Moore was born on February 17, 1933 in North Carolina and worked in a grocery store. Between 1968 and 1986 four people close to her died or nearly died: her father P. D. Kiser; her first husband James Taylor; her mother-in-law Isla Taylor; and Raymond Reid, her boyfriend, who died in 1986.
The case began when her second husband, the Reverend Dwight Moore, fell gravely ill weeks after their marriage in 1989 and was found to have an enormous quantity of arsenic in his body. He survived. Raymond Reid's body was exhumed and was full of arsenic, as was her first husband's.
She was tried for Reid's murder, convicted, and sentenced to death on January 18, 1991. The other deaths were not prosecuted, which is the range of one to four in this roster.
She remains on North Carolina's death row, where no execution has been carried out since 2006, and she is among the longest-serving women under sentence of death in the United States, more than thirty years after sentence.
She has always denied it. The convicting evidence was the arsenic in Reid's exhumed body and the pattern of her presence at each illness; there was no confession.