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Quick Facts
Offender Status: Executed
MO: Poisoning, familicide
Timespan of Crimes: 1937–1951
Date Apprehended: March 1956
Sentence: 1 count of first-degree murder despite her confessing to 6 murders
Case Status:
Number of Victims: 6
Victims: her mother, two husbands, and three of her children
Location of Crimes: Montgomery, Alabama
Summary of Rhonda Belle Martin’s Crimes
Rhonda Belle Martin confessed in March 1956 to poisoning her mother, two husbands, and three of her children.
Her fifth husband, formerly her step-son, was poisoned like the others, but survived and was left a paraplegic. It was his illness that led authorities to look into the strange deaths surrounding Martin.
She was convicted of murdering fifty-one-year-old Claude Carroll Martin in 1951 by surreptitiously feeding him rat poison and was executed in Alabama’s electric chair on October 11, 1957. She was the last woman executed in Alabama until 2002.
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