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Background

Blanche Taylor Moore was born Blanche Taylor Kiser on February 17th, 1933, in Concord, North Carolina. Her father, Parker Davis Kiser, was an ordained minister, but that didn’t stop him from excessively drinking, gambling, and cheating on his wife.

Moore later claimed her father forced her to sell her body so he could pay off his gambling debts.

Moore married James Napoleon Taylor in 1952 when she was 19. The couple had two children. In 1962, she started an affair with Raymond Reid, a co-worker at the grocery store where she worked.

In 1973, she lost her husband, also to a heart attack. With her husband gone, Moore and Reid started dating publicly.

When the relationship ended in 1985, Blanche moved on to divorced reverend Dwight Moore.

Even though she had a new man, she was still sleeping with Reid. She asked Dwight to get her some arsenic-based ant killer.

From there, she started poisoning her ex-boyfriend. Doctors thought Reid had shingles, and he was hospitalized in April 1986.

Moore visited him and brought him food, and his health continued to deteriorate over the summer. He died on October 7th, 1986.

His cause of death was listed as Guillain–Barré syndrome.

Blanche moved on with her life and married Dwight on April 19th, 1989, but she wasn’t done with her murderous scheming.

Dwight became sick days after they returned from their honeymoon. He went to the hospital on April 28th, 1989. He was transferred to two other hospitals because no one knew what was wrong.

He was close to death, but he said something that saved him. He claimed he had been working with herbicides for the past week.

The doctors ordered a toxicology test to see if he had herbicide poisoning. They discovered he had twenty times the lethal dose of arsenic in his system.

Doctors called the police, and when they interviewed Dwight, he told them his new wife had lost an ex-boyfriend to Guillain–Barré syndrome three years earlier.

Police also learned that Blanche tried to become the beneficiary of Dwight’s pension.

Detectives were suspicious that she was involved in the deaths of many of her loved ones.

They decided to exhume her father, whose 1966 death was ruled to be caused by a heart attack. They also exhumed her first husband, Taylor, and her ex-boyfriend, Reid.

They found fatal levels of arsenic in Taylor and Reid.

When they interviewed Blanche about Taylor and Reid, she claimed both men were depressed and likely took their own lives with the poison.

Investigators didn’t buy it, and on July 18th, 1989, they arrested the 56-year-old for two counts of first-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon for poisoning Dwight.

Legal Proceedings

Her trial for the murder of Reid started on October 21st, 1990. Her defense claimed she never brought Reid food while he was hospitalized, but several witnesses said otherwise.

A jury convicted her of murder on November 14th, 1990, and recommended the death penalty. Two months later, the judge sentenced her to death.

After convicting her in Reid’s murder, prosecutors decided not to try her for the death of her first husband or the poisoning of Dwight.

Moore has been on North Carolina’s death row for 34 years. She is 91 years old and the oldest woman on death row in the United States.