(Blanche Taylor Moore. Picture credit: Greensboro News)
*Please be aware that I will be sharing some disturbing details in this post where I will be talking about childhood trauma and sexual abuse. As always I will try to be as sensitive as I can be with the details and if you have any comments or questions about the post, please contact me via the contact form on my blog page or email me at jocaledoniankitty@gmail.com*
They said that her homemade chocolate cake was phenomenal at the church fair, she could've been a chef if she wanted to as she was a dab hand at baking and cooking. She was a pillar of the community, always a friendly, smiling face, always available for a nice chat and a cup of coffee.....but there was just a slight concerning detail about the flirtatious and charismatic Blanch Taylor Moore.......people who were close to her had a habit of dying a painful death. Call it a terrible coincidence or that she was just very unfortunate when it came to her choosing of husbands and lovers, but mysteriously these men would end up deceased.
It wasn't a mystery for long because anyone with two brain cells could see what the real story was with Blanche and the cops were suspicious of her from the start. I briefly talked about Blanche in a post I had written back in 2020 but in that particular post I just touched on her crimes as I had been talking about two other cases too. As I've always been intrigued with the Blanche Taylor Moore case (thanks in part to the 90's TV movie based on the case featuring one of my glamorous idols, Elizabeth Montgomery) I thought it was time for good old Blanche to have a post of her own on my blog especially as she is the USA's oldest living female prisoner on death row.
At the current age of 92, she seems to be still going strong despite having battled a number of health issues, including cancer. Thanks to her numerous appeals over the years she has managed to manipulate the system and prolong her execution date meaning she'll most probably die before that day ever comes around.
Blanche is currently serving her sentence in the same prison that she has been in since November 1990, the Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh, North Carolina. Since the day she was arrested she had continued to plead her innocence despite the high amount of evidence to the contrary. She is said to be a model prisoner and spends a lot of time writing poetry as well as partaking in other hobbies such as cooking and reading.
So let's get into some of Blanche's background especially her upbringing and her crimes. She was born on the 17th of February 1933 in Concord, North Carolina, USA. She had a difficult childhood which may come as no surprise. Not much is known about her relationship with her mother Flonnie, but her father was said to have been a very abusive man who subjected her to a lot of trauma. Parker was a religious man and Baptist Minister who was very strict, cruel and reportedly forced Blanche into prostitution to pay off his debts, he was a heavy gambler. According to Blanche he was a violent drunk who would have numerous affairs behind his wife's back. The traumatic experiences with her father and watching how he behaved, developed this mistrust and hatred towards men that would continue for the rest of her life.
You can see where the path with Blanche began and it was with her father's abuse. Your first important relationships in your life are with your parents and in a lot of cases your experiences in childhood help shape your views on the world and people, and these views can be carried on way into adulthood. Blanche didn't have many positive experiences with men when she was growing up and this further created this view that they were not to be trusted. Blanche's upbringing was quite a cold, unaffectionate one and this shaped her lack of genuine warmth, love and care for others, she knew how to put on an act in front of people but she couldn't feel genuine love for them.
As she grew older it became more about survival for her and she viewed everyone with suspicion. With having a lot of disturbing sexual abuse in her childhood, she had almost a split personality jumping from an adult like state to a child like state. She was very intelligent, she could quote several texts from the bible and had the ability to be a great conversationalist which enabled people to warm to her and believe her to be a trustworthy person. Blanche's father passed away in 1968 and the death was listed as being due to a heart attack, nobody batted an eyelid because of his lifestyle but suspicions weren't raised until many years later about what was the real truth of his death.
Having been starved of love, affection and put through horrendous abuse in her childhood, it was no surprise that Blanche was looking to create a family of her own and find a father figure. She thought she had found that in a man named James Taylor. She rushed into marriage with him and had two children. Things were fine at first, she felt she had some sort of security with him and she had taken a job at a local grocery store to help pay the bills but became very dissatisfied with married life. James had disappointed her and she felt that there was no excitement in the marriage so she began an affair with her boss, the store manager, Raymond Reid.
Just a few years after her father's death from a supposed heart attack, James Taylor suddenly died of a heart attack too. Eyebrows were raised when it was discovered that the whole time she and Raymond were seeing each other and continued to see each other after James's death. By 1985 she was fed up with Raymond and began flirting with another employee at work who just happened to be a regional manager. For one reason or another this affair quickly turned sour and Blanche publicly accused this man (Kevin Denton) of sexual harassment. Whether this was actually the case is unclear but later knowing the full track record of Blanche it's possible that this man tried to end things and she wanted revenge with some sort of financial gain. Kevin was humiliated and viewed as a pervert, his life was turned upside down and he was fired from his position. Blanche didn't let the matter drop and the company ended up paying her $275,000 in compensation.
