145. The Black Widow of North Carolina: Blanche Taylor Moore

SPEAKER_03 0:12

In the summer, they came to the edge of town with a team. Canvas stretched over wooden poles in a cow pasture. Sole dust on the ground. Folding chairs. No chairs at all. Care scene lambers hanging from the center pole. And when the sun went down, they found the fruit. The people came. Middle families, foreign families, little kids understand clothes. Fanning themselves with cardboard fans from the preacher stood up. He preached about the wages of steam. Till the crowd came walking down that sofa's trail. With tears running down their face. It was revivable. For a few minutes every summer. the whole town got right with God. The Piedmont of North Carolina in the 1930s and 40s, Cabaras County, Concord, was a mill town. The Cannon family built their first cotton mill there in the 1880s. By the Great Depression, the Middle family country. People came down from the hills and out of worn-out tobacco farms to find work. The mill gave them a job and a house on a street where all the houses looked the same. A whistle blew when it was time to go to work and when it was time to go home. Folks who worked inside breathed cotton dust all day and came home with lint in their hair. People who thought they were better called them lint heads. They weren't rich, but if they were smart, they weren't starving either. They were just poor in the way that almost everybody was. Little girls wore dresses their mamas sewed out of printed flour sacks. Men wore overalls all week and had one good soup for Sunday. Supper was pinto beans, cornbread, fatback, collards out of the garden, biscuits and gravy when there was flour, and on special Sundays, dinner on the grounds after preaching. Fried chicken or Brunswick stew on long tables, full of trees, and banana pudding at the end of every one of them. And on Sunday morning, a lot of the same men who ran the machines all week stood up in the pool pit. Which is back then the preacher didn't need a seminary degree. If the man felt called and The congregation believed it. They could ordain him right there. A working man could preach on Sunday. and go back to the mill on Monday. Some of them were the finest Christians in the country. And some of them weren't.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

I'm Darlene. And I'm Melody. This is Hard Times and True Crimes. And today we've truly had a hard time. Hard times. So we are learning how to video, record, and we have absolutely no idea what we're doing. No idea. We've spent hours.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

And we probably won't even end up using it. We're a little worse for the wear. But we haven't killed each other, and that's good for our true crime podcast. Exactly. Do we have anything that we want to do?

SPEAKER_01 3:18

At this point, I have no idea.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Let's just get all right.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

Today's story is actually out of Alamance County.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

In North Carolina, the Burlington Graham area. And it starts all the way back in the 1930s in a mill town close to home. So I'm I know you've been to Alamance County. Many times. I was just there the other day at a cigar shop. I have family that lives in Alamance. Okay. On February 17th in 1933, a little girl named Blanche Kaiser was born in Concord, North Carolina. And that's your birthday. Yes. I'll try not to read too much in it. Okay. Concord was a mill town. Most family you lived in a mill house. I did. I've always romanticized those little houses and those little communities. They just seemed so idyllic. The Kaisers had been in Kabaras County for generations. Okay. Cabaras. Kabaras. Okay. But you can tell. You can tell I'm not a true. You're not from North Carolina. But so I actually found some family history that goes all the way back to the 1800s. Oh wow. One of her ancestors, George Kaiser, he killed a man in 1842. Apparently, he was a drunk and a no-gooder, and things got out of hand. Okay. Her mom's name, and I love this, her name was Flony Honeycut Kaiser. And her dad was Parker Davis Kaiser. And everyone called him PD. So Blanche, she was a preacher's daughter, and she grew up in church singing hymns. She knew her Bible. She knew scripture. P. D. was a primitive Baptist preacher. Okay. Well, I don't know if he was actually Baptist or if he was Pentecostal because his preaching style seemed very Pentecostal. Really? He preached that old camp meeting style from what I understood. I don't think he ever went to seminary or anything like that. Back then, you know, you just needed a call from the Lord and you were ordained by the local church and mill workers in the 1920s and 30s. I doubt they had money for seminary. But what he did have was a Bible. He had a loud voice and a congregation full of tired mill workers who just wanted to hear about Jesus. Okay. The Kaisers were also a singing family. They sang on the gospel radio stations around here, which I thought was really cool. That's neat. PD strummed on an old guitar and Floney and the girls, they sang their hearts out and they shook tambourines.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

And yes. Okay, I can actually picture that. But I bet I bet he was more Pentecostal because I am pretty sure primitive Baptists do not have musical instruments. I didn't think so either. So I think you were right when you were thinking maybe more Pentecostal.

