Rhonda Belle Martin

A 49-year-old waitress in Montgomery, Alabama, Martin confessed during March 1956 to the arsenic murders of her mother , two of her five husbands, and three of her own children. Husband number five had been more fortunate than his predecessors, surviving the dosage that left him paralyzed from the waist down, confined to a hospital in Biloxi, Mississippi. Under questioning, Rhonda was vague on her motive for the string of killings, but detectives learned that she collected insurance money on each of the victims in turn. (She denied the slaying of two other children, whose deaths were also the subject of investigation.) She received the death sentence and was executed in the electric chair on October 11, 1957. She stands as the last woman executed in Alabama.