Arsenic and Devotion

The Crimes and Execution of Velma Barfield

By: Donovan McGuinness

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Paperback | 24 February 2026

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372 Pages

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21.59 x 13.97 x 2.11

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Arsenic and Devotion: The Crimes and Execution of Velma Barfield

On 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.

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