Rhonda Belle Thomley Martin (1907 – October 11, 1957) was an American serial killer.

A 49-year-old waitress in Montgomery, Alabama, she confessed in March 1956 to poisoning her mother, two husbands, and three of her children. She denied killing two other children. According to LIFE Magazine in an article published at the time, she loved getting the get-well cards, and later the sympathy cards that came when the victims died, as well as taking great care to have them buried side by side in a private plot.

Her fifth husband, formerly her step-son, was poisoned like the others but survived only to be left a paraplegic. It was his illness that led authorities to look into the strange deaths surrounding Martin.

Prosecutors said collecting insurance proceeds prompted her serial-killing spree, although this is unlikely, since she collected only enough to cover burial costs, and she never admitted this was the case.

She was convicted of murdering 51-year-old Claude Carroll Martin in 1951 by surreptitiously feeding him rat poison and was executed in Alabama’s electric chair on October 11, 1957.

Resources

• “Mother Tells 6 Killings by Poison,” The Associated Press, March 14, 1956.
• “Jury Sentences Woman To Death,” United Press International, June 5, 1956.
• “Rhonda Bell Martin,” Mind of a Killer (DVD), Kozel Multimedia [1998].
• Shipman, Marlin (2002). “Murdered Family Members and Other Schemes”. The penalty is death: U.S. newspaper coverage of women’s executions. University of Missouri Press. pp. 46–51. ISBN 0-8262-1386-3.