Blanche Taylor Moore has been under sentence of death in North Carolina since November 16, 1990. A Forsyth County jury found that she killed Raymond Reid, a Kroger store manager who had been her companion for years, by giving him arsenic over many months in 1986. In October 2026, at 93, she was still listed by the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction as an active inmate on death row, held at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh. She has always said she is innocent.
The case is a single murder conviction set inside a much larger investigation. It began in May 1989, when doctors at North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill found arsenic in her second husband, the Rev. Dwight Moore, who had married her a few weeks earlier. Investigators then exhumed five bodies from Alamance County cemeteries. Arsenic was reported in four of them, including Reid, her first husband James N. Taylor and her father. She was charged over Taylor's death and over the poisoning of Dwight Moore, and the state supreme court records an indictment over her father's death as well. Only Reid's death was tried. The other charges were dropped after she was sentenced, and no court has ruled on whether she caused any death but his.
She was born Blanche Kiser in Concord, North Carolina, on February 17, 1933, the birth date on her prison record. Her father, P. D. Kiser Sr., was a preacher, and news accounts have long described her as a preacher's daughter who later became a preacher's wife. She spent most of her adult life in Alamance County. She went to church and raised children who in turn had children of their own, WTVD reported in 2019, and neighbors and church members saw her as a grandmotherly figure. None of her children or other relatives was accused of anything.
She married James N. Taylor in 1952. For many years she worked at a Kroger supermarket in Burlington, where she rose to head cashier. Some of her co-workers, interviewed by the Baltimore Sun in 1989 and quoted by WTVD in 2019, described her as vindictive and two-faced. Her father died in 1966. James Taylor died in 1973; at the time his death was attributed to a heart attack.
Raymond C. Reid Sr. met Blanche Taylor at the Burlington Kroger in 1962, when both worked there, according to the facts set out by the Supreme Court of North Carolina. The court dates the start of their romantic relationship to 1979. Reid was divorced. Kroger transferred him several times, and he became the manager of a store in Winston-Salem. He had sons, and he lived in Kernersville, according to Associated Press reports.
She left her job at Kroger on October 17, 1985, on account of sexual harassment, the court said, and she brought a sexual harassment suit; the court mentions her lawyer in that suit, but its outcome was not reported.
By then she had met another man. Dwight Moore was the divorced pastor of the Carolina United Church of Christ in Alamance County, and WTVD reported that the two met on Easter Sunday 1985. The supreme court later noted that in the cases of Reid and Taylor, she was already seeing the next man in her life at the time of the arsenic poisonings.
On New Year's Eve 1985, she made Reid a homemade potato soup. He fell ill on January 1, 1986. Over the next months he missed more than four weeks of work, and his last day on the job was May 29, 1986.
The next day, May 30, he was admitted to Wesley Long Hospital in Greensboro. The admitting doctor's first diagnosis was acute gastroenteritis, later revised to multiple systems failure. The supreme court listed his symptoms: nausea, vomiting, skin rash, swelling, bone marrow damage, kidney shutdown and numbness in his hands and feet, which it described as all characteristic of arsenic poisoning. Several witnesses at Wesley Long remembered her bringing him milkshakes from McDonald's. A co-worker saw a red container of Jello in her purse, and Reid told his doctor that he had begun vomiting after eating Jello the night before.
On June 13, 1986, with his condition threatening his life, Reid was moved to North Carolina Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem. His doctors there first attributed his illness to Guillain-Barre syndrome, a nerve disorder whose symptoms resemble those of arsenic poisoning. On June 21 he suffered a medical emergency and was placed on a breathing tube. A urine sample taken on June 27 and 28 showed arsenic levels that the court called "quite elevated," but the physician in charge of his care never saw the results.
Later that summer Reid improved, though he still needed a respirator and was nearly paralyzed. She asked to bring food from home, and the hospital allowed it. Witnesses described peanut butter milkshakes, banana pudding, tomato pudding, corn bread and milk. A nurse, Wanda Moss, testified that she often saw the defendant feed Reid herself, that she was frequently in the room when Coca-Cola was given to him through his feeding tube, and that the syringes were kept in an unlocked closet. Nursing notes recorded repeated nausea after she fed him. Moss said she never saw anyone else feed him.
