and a relative of Dollie Edwards. Fearing he had discovered that she had been forging checks on his account, Barfield mixed an arsenic-based rat poison into his beer and tea. Edwards died on February 3, 1978, while she was "trying to nurse him back to health"; an autopsy found arsenic in Taylor's system. After her arrest, the body of Jennings Barfield was exhumed and found to have traces of arsenic, a murder that Barfield denied having committed. Although she subsequently confessed to the murders of Lillian Bullard, Dollie Edwards, and John Henry Lee, she was tried and convicted only for the murder of Taylor. Singer-songwriter Jonathan Byrd is the grandson of Jennings Barfield and his first wife. His song "Velma" from his Wildflowers album gives a personal account of the murders and investigation. Imprisonment and execution Barfield was imprisoned at Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina, in an area for escape-prone prisoners and mentally ill prisoners, as there was no designated area for women under death sentences at the time and she was the state's only female death row inmate. A death row unit for female inmates in North Carolina was subsequently established at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women. During her stay on death row, Barfield became a devout Christian. Her last few years were spent ministering to prisoners, for which she received praise from Billy Graham. Barfield's involvement in Christian ministry was extensive enough that an effort was made to obtain a commutation to life imprisonment. A second basis for the appeal was the testimony of Dorothy Otnow Lewis, Professor of Psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine and an authority on violent behavior, who claimed that Barfield suffered from dissociative identity disorder. Lewis testified that she had spoken to Barfield's other personality, "Billy", who told her that Velma had been a victim of sexual abuse, and that he, Billy, had killed her abusers. The judge was unconvinced. "One of them did it," Lewis quoted him as saying "I don't care which one." After Barfield's appeal was denied in federal court, she instructed her attorneys to abandon a further appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Barfield was executed on November 2, 1984, at Central Prison. She released a statement before the execution: "I know that everybody has gone through a lot of pain, all the families connected, and I am sorry, and I want to thank