Death Sentence

Death Sentence

The True Story of Velma Barfield’s Life, Crimes and Execution

Jerry Bledsoe

Copyright

Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com

Copyright © 1998 by Jerry Bledsoe
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For more information, email
[email protected]

First Diversion Books edition May 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-288-8

More from Jerry Bledsoe

Before He Wakes
Bitter Blood
Blood Games

Some names in this book have been changed for privacy’s sake. They are indicated with an asterisk upon first usage.

Prologue

I Only Meant to Make Him Sick

To millions of travelers passing through on Interstate 95, the primary New York-to-Florida highway, Robeson County, North Carolina, seems to be little more than piney woods, marshes and endless fields of corn, tobacco and soybeans. They have no reason to know that they are passing through one of the most unusual counties in America.

For nearly two centuries Robeson’s population has been about evenly divided between blacks, whites and Lumbee Indians. Until the 1960s, doctors’ offices, and train and bus stations in the county had three separate waiting rooms, designated by race, and movie theaters had three different seating areas. Long-simmering racial tensions and high rates of poverty and unemployment gave Robeson an unwanted distinction. It was one of the most violent counties in America.

Until 1974 the county’s murder rate was among the highest per capita in the country year after year. Nobody seemed to know what to do about it until a lanky Robeson County native named Joe Freeman Britt became the county prosecutor.

Britt was offended by lawlessness, especially murder, and he was certain that the people of his county were fed up with it as well. He mounted an offensive against murderers that came to be known as “Britt’s Blitz.” In a twenty-three-month period he won death sentences for more people than resided on the death rows of two-thirds of the states that embraced capital punishment.

At six feet six inches tall, Britt was a man of imposing presence and immense fervor. Many viewed him as an avenging angel, and he sometimes literally played out the role, swooping from the heavens onto crime scenes in his own helicopter.

By 1978, as he entered the final year of his first full term in office, Britt had won twenty-two death sentences and sent twenty-one murderers to death row without losing a case. And the
Guinness Book of World Records
proclaimed him the world’s deadliest prosecutor.

To many, Britt was a hero. One of his admirers and staunch supporters was a young family man in Lumberton, Ronnie Burke, who had lived his entire life in Robeson County. Ronnie firmly believed that a person who with forethought maliciously killed another should pay with his, or her, own life. But he couldn’t have conceived that Britt soon would put his beliefs to a test almost beyond endurance.

Ronnie was married with a three-year-old son, struggling to hold a full-time job while carrying a complete load of college courses. In just two months he was to receive a degree in business from Pembroke State University. He was twenty-six, and although he was a good student who consistently got high grades, getting through college hadn’t been easy. Yet he was determined to become the first on either side of his family to earn a four-year degree.

Monday, March 13, started off sunny and breezy, the air holding the balmy promise of spring. Yellow bells and jonquils were in bloom, and fruit trees were already blossoming. Ronnie had crammed all of his classes into the morning hours so he could work afternoons. After finishing his last class, he hurried to his car, a gray, Navy surplus Dodge Dart station wagon, to drive the fifteen miles from Pembroke to Robeson Technical Institute in Lumberton. Ronnie had started college at Pembroke only to drop out after his first year. Later he enrolled at Robeson Tech to study business and had been valedictorian of his class before returning to Pembroke for the final year of his education. Now he worked at Robeson Tech in the student financial aid office.

As he drove to the campus, a collection of modern brown brick buildings in a greensward alongside Interstate 95, Ronnie was looking forward to the day when he wouldn’t have to be rushing to class by seven each morning, when he wouldn’t have to study until after midnight each night, when he could get more than a few hours’ sleep at a time. He could picture himself in cap and gown, striding across the stage to receive his diploma. His mother, he knew, would be in the audience. It was she, after all, who had always stressed the importance of education, who had always pushed him to study hard and make something of himself.

Ronnie had only been at work a short time when the telephone rang about two. “I’m a friend of your mother’s,” said a woman who didn’t identify herself. “I’ve heard she’s going to be arrested today. I thought you ought to know.”

Startled, Ronnie asked, “Are you sure?”

“Yes, they’re going to charge her with Stuart’s death.”

“How do you know?”

“I know somebody who works in the sheriff’s department.”

Despite his shock, Ronnie hadn’t been without warning that something like this could happen. Now he realized that he shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss what his mother had told him two days earlier.

He had been visiting his in-laws Saturday morning when his mother called, nervous and upset. The police had come the evening before and asked her to go downtown with them, she told him. The first thing that popped into Ronnie’s mind was that she had been writing bad checks again. She was dependent on prescription drugs and, when they ran out, she had to have them whether she had money or not.

“What did they want?” he asked, though he thought he knew.

“They wanted to talk about Stuart,” she said, surprising him. “They said he was poisoned. They seemed to think I had something to do with it.”

Her words stunned Ronnie. Poisoned? Stuart Taylor, the man his mother had planned to marry in May, had been dead for five weeks. He had been a neighbor of Ronnie’s boss, the president of Robeson Tech.