While Reid was in Baptist Hospital, a Winston-Salem lawyer, Robert Hinshaw, drew up a will and a power of attorney for him. Reid could not speak and answered by nodding and squeezing hands. Hinshaw testified that Reid understood the will would leave his property to her and leave out his sons, and that Reid agreed she should share in his insurance. Because Reid could not sign his name, Hinshaw signed for him. She later denied any part in the will, although Reid gave her his power of attorney.
He had a serious setback in late September. On October 1, a nurse saw her feeding him banana pudding. On October 3 he told a nurse, "Please help me or I'm going to die." One of his sons visited on October 4, and on October 6 she told that son to come back to the hospital as soon as he could. Reid died on October 7, 1986. He was 50. Moments after his death, according to testimony the court summarized, she said that there could be no autopsy because he had been through too much. At trial she said she would not have opposed one.
Blanche Taylor and Dwight Moore married on April 19, 1989. Five days after the wedding, according to a 2015 Associated Press report drawing on the Greensboro News and Record, he became ill about 30 minutes after eating a fast-food chicken sandwich she had given him. Weeks later, in a hospital in Chapel Hill, he was near death and on a ventilator, with his liver, kidneys and heart failing, the News and Record later wrote, and he was not expected to live.
Because he had been using herbicides, his doctors ordered tests for herbicide poisoning on a long shot. The result showed arsenic. The 2015 account and WTVD put his level at about 100 times normal; CBS 17 reported in 2023 that University of North Carolina doctors had found 20 times the lethal dose. The supreme court's opinion says only that in May 1989, while being treated at North Carolina Memorial Hospital, he was diagnosed with arsenic poisoning.
He survived. Police interviewed him in what was expected to be his deathbed, and he told them about his wife's former companion, Raymond Reid, who had died of what doctors called Guillain-Barre syndrome. Years later Dwight Moore said, "I have no doubt that I was poisoned."
Dr. John Butts, the state's chief medical examiner, sought permission to exhume Reid's body. He later told CBS 17 that Reid's medical history had been "very suspicious for arsenic poisoning": violent illness and gastroenteritis, then nerve damage, persisting for something like four months. A single episode of that severity, he said, would have killed him. "When we examined Mr. Reid, we found that his tissues contained lethal concentrations of arsenic," Butts said.
Reid's body was exhumed in Alamance County on June 13, 1989. The autopsy found what the court called clearly recognizable Mees lines on his fingernails. The arsenic in his liver was about 30 times the level expected from significant exposure, and the level in his brain about 67 times. Butts concluded that Reid died as a result of the complications of arsenic poisoning. A chemistry professor, Dr. Vincent Guinn, analyzed Reid's hair and found a pattern consistent with multiple doses over a long period, peaking on June 24, 1986, at 70 parts per million, about 70 times normal.
Butts said the findings started a process of examining others connected to her. Five caskets were raised from Alamance County cemeteries in the summer of 1989, the Associated Press reported. James Taylor's remains showed arsenic at about 60 times normal. Her father, P. D. Kiser Sr., and her mother-in-law, Isla Taylor, showed elevated arsenic that the medical examiner concluded was not fatal. The last body exhumed, that of a former co-worker, Joseph Mitchell, showed no unusual level. The supreme court summarized the exhumations of Reid, Taylor and Kiser by saying that all of the bodies tested positive for arsenic.
The investigation reached well beyond those graves. David Hedgecock, an agent of the State Bureau of Investigation, told the Associated Press in 2015 that more than 30 people had been named as possible victims. "There was a good bit of hysteria going on," he said; it seemed as if anyone with a dead family member who had known her came forward. The 2015 report said prosecutors and family members had linked her to arsenic poisonings beginning in 1966, among them her father, her mother-in-law, a sister-in-law, her first husband and her second husband. No charge over the mother-in-law or the sister-in-law was reported.
