Betty Lou Beets would be the second woman sentenced to death in Texas after they reinstated their death penalty. Her crimes? Murdering two of her husbands and burying them in her yard. She would request no final meal and left the world without giving a final statement.
Betty Lou was born Betty Lou Dunevant in Roxboro, North Carolina on March 12, 1937. She would suffer with hearing impairment for her entire life due to a bout of measles as a child. The Dunevants moved to Hampton, Virginia while she was a child. She would later claim that she had been sexually abused by her father. Her mother was institutionalized when she was twelve, leaving the duty of raising her younger sister and brother to fall onto her shoulders.
By the time she was fifteen she had married her first husband, Robert Franklin Branson. Their relationship lasted until 1969, and she had six children. The relationship was strained and very much on and off again until they separated for the last time.
In 1970, Betty Lou married her second husband, Billy York Lane. Their marriage was also strained, and she would end up shooting him twice in the back. She was acquitted after Billy admitted that he had threatened her life first. The two would then remarry. This time the marriage only lasted for a month before the couple separated for the final time.
She would then marry Ronnie Thelkold in 1978. This marriage proved to be no different than her previous two. Though instead of shooting Thelkold, Betty Lou tried to run over him with her car. Their marriage had lasted five years.
In 1980, Betty Lou married her fourth husband, Doyle Wayne Baker. The marriage would only last for 7 weeks. Despite the marriage being fairly short and over, Betty Lou shot Doyle and buried him on her property. His whereabouts would not be discovered for another three years.
On August 6, 1983, Betty Lou reported her fifth husband, Jimmy Don Beets, as missing. At the time they lived near Cedar Creek Lake in Henderson County, Texas. She claimed that she was worried he might have had a boating accident while fishing.
Her son, Robert, later testified that Betty Lou had told him that she planned to kill her husband and that he should leave the home for a few hours. When he returned, he found Jimmy dead on the floor. Betty Lou roped him into helping her bury the body in a wishing well that Jimmy himself had installed for her. The next day they had taken and dumped his heart medication on his boat and abandoned it on the lake.
On August 12, 1983, Jimmy’s boat was found washed ashore near the Redwood Beach Marina. The police, believing he may have fallen overboard and drowned, spent three weeks dragging the lake to search for his body. None was ever found, and the case went cold.
Betty Lou may have gotten away with two murders had she not bragged to a boyfriend that she had killed Jimmy. In 1985, an anonymous tip led the police to reopen the case. Having enough evidence to arrest Betty Lou, they did. They then searched her home and property for any clues as to where the body may be buried. The police found Jimmy’s skeletal remains in the filled-in wishing well. Upon searching the garage, they also found the remains of Doyle Wayne Barker, her fourth husband.
Betty Lou’s defense tried to argue that she had been acting in self-defense after suffering domestic violence. Her second and third husband, along with two of her children, testified against her during court and this through that argument out the window. The prosecutors dubbed her a Black Widow, claiming that it was not self-defense but greed as Jimmy had a $10,000 life insurance policy.
On October 11, 1985, she was found guilty and three days later she was sentenced to death. After ten years of appeals she would be executed by lethal injection on February 24, 2000.
Her daughter, Shirley Furgala, would later go on to retell her mother’s crimes on an episode of Evil Lives Here which aired on September 13, 2020.
References
•https://web.archive.org/web/20181011013823/http://crimefeed.com/2018/02/betty-lou-beets-the-black-widow-who-shot-3-husbands-ran-over-a-fourth/
• https://the-line-up.com/betty-lou-beets-and-buried-memories
• https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/famous-murders/betty-lou-beets/
• https://mycrimelibrary.com/betty-lou-beets-execution/
• https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-executes-betty-lou-beets/
• https://www.nydailynews.com/2017/03/05/black-widow-of-texas-almost-got-away-with-killing-two-husbands-in-1980s/
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Paige Guffey
Just an odd mom obsessed with all things strange, weird, creepy, and true crime. I'm here to share my passion and present to you my research into all things related.
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