Betty Lou Beets (March 12, 1937 – February 24, 2000) was a murderer executed in the U.S. state of Texas. She was convicted of shooting her fifth husband, Jimmy Don Beets, on August 6, 1983. Early life Born Betty Lou Dunevant to Margaret Louise Smithwick (April 20, 1917 – June 16, 1993) and James Garland Dunevant (September 15, 1912 – February 14, 2003), she was born in Roxboro, North Carolina, on March 12, 1937. Beets was deaf due to a childhood bout with measles, and claimed she was sexually abused by her father. When Beets was a child, the family moved from North Carolina to Hampton, Virginia, where her father was employed as a machinist at the Langley Research Center. Her mother was institutionalized when she was 12 years old, leaving her to take care of her younger sister and brother. Marriages Beets married her first husband, Robert Franklin Branson, at age 15, and according to her supporters, all of her marriages were plagued with sexual abuse and domestic violence, which Beets cited only well after her conviction and sentence of death. Beets had a criminal history prior to her arrest for murder, including public lewdness, and shooting former husband Bill Lane in the side of the abdomen. Married six times, twice to the same man (Bill York Lane), Beets shot Lane twice in the back in 1970; she was acquitted after Lane admitted he had threatened her life first and the two remarried, divorcing again a month later. She later tried to run over her third husband, Ronnie C. Threlkold, with her car in 1978. Both men survived and testified at her murder trial. Crime On August 6, 1983, Beets reported her fifth husband, Jimmy Don Beets, missing from their home near Cedar Creek Lake in Henderson County, Texas. Her son, Robert Branson, later testified that Betty Lou Beets had said that she intended to kill her husband, and told her son to leave the house. On returning to the house two hours later, he found Jimmy Don Beets dead with two gunshot wounds. He helped his mother conceal the body below ground in the front yard of the house, after which Betty Lou Beets telephoned the police. According to her son, Beets put some of Jimmy Don's heart medication in his fishing boat the next day. Branson and Beets then abandoned the boat in the lake. It was