She was arrested on July 18, 1989, and held without bail. The Alamance County sheriff at the time, Richard Frye, told the Associated Press that year, "We're talking about an average, ordinary neighborhood lady." She was charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of James Taylor and Raymond Reid and with assault with a deadly weapon in the poisoning of Dwight Moore. The Supreme Court of North Carolina's later account of the indictments is somewhat different: it says she was indicted in Alamance County for the murders of her father and of Taylor and for the felonious assault on Dwight Moore, and in Forsyth County for the murder of Reid, who had died in a Winston-Salem hospital. Judge J. B. Allen Jr. moved the Alamance County cases to Forsyth County.
Dwight Moore filed for divorce in December 1990, after her trial.
While she was in the Alamance County jail, she received a letter dated May 19, 1990, that claimed to be a confession. It was signed with the name of a man, G. T., described in later reporting as a homeless man said to have been infatuated with her and to have since died. The letter confessed to the murder of Reid and the attempted murder of Dwight Moore. A jailer testified that, two to four months before the date on the letter, a man carrying a teddy bear and signing in under that name had tried to visit her. A secretary in her defense lawyer's office testified that the man told her he knew he was going to die and that he knew Blanche Moore had not done what she was accused of.
The state's questioned-document examiner, Special Agent Thomas J. Currin, concluded that she had written the letter herself. A state examiner ruled out the man named in it as the writer with 99 percent certainty, WTVD reported. A defense handwriting expert testified that she could not have written it, but he did not say that the man named in it had. The prosecution offered the letter as evidence of what the supreme court called her plan to throw suspicion away from herself. Vincent Rabil, one of the two prosecutors, wrote in 2015 that he had come to believe that if the state could prove she wrote the letter, she had signed her own death warrant.
Her lawyers asked to move the trial out of Forsyth County because of press coverage. The supreme court later reviewed the 33 articles they offered, published between September 1989 and August 1990, and found that 29 were mainly factual and only one was potentially inflammatory; each of the 12 jurors seated said they had formed no opinion and could be fair. The trial court also refused a bill of particulars, refused to hold her trial under an open-file discovery agreement made by the Alamance County district attorney, and refused to question prospective jurors one at a time in private. It did not allow her lawyers to question jurors about parole eligibility, a ruling that became the basis of her petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The central pretrial ruling concerned the other poisonings. The state moved on September 14, 1990, to introduce evidence about Taylor, Dwight Moore and Kiser, and the motion was heard on October 5. Just before trial, Judge William Freeman ruled that prosecutors could present evidence of the Taylor, Dwight Moore and Kiser poisonings, although the court did not allow evidence of the arsenic levels found in her father's body.
The trial began at the October 15, 1990, criminal session of Forsyth County Superior Court in Winston-Salem, before Judge Freeman. The prosecutors were Janet Branch, a former labor lawyer, and Vincent Rabil. Her trial lawyers included David F. Tamer and Mitchell McEntire. The state had no eyewitness to any poisoning. Its case was circumstantial, and it called 53 witnesses.
The core of the case was the hospital. The nursing testimony and Reid's hair analysis put the arsenic doses during the months when she was bringing food to his room. The head nurse of the intensive care unit testified that she often fed him food from home, and recalled his plea for help in early October. One of Reid's sons described his father's condition in the last days.
The state also had to show where the arsenic came from. Peggy Vaughn, who ran Atla Chemical Company, testified that her company had made Anti-Ant for more than ten years, including 1985 through 1988, and that its main active ingredient was arsenic. Brenda Green, who had worked with her at Kroger, heard her recommend Anti-Ant to a customer. Dwight Moore testified that in the summer of 1985 she showed him a bottle of Anti-Ant and asked him to buy another at Byrd's Food Center, which he did. Leonard Wolfe, who ran a convenience store, testified that in early April 1989 she asked whether he had any Anti-Ant in stock. A bottle of Anti-Ant was admitted to show what the product looked like, although it was not the one used on Reid; the supreme court said that difference was immaterial.
