Career
Gibbs" husband of 18 years, Charles Clayton Gibbs, 39, died January 21, 1966. She inherited $31,000 from their deaths and tithed 10 percent to her church. On October 28, 1967, Roger"s month-old son Ronnie Edward Gibbs also died under suspicious circumstances.
Despite the unusual coincidences of so many deaths in such a short period of time, she blocked insurance adjusters" requests for autopsies.
Although insurance adjusters were suspicious, most of Gibbs" neighbors and friends from church could not believe that the 35-year-old mother and former farmer"s wife who ran a day-care center could be a killer. The autopsy found fatal levels of arsenic in the young man"s body.
The court ordered the rest of her family exhumed and each was found to have been murdered. She admitted methodically feeding rat poison to her family one victim at a time, but did not give a motive.
In February 1968 she was found to be insane and served time in a state mental hospital until 1976.
She remained on parole and was required to check in once per year due to her deteriorating condition. She used a wheelchair and lived in a nursing home in Douglasville, Georgia until her death on February 7, 2010.
