A Maryland woman dubbed the “Black Widow” for murdering two husbands and a boyfriend for insurance money is now free after President Joe Biden commuted her 40-year prison sentence, undercutting the White House’s claim that Biden released only “non-violent” offenders in a clemency bonanza last week.
Among the 1,500 federal convicts granted clemency was Josephine Virginia Gray, who was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2002 for insurance fraud schemes connected to the murders of three men between 1974 and 1996. Gray was resentenced to the same amount of time again in 2006 following a series of appeals.
Gray, who collected $165,000 from the three insurance settlements, was charged with murder by Maryland state authorities but ultimately convicted in federal court in 2002 for insurance fraud for violating what’s known as the “slayers rule,” which prohibits killers from receiving inheritance and insurance proceeds from their victims’ death. Witnesses at Gray’s various trials accused her of using intimidation tactics—including threats of voodoo—to coerce them into remaining silent. “It was the witchcraft, mostly,” Lenron Goode, the brother of Gray’s third victim, told the Washington Post in 2002.
Gray did not face a murder trial in state court after Maryland’s state attorney said her hefty federal sentence “ensures she will die in prison.”
The COVID-19 pandemic allowed Gray—and the rest of Biden’s clemency recipients—to serve out their sentences in home confinement. Now, Biden has freed Gray altogether in what the White House called the “largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history.” Biden, in order to correct historical “injustices,” granted clemency to those “convicted of non-violent crimes who were sentenced under outdated laws, policies, and practices that left them with longer sentences than if the individuals were sentenced today,” the White House said.
But Gray’s body count “puts the lie to [Biden’s claim that] these are non-violent offenders,” according to a former federal prosecutor who handled her case.
“It pisses me off, as you can imagine,” James Trusty, who prosecuted Gray as assistant U.S. attorney in Greenbelt, Md., told the Washington Free Beacon.
“This doesn’t feel like a ‘rule of law’ moment for the Biden administration,” said Trusty, who said he learned of Gray’s commuted sentence after receiving a notification of Biden’s action through an alert on the court docket for Gray’s case.
Indeed, Biden has faced intense blowback over his selection of pardon and clemency recipients over the past few weeks. Biden pardoned his son Hunter on Dec. 2 ahead of his sentencing for tax evasion and felony gun charges, reneging on his repeated promises not to do so.
In his mass-clemency spree, Biden commuted the 17.5-year prison sentence of William Conahan, a former Pennsylvania judge who sent more than 2,000 juveniles to prison as part of what’s been called the “Kids for Cash” kickback scheme. Gov. Josh Shapiro (D.) said Biden was “absolutely wrong” to commute Conahan’s sentence given the shocking nature of his crimes. The mother of one of Conahan’s victims has blamed the judge for her son’s suicide.
Biden also commuted prison sentences for a Mississippi cancer doctor who diluted chemotherapy drugs as part of a Medicare fraud scheme, an Illinois comptroller who embezzled $53 million in the biggest municipal fraud case in the nation’s history, and the 15-year sentence of Wendy Hechtman, a former journalist convicted of manufacturing and selling a drug considered more potent than fentanyl. An Omaha police detective who investigated Hechtman said her drug operation was suspected in at least six overdose deaths. That investigation “now feels wasted,” Chris Perna, the Omaha investigator, told the Free Beacon.
Gray, now 78 years old, is the first Biden clemency recipient found so far to have been directly involved in murder or any other violent criminal activity.
According to prosecutors, Gray admitted to a friend in 2000 that she “had killed both her husbands and another gentleman.” Gray told her friend that she shot her first husband, Norman Stribbling, and left his body on the side of a road to make it look like a robbery. Gray confessed that she killed her second husband, Robert Gray, with “help” from her boyfriend. That man, Clarence Goode, would be the Black Widow’s third victim. Gray told her friend “she had to get rid of” Goode because he threatened to blackmail her over Robert Gray’s murder.
Police found Goode’s blood stains at Gray’s house and a 9mm bullet casing that matched the one used in the murder.
According to prosecutors, Gray schemed to have all three of her victims designate her as the beneficiary of their life insurance policies and then murdered them to receive benefits after their deaths. Gray tried to take out an insurance policy on a fourth man, Andre Savoy, whom she promised to buy a Mustang GT with proceeds from the Goode insurance settlement. Savoy testified at Gray’s trial that she admitted to murdering Robert Gray, her second husband, after sneaking into his house dressed as a man.
For Trusty, the former Gray prosecutor, questions remain about Biden’s process for granting relief to a career criminal whose life story he’s said was “written in the blood of three men who loved Josephine Gray.”
“What in God’s name created the impetus to help her?”
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