R.J. Parker: The Serial Killer Compendium

Wondering what else she’d lied about or done, John gave the police several of the vitamin pills that Judias had been giving him back in 1982. Examination of these pills showed that they contained Para formaldehyde, a poison with no known medical uses. However, the prosecution office in Florida declined to file charges of attempted murder for lack of sufficient evidence, but they later obtained a warrant to search her home.

On July 27, one month after the car explosion, court officers, federal agents, and police, searched Judias’ home in Gulf Breeze where they collected tape and wire from her bedroom that appeared to match components that had been used in the car bomb device. With further investigating, they linked Judias by way of phone records to the source where she purchased the dynamite in Alabama. She was arrested and charged with attempted murder. Lo and behold, she was released on bail.

The investigation continued before her trial, meanwhile, and on January 14, 1984, Judias was indicted for one count of murder in the death of her son, with a supplementary count of grand theft for the insurance frauds. Upon her arrest that evening, she had a dramatic fit of convulsions and wound up in Santa Rosa Hospital under security.

Once the authorities got started, they dug through Judias’ past and uncovered all sorts of mischief. Bobby Joe Morris’ body was exhumed on February 11, and further testing revealed arsenic in his remains. Judias was sentenced to life without parole for the first twenty-five years, but it did not stop there for the investigators. In Florida, in July, just a short few weeks after being sentenced, authorities exhumed the body of her late boyfriend, one Gerald Dossett. Unfortunately, there were no signs of arsenic and therefore no charged filed in that particular case. The body of James Goodyear was also then disinterred on March 14, which showed results of arsenic poisoning.

Judy went to trial for the murder of husband James Goodyear. A week was devoted to the trial, with Judy denying any criminal activity. The jurors, however, weren’t buying into her act, and convicted her yet again of first-degree murder, sentencing her to die by electrocution on March 30, 1998 at 7 a.m.

Early Monday morning on March 30, Judy showered and was dressed by female correctional officers. Her head was shaved to ensure a good electrical conduit – and so that her hair did not catch fire during the electrocution. She entered the execution chamber at 7 a.m. accompanied by several guards. She was strapped into the large oak chair at her wrists, waist, chest, and legs. When asked if she had a final comment, she replied "No sir," and kept her eyes shut tight. A leather mask was placed over her head, covering her face and, at the signal from the warden, the automatic electrocution cycle commenced at 7:08 a.m. She was pronounced dead at 7:13 a.m.

Christine Falling

Christine Falling was born to a poor family on March 12, 1963, in Perry, Florida. She was considered obese and slow. In order to control her epileptic seizures, she needed regular doses of medication. At a very early age, she was known to drop cats from deadly heights to "test their nine lives.” As a way of showing affection to the cats, she would strangle them. This was all before the age of nine, at which time Christine and her sister were placed in a children's shelter in Orlando, Florida, for a year.

At the young age of only fourteen, Falling married a man who was in his twenties, and their marriage lasted just six weeks. The couple would fight violently, and Falling would often throw things at her husband, including, once, a twenty-five pound stereo. Upon splitting up, she visited the hospital constantly – upwards of 50 times – complaining of vaginal bleeding, snakebites, etc., and the doctors found nothing to treat. It was quite evident that she was going through a hypochondriac stage.

Christine would babysit for family and neighbors in order to make money. On February 25, she was babysitting Cassidy Johnson, aged two, who had to be taken to the hospital where she was diagnosed with encephalitis, and died just three days later. The autopsy, however, revealed that the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. When asked, Christine said that the baby had passed out and fallen out of her crib, but the doctor did not believe her story and contacted the police to investigate. The note to the police, however, somehow got lost; the incident was not looked into, and the parents were not apprised of the coroner’s report.

Shortly after that incident, Falling moved to Lakeland, Florida and another job babysitting when, all of a sudden, four-year-old Jeffrey Davis stopped breathing while in her care. The autopsy conducted showed symptoms of myocarditis, a heart problem which is seldom critical. While the family of little Jeffrey was attending his funeral, Christine was hired to babysit two year old Joseph Spring, Jeffrey Davis’s cousin. While at the funeral for Jeffrey, little Joseph died suddenly that afternoon in his crib, apparently while taking a nap. The physician’s indicated there was a viral infection that may have killed little Joseph, and noted that it was quite possible for the same virus to have killed Jeffrey too.

“It’s hard to believe the connections were not made at this point in my opinion.”

William Swindle, seventy-seven, died in his kitchen in July of 1981 on his caretaker’s first day on the job. You guessed it: Christine Falling had switched from babysitting to housekeeping.

A short while after that, Christine and her stepsister took her eight-month-old niece for a standard vaccination. After leaving the doctor’s office, the stepsister ran into the store, leaving Christine alone with the baby. When she came back to the car, the little eight month old had stopped breathing.

It was not until July 2, 1982, when little ten week old Travis Coleman was smothered that the police began to pay attention. The autopsy report on Coleman showed internal ruptures caused by suffocation. Immediately following the autopsy report, Falling was taken for questioning where she admitted to killing three babies by, in her words, “smotheration.”

"The way I done it, I seen it done on TV show," she explained. "I had my own way, though, simple and easy. No one would hear them scream."

Christine Falling was given a life sentence with no chance of parole possible for twenty-five years.

Caril Ann Fugate and

Charles Starkweather (Couple)

Charles Starkweather, known as "Chuck" or "Charlie" to his friends and family, was born in 1938. Caril Ann Fugate was born in 1943. At the age of fourteen, in 1956, she was in love with Charlie who was five years her senior.

Starkweather had a speech impediment and was often made fun of in school, getting into many fights. He did not do well in school, but excelled in gym where he released his pent-up rage and frustration. He dropped out of high school in his senior year and went to work in a newspaper warehouse, which he later quit to work as a garbage collector and used his route to plan robberies. His first robbery was at the Crest Service Station in Lincoln on December 1, 1957, where he held Robert Colvert, twenty-one, at gunpoint, robbed him of $100, abducted him, and then took him to a secluded location where he shot him in the head.

In 1958, the massacres commenced. It was on January 21, 1958, that Caril Ann returned from school to her family’s one story house in the poor Belmont section of Lincoln, Nebraska. Apparently, after an argument with Starkweather, Marion Bartlett, fifty-seven, Caril’s father, and her mother, Velda Bartlett, thirty-six, were shot in the head. Betty Jean, Caril’s two and a half years old sister, was strangled and stabbed to death in her bed. Following the murders, the couple simply made sandwiches and had lunch together.