Arsenic and Devotion: The Crimes and Execution of Velma Barfield

Arsenic and Devotion: The Crimes and Execution of Velma BarfieldOn November 2, 1984, Velma Barfield became the first woman in American history to be executed by lethal injection, and the first woman executed in the United States in twenty-two years. She had poisoned at least seven people across nearly a decade, including her own mother, two elderly patients in her professional care, and the man she lived with, using arsenic-based rat poison she administered in food and drink while simultaneously attending to her victims with every outward appearance of devoted care.Arsenic and Devotion: The Crimes and Execution of Velma Barfield is the definitive account of one of the most psychologically complex criminal cases in American history. Moving from the grinding poverty of the Carolina Piedmont through the benzodiazepine epidemic of the 1970s, the structural failures of the home care industry, and the extraordinary political theatre of the most expensive Senate race in American history, Donovan McGuinness reconstructs not just a series of murders but the social, medical, and institutional conditions that made them possible, and the machinery of justice that ultimately chose to respond with execution rather than understanding.Part true crime, part forensic history, part indictment of the systems that failed both the victims and the perpetrator, this is a book about what happens when a damaged life meets a broken world. Donovan McGuinness is an Irish writer and scholar whose work sits at the intersection of criminal justice history, forensic sociology, and narrative nonfiction. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin and University College Cork, where he completed postgraduate research on institutional violence and the sociology of punishment, he has written extensively on the history of capital punishment, the criminology of domestic homicide, and the structural conditions that enable predatory behaviour within systems of care. His writing has appeared in Irish and international publications covering law, history, and public affairs, and he has lectured on criminal justice history at institutions in Ireland and the United Kingdom.McGuinness is drawn to cases in which individual criminal histories illuminate larger failures of medicine, law, and social policy - cases where the question of what a person did is inseparable from the question of what the world they inhabited made possible. He approaches true crime not as spectacle but as a form of forensic social history, one that takes seriously both the agency of those who cause harm and the institutional conditions that enable and conceal it.