The Wishing Well

Betty Lou Beets was 46 and living on Cedar Creek Lake in Henderson County, Texas, when her fifth husband disappeared. Jimmy Don Beets was a retired Dallas fire captain. On August 6, 1983, she told police he had gone out on the water and not come back. His boat was found adrift with his things still aboard.

Divers searched the lake for weeks and found nothing. In 1985 a tip sent investigators back with a warrant. Jimmy Don’s body lay under a decorative wishing well in the front yard, shot twice in the head with a .38-caliber pistol. A second grave beneath a storage shed held her fourth husband, Doyle Wayne Barker, missing since 1981. Ballistics tied both killings to one gun seized from the property in an unrelated case. Her son testified that he helped bury Jimmy Don, and her daughter said she helped with Barker.

In October 1985 Beets was convicted of murder for remuneration, the finding that made the case a capital one, because she stood to collect roughly $100,000 in life insurance along with his fire department pension. Her lawyers later argued that her trial attorney had a conflict after taking media rights to her story, and that years of abuse explained what she did. The Fifth Circuit rejected the conflict claim in 1995. She was executed on February 24, 2000, at 62.