The Texas Woman Who Was Executed For Killing Three of Five Husbands

Have you heard to story of Betty Lou Beets? She was no doubt plagues with a harder life than most. 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.

Beets seemingly attempted to escape that life by dropping out of high school and getting married. She wed her first husband when she was just 15. During their 16 years together, Beets claims her husband was abusive, and along the she had six kids before he left.

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

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

Beets shot her second husband twice in the back in 1970; she was acquitted after he admitted he had threatened her life first. She unsuccessfully attempted to murder her third husband by running him over in 1978. These were the only two husbands who survived her attempts on their lives and both 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 dead. This was the murder she was sentenced to death for.

Beets was executed by lethal injection on February 24, 2000, in the Huntsville Unit. She was just the second woman executed in the 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, there are many who say she never should have been executed and that it was due to a bad lawyer she was.