinced her to stay, right. Yeah, she stayed. But then I think she ended up moving on to that nursing job and moving into the trailer before she could do anything. Oh, okay, okay, sorry.

It gets confusing, there's a lot of people now. Her name is Margie Pittman. They brought her to the stand. And this drew immediate objections from the defense, who argued that Britt was attempting to use evidence from an unrelated crime. Because they're talking about Stewart's murder to prove intent to the murder of Stewart, Taylor and defense attorney Bob Jacobson said Mr.

Britt is trying to try five or six cases here, rather than one, the judge agreed, but allowed Britt to continue presenting evidence from the other cases. As a means of establishing Velma's pattern of intent, which I think is right, I think that's fair now. Arguing in Velma's defense, Bob Jacobson presented an equally simple case to the jury. He said she was raised by an extremely violent man who terrorized the entire household.

And so she went on to develop mental illness and a severe drug addiction in adulthood that caused her to lose control and made her psychotic and violent. So he wasn't arguing that she hadn't murdered Stewart, he was saying she did it in insanity, basically the insanity thing.

Now, Jacobson noted that his client had, like we said, killed Stewart Taylor. But she had done so in a psychotic, manic state and therefore could not be held accountable for her actions. I don't agree now. Moreover, Velma maintained that she had always intended only to make her victims sick. Remember, I was just going to make them sick, right?

Just to buy myself enough time to give back that money. Not true. She never intended to kill them, even though she did it six times the exact same way. That's a thing, and again, that was.

The problem is that Britt had already established that she had done this six times, same outcome every time. So he was like, I don't know about that, yeah. And she actually was on the stand at one point, Velma, they brought her on the stand and she was very combative.

She did not help herself, she came off as a real asshole. So for a case as complicated and emotionally charged as Velma's was, it was pretty surprising because it moved pretty quickly. Once the trial began, on November 27th, 1978, both sides arrested within a week. Wow.

And the jury was also quick to make their decision. They deliberated for a little over an hour and returned a verdict of guilty, and then they deliberated a little more than three hours. Before delivering a recommendation that Velma be executed in the state's gas chamber, now, when the verdict and sentence was delivered, Velma was emotionless. She just sat there.

She was chewing gum just sitting there, but her daughter Kim was sitting a little few rows behind her and just started sobbing. Of course, and I can't even imagine, because it's like she already was dealing with such a strained relationship.

A strained relationship with her mom. And now this comes out, and you find this out, and you find out she killed your grandmother. Oh my God.

I didn't even think of that who you got along with, I didn't even think of that. Yeah, like, what a heavy.

Your grandmother and multiple, like your mother, killed elderly people. yeah, including your grandmother. Wow, yeah.