Death Sentence; The True Story of Velma Barfield's Life, Crimes and Execution

New York: Dutton, 1998. Third Printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 371, pages. Illustrations. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Inscribed by author on half title page. Pencil erasure residue on half title page. Jerry Bledsoe (born 1941) is an American author and journalist known for several true crime titles based on murders in his native state of North Carolina. His journalism career, which spanned over 20 years, included newspaper work in the North Carolina Cities of Kannapolis, Charlotte, and Greensboro and work at Esquire magazine. Bledsoe also contributes investigative reports to the Rhinoceros Times, including a multi-part series detailing the controversies surrounding the Greensboro Police Department. His first published book was the stock car book The World's Number One, Flat-Out, All-Time Great Stock Car Racing Book published by Doubleday in 1975. His book Bitter Blood was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted as a television movie. Bledsoe established Down Home Press to publish books about North Carolina. Derived from a Kirkus review: Veteran true-crime writer Bledsoe offers a vividly bifurcated portrait of a woman who was by turns a cruel killer and a loving grandmother. Velma Barfield was the first woman in 20 years to be executed in the US when she was given a lethal injection in 1984. She had confessed to killing four people with arsenic. Her path to crime: a series of ailments led to Barfield's addiction to painkillers and sedatives. Often drugged to a stupor, and further afflicted with undiagnosed manic-depressive illness, she grew selfish and shrewish, poisoning her mother as well as her boyfriend and two elderly people who employed her as a caregiver. The second half of Bledsoe's smooth and engrossing narrative depicts the woman who found God after her murder conviction and served while in prison as a spiritual mentor and confidante to other women prisoners. The author's account also evokes the drama of intriguing conflictual characters: Joe Freeman Britt, the near-fanatical prosecutor who obtained her conviction; Jimmy Little and Dick Burr, the lawyers who selflessly volunteered years of work without pay, trying to get Barfield's death sentence overturned.