SPEAKER_01 6:17

And when Petey got a notion to start himself a new church, he would march the whole family downtown and have them sing hymns and he would raise money and start a new church. Well, how often did he start new churches? Apparently a lot. Oh, okay. Because he was not a typical preacher. He went through spells of being really on fire for the Lord. And when he was, he was really on fire. He was good. Blanche and her family could hold their heads up high in the community. They could afford to eat, you know, dress, and there was peace in their home. But when he fell off, he fell off.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

And boy, he fell off. So it sounds like you have some stories about okay.

SPEAKER_01 7:06

So PD had a wondering eye.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Ugh.

SPEAKER_01 7:09

Yes. And he would run around on Flony with those lonely millwives who went to his church. Then the husbands more than once would come to confront him with a gun, crying, cussing, drunk, mad. Can you imagine though the betrayal from a pastor, a preacher sleeping with your wife?

SPEAKER_00 7:31

And I just have some kind of feelings about that.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

It's very interesting. And of course, it would always cause a big uproar in the town, as it does when you hear of pastors sleeping with married congregants or you know, the call in affairs. But and then of course he would be forced to step down, embarrassed. Well, I don't know if he was embarrassed, but his family personally was. And he would start drinking, and then to make ends meet, he'd go to the mill looking for work, but they still didn't make ends meet because he would gamble it all away, drink it all away, spend it on women. And this would go on for several months until there would inevitably be some revival that would come to town, and he would go and he would feel some conviction from this hellfire and brimstone preaching. He would go to the front, rededicate his life, and the cycle would begin again. Floney and the kids, he'd have them out in the streets raising money to start a new church. And this literally continued on and on and on for years, for his really his whole life. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

I think he was deceiving himself.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

Exactly. So when Pete didn't have a church, he would fix looms down at the mill, go door to door selling penny insurance policies to mill wives. And every cent he made, of course, like I said, he gambled away. While his poor wife, Flony, literally kept the family together. She worked full-time at the mill just to keep the rent paid and food on the table with seven children. She had been an absolute beautiful woman in her prime, but of course, years of stress and it took its toll as it would. It does take a toll. Wow. In 1942, when Blanche was nine, the family moved to Burlington. And Petey, he was hard on his kids, especially the girls. He'd go through their clothes to make sure nothing was too short or too tight. You know, they weren't allowed to stay after school and hang out with friends. When the bell rang, they better be home. It's so funny to me that this man who runs around on his wife is gonna check his girls' hemlines. I know. That's what he's worried about. Well, he seems to be full of hypocrisies. But somehow Blanche did manage to stay in church her whole life because I feel like that kind of hypocrisy and growing up with that could really turn you away. And many times it does, though. Exactly. But you know, Blanche, she found her way around him too, though. And as soon as she was old enough, she went to work at a store downtown, and she would spend her paychecks on pretty clothes that she would hide from her dad. And by the time she was a teenager, she was a beauty of a girl. She was really pretty, and the boys liked her. And Petey knew this, and it made him suspicious of her and even harder on her. People that knew her as a teenager said that she was just kind of a mixed bag. She would cuss one minute, and the next minute would be quoting scripture. Because that's what she has seen. That was normal to her. And then when somewhere along the way, I'm not sure when or why, but she ended up quitting school and worked. And then when she was 19, she met a man named James Taylor. James brought her home to meet his family, and the fall before they were married, he introduced her to his brothers and sisters and mother. And his sisters, they were very suspicious of her. They just thought she was too dolled up for their liking. I think they grew to be okay with her, but they weren't crazy about her. But James's mother, she really took Blanche under her wings and treated her like a daughter. She protected her, you know, would tell the other girls, don't be talking about her. She's a good girl. And she felt like Blanche was good for James. And so they had a really good relationship, Blanche and her mother-in-law, Isla.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

Okay. And you may have said this earlier, but how old was Blanche and James at this time?

