For 16 Years She Got Away With 2 Murders — Until Her Last Husband Survived

For 16 Years She Got Away With 2 Murders — Until Her Last Husband Survived

For 16 years, Blanche Taylor Moore got away with murder, twice. She cooked for the men closest to her. She nursed them when they got sick. In 1986, her boyfriend Raymond Reed lay dying in a hospital bed from something doctors couldn’t explain. On his tray sat a banana pudding she’d made herself. Nobody had a reason to suspect the woman who’d spent her whole life being called sweet.

It took one more marriage to catch her. This is the case collector, and the one man from that marriage who refused to die is where this story begins. Blanche Taylor Moore could recite scripture and switch mid-sentence into stories so explicit they made grown men in her Alamance County congregation look at their shoes. People noticed. Nobody said anything.

By 1954, she was working the registers at a Kroger grocery store in North Carolina. Five years later, she was head cashier, the highest position a woman could hold there at the time. Co-workers described her as sharp, reliable, the kind of employee managers didn’t worry about. Outside of work, she was known for something else. When someone in her circle got sick, Blanche showed up. She brought food. She sat with the ailing in hospital rooms long after visiting hours thinned out other guests. Church members called her generous. Neighbors called her a blessing to have nearby.

That reputation did something specific. It made her invisible in exactly the moment she needed to be. Nobody watches the woman who’s already there to help. Nobody questions the meal she brings because bringing meals is what she does. So, the question isn’t whether people trusted Blanche Taylor Moore. They did, completely, for decades across two marriages and one long-term relationship. The question is what happens when the person everyone trusts to take care of you is the same person deciding whether you get better.

That trust started somewhere specific. In 1952, at 19, she married James Napoleon Taylor, a Korean War veteran who restored furniture for a living. It looked, by every outward account, like an ordinary marriage. But 10 years into that marriage, something began inside the walls of that Kroger store. Something none of her church-going neighbors would learn about for another two decades. What began inside that Kroger store in 1962 was an affair with Raymond Reed, the store’s manager and Blanche’s direct supervisor. At home, James Napoleon Taylor had no idea.

Taylor had served in the Korean War before coming back to Alamance County and building a quiet trade restoring furniture. He and Blanche had two children together, one born in 1953, the other in 1959. Neighbors who knew the family described exactly the marriage it appeared to be: unremarkable, stable, the kind nobody thinks to ask questions about.

That’s what makes the next 11 years difficult to look at directly. Blanche kept both relationships running at once, a husband at home, a lover at work, for the better part of a decade. Reed wasn’t a secret she stumbled into. He was a fixture in her life for 11 years before anything happened to the man she was still married to. Nobody in Alamance County knew any of this while it was happening. Taylor didn’t know. The congregation that called Blanche generous didn’t know. Reed’s own family later would have their own reasons to wonder how much he knew.

For 11 years, that arrangement held. Then, on October 2nd, 1973, James Taylor died. The listed cause was a heart attack. He was in his 40s. No autopsy was requested. There was no reason, at the time, to think one was needed. His death was recorded, filed, and treated exactly like what it appeared to be: a sudden, unremarkable end to an unremarkable life. It would be 16 years before anyone looked at that file again.

Seven years before Taylor died, Blanche’s own father died the same way. Parker Davis Keyser Sr. was a mill worker who also served as an ordained Baptist minister. A man who preached on Sundays and, by his daughter’s own later account, drank and gambled the rest of the week. In 1966, he died. The listed cause: a heart attack. No autopsy, no second opinion. Just a death certificate and a funeral.

Nobody connected the two deaths at the time because there was nothing to connect. Men in their 50s and 60s had heart attacks. It happened every day in every county in North Carolina, and it required no explanation beyond the obvious one. What nobody in 1973 knew, what nobody would know for another 16 years, is that two men who trusted Blanche completely were now both listed as heart attack victims. Not one, two.

Nobody was looking for a pattern, but patterns don’t need to be looked for to exist. Moving forward looked, at first, like nothing complicated at all. With Taylor gone, Blanche and Raymond Reed stopped hiding. They dated openly for over a decade, the kind of relationship everyone around them had quietly expected for years.

