Betty Lou Beets: From Victim To Convicted Husband Killer

Have you heard to story of convicted murderer Betty Lou Beets? The Texas woman who killed at least three of her husbands and was suspected of even more killings.

Ms. Beets' life was hard. At the age of three, she lost her hearing after contracting measles. When she was 12, her mother was institutionalized, and after that, she was forced to take care of her siblings and her sexually abusive father.

Betty Lou Beets: From Victim To Convicted Husband Killer

Beets, seemingly in an attempt to escape that life, dropped out of high school at the age of fifteen and got married. During that 16-year marriage, Beets claims her husband was extremely abusive. That marriage produced six kids before he left them.

From there, Betty Lou was remarried five times (to four different men, one she married twice), and of her five total husbands, only two survived.

In 1970, Beets shot her second husband twice in the back; she was acquitted after he admitted he had threatened to kill her first.

Later, in 1978, she attempted to murder her third husband by running him over. She was not successful in that attempt. Wildly, these two men were the only two husbands who survived being married to her. Both later testified at her trial.

For the murder of her fifth husband, Beets enlisted the help of her son. He helped his mother conceal the body after she shot him to death. For this murder, she was sentenced to death.

After a decade of unsuccessful appeals, Beets was sentenced again to death in November of 1989. Her case then wound through the Federal courts for another ten years before she received a lethal injection at Huntsville in February of 2000. - crimereads.com

Beets was executed by lethal injection on February 24, 2000, in the Huntsville Unit. She was just the second woman executed in Texas after the reintroduction of the death penalty.

At the time of the execution, she was 62 years old and had five children, nine grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

To this day, many say she never should have been executed and that it was only due to a bad lawyer that she was.