SPEAKER_01 12:01

So Blanche was 19 and he was 24. Okay. So James had served in the Korean War, and when he came home, he would restore furniture. That was his job. That's pretty big in North Carolina, too. James was kind of the black sheep of his family. They loved him a lot. He was super funny. He was always a good time. But he was one of 11 kids, hilarious. But most of his brothers and sisters had gone to college and just did really well for themselves. And he liked to drink and he liked to gamble and hang out at the moose club or moose hall. And isn't it interesting she's chosen someone like her dad? And his family kind of always had to bail him out. They even loaned him the down payment for his and Blanche's little house down on Fair Street in Burlington. They did settle there though. They had two daughters, Vanessa and Cindy. One was born in 1953 and the other in 1959. Now, James had a temper. He especially when he was drinking. He wasn't a his daughters, like I listened to Cindy in an interview, actually on the way over here. And she said that she felt like she had a really good childhood. She said when she was 13, she was still like hold hands and go places with her dad. So I think he was a really good father. And I think he loved Blanche as well, but she wasn't a saint either. We'll just put it that way. Okay. I think she knew how to push his buttons. But in 1954, Blanche has years before she had started working at the Kroger in Burlington, which was kind of a new fancy store.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

Didn't know that Kroger existed back then, so it must have been fairly new.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

That's interesting. She was a cashier, and by 1960, she was the head cashier. It seemed like she was pretty ambitious. She worked very hard, and I think she went about as far as they would allow her to go. She like I said, she was a hard worker. But not everybody at Kroger was a fan. Some of her coworkers would say that she was very two-faced and sweet as pie to the men, but would stab her friends in the back. So his sweet as pie code for flirty? Yeah, very, very flirty. Meanwhile, things with her mom and dad had finally fallen apart. In 1956, Petey left Flony for a younger woman. Of course he did. All of those years of everything she went through, and then he just leaves and doesn't come back. That's crazy. But in 1959, Floney went to the courthouse with a lawyer and she filed for divorce. She told the judge that she had seven children and that Petey walked out right at Christmas, left them with nothing to eat, bills piling up, no heat in the house in December. That's crazy. He told her that he was going to find himself a younger woman and she was not getting a dime from him.

SPEAKER_00 15:04

Oh, he sounds like an upstanding godly man.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

But the judge saw it differently, and he ordered PD to pay her $25 a week for a year and then $10 a week for another year. I don't know. Maybe at the time that was more money than it seems like 1950s.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

Maybe that was 1959. Maybe that was a lot more back. I'm sure she deserved a whole lot more than that. She did. My goodness.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

So now we're we'll go back and talk about James and Blanche because their marriage wasn't great either. It was easy to see that she was probably stepping out with other men. She's a lot like her dad. If not stepping out, I think she probably was, but she was definitely crossing lines.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

Or causing enough talk that people thought she was, I guess. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

Like one of her bosses at Kroger would let her drive the company car all over town. And James wasn't dumb. One day, in fact, they were arguing over who was gonna use the car. She said she wanted to go see her mama and he wanted to go to the moose hall with his friends. And she was like, That's okay. I'll I'll find my own way I can use my boss's car. Okay. And he had been eating pudding and so he flipped it in her face. And I don't know. I guess she just kind of just stood there and just kept doing what she was doing and just didn't act like it bothered her one bit. And again, she's very pretty, he's gained weight. He's I think she was very cold to him.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

You know, not that that's an excuse. I feel like I'm making excuses for him doing that, but I don't know. They weren't sleeping together though, and she just worked as often as she possibly could. But James loved Blanche and he would try with her, but she just wasn't interested at all. And one time he got really drunk and desperate, and he went up to the Kroger and threatened her boss. I know what you're doing with my wife. Oh, and the scene caused such a big scene, and the boss was telling her, like, get him out of here. Oh no. And she's like, Go telling him, Go home, go home, James. But I'm sure that probably didn't help matters.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

Probably not. He he was already fit to be tied.