She testified in her own defense. She denied feeding Reid or taking him food in the hospital, denied ever buying or trying to buy Anti-Ant, and denied giving arsenic to Taylor, Reid or Dwight Moore.
Twice during the trial Janet Branch broke down in tears while describing the victims' suffering. On one occasion she could not continue questioning Dwight Moore and left the courtroom; her opponents described her as having burst into tears and fled. The judge found there had been no audible outburst, sent the jury out, and when it returned each juror confirmed by a show of hands that they could still give a fair verdict. He denied a mistrial the next morning. In court Branch described Reid lying flat on his back in Baptist Hospital, unable to move, crying on the days when, she said, the woman who was killing him did not come. "And he loves her with all his heart," she said, while, she told the jury, the defendant was involved with Dwight Moore.
The jury deliberated for six hours before finding her guilty of first-degree murder by poisoning, and for four more hours before recommending death, the Associated Press reported. A WTVD photo history of the case shows her, long known in court for her composure, weeping after the verdict, with her family visibly distressed. "I don't care if it was us 12, the next 12 or 112 people down the road, I think the decision would have been the same," one juror later said.
At the sentencing hearing the jury found two aggravating circumstances: that the murder was committed for pecuniary gain, and the statutory circumstance that the murder was especially atrocious or cruel. It found three mitigating circumstances: that she had provided well for the needs of her children, that she had peacefully submitted herself once she learned of the arrest warrant, and that she had shown concern and kindness for others in her community. It found the mitigating circumstances insufficient to outweigh the aggravating ones. In his 1990 argument Rabil told the jury that Reid's murder set "a new standard for cruelty in the history of this country" and that she deserved the most severe penalty.
Judge Freeman entered the judgment of death on November 16, 1990, the date on which her prison record shows her admitted to the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women. Execution was stayed on November 26, 1990, pending appeal. Soon afterward, Alamance County officials dropped the charges over James Taylor's death and the poisoning of Dwight Moore. What became of the indictment over her father's death was not reported, and no report says it was ever tried.
Her direct appeal went to the Supreme Court of North Carolina, which decided State v. Moore on March 1, 1994, in an opinion by Justice Parker. The attorney general, Michael F. Easley, and Special Deputy Attorney General Barry S. McNeill represented the state; David F. Tamer and Lisa S. Costner represented her. The court rejected every assignment of error and upheld the death sentence.
The most important ruling concerned the other poisonings. The court held that the evidence about Taylor, Dwight Moore and Kiser was properly admitted to show modus operandi, motive, opportunity, intent and identity. It listed the similarities. Three men married to or intimately involved with her had died or nearly died of arsenic poisoning. In each case she had a financial motive, the opportunity that came with a close relationship, and the means, in knowledge of and access to Anti-Ant. The medical evidence pointed to multiple doses over a long period rather than one large dose. She had often been alone with the victim in the hospital. In each case she had been heard to say that she hated the victim or that he was cruel or evil. Such similarities, the court said, need not be unique; they must support a reasonable inference that the same person committed the earlier and later acts. "Murder by poisoning is inherently a surreptitious crime," the court wrote.
The court also held that the trial judge had been right to refuse an instruction on second-degree murder, because murder by poison is first-degree murder under North Carolina law; that the prosecutor's tears did not require a mistrial, since Branch had left the courtroom quickly and quietly; that the letter was not offered as a dying declaration and its authorship was in dispute; that the jurors need not have been asked about parole; and that the evidence that Reid died of repeated doses of arsenic given by the defendant was sufficient. It found the pecuniary gain circumstance properly submitted, rejecting the argument that money had to be her main motive, and found the cruelty circumstance properly submitted as well, noting that Reid suffered inordinate pain over an extended period. On proportionality review it found that the sentence was not imposed under passion or prejudice and was not disproportionate.
In July 1994 Gordon Widenhouse of the state Office of the Appellate Defender asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear her case, arguing that the trial judge wrongly barred her lawyers from telling jurors that she would serve at least 20 years in prison if not sentenced to death. Her first round of appeals ended later in 1994, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the conviction.
