Will This Become the Cause of the Week?A black woman who
claims she is innocent is scheduled to be executed this week for killing her husband and two children in 1988.
The article seems to paint a picture of an innocent woman at the beginning:
Tears well in her eyes when Frances Newton talks about her children.
"I wonder how they would have turned out," she says, her voice wavering. "Would they be happy, well-adjusted kids?"But read to the end and you'll quickly see that she's a cold-blooded killer:
The cheap .25-caliber handgun determined to be the murder weapon was found in a bag Newton placed in an abandoned house that belonged to her parents. Newton said she found it in a drawer at home and hid it to keep her husband from getting into trouble. Adrian Newton had a drug history, and the couple was having marital problems.
The cousin with Newton when they arrived told police about the bag she saw Newton conceal.
The blue dress Newton was wearing had possible gunpowder residue on it. The trace of nitrites, however, came from fertilizer rubbed on her dress by her daughter, who stayed with relatives during the day while she worked at a tax accounting office, Newton said. Her uncle had a large garden, where he used fertilizer, and toddler Farrah would have collected it on her shoes, she said.
Attorneys have been unable to conduct additional tests because the clothing was contaminated when it was stored unprotected with other evidence, and because the initial testing destroyed that part of the fabric.
Three weeks before the deaths, Newton took out $50,000 life insurance policies on herself, her husband and her daughter. She named herself as beneficiary, and signed her husband's name. She said later that she didn't want her husband to know she had been saving money for the policies because he would have wanted the cash. After their deaths, she says at the urging of her insurance agent, she applied to receive the policy benefits.
