James Richardson, The Man Wrongfully Arrested For His Children’s Murder
Public DomainJames Joseph Richardson’s mugshot after his wrongful conviction.
On October 25, 1967, James Richardson’s seven children were murdered en masse. The children, whose ages ranged from two to eight, unwittingly ingested poisoned food — laced with a pesticide. At the time, Richardson was a farm worker living in Arcadia, Florida with his wife, Annie Mae, and their children, two of whom were from his wife’s previous marriage.
Before the poisoning, Annie Mae Richardson had prepared her children a normal lunch of beans, rice, and grits. The four school-aged children came home, at their lunchtime, and went back to school, where teachers noticed they were all exhibiting strange symptoms. One teacher went back to their apartment to check on the other three, who were also sick.
The children were taken to the hospital, and doctors contacted their parents to inform them that they had a sick child in the hospital and needed to get there soon. They left out that six of the children were already dead.
Investigators, meanwhile, noticed that all of the sick children came from the same home, and they went to investigate their apartment and their shed outside. They found nothing in the apartment that could be used as a poison, other than some insect spray. However, once they learned that it had likely been a pesticide that killed the children, they went to look in the apartment’s shed again — and this time, they found a bag of parathion.
The question now was who had poisoned the children’s food. Sheriff Frank Cline felt like he had an answer: James Richardson.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, Cline believed that Richardson killed his children to collect $14,000 in insurance, as he had reportedly discussed life insurance with a salesman shortly before the mass murder. However, Richardson did not have the money to put the insurance into effect.
Richardson was indicted by a jury in December 1967, and during his testimony, he cried and said, “Nobody could do that to their own children.”
It took more than 20 years before anyone listened to him. He was initially sentenced to death, spared only by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that determined that the death penalty law at the time was unconstitutional.
Then, the truth came out. James Richardson had not poisoned his children. Nor had his wife Annie Mae. Instead, it was likely their neighbor, Bessie Reece (sometimes spelled Betsy Reese), who had been babysitting the three youngest Richardson children when they first became dangerously ill. Reece was a suspect in the death of her first husband, on parole for a murder conviction in the death of her second husband, and her third husband left her for Richardson’s cousin — an act for which she vowed revenge.
Reece had eventually confessed to the murder — more than 100 times — but by the time authorities were seriously reconsidering the case, she was in a nursing home suffering from Alzheimer’s. Anything that Reece said at that point couldn’t feasibly be used in court.
Still, there was enough evidence to suggest that James Richardson had not killed his children, and in 1989, he was released and exonerated.