SPEAKER_01 17:30

And of course, he just felt humiliated and knew he had made a fool of himself. I think that maybe was a wake-up call for him because he got his drinking under control. He stopped gambling and going out with his friends, and he actually joined the local Baptist church and he became really active there and took up photography. We need him.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

We need James today. We could have used a really good photographer.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

And he loved cameras. And on Sundays, this happens now, but back then he was really interested. So he would go to church and record the preacher preaching and the singing and all of that.

SPEAKER_00 18:11

Oh, that would have definitely cutting on it. For sure. I mean, I grew up in church and I don't remember seeing videoed services right now. Oh no. Ever.

SPEAKER_01 18:20

Me either. Not at all. So he'd edit tape recordings of the sermons at Glen Hope Baptist Church so they could be sent overseas to missionaries. Oh wow. I love that. And Blanche, she picked up a side job selling Tupperware. And it seemed like they were really kind of, I don't know, like a normal family. Well, things were good. And I think they could have been. You hear so many women like, oh, I just wish my husband would do right. And then when they do, they're still better.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

They don't appreciate the change. And I get it. I mean, I can emerge that too. But it sounds like if he had a true conversion experience, then he's he's better. Okay. And things are going well for him at this point.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Yes. Okay. In every way, except for I do think she may have been still a little bit better. Okay. Or maybe she just wasn't attracted to him. I don't know. I really don't know. She really had moved on with someone else. Well, because in 1962, there was a guy named Raymond Reed who had started working at Kroger, and he was well, he was actually in his 20s then, but he was a new assistant manager and had everything together. He never called in sick, was just this really hard worker. And but he was married and he did have children at home, two kids at home. And whatever went on between them, life did go on with Blanche and her husband James, except that she worked as often as she possibly could. And he did stay busy with church and his cameras. And the girls, you know, were growing up. And I do think they both were trying to be good parents. In September of 1966, Blanche did decide to go see her dad. She just felt like it was time that she needed to. And so he had been married, he got married again and was actually preaching. Again? Again.

SPEAKER_00 20:25

Oh, I do not like that guy.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

I know.

SPEAKER_00 20:27

But he has no business preaching.

SPEAKER_01 20:29

No, absolutely none. But they made peace with each other. And Blanche started visiting him regularly. And that meant a lot to him. She would later say that when she was young, that her dad would force her to sleep with men who he owed gambling debts to.

SPEAKER_00 20:55

And so is there any truth to that? Or like has any of that been proven? No or backed up, but or oh no.

SPEAKER_01 21:04

But that was an allegation that she that as early as nine years old and that the first time he made her do it, that it was actually with someone that went to their church. That is horrendous.

SPEAKER_00 21:15

It is. So when did she make the accusation when she was younger or years later? Years later. So we'll talk, we'll come back, we'll circle back to that.

SPEAKER_01 21:24

Okay. But you know, she went to him, made peace with him, but in a few weeks his health took a turn for the worse. And so she was really glad that she had, you know, taken that step. And so she stayed right by his side and took care of him. And people who knew what he had put her family through, they were like, She's a saint, because most people just wouldn't do that. He ended up kind of going out of his head. He got really sick with a stomach virus. He was throwing up. And on September eighteenth, nineteen sixty. 66 PD Kaiser died. He was 62 years old. So really not too old. No, that's pretty young.

