Betty Lou Beets: Abused wife or Black Widow
Betty Lou Beets (Dunevant) was born March 12,1937 to Margaret Louise Smithwick and James Garland Dunevant in Roxboro, North Carolina. At the age of three years old she contracted measles. The disease wreaked havoc on her body and left her deaf.
The family moved to Hampton, Virginia during Betty's childhood. The move was for her father's job at the Langley Research Center. When she was twelve years old, her mother was institutionalized. Her mother being committed left her to care for her younger siblings alone as her father worked. She dropped out of school in 10th grade. Later in life, Betty would claim that she was sexually assaulted by her father and several other people close to the family starting at the age of five.
With all of the responsibility put on her, Betty left home and married at a very young age. At just 15 years old, she married her first husband, Robert Franklin Branson in 1952. Just a year later the couple had a daughter. Betty started claiming the relationship was abusive around the same time as her daughter's birth. The couple separated for a time but reconnected the first time after Betty tried to committed suicide. They went on to have five more children during their marriage and would separate and reconcile many times throughout the relationship. In 1969 Robert left Betty for good and they divorced.
After Robert divorced Betty, she turned to drinking to help her deal with the loneliness and emotional destruction she had been left with. In July of 1970, Betty married her second husband Billy York Lane. This marriage was also abusive and therefore it was short lived. They divorced the same year but continued to fight. At one point, Billy broke Betty's nose. She returned the favor by shooting him in the side. She was arrested and tried for attempted murder for the shooting. The case was dropped due to Billy admitting that he had threatened to kill her before she shot him. During the trial the pair rekindled their relationship and remarried in 1972. The second time around their marriage only lasted a month before Billy walked away for good.
Betty then married her third husband when she was 36 years old. At this point in her life, she knew a few things about men. Betty married Ronnie Threlkold in 1978. The marriage would only last a year. They divorced in 1979 after Betty tried to run over Ronnie with her car. She was arrested and charged in the incident. The year was a rough one for Betty. She was arrested at her job and put in jail for public lewdness as well that year and spent 30 days in jail. But by the end of the year, she was already married to her fourth husband.
At the end of 1979, Betty married Doyle Wayne Baker. Yet again, she was making claims of domestic violence in this marriage as well. By 1981, Betty was telling friends and neighbors that she and Doyle had a huge fight and he took off. She claimed he had left his truck behind and just left. Most people she told this too believed it and to them it explained his disappearance. She claimed to not know his whereabouts or have had any contact with him after he left. This would later prove false.
Less than a year after Doyle disappeared, Betty married for the final time. In August of 1982 she married retired firefighter Jimmy Don Beets. She met Jimmy at the bar she was working at the time. He had stopped in for a drink and she was interested in him immediately. It did not take her long to put him under her spell and they married within nine months. It was not long after they were married that her charms wore off. She soon asked him to build her a wishing well in their front yard. He built it for her not knowing he was building his own grave.
A year later, on August 6, 1983, Betty called police to report her husband missing. At the time, she lived near Cedar Creek Lake in Henderson County, Texas. According to her son, Robert, she had informed him she planned to kill her husband, Jimmy Don Beets, and told him he needed to leave the house. When he returned home after two hours, he found his stepfather deceased from 2 gunshot wounds. He then helped his mother bury the body in the yard. After they hid the body, Betty put some of Jimmy's heart medication in his boat and abandoned it in the lake. Once she felt like she had done a sufficient job at hiding all evidence and staging his disappearance, she made the call to police.
Police started their investigation and took into account that Jimmy's boat was missing. They found the boat 6 days after he was reported missing on August 12, 1983. It had washed ashore near Redwood Beach Marina. It was assumed that he had fallen overboard and drowned. When police located his boat they found his fishing license and his medication in the life jacket on board. The police dragged the lake for three weeks with no sign of Jimmy. At the time of his disappearance, they had only been married six months.
Two years later, in 1985, the Henderson County Sheriff received some information from a confidential informant that stated that Jimmy's disappearance may have been forced and intentional. This information helped police gather enough evidence to arrest Beets for murder. They quickly obtained a search warrant for her property. During the search they found the remains of Jimmy Don Beets buried in a filled in wishing well. They also located the remains of her fourth husband Doyle Wayne Baker. He had been buried in the garage. Beets was never charged for Baker's murder, though both men had been shot with a .38 caliber pistol.
Trial began on July 11, 1985. Beets plead not guilty saying that she had not committed the murder, that in fact 2 of her children had committed the murder. On October 11, 1985, she was found guilty of the murder of Jimmy Don Beets and was sentenced to death three days later. During the trial, not one piece of evidence was shown to prove any kind of abuse towards her at the hands of her husband. After multiple appeals throughout the late 80's and early 90's, she was put to death by lethal injection on February 24, 2000, at the age of 62.