By 1985, it wasn’t working anymore. Blanche had moved on to Reed’s regional manager, Robert Hutton. A relationship that ended badly enough that she filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against him and the company that October. That same year, she told people someone had deliberately set fire to her mobile home twice. That same spring, on Easter Sunday, she met Dwight Moore, a divorced pastor from a rural Alamance County church. They started meeting for meals.

So, by the time Raymond Reed got sick in April of 1986, Blanche already had somewhere else to be. He didn’t know that. What he knew was that the woman he’d loved for over 20 years was still showing up, still bringing him meals in the hospital, still, by every account, exactly as devoted as she’d always been. Doctors diagnosed shingles first, then something worse, a slow degrading illness that left him weaker every week with no clear explanation.

On one of those hospital visits, Blanche brought a banana pudding made at home, the way she always did for people she was caring for. Nobody in that hospital room thought to ask why a woman devoted enough to bring homemade food to a dying man’s bedside might be the reason he was dying at all. By October, Raymond Reed was gone. Raymond Reed died on October 7th, 1986. His doctor’s final diagnosis was Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare nerve disorder that can cause exactly the kind of slow physical collapse Reed had suffered for six months.

That diagnosis was wrong, and the hospital had proof of that while Reed was still alive to be saved by it. During his hospitalization, a doctor at Baptist Hospital had ordered a toxicology screen, a routine step for an illness this unexplained. That screen came back showing an extremely high level of arsenic in Reed’s system. The problem was timing. On the day those results were ready, the resident overseeing Reed’s care had already rotated off the case and onto a different assignment, as hospital residents regularly do.

The new resident taking over never saw the report. It sat in Reed’s file, correct and unread, while his doctors kept treating a diagnosis that was already wrong. Reed died three years before anyone connected any of this. Nobody at the hospital was covering anything up. Nobody was protecting Blanche. A scheduling handoff, the most mundane kind of institutional failure, was the only thing standing between Reed’s arsenic poisoning and a diagnosis that could have stopped it. If you’re watching this from a hospital system with the same kind of resident rotation, drop your location in the comments because this exact gap has outlived Reed by decades.

It would take another man, three years later, refusing to die the same quiet way before anyone opened that file again. That man was Dwight Moore. There was a complication in dating him openly. Blanche’s ongoing lawsuit against her former employer rested on a claim that she was completely alienated and antagonistic towards men and unable to maintain any relationship with one. A public relationship with a pastor would have undercut her own case in court. So, she kept Dwight quiet the same way she’d once kept Reed quiet from Taylor.

In 1987, Blanche was diagnosed with breast cancer. The wedding, originally planned for that November, was pushed back. Then a mysterious intestinal illness required two separate surgeries to correct. On April 19th, 1989, Blanche and Dwight married. They honeymooned in New Jersey. Within days of returning home, Dwight collapsed after eating a fast-food chicken sandwich Blanche had given him. What followed was days of extreme nausea and vomiting.

By April 28th, Dwight was admitted to Alamance County Hospital. Over the following two days, he was transferred between two more facilities, first to North Carolina Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, then to North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill as his condition kept deteriorating. By the time he reached Chapel Hill, Dwight was close to death. He told doctors he’d been working with herbicide recently. His own explanation for the nausea, offered before anyone suspected otherwise. Doctors ordered every test his explanation pointed toward. None of them were looking for what was actually in his blood.

What was in Dwight Moore’s blood was arsenic, 20 times the lethal dose, the highest level of arsenic the hospital had ever recorded in a living patient. He survived, barely. He lost the full use of his hands and feet, and doctors weren’t confident he’d keep either. But he survived, which meant he could talk. From his hospital bed, Dwight told investigators something that reframed everything. A previous boyfriend of Blanche’s had also died of an illness with symptoms just like his.

Investigators pulled the records. They also found Blanche had recently tried to change Dwight’s pension so that she, not his children, would be the principal beneficiary. Before investigators could act on any of that, they had to get past something Blanche had already done. She’d had Dwight’s hair cut before the SBI could collect samples from it. A routine forensic tool she quietly closed off. Investigators used pubic hair instead. It worked, but it cost them time, and it told them something about who they were dealing with. Someone thinking several steps ahead of the people trying to catch her.