SPEAKER_00 22:07

That's pretty young now to me.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Oh, it's very that's what I was thinking. I was expecting him to be much older, but no.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

Well, in your brain, you're thinking 80, but exactly.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

But the doctor said that it was a heart attack brought on by emphysema. And that sounds plausible because he did drink and smoke most of his life. So it's not like it came as a big surprise. But anyway, so three years later, around 1969, James had a scare of his own. He ended up having a heart attack. He was only 41 years old. Oh, that's young for a heart attack. It is. And he got through it. But after that, he just the whole family really worried about him. And James tried really hard to get Blanche to spend more family time with him and the kids because she seemed to always have a reason to be away. Then James's mom, Isla, by the summer of 1970, was bedridden. And Blanche, the daughter-in-law who Isla had always been so good to and treated her like a daughter, she did her best to help take care of her and keep her comfortable. Isola and her husband William raised 11 children in that little three-bedroom mill house in that section of Burlington. And they were married 66 years or 60 years. On November 25th in 1970, Isola Taylor died. She was 83, and the death certificate said that she'd had a stroke. Over at Kroger, things were changing too. In 1971, Raymond Reed left his wife. He got himself a little apartment and filed for divorce. And Blanche started stopping by his place in the mornings to cook him breakfast. She would tell people that he was just helpless. I know. And remember, she's still married to James. But in the fall of 1973, James got really sick. He was sick for a couple of weeks. It was like he had a really bad case of the flu, a sore throat, diarrhea, throwing up, and just felt awful altogether. He went to the doctor more than once and he was worried, sick about how he'd pay the bills. And then one day he seemed a little better. He didn't feel like eating supper with a family. And so Blanche just fixed him some ice cream. He had been really sick. But he felt good enough that he went over to his pastor's house that evening and helped him work on the tapes from the church singing so that they could send them over to the missionaries. But by bedtime, he was sweating and jittery. And so Blanche ended up putting him to bed. She wiped the sweat off of his forehead with a cool rag and sat there holding his hand, humming hymns to him until he finally fell asleep. And then she went to sleep on the couch. And her daughter would say that she slept on the couch because his skin was so sensitive that it just burned like when anybody would touch him. A lot was made of her not sleeping with him. But the daughter said that's why like he couldn't stand for her to sleep in the bed with him.

SPEAKER_00 25:32

Not because he was sick now, but that was just had always been.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

No, no, no. Like during this sickness, during the sickness, okay. He didn't want her to sleep with him. Plus, he didn't want her to end up catching whatever it was he had. So, but at five o'clock the next morning on October 2nd in 1973, Blanche would call James's sister, Dot, and told her that she could not wake James up. Dot jumped up, she got in her car and her pajamas and drove over there. And she didn't know it, but their other brother was also on the way over there. And when she got there, she saw Blanche was sitting at the table, and she just said, He's in there. Now, mind you, all she said was, He's sick, I can't wake him up. And anyway, when she went into the bedroom, she said that James had this horrific look on his face. His mouth was all the way open, like he had been screaming, his eyes were wide, he looked like he had been straining, he had blood vessels busted. Just she said it was horrific. And he was 45 years old. Wow. Blanche was sitting there with the girls, she wasn't crying. One of the girls said, Mom, should you call Raymond? And Dot was like, You need to call the coroner because he's obviously dead. And the death certificate would say that he had a heart attack. And with his history, again, it wasn't a complete shock because he had drank for years and years and wasn't in the best of health. He was overweight and those types of things. And so Blanche had him buried at Pine Hill Cemetery in Burlington. James didn't leave much behind, but it wasn't long before Blanche had got herself a new house in Burlington. She was a widow now at 40 with two girls. After James died, she and Raymond did start dating out in the open. Her daughter, Vanessa, would later say that Raymond was a good man. He was so good to her and her sister and was still very active in his boys' lives. It was good that they had somebody after their dad died who genuinely cared about him. Blanche and Raymond talked about getting married for years, but for whatever reason, it just never happened. There was always a reason to kind of postpone it. And Kroger kept moving Raymond from store to store. He was a really good employee. He was, you know, just a Kroger man. And he landed at he ended up in Winston-Salem. Blanche stayed in Burlington, except for one short stretch in 1979 when she went to work at a store over in Durham. She worked in Burlington, though, the rest of her career. Raymond Reed, like I said, he was divorced. He had his two sons, and one of them, Steve, was a student at East Carolina University. Raymond was one of those people who he did work a lot, but he was also a family man too. And he loved Blanche. He told one of his coworkers that they'd probably have gotten married, but she wanted to stay in Burlington. And so they had to maintain the long-distance relationship for years. Blanche told people she was Raymond's fiance. She wore a ring, which was an old family heirloom that he'd given her. And everybody at Kroger figured there would eventually be a wedding. 1985, though, was a really hard year for Blanche because in January of 1985, her house in Burlington caught fire. The fire department said that somebody had said it. Blanche told them she'd seen a strange man hanging around the place, some pervert, she said. She was able to collect the insurance money and bought herself a mobile home. But about a month later, that mobile home caught fire. Blanche is having a string of bad luck. She is, but she said that it was this, you know, this pervert, and she was able to collect again.

