Five Women Serial Killer Profiles Read Online Free PDF Page A

heart complications.
    Less than a year after her marriage, Velma was a widow again and seemed inconsolable.

Widowhood
    Velma continued taking her pills trying to keep the depression she felt at bay. A sympathetic manager at Belks department store gave her a job. Adding to her depression was her son Ronnie’s draft into the US army who had ordered him to report to Fort Jackson in South Carolina. The Vietnam War was in full swing, and the nation’s youth were being sent to fight a war in a country most had never heard of and for reasons they didn’t fully comprehend.
    Velma finally got the sack from her job because of her obvious drug addiction and to top it all off, her house burned down again. Velma was practically hysterical wanting to know why all these dreadful things kept happening to her. Once more, Velma and her daughter moved back in with her parents’, Murphy and Lillie. Shortly after moving back in, her father was diagnosed with lung cancer and died at the age of sixty-one.
    In March of 1972, Velma forged a prescription and was arrested. She pled guilty and received a fine and a suspended sentence. Life with her mother was not going well. Her mother was demanding and was constantly complaining about Velma’s pill taking. The two women seemed to quarrel incessantly. Her daughter Kim, meanwhile, had married her boyfriend Dennis and had moved into a trailer home.
    Ronnie had been discharged from the army and had married.
    In the summer of 1974, Velma’s mother, Lillian, became ill with severe nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting and was hospitalized. The doctor’s put the cause down to a virus, and Lillian returned home.
    About two months after this incident , a man who Velma had been dating died in a car accident. He had made Velma the beneficiary of his life insurance, and she received $5,000.
    Meanwhile, just before Christmas, Lillian was fretting about a letter she had received from a finance company informing her that a loan was overdue on her car. She had not taken out a loan on her car and was mystified as to why she had received the letter. Her youngest son told her not to worry ; it was most probably a bureaucratic mistake.
    On December 30th, 1974, just after a large family Christmas , Lillian became ill with the same symptoms she had displayed earlier in the year. Only this time, they were considerably more severe, and she was in agonizing pain. Olive, Velma’s older brother, called for an ambulance, and Velma accompanied her mother to Fayetteville’s Cape Fear Valley Hospital. Lillian died two hours after arriving at the hospital. An autopsy was performed after obtaining permission from the family including Velma, but the doctors were unable to diagnose Lillian’s fatal illness. No toxicological screenings were carried out.
    In 1975, Velma was arrested for writing fraudulent checks. The judge sentenced her to prison for six months, but she served only three. When she was released, she stayed with her daughter Kim whilst looking for work. Velma was still heavily addicted to pills which concerned Kim greatly; she visited Velma's doctors urging them to stop prescribing pills for her mother, all to no avail.
    In 1976, Velma got a job looking after an elderly couple, Montgomery and Dollie Edwards, in their comfortable, brick, ranch house in Lumberton. The Edwards’ agreed to pay Velma $75 a week, in addition to room and board. Montgomery was an incontinent bedridden ninety-four-year-old. Both of his legs had been amputated, and he was blind. Dollie was eighty-four and a cancer survivor who was in far better shape than her husband. Velma, still a regular church goer, began attending the First Pentecostal Church near the Edwards’ house. During Velma’s stay at the Edwards’ house, she met Dollie’s nephew, Stuart Taylor, on several occasions. He told Velma he was in the midst of a divorce.
    Montgomery died in January of 1977, and Velma stayed on to help Dollie. The two women began to argue. Dollie