That was enough. Investigators ordered exhumations, five bodies in total, carried out that summer of 1989: James Taylor, Raymond Reed, Blanche’s father, Parker Keyser, her mother-in-law, Ila Taylor, and a former co-worker named Joseph Mitchell, whose only connection to the case was that he’d once worked alongside her. Taylor and Reed showed fatal concentrations of arsenic, high enough to officially reclassify two deaths that had sat on record for 16 and 3 years respectively as murder. Keyser and Ila Taylor both showed elevated arsenic, too, though not at a lethal level. Only Mitchell came back clean. Whatever Blanche had done, he wasn’t part of it.

There was a sixth name investigators never got to test. Back in 1972, a woman named Lillian Taylor Stewart, James Taylor’s own sister, had died with symptoms nearly identical to what would later kill Reed. Her family suspected poisoning at the time. One prosecutor’s office even considered exhuming her, but jurisdiction landed with a different county, which declined to pursue it, and the case went quiet for 17 years. For 16 years, two men had been buried under the wrong cause of death. It took a third man surviving what should have killed him to reopen both of their files at once.

Investigators weren’t finished. Before they could formally charge her, Blanche had one more move left. That move arrived in the mail, a handwritten letter addressed to authorities from a man named Garvin Thomas. Thomas claimed responsibility for every poisoning. He wrote that he’d done it out of love for Blanche, that he alone had killed Taylor, Reed, and nearly killed Dwight, and that Blanche had never known any of it. There was one problem. Nobody could find Garvin Thomas.

Investigators turned to forensic document examiners and had them compare the letter’s handwriting against known samples of Blanche’s own writing. The analysis was conclusive. Blanche had written the letter herself. It wasn’t the only time she tried to redirect the story in her own words. In interviews, she told investigators that both Taylor and Reed had seemed depressed in the months before they died, that they’d probably been taking arsenic themselves.

Investigators found the claim almost impossible to credit. Two men in two different decades quietly self-administering the same poison with no history of it before or after Blanche entered their lives. It wasn’t evidence. It was a story offered before the letter was, built from the same instinct. If suspicion couldn’t be avoided, it could at least be pointed somewhere else. She hadn’t just avoided detection for 16 years. Days before facing trial for murder, she sat down and manufactured a second identity, invented a motive of obsessive love, and mailed a confession to save herself. Banking on investigators believing a stranger’s devotion over the evidence already stacking up against her.

At trial, prosecutors didn’t hide the letter. They used it. The North Carolina Supreme Court later described it plainly. It was entered into evidence not as any man’s real confession, but as proof of Blanche’s own deceptive plan to throw suspicion away from herself. The letter that was supposed to set her free became the clearest evidence of who she was.

The trial opened in Winston-Salem on October 21st, 1990, and the forged letter never stood a chance once the prosecution laid out its case. Blanche took the stand and denied it all. She testified she never once brought Raymond Reed food during his hospitalization, that whatever killed him had nothing to do with her. The prosecution called 53 witnesses to say otherwise. Nurses, hospital staff, visitors, friends, one after another, describing the same thing. Blanche at Reed’s bedside, bringing him meals she’d made at home, again and again, for months.

53 witnesses is not a number prosecutors reach by accident. Most of that evidence didn’t come from the criminal investigation at all. It came from a lawsuit Reed’s own family had filed years earlier. One that had nothing to do with putting Blanche in prison. After Reed died, his ex-wife and sons sued Baptist Hospital for malpractice, arguing the hospital had a toxicology result showing lethal arsenic, and never acted on it. Normally, a lawsuit filed that many years after a death would be thrown out. Wrongful death claims have strict time limits.

But the Reed family argued something specific. Blanche, as executor of Reed’s estate, was the one person legally positioned to discover that buried test result, and she never told anyone it existed. Courts have long held that when someone fraudulently conceals the truth, the clock on filing a lawsuit doesn’t start until the concealment is uncovered. The judge agreed. The case moved forward.