SPEAKER_00 29:56

Okay, and by pervert, I'm assuming she's a saying he's a peeping tom.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

Or just somebody who's kind of stalking her, maybe. Okay. And people felt bad for her. Like you said, she could not catch a break. And then on Easter Sunday in 1985, somebody in her family took her to a sunrise service. Blanche went to church the this entire time. She was very faithful, took her girls to church, and she went to church. But anyway, so somebody did invite her to the sunrise service at this little church called Carolina United Church of Christ. And it sat on a hill looking just over the textile mills on Hall River. I bet that was so pretty. And this was just outside Burlington. They had breakfast after the service, and that's where Blanche met Dwight Moore. He was the pastor of that church. And he was about her age, and he was divorced and had two grown children of his own. Dwight took a liking to her. And when she wasn't home, he'd leave little notes on her door. The first date was an ice cream, they went for an ice cream cone. And he later said that's when he started hearing bells. Like he fell in love with her.

SPEAKER_00 31:14

But is she still dating Raymond?

SPEAKER_01 31:16

Yes, like she still had a boyfriend. Raymond was still very much in the picture. Then in October, Blanche walked out of Kroger and she never walked back in after 31 years. She didn't tell anybody, she just Well, she said that an area manager named Robert Hutton had been after her for a long time. And he had put his hands on her. He had reached up her dress. And she said that in October, he grabbed her from behind when they were in a conference room and was naked from the waist down. So she snatched up his pants and underwear and ran out of the store with them, leaving him to like he had to leave the store wearing a meat cutter's smock. Oh wow. Lord have mercy.

SPEAKER_00 32:07

And I don't know. Maybe you'll tell me in a minute if that's actually a true story. If was she making that up? Well, we'll see. Okay. But I don't have a hard time believing it because I do believe back in the 80s there was a lot of sexual harassment on joints. So I don't have a hard time believing it if it wasn't true.

SPEAKER_01 32:22

Yeah, yeah. And that's one of the things that you'll kind of have to judge for yourself. Okay. Maybe at the end of the story we can circle back to that too. A few months later, she sued Hutton and Kroger for sexual harassment. Hutton had to resign. Two years later, right as they were picking a jury, Kroger settled with her, and she reportedly got $275,000. That's a lot of money. That is a lot of money. That fall, Blanche was seeing a psychiatrist, and so she talked to him about Raymond. And by November of 1985, she told him that she had once loved Raymond, but that her feelings had literally turned to hate toward him.

SPEAKER_00 33:12

Well, that's kind of a big switch.

