A Prison Door To Eternal Life

A Prison Door To Eternal Life

The media dubbed her “the grandmother next door.”

VELMA BARFIELD was born in rural North Carolina in October 1932. As the oldest daughter, she became the target of her drunken father’s abuse for trying to protect her younger siblings.

“A lot of those times I wanted to talk to somebody about all the bad feelings going on inside me, like all the anger and resentment,” Velma recalled. “I didn’t know who could do anything about it, anyhow. I just kept pushing it deeper inside.” No one in the community knew what life was like in their home.

When she was seventeen, Velma escaped the horror at home by eloping with a young man from church. During the next four years she had a son and a daughter and experienced happiness for the first time in her life.

Then life began to fall apart. Hospitalized after an accident caused by a drunk driver, Velma suffered her first bout of depression. About the same time, her husband began to drink and became abusive. Velma supported their family by working two full-time jobs. Worn down by stress and lack of sleep, she suffered a nervous breakdown in 1968.

Velma found some relief from the pain and shame that had hounded her from childhood through the drugs the doctors prescribed for her depression. Soon she was addicted to prescription tranquilizers and painkillers and supported her habit by fraud, hiding the drugs and her pain from everyone. Only her children suspected she had a problem.

Then on March 13, 1978, Velma Barfield, “the grandmother next door,” confessed to poisoning the man she hoped to marry. Later it was revealed that she had murdered three others as well, all with arsenic. Although aware that each had died, in her drug-induced fog, Velma could only remember wanting painful people to go away.

Coming off drugs nearly killed her during the five months of solitary confinement while she awaited trial, and Velma was at the bleakest point of her life. Her one thought was, I want to die.

Outside Velma’s cell a guard regularly listened to a Christian radio station. One night an evangelist invited everyone who could hear his voice to accept the forgiveness of Jesus Christ.

Velma later said, “The horror of my life, ever since childhood, had been unbearable. . . . But the marvelous revelation was that God knew that. He knew that I was helpless without Him. And that’s why He sent His only Son. Jesus was blameless, paid the penalty for me because I couldn’t. . . . I couldn’t undo my grievous sins. I couldn’t bring those people back to life. It was too late to go back. But I realized at that time that I could go forward.”

Going forward was not easy, even with Christ. Velma was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. The next five years of appeals and stays of execution were a time appointed by God for the redemption of many. Velma joined a prison Bible study and led many young women to Christ. She corresponded with hundreds of people from death row and wrote her autobiography, testifying to the transforming power of God.

But God did not choose to stop her execution. Anne Graham Lotz, Billy Graham’s daughter, had become a close friend of Velma’s and later wrote, “I witnessed the execution of my dearly beloved sister in Christ on November 2, 1984, comforted by the knowledge that physical death is no interruption to a believer’s relationship with Jesus Christ. It is merely a stepping over from a relationship based on faith, to one of sight. Velma Barfield, with peace and tranquility on her face, her lips moving in silent prayer, closed her eyes in death at 2:15 A.M., while opening them to the face of her beloved Savior and Lord for all eternity.”

Reflection

The apostle Paul had participated in the murder of Stephen, yet he became the leader of the New Testament church. God specializes in saving those who need him the most.

For I am the least of all the apostles, and I am not worthy to be called an apostle after the way I persecuted the church of God. But whatever I am now, it is all because God poured out his special favor on me.

1 Corinthians 15:9-10