An Actual Murderer Among the Recently Commuted by Biden

A Life Insurance "Fraudster" One of the Many with Commuted Sentence

The problem with blanket commutations and pardons: a lot of people manage to “slip through” who probably didn’t deserve clemency.

Such as somebody who murdered for life insurance proceeds.

Washington Free Beacon: ‘Black Widow,’ Who Murdered 3 Ex-Lovers, Freed in Biden’s Historic Clemency Spree

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."

Given one might have a senile executive who has some flunky taking over the commutation autopen, this is setting up incentives not to make this mistake again.

To be sure, the murders occurred going back 50-30 years ago, she was convicted over 20 years ago in federal court, but now that people have been made aware of the absolute crapshow of a blanket commutation just enacted, there is no reason to assume the federal authorities won’t make completely asinine choices decades in the future.

Let us be blunt: even if Biden had full use of his faculties, he still may have made such inane choices as his political career is over.

But that’s not why I’m posting about this. The life insurance “fraud” angle is.

Life Insurance Fraud podcast episodes

Insurance fraud is something people attempt all the time in property & casualty insurance and health insurance. This is one of the reasons insurance companies annoy you when you have legitimate claims to make.

Insurance fraud is something that has been going on since the beginning of insurance, and methods to keep it in check have also been in place since then.

Terry Pratchett even put insurance fraud in the first scene of his first Discworld novel (not much of a spoiler, I figure).

But even health insurance fraud (usually Medicare or Medicaid fraud, as the government is not as careful as private companies) is not as out-there as life insurance fraud, which often involves murder.

That goes beyond fraud, I think.

Early on in doing the podcast for this substack, I did a few episodes on life insurance fraud, some of which was fraudulent life insurers (and in one case, from Dickens, a fictional fraudulent life insurance company.)

But while there are cases of life insurance fraud where deaths are faked, that is difficult. As Agatha Christie would write, Murder is Easy

Here are the two episodes:

Episode 1, Don’t Sell Insurance to the Mafia, on Life Insurance Fraud

I picked only a few notorious cases where people were explicitly murdered for the life insurance proceeds:

• Iron Mike Malloy

• Black Widow Murders (not to be confused with the woman above, this involved the women befriending homeless men, insuring them, and running them over with their cars)

Then there were a few cases of faked deaths.

Agatha Christie liked to mention cases in her books of mothers who murdered their children for the sake of life insurance proceeds (though that never was a plot element). She did use a tontine once in a plot, but I will not tell you which one, in case you’ve not read that one yet.

If you know, you know

Episode 2, Fraudulent Life Insurers

This episode is generally just fraud; only the fictional stories herein have murders.

Back to Foolish Clemency

Let us go back to the news story:

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?"

The problem, of course, is that it’s not about her at all.

As mentioned in my last post on this stupidity:

This blanket commutation covered ~1,500 people in a particular situation with respect to “compassionate release”, and a lot of them were on release due to their age and health conditions. They didn’t make any sort of review as to the people who had been released, but just made blanket commutations without needing to do further work.

It had nothing to do with their original sentences or offenses.

As a result, within that large group of people, there were sure to be some who had horrible offenses to their names. Here is yet another one.

As the person in whose name (Biden) these commutations were being made is beyond caring about political consequences, people were not being careful about this. So this is creating a political bonanza for those who do care.

Those who have been pushing for “de-carceration”, aka springing people from prison, this is not exactly a win.

People are fine with admitting some prison sentences may be excessive with regards to specific crimes, but not with murdering for life insurance benefits. Some decisions were made 20 years ago assuming that people wouldn’t be completely cavalier in the future.

That calculus has changed.