SPEAKER_01 33:14

It is, and I could not find anything that would there, no explanation. The only thing I could see that would make any sense is that he still worked for Kroger, the company that she'd sued. And I don't know if that became some awkward source of contention or something. I don't know. But on the other hand, she had Dwight, the preacher, that she was still also seeing both of them at the same time. So a few weeks after she told her psychiatrist that she hated him, she was standing in her kitchen making him potato soup. On New Year's Eve, she had Raymond over and gave him that homemade potato soup. And on New Year's Day, 1986, Raymond woke up sick as a dog, throwing up, diarrhea, couldn't keep anything down. His stomach was he was in excruciating pain. So bad that he couldn't stand up. And then he had burning in his hands and his feet that went numb, and his limbs, like his hands and feet, like wouldn't even work right. So this went on. This wasn't like a day or two.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

This it lingered. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 34:31

His skin broke out, and he'd hardly been sick a day in his life. And now nobody could figure out what was wrong with him. At first, the doctors thought he had shingles. He missed weeks of work that winter and spring, which, of course, not like him at all. His last day of work at Kroger was May 29th, 1986. He just could not work anymore. That April, Raymond gave Blanche $10,000 to help her get by because she wasn't working anymore. He told his son that if anything had ever happened to him, he wanted her to get a third of everything he had. Sick as he was, he was thinking of her. He really loved her.

SPEAKER_00 35:14

Gosh, you really feel bad for Raymond.

SPEAKER_01 35:16

Yes. The night before he went into the hospital, he ate some Jell-O and he told the doctor that he started throwing up right after that. On May 30th, he was admitted to Wesley Long in Greensboro, which is right up the road from us. His doctor, Dr. Norman Garrett, thought he had a really bad stomach flu at first. He was dehydrated, you know, couldn't keep anything down, but they took care of him and he got better. By June 5th, the doctor told him that he might be able to go home in about a week. But Blanche was standing there in the room when he said it, and things started to get worse. On June 13th, they moved him to Baptist Hospital in Winston, Salem. The doctor there, Dr. Robert Hamilton, thought that he might have. Have you ever heard of the Gillian Gillian Barr syndrome? That's what they were thinking that he had that genetic disease that attacks your nerves because he was his skin, his everything. They ran all kinds of tests. On June 21st, he actually coded.

SPEAKER_00 36:25

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 36:26

And they called the code blue, but they did get him back. But they had to put him on a ventilator. And over the next few days, he became almost completely paralyzed. Wow. They tried a treatment where they filter your blood. And that actually that did help a little bit, but just a little. And one of those tests they did though was a urine sample. They took it on June 27th and 28th. The results came back, but nobody looked at them. Why? His doctor moved to another hospital that same day, and the new doctor just never passed on the results.

SPEAKER_00 37:05

He got slipped through the cry.

SPEAKER_01 37:06

And it just reminds me if you have somebody in the hospital, be the squeaky will. Who cares? If they're mad at you, it'll be okay. You know, the nurses and doctors are human, and as hard as they work, mistakes are made.

SPEAKER_00 37:20

I fully believe every patient needs an advocate. Yes. And that was when Tim had COVID and I couldn't get in the hospital. That was horrible because he needed an advocate. People for those types of reasons, people need an advocate in their hospital.

