Hubby digs his own grave
BETTY LOU BEETS, 46, had an ornamental wishing well in her yard near Gun Barrel City, Tex. She used it as a place to plant some begonias, a few petunias — and one husband. Days before she killed him, Betty had begged her fifth spouse, retired Dallas Fire Department Capt. Jimmy Beets, also 46, to build the well to beautify the property that held her trailer home.
Beets cheerfully went about the task, unaware he was digging his own grave.
He was also blissfully ignorant of Betty’s true motive when she insisted some time earlier that he build a shed on the property. She told him it was needed to store stuff that was cluttering the house.
Its real purpose was to conceal the final resting place of husband No. 4, Doyle Barker. When Barker vanished in 1981, Betty told friends and neighbors that the couple had had a fight and he took off, leaving his truck behind, wrote Irene Pence in a book on the case, “Buried Memories.”
Betty reported Capt. Beets missing on Aug. 6, 1983, saying he had gone night fishing and never came home. About a week later, people spotted his boat drifting in a lake, empty. Nitroglycerin tablets scattered at the bottom of the boat suggested that he had had a heart attack and fallen into the water.
Most people bought both stories, but there were skeptics.
“Every time we would walk by their place, my dog would run straight to that wishing well and stand there and bark,” one neighbor told the Dallas Morning News.
Betty may well have gotten away with killing two husbands had it not been for a few errors in judgment. For one, she got drunk and bragged about the killings to a new boyfriend.
Second, she turned her children into accomplices, telling them about her plans and forcing them to help her hide the bodies. Then there was the matter of the $10,000 life insurance policy she had taken out on Beets without his knowledge.
Some acquaintances called her a “good old gal,” but among those who knew her well, few were surprised that her final two marriages ended in murder. Violence had marred all five of her unions.
The notorious Black Widow of Texas was born in 1937 in North Carolina, the daughter of an alcoholic tobacco farmer. Betty would later accuse her father and other male relatives of sexual assault.
Her first marriage, to Robert Branson, lasted from 1952, when she was 15, to 1969, and produced six children.
By 1970, the shapely bottle blond had snared another man, Billy Lane. It was stormy from the start — he once broke her nose — and they split less than a year later.
After the divorce, Lane appeared one night at Betty’s house. Her story is that he saw her at a bar with another man, flew into a rage, followed her home and threatened to kill her.
His story was that she had called him and begged him to come over. When he got there, she pulled a gun.
Whatever the reality, Lane ended up with a couple of bullets in him. Betty told police he had come raging to her door and she had no choice but to take a few shots, in self-defense. They didn’t buy her story and arrested her.
Then, in a bizarre twist, Lane volunteered to sign an affidavit saying that her story — that he had threatened her — was the real one. She pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, misdemeanor aggravated assault.
And then, even weirder, he asked her to marry him — again.
The wedded bliss rerun lasted one month.
In 1973, Betty, who had been working in a topless bar, found another husband, salesman Ronnie Threlkeld. Her attempt to run him over with her car may have had something to do with the dissolution of the marriage, which lasted about five years.
Within a few months of Threlkeld’s escape, Betty was Texas two-stepping down the aisle with Barker. He mysteriously vanished about a year later.
Before Barker’s murder, she had told one of her married daughters, Shirley Thompson, of her plan. After the deed was done, Betty called Shirley and demanded that she help her bury the body in the yard.
Eight months later, she exchanged vows again, this time with Beets. When she shot him dead, she recruited her son, Robby Branson, to help hide the body and set his boat out floating on the lake to make it look like an accident.
It would take two years before investigators got the tip that led them to Betty’s yard. They found the skeletal remains of the missing men, both tucked into identical blue sleeping bags. Barker was under the shed and Beets was in the planter.
True to form, Betty tried to shift the blame to her children, but the strategy didn’t work. They testified against her at her trial for the murder of Beets. She was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1985.
Appeals dragged on for years. Antideath penalty activists, including Sister Helen Prejean, author of “Dead Man Walking,” insisted that Betty was a battered woman and that she deserved to live. But appeals and protests flopped.
With a smile on her face, the 62-yearold great-grandmother went silently to her execution by lethal injection on Feb. 24, 2000. She made no request for a last meal and uttered no final words.