Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette
	Donna Moonda widow of Dr. Gulam Moonda, enters U.S. District Court in Youngstown, Ohio, in July. She is charged with hiring her 25-year-old lover to murder her husband. RELATED COVERAGE States have executed 11 women since '84

Bonnie Brown Heady kidnapped and murdered a 6-year-old boy. Ethel Rosenberg leaked atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

The U.S. government executed them both in 1953. No woman has been put to death in a federal case since.

Given that history, Donna Moonda and her attorney did not expect prosecutors to seek the death penalty against her.

"I was surprised when they did," Roger Synenberg, Mrs. Moonda's attorney, said of the government's decision this month to pursue a capital case. "I didn't think this would happen."

Mrs. Moonda, 47, of Hermitage in Mercer County, is charged with hiring her 25-year-old lover to murder her husband.

She says she is innocent. Prosecutors say she is a cold, money-hungry killer who planned the murder of Dr. Gulam Moonda for six months.

Dr. Moonda 69, a urologist, died in front of his wife and mother-in-law on the Ohio Turnpike the evening of May 13, 2005. Damian Bradford, who was having an affair with Mrs. Moonda, shot the doctor dead. He says it was premeditated murder that was supposed to look like a highway robbery.

Mr. Bradford admits he killed because of greed, saying Donna Moonda promised him a seven-figure payoff. He said she expected to collect millions in inheritance and life insurance proceeds from her husband's death and told him he would receive half of the money.

The planning that went into the crime is one reason U.S. Attorney Gregory A. White, of the Northern District of Ohio, is seeking the death penalty against Mrs. Moonda.

Another factor is that Mrs. Moonda's mother, Dorothy Smouse, then 74 years old, was in the car with Dr. Moonda when Mr. Bradford shot him.

"She made her own mother a witness to murder, and placed her in the line of fire when she planned that her husband would be shot to death," Assistant U.S. Attorney Linda Barr said in a brief filed in the summer, when Mrs. Moonda was trying for bail.

Mr. Synenberg said he did not expect a capital case because the government reached a "sweetheart" plea bargain with Mr. Bradford. He could receive as little as 17¹/₂ years in prison in return for his testimony against Mrs. Moonda.

"One issue that is supposed to be considered in death-penalty decisions is disparity of sentences," Mr. Synenberg said. "They gave the person who pulled the trigger 17 years and they want to put my client to death."

Mr. White declined to be interviewed, but he and his trial staff consider Mrs. Moonda the instigator of the plot. They believe Mr. Bradford, a small-time drug dealer in Beaver County before the murder, had no inclination to kill the doctor until she set the plan into motion.

Mr. Synenberg, though, has begun arguing that Mr. Bradford killed on his own, without any help from Donna Moonda.

"Bradford saw a sugar daddy," Mr. Synenberg said. "By killing him, he thought, he could get his hands on a lot of money."

Mr. Bradford and Mrs. Moonda met in 2004 in a Beaver County drug-rehabilitation center. He said he was addicted to cocaine. She had stolen the painkiller fentanyl from hospitals where she worked as a nurse anesthetist. The second drug case led to her firing and a criminal prosecution.

He said she told him she was 31 years old and married to a doctor in his 50s. In December 2004, Mr. Bradford said, she decided she wanted her husband dead.

By that time, he said, Mrs. Moonda was in the habit of giving him money and gifts. She smuggled him steroids from her husband's medical office to indulge Mr. Bradford's nascent interest in bodybuilding, he said.

Though Mr. White recommended a death-penalty prosecution against Mrs. Moonda, the final decision was made by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. He must authorize every capital case in the federal system.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., said federal prosecutors had a record of diligence in capital cases.

"Money is spent to do these cases right," said Mr. Dieter, whose organization takes no moral stand on the death penalty, but monitors the fairness of state and federal prosecutions.

Today, 45 federal prisoners are on death row. One, Angela J. Johnson, is a woman.

She was sentenced in December for the 1993 murders of five people in Mason City, Iowa. The victims included two girls, ages 6 and 10.

Iowa is one of 12 states that have no death penalty, but Ms. Johnson and her boyfriend, Dustin Honken, were prosecuted by the U.S. government.

A methamphetamine dealer, Mr. Honken also has been sentenced to death for the murders. Ms. Johnson, 41, says she had no knowledge of her boyfriend's plan to kill anyone. She has years of appeals ahead to press that claim.

That was not the case with the first woman executed by the federal government.

She was Mary Surratt, who was hanged July 7, 1865, for conspiring in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Her execution came 83 days after the president's death.

Execution was even swifter for Bonnie Brown Heady. An alcoholic and a prostitute, she was smooth enough to escort 6-year-old Bobby Greenlease from his Kansas City, Mo., elementary school in September 1953 by falsely claiming to be his aunt.

Bobby's father was one of the wealthiest auto dealers in America. Ms. Heady and her boyfriend, Carl A. Hall, had been watching the Greenleases for months, intent on extorting money from them.

They shot Bobby in an Overland Park, Kan., field less than an hour after abducting him, then demanded a $600,000 ransom from his family, who assured the boy was alive.

Because Ms. Heady and Mr. Hall had crossed state lines in the crime, they were prosecuted by the federal government. They were executed Dec. 18, 1953, 81 days after Bobby's death.

Ms. Heady, 41 when she went to the gas chamber, died six months after Ethel Rosenberg. Mrs. Rosenberg, 37, and her husband, Julius, 35, were electrocuted after being convicted of espionage.

Theirs was perhaps the most publicized federal death-penalty case until Timothy McVeigh's. He was executed for killing 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.