Ronnie was all too aware that his mother had problems—lots of them—but it was inconceivable that she could deliberately harm somebody. Not Velma Barfield. She made her living caring for others. She had been at Stuart’s side throughout his sickness, had tended him lovingly and had been lauded by his children for it. Clearly, this had to be some kind of misunderstanding.

“Just calm down,” he told her. “I’ll be home in a little while. Come on over and we’ll talk about it then.”

Ronnie lived in a duplex apartment owned by one of his professors off a country road near Lumberton. He took his mother for a walk along that road—Snake Road, it was called, because of the way it wound through the flat countryside. She told him a police officer had stirred her from sleep late Friday afternoon—she worked at a nursing home from eleven at night until seven in the morning and slept during the day. He had told her that he needed her to come downtown to the sheriff’s department to talk about some checks.

It was true, she acknowledged, she had recently written checks without enough money in the bank to cover them. She didn’t know what else to do. She had to have her medicine and she thought she could get the money to the bank in time. Ronnie shook his head at these familiar excuses. But then, she said, the officers had changed direction, telling her that they knew Stuart had been poisoned—they mentioned arsenic.

“I believe they think I had something to do with it,” she said. Clearly, she was offended that anybody could imagine such a thing.

“Well, you didn’t, did you?” Ronnie asked jokingly.

She stopped, turned to him and said, “Son, you know I couldn’t do something like that.”

“I know that,” he said, putting his arm around her. They walked back to his apartment arm in arm.

“Do you think I ought to get a lawyer?” she asked, as she was about to leave.

No, Ronnie told her, there was no point to it. She’d probably heard the last about that. Surely, the police would see that she had nothing to do with any poisoning, and hiring a lawyer would just be an unnecessary expense she couldn’t afford. A bigger concern, he thought, was how she’d get the money to pay off the bad checks she’d written, but he didn’t bring that up.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Everything will be fine.”

He genuinely believed that, too. But he couldn’t stop thinking about what his mother had told him, and to settle his mind, he called Stuart Taylor’s daughter, Alice Storms, to find out what was going on. She seemed cool, reluctant to talk, but she confirmed that an autopsy had revealed that her father had been poisoned. Surely, it must have been from chemicals he’d been using on the farm, Ronnie suggested.

“There is no known use for arsenic on a farm,” he would recall Alice telling him icily.

Still, he knew his mother, knew it was impossible that she could have had any part in poisoning somebody, and he pushed the matter out of his mind until the stunning call Monday afternoon.

After hanging up, Ronnie sat staring at the phone as the implications of what he had heard sank in. His concern was not that his mother could have committed murder—he knew that couldn’t be so—but what effect such an accusation could have on her. He knew how fragile she was. He was all too aware of what depression and the drugs her doctors had so willingly prescribed had done to her since his father’s death nine years earlier. His first thought was that he had to straighten this out quickly to prevent his mother from falling into despair and perhaps trying once again to kill herself.

Ronnie informed his supervisor that he needed to attend to family problems and drove downtown to the courthouse. His anger grew with each mile, and by the time he got to the Robeson County Sheriff’s Department he was ready for a confrontation. He identified himself and asked to speak with the officer who had interviewed his mother.

Wilbur Lovett soon appeared and invited Ronnie into his office. Lovett had spent nearly thirty years with the Lumberton Police Department, had risen to the office of chief before a political falling out had cost him his job. Sheriff Malcolm McLeod had hired him as a detective a couple of years earlier. When Ronnie demanded to know why Lovett was harassing his mother, Lovett replied that nobody was harassing her; she’d only been questioned.

“I heard you are going to arrest her today,” Ronnie said heatedly. “Is that so?”

“We don’t have any plans to arrest her,” Lovett responded. “We do consider her a suspect.”

That was crazy, Ronnie told him, his anger flaring. She wasn’t capable of such a thing. They didn’t know her the way he did. Her “nerves” were bad; she’d been hospitalized because of it many times; she was dependent on prescription medicines; several times she’d attempted suicide.

“You’re going to push her over the edge,” he railed at the detective. “This is going to do it. And you’ll be responsible!”

“This is a homicide investigation,” Lovett told him calmly, “and we have to follow it wherever it takes us.”

Ronnie took a few moments to compose himself.

“Do you really think that she’s a suspect?” he asked, still incredulous.

“Yes, I do.”

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“So you can offer me no proof?”

“That’s right. That’s all I can tell you.”

Ronnie was still angry when he left the courthouse. He wasn’t sure what to do, but he knew that he had to protect his mother. It was a responsibility he’d borne for longer than he cared to remember. He was always having to extricate her from the fixes she got into, always trying to save her from herself.

The situation obviously was far more serious than he had at first imagined. If the police were about to arrest her—and he was fairly sure that they were—he needed to be there to break the news, to stop her if she attempted to hurt herself.