That civil case had power the criminal case never could have had on its own. In criminal proceedings, defendants are broadly protected against being forced to incriminate themselves. Civil law works differently. It allows far more aggressive subpoenas, far more invasive discovery, far less room for a defendant to simply refuse to answer. Under a deal between the Forsyth County DA’s office and the Reed family’s civil attorneys, most of the evidence that ultimately convicted Blanche in criminal court had first been unearthed by a private lawsuit seeking money, not justice.

The jury heard all 53 witnesses. They heard the arsenic. They heard about the letter Blanche had written to herself. Then they went to deliberate. On November 14th, 1990, the jury found Blanche Taylor Moore guilty of first-degree murder. Three days later, on November 17th, that same jury recommended the death penalty. On January 18th, 1991, the presiding judge agreed, and Blanche was formally sentenced to die by lethal injection.

She had been convicted of exactly one murder, Raymond Reed’s. James Taylor’s death, proven through exhumation to be arsenic poisoning, was never tried. Dwight Moore’s poisoning, documented at 20 times a lethal dose by his own doctors, was never tried, either. Prosecutors had charged her with both. Once the death sentence for Reed’s murder was secured, they dropped both remaining cases. There was no legal mystery in that decision. A death sentence is a death sentence, and pursuing two more convictions against a woman already sentenced to die offered prosecutors little practical benefit. But, it meant something specific got lost. James Taylor and Dwight Moore never had their day in court.

The record shows Blanche Taylor Moore killed one man. The evidence says she killed two and nearly killed a third. That gap between what was proven and what was ever legally settled would follow Blanche for the rest of her life. What nobody in that courtroom could have guessed is how long that life would turn out to be.

In 2010, 19 years into her sentence, Blanche joined 11 other death row inmates from Forsyth County in a legal challenge that had nothing to do with arsenic. The claim was built on North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law allowing death row inmates to argue that racial bias had shaped how their juries were selected. If proven, their sentences would convert to life without parole.

Part of Blanche’s own filing leaned on something unexpected. How saturated her case had been in the local media. Her legal team pointed to a local radio station that had repeatedly played a song accusing her, by name, of being a black widow spider years before any appeal was filed. A survey commissioned by her own investigator found that nearly every person asked had heard of her case, and most who had an opinion believed she was guilty. It was evidence aimed at proving her trial had been compromised by publicity, not evidence of innocence, but of a community that had reached its verdict long before a jury did.

The law didn’t survive. In 2013, the state legislature repealed it, applying the repeal retroactively, erasing most of the pending claims before they were ever heard. Blanche’s among them. It didn’t stay closed. In 2020, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that repealing the law retroactively had violated the state and federal constitutions. More than a hundred stalled claims, filed years earlier, were suddenly alive again. What happened to Blanche’s individual claim after that ruling isn’t part of the public record available today. Some death row inmates have had hearings, others are still waiting. Which one describes her case isn’t something that can be stated with confidence right now.

What is confirmed? Blanche Taylor Moore is 93 years old. She remains at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women. She is the oldest woman on death row in the United States, and North Carolina hasn’t executed anyone since 2006. Whatever legal process is still moving somewhere behind those numbers, one fact hasn’t changed since a jury in Winston-Salem convicted her more than three decades ago. Nobody has ever proven in a court of law more than a single one of the men she poisoned.

That banana pudding from the cold open wasn’t incidental. It’s the detail that outlived the trial, the appeals, and three decades on death row. The single image every retelling of this case returns to. A homemade dessert brought by a woman everyone trusted, sitting beside a hospital bed while the man eating it slowly died. Investigators never proved arsenic was in that specific dish. They didn’t need to. It became shorthand for everything Blanche Taylor Moore was. Generous on the outside and lethal in exactly the moments that generosity was believed the most.

What’s never been resolved is how many men actually died at her hands. Only one murder was ever proven in court. Arsenic was found in three more bodies. Two at fatal levels, two below it. If this case meant something to you, sharing it costs nothing and helps this story reach the people who need to hear it. Drop your verdict below. I’ll see you on the next case.