Her second round of appeals did not challenge the evidence. It challenged the people who had run the trial. At a three-day hearing before Judge William Wood in Forsyth County Superior Court in July 1997, her lawyers alleged that Judge Freeman had had improper contact with jurors: wearing a Darth Vader mask to a Halloween gathering with them, posing for photographs with them, and sharing birthday cake and popcorn. Janet Branch, by then Janet Branch Clary, testified that she remembered seeing the judge at the doorway of the jury room on Halloween, wearing the mask, with his arms raised.
David Tamer, who had represented her at trial and on appeal, testified that he and two other defense lawyers agreed at the time that the judge should not have had contact with the jury, but that the state Appellate Defender's office had advised them not to raise it during the trial so that it could be used on appeal. "I was told to leave it alone," he said. Tye Hunter, the appellate defender, denied telling them to take no action. Barry McNeill, for the attorney general's office, said the defense had been advised to keep the issue "in their pocket." The defense also argued that Tamer had been suffering from depression and had not defended her as well as he should have. Tamer's law license had been suspended in 1994 for at least three years after the State Bar found that he lied to clients, neglected their cases and kept fees for work he did not do. The briefs alleged as well that both Branch and Tamer had dealt with television producers during the trial; the State Bar had found that Branch talked with representatives of Lorimar Productions but did not negotiate, and had reprimanded her in 1993.
Later that month, in July 1997, Judge Wood dismissed the misconduct claims against Judge Freeman. He ruled that her trial lawyers had known what the judge did, had done nothing about it, and could have raised it on direct appeal. "I cannot allow the defense to do so at this time," he said. How the rest of that motion was resolved was not reported. William Taylor III, a Washington lawyer, has represented her since 1995, and the 2015 Associated Press account summarized the long record simply: all of her appeals have been unsuccessful.
In January 2001 North Carolina Lawyers Weekly reported that Judge Freeman was about to retire, and recalled that he had sentenced her to death.
In 2009 North Carolina passed the Racial Justice Act, which allowed death-row prisoners to use statistical evidence to argue that race had affected their sentences. Many of the claims filed under it focused on the makeup of juries. By the filing deadline in August 2010, 135 of the 159 people on the state's death row had filed claims. Blanche Moore, then 77, was among them; WRAL described her filing as another diversion of her case away from the execution chamber. Her lawyer, William Taylor, sought to have her sentence converted to life in prison. The act was repealed in 2013, under Governor Pat McCrory. No ruling on her claim was reported.
She has been held at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh since November 16, 1990. Her prison record lists two infractions: misuse of medicine in November 1996 and disobeying an order in February 2008. She has had at least one recurrence of the cancer she first fought in the 1980s, the Associated Press reported in 2015. In 2015 she was the state's oldest death-row prisoner and its second-longest serving, and one of two women among the 148 people awaiting execution. Reporters could not interview her, because prison rules required written consent from her lawyers first.
In February 2023, when she turned 90, CBS 17 called her the oldest woman on death row in the United States. North Carolina had not carried out an execution since August 18, 2006, WTVD noted in 2019. The Death Penalty Information Center's list of women on death row, current to June 24, 2026, still includes her as a Forsyth County case. On October 22, 2026, the Department of Adult Correction listed her as an active inmate with the special status of death row, in close custody at the women's prison, with a conviction date of November 16, 1990, in Forsyth County for first-degree murder; her term and projected release date are both given as death.
Dwight Moore remarried, moved to Virginia and died of natural causes in 2013. Janet Branch died in October 2015.
Vincent Rabil, who helped win the death sentence, later became an assistant capital defender. By 2015 he believed capital punishment should be abolished and said the Moore case had helped shape that view. "The only thing these victims had in common was chronic arsenic poisoning," he said. He asked whether endless rounds of appeals and hearings had achieved justice or provided closure to the victims and survivors, and called the 25 years and more than one million dollars spent on the case "a monument to another failed government program."
The case was the subject of a best-selling book and, in 1993, of a television film, Black Widow Murders: The Blanche Taylor Moore Story, with Elizabeth Montgomery in the title role. The film is a dramatization.
