In the spring of 1989 doctors at North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill ran a toxicology screen on a Baptist minister named Dwight Moore, who had been married for less than two weeks and was very close to dying. He had told them he had been working with herbicide. The screen showed about twenty times the lethal dose of arsenic, the most the hospital had ever found in a living patient. He survived, though he never recovered the full use of his hands and feet. The woman who had brought him the fast-food chicken sandwich he collapsed after eating was his new wife, Blanche Taylor Moore. She has been under sentence of death for more than thirty-five years, and at ninety-three she is the oldest person on North Carolina's death row. She has always said she is innocent.
She was born Blanche Kiser in Concord, North Carolina, on February 17, 1933, one of seven children. Her father, Parker Davis Kiser, was a millworker and a self-styled Baptist preacher, a drinker and a womanizer; she later said he had forced her into prostitution to pay his gambling debts. He died in 1966, reportedly of a heart attack. On May 29, 1952, she married James Napoleon Taylor, a Korean War veteran who restored furniture, and they had two children. In 1954 she went to work as a cashier at a Kroger store, and by 1959 she was head cashier, the highest job the company then gave a woman. In 1962 she began an affair with the store manager, Raymond Reid.
James Taylor died on October 2, 1973, and, as with her father, the death was put down to a heart attack. Blanche and Reid began to see each other openly. Isla Taylor, her mother-in-law, also died in the years that followed, a death that investigators would later add to the list of those they suspected her of. By 1985 the relationship with Reid had soured. That October she sued Kroger and a regional manager, Robert Hutton, for sexual harassment; Hutton was forced to resign, and two years later the company settled for $275,000. In the same year her mobile home was damaged by two fires, which she blamed on an unknown pervert. The writer Jim Schutze, who later wrote a book about her, found evidence suggesting that she had set Hutton up and may have set the fires herself.
On Easter Sunday she met Dwight Moore, the divorced pastor of the Carolina United Church of Christ in rural Alamance County, and they began meeting for meals. The relationship had to stay quiet, because her lawsuit claimed she had become so alienated from men that she could not keep up any social contact with them. While she was seeing him she asked him to get her some arsenic-based ant killer.
In 1986 Raymond Reid fell ill with what was first diagnosed as shingles. He was admitted to North Carolina Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem in April and died there on October 7, after months of severe illness, of what his doctors called Guillain-Barré syndrome. His doctors had ordered a toxicology screen, and it came back showing a very high level of arsenic, but on the day the result arrived the resident responsible for him rotated to another hospital, and his replacement never passed it on. As executor of Reid's estate, she was the person who should have been told.
She and Dwight Moore meant to marry, but she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1987, and when the wedding was set again for November 1988 he developed an intestinal illness that took two operations to put right. They married on April 19, 1989, and went to New Jersey for their honeymoon. Within days of coming home he collapsed. He was admitted to Alamance County Hospital on April 28, moved back and forth to Baptist Hospital, and was finally taken to Chapel Hill, where the arsenic was found. The hospital and the State Bureau of Investigation told the police.
From his hospital bed Dwight Moore told the investigators about a former boyfriend of his wife's who had died of Guillain-Barré syndrome, whose symptoms are much like those of arsenic poisoning. They learned she had tried to make herself the principal beneficiary of his pension. She had also had his hair cut, which kept the state from taking the samples it wanted; it used pubic hair instead. Reid, James Taylor and her father were exhumed. All three bodies held elevated levels of arsenic, and the levels in Reid and Taylor were high enough to have killed them, so both deaths were reclassified as poisonings. A fifth exhumation, of a former co-worker named Joseph Mitchell, found no arsenic at all. In her interviews she suggested that Taylor and Reid had both been depressed and had probably taken arsenic themselves.
She was arrested on July 18, 1989, and charged with the first degree murders of Taylor and Reid and with assault with a deadly weapon on Dwight Moore. Only the Reid case was tried, in Forsyth County, where he had died. Much of the evidence came from an unusual source. Reid's former wife and sons had sued Baptist Hospital for malpractice over the lost test, and had got past the time limit for a wrongful death claim by showing that Blanche, as executor, had concealed it; under an agreement with the Forsyth County district attorney's office, their lawyers gathered a good deal of the proof, using the wider powers of search and subpoena that civil cases allow.
The trial opened in Winston-Salem on October 21, 1990. She denied giving Reid any food in the hospital; the State called fifty-three witnesses who said she had. The lead prosecutor, Janet Branch, wept in the courtroom at one point and nearly caused a mistrial. The jury convicted her on November 14 and recommended death on November 17, and on January 18, 1991, the judge sentenced her to die by lethal injection. The charges over Taylor and over Dwight Moore were then dropped. She has never been tried for any death but Reid's.
She has been held ever since at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, as prisoner 0288088. She has had chemotherapy and radiation for recurring cancer, has written poetry and music, and in more than three decades has been cited twice for breaking prison rules, in 1996 and 2008. Every appeal has failed. One of them argued that the judge should not have let the jury hear that she had poisoned her first husband and tried to poison her second. One of her early lawyers, David Tamer, stole from his clients, her among them, and was convicted of embezzlement. William Taylor III has represented her since 1995.
In 2010 she and the eleven other people on death row from Forsyth County asked for their sentences to be reduced to life under the state's Racial Justice Act of 2009, which let prisoners challenge a death sentence with statistical evidence of racial bias in jury selection. Dwight Moore told the Winston-Salem television station WXII that he had no objection to her trying. The legislature repealed the Act in 2013, under Governor Pat McCrory. North Carolina has carried out no execution since 2006.
Two of the people at the center of the case did not live to see how long it would go on. Dwight Moore divorced her weeks after the death sentence, remarried, moved to Virginia and died of natural causes in 2013. Janet Branch took her own life in 2015. Mark Rabil, who told the jury in November 1990 that Reid's murder set "a new standard for cruelty in the history of this country," later became an assistant capital defender, and by 2015 he no longer believed in the sentence he had asked for. He wondered aloud whether twenty-five years and more than a million dollars of litigation had brought anyone justice or closure. The case became a book, Schutze's Preacher's Girl, in 1993, and the same year a television film with Elizabeth Montgomery in the role of Blanche.