Still in a relationship with Raymond Reid and being awarded this sum of money, Blanche didn't waste any time moving on to the next guy who happened to be a Reverend. The man, Rev Dwight Moore was well thought of in the community and instantly fell for Blanche's charms and they grew close, well, he obviously was quite taken with her and she had ulterior motives. Fed up with Raymond Reid, she complained to Dwight that she was having a problem with ants and needed some sort of pesticide to get rid of them. Dwight purchased some 'Anti-Ant' for her. Keeping both relationships a secret, Blanche found herself playing the concerned partner of Raymond Reid who mysteriously fell ill. The poor man struggled to get out of bed and it was a total mystery as to what was wrong with him. Blanche continued to give him her homemade cooking but he just grew worse and worse. Eventually he was admitted to hospital and although practically at death's door on admission, he eventually came round and seemed to be in recovery. You'd think that despite Blanche no longer being happy in a relationship with Raymond, that she would be at least happy to see that he had been improving after this mysterious illness that seemed to just come out of nowhere.
To show how much she apparently cared for Raymond, she insisted on bringing him some of her home cooking into the hospital. This wasn't really allowed but Blanche managed to charm the nurses and because she came across as such a lovely, polite woman just looking out for her beloved partner, they just let it slide. Just hours after Blanche's visit, Raymond suddenly took a turn for the worse and continued to decline, getting sicker and sicker by the day, the Doctors were baffled. Blanche continued to visit him and bring him the food she had prepared at home. Raymond Reid passed away in 1986 and Blanche managed to have the autopsy refused. She was very calculating and very persuasive.
Not long after Raymond's death, Blanche and Dwight made it known in town that they were officially seeing each other and had plans to marry. The pair had to postpone their wedding arrangements a couple of times because Blanche had breast cancer and was undergoing treatment and Dwight needed surgery for a stomach complaint.
They did eventually get married on the 19th of April 1989 and had their honeymoon but as soon as they returned home, within days, Dwight suddenly fell violently ill and needed hospitalisation. Doctors were baffled at what was wrong with him so they ran a series of tests and found that he had a very dangerous amount of arsenic in his system. When they informed Blanche, she played it off that Dwight had been doing some gardening and must have accidentally gotten some pesticide into his system but the Doctors were not convinced. There was no way that he would be able to get twenty times the amount of a lethal dose of arsenic in his system without it being deliberately administered to him. It was a miracle that Dwight survived and the Doctors didn't waste any time contacting the police. Dwight, when he began to recover, refused to believe that his beloved Blanche had anything to do with his sickness.
The police interviewed Dwight in his hospital bed and the real truth was beginning to emerge. Dwight was in denial about the thought of Blanche deliberately trying to poison him so they showed him documents that also proved that Blanche was trying to have his life insurance policy paid out to her in the event of his death. Dwight had mentioned that Blanche had told him her previous partner had died suddenly after a short illness and the police decided to investigate further and check out who had previously been involved with Blanche.
The police's investigation resulted in the bodies of James Taylor, Raymond Reid and even her father being exhumed and tested for arsenic poisoning which of course, all three bodies were found to be riddled with it. Blanche was promptly arrested and questioned. Without so much as a flinch, Blanche was cool as a cucumber when being questioned and accused of the murder of her father, her two previous partners and the attempted murder of her current husband. Obviously the circumstances were in no way humorous in the slightest but Blanche actually thought she was smart enough to get away with it all. She sat there in front of the investigators with a straight face and said that all of the men must have been depressed and suicidal and that the whole thing had been some crazy coincidence. She claimed that she knew nothing about the arsenic and complained about how the whole thing was causing her stress and that nobody was thinking about what she was going through. The police were in disbelief at her confidence, lack of remorse and delusional attitude that she thought she could talk her way out of all of this because she had done so for so many years.
This time Blanche's ability to charm and talk her way out of situations didn't work. She was being tried for murder and attempted murder. Her trial began in October of 1990, she was found guilty and given a death sentence by lethal injection which, as I mentioned earlier, she has managed to stave off with appeals up to the present day (2025).
Blanche is suspected to have murdered many others, there were reportedly a number of mysterious deaths around her and with her father's death occurring in 1968 and her finally being caught in 1986, who knows for sure how many poisonings she was actually responsible for. It would certainly be a difficult task for investigators to have every single deceased person connected to her to exhumed. I think the attitude was that they had her, she was found guilty and put behind bars to meet her maker which they hoped to have been swiftly but Blanche being Blanche, she had other ideas and had to have her usual last say and control on what was happening.
Rev Dwight Moore, managed to make a recovery despite all that Blanche had put him through but he sadly passed away in 2013.
The TV movie I mentioned, starring Elizabeth Montgomery is available to view on YouTube
RIP to the known victims of Blanche Taylor Moore and also to the unidentified victims (I believe there is more).
Further Reading & Sources:
- State V. Moore: Court Documents | Justia US Law
- Blanche Taylor Moore: Article | Greensboro News
- Preacher's Girl: The Life & Crimes of Blanche Taylor Moore | Book by Jim Schultze
- Blanche Taylor Moore | Wikipedia
- Blanche Taylor Moore | Murderpedia
- Arsenic Poisoning | Wikipedia
- North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women
- Rev Dwight Moore | Find A Grave
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