Proven by final judgment: the first-degree murder of Raymond C. Reid Sr. by arsenic poisoning, affirmed by the Supreme Court of North Carolina in 1994.
Charged and dropped, never tried: the death of James N. Taylor in 1973, which the medical examiner's findings, as reported, attributed to arsenic, and the poisoning of Dwight Moore in 1989, which he survived. The supreme court treated evidence of both as admissible to show that the same person poisoned Reid, but that is a ruling about evidence, not a conviction.
Indicted, outcome unknown: the death of her father, P. D. Kiser Sr., in 1966. News reports say the arsenic found in his remains was elevated but not fatal, and the trial judge kept the levels from the jury.
Suspected, with no charge reported: her mother-in-law, Isla Taylor, whose remains held arsenic at a level the medical examiner judged not lethal, and a sister-in-law whom prosecutors and family members named as another possible victim. Of the more than 30 people named to investigators as possible victims, no further charges were reported.
Cleared by testing: the former co-worker whose exhumation showed no unusual arsenic.
Figures that vary: Dwight Moore's arsenic level is given as about 100 times normal (WTVD; Associated Press and Greensboro News and Record, 2015) and as 20 times the lethal dose (CBS 17, 2023). Reports also differ on which charges were brought at her arrest (Taylor and Reid, with the assault on Dwight Moore, in news reports) and which indictments were returned in Alamance County (Kiser and Taylor, with the assault, in the supreme court's opinion).
She has maintained her innocence throughout.
February 17, 1933: born Blanche Kiser in Concord, North Carolina.
1952: marries James N. Taylor.
1962: meets Raymond Reid at the Kroger store in Burlington, where both work.
1966: her father, P. D. Kiser Sr., dies.
1973: James Taylor dies; his death is attributed at the time to a heart attack.
1979: her romantic relationship with Reid begins.
Easter Sunday 1985: meets the Rev. Dwight Moore.
Summer 1985: asks Dwight Moore to buy her a bottle of Anti-Ant.
October 17, 1985: leaves Kroger, on account of sexual harassment, the court said.
January 1, 1986: Reid falls ill after eating potato soup she made on New Year's Eve.
May 30, 1986: Reid is admitted to Wesley Long Hospital, Greensboro.
June 13, 1986: Reid is moved to Baptist Hospital, Winston-Salem.
June 24, 1986: arsenic in Reid's hair reaches its peak, by later analysis.
October 7, 1986: Reid dies at Baptist Hospital, aged 50.
Early April 1989: she asks a convenience store owner whether he stocks Anti-Ant.
April 19, 1989: marries Dwight Moore.
May 1989: Dwight Moore is diagnosed with arsenic poisoning at North Carolina Memorial Hospital, Chapel Hill.
June 13, 1989: Reid's body is exhumed; five bodies are exhumed that summer.
July 18, 1989: she is arrested and held without bail.
May 19, 1990: date on the letter claiming to confess to Reid's murder.
September 14 and October 5, 1990: the state's motion to admit the other poisonings is filed and heard.
October 15, 1990: trial session opens in Forsyth County Superior Court.
November 1990: found guilty of first-degree murder; the jury recommends death.
November 16, 1990: judgment of death entered; admitted to the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women.
November 26, 1990: execution stayed pending appeal.
December 1990: Dwight Moore files for divorce.
After sentencing: Alamance County charges over Taylor and Dwight Moore are dropped.
1993: prosecutor Janet Branch is reprimanded by the State Bar; a television film about the case airs.
March 1, 1994: the Supreme Court of North Carolina affirms the conviction and death sentence.
1994: the U.S. Supreme Court refuses review; David Tamer's law license is suspended.
1995: William Taylor III becomes her lawyer.
July 1997: Judge William Wood dismisses the judicial misconduct claims.
2010: she files a Racial Justice Act claim.
2013: the Racial Justice Act is repealed; Dwight Moore dies.
October 2015: Janet Branch dies.
February 2023: she turns 90, described as the oldest woman on death row in the United States.
October 22, 2026: listed as an active death-row inmate at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women.