SPEAKER_01 37:33

Oh, it just this kind of just really got me thinking about that. Raymond kept fighting though, and he'd get a little better and then he'd get sick again. Blanche had asked the doctor if she could still bring him in food from home. And the doctor told her yes. Why wouldn't he? She looked like the most devoted girlfriend in the world, coming up to see him all the time. By June, he was doing better and he had some use of his arms and legs back. And some days he could breathe on his own. But now for a lot of the time, he was actually being fed through a tube that ran down his nose and into his stomach. And when the tubes clogged, the nurses cleared them by pushing Coca-Cola through them with a syringe. I know it's crazy. One of the ICU nurses, Wanda Moss, said that Blanche was usually right there in the room when they did this. The Coke was often left sitting out, and the syringes were kept in an unlocked closet right there in Raymond's room. So she would bring Blanche milkshakes for McDonald's, peanut butter milkshakes, iced tea, frozen yogurt, soup, cornbread, banana pudding. The nurses all knew her by name. She was always there feeding her man. Feeding him good. Now the same nurse did say that she'd never seen anybody but her bring him any food. And then on September 2nd in 1986, a Winston-Salem lawyer named Robert Henshaw came to the hospital. Blanche had gotten his name from the lawyer handling her Kroger lawsuit, and she handed him some notes that a nurse had written up. Raymond couldn't talk by then, but he answered by nodding his head and squeezing hands, and the nurse would help interpret. He couldn't even sign his own name. The lawyer signed it for him with a notary and two nurses watching. And this made Blanche the executor of Raymond's estate. It left her a third of everything, gave her power of attorney. And about five weeks later, he was dead. Five weeks, though. Five weeks. On October 1st, the head nurse of the ICU, Linda Hutchins, saw Blanche feed him banana pudding. And a couple of days later, he could hardly breathe. They said he was scared to death and looked at her and begged her to please help him that he was gonna die.

SPEAKER_00 40:05

That's horrible.

SPEAKER_01 40:06

His son came to see him on October 4th, and Raymond was eating breakfast with Blanche that she'd made him. Steve went back to school, and Blanche called him and told him he needed to get back there quick. And when Steve got back there, he said that he barely recognized his dad. Raymond was swollen up, his eyes were swelling, his skin was splitting open. I can't even imagine his son walking in and seeing that. And then Raymond Reed died October 7th, 1986, at 50 years old.

SPEAKER_00 40:40

Oh man.

SPEAKER_01 40:41

The doctor said that it was complications from that Gillian Barr syndrome. When he died, Blanche told doctors that she didn't want him to have an autopsy. I mean, he had gone through so much already. And so they buried him at Pine Hill Cemetery in Burlington. And Blanche was the executor of his estate. And she didn't waste any time. She took his sons to the bank to close out his account. And she told people at the bank he was doing fine, even though he's already dead. Huh. Then she told the boys that since she was the executor, she was entitled to a third of their dad's life insurance, which she actually wasn't.

SPEAKER_00 41:23

Not the life insurance. Because that has to be separate. That's where you're named beneficiary. So that has nothing to do with the estate.

SPEAKER_01 41:30

They trusted her, and each of them paid her a part of his share.

SPEAKER_00 41:35

Oh my gosh. You are how old are they now? Now they're I mean, in that at that point in the store.

SPEAKER_01 41:40

They were, you know, well, one of them was in college. They were young. They just didn't know. Oh, they just had no idea. Now later, the estate lawyer told them they never owed her a dime, but she wouldn't give anything back.

SPEAKER_00 41:52

Oh my gosh. Now that is just slimy. It's terrible. That to take that from a child. That's slimy.

SPEAKER_01 41:58

She walked away with forty-five thousand three hundred and eighty-four dollars from that insurance policy on top of her share of the estate.

SPEAKER_00 42:07

That's calculating.

SPEAKER_01 42:08

And now there's Reverend Dwight Moore, who was a pastor of the Carolina United Church of Christ out in Alamance County. He was divorced, and back then, a divorced preacher, and I would imagine he was pretty lonely, and he wasn't perfect either. In fact, he admitted that his marriage had come to an end because he had had an affair with his church secretary. But he did own it, and he it wasn't like it was something he was trying to conceal or hide. He owned it, and I'm giving him credit for that. And then along comes Blanche, preacher's daughter. She loves the Lord, she knows all the hymns, she knows all the scriptures, and what a what a pastor's life is like. She understood. And I'm sure to Dwight, she probably did seem like a real answer to prayers. And after Raymond died, she and Dwight they started getting closer and courting and talking about getting married.

SPEAKER_00 43:04

I bet they were close before.

SPEAKER_01 43:06

They were. And then in 1987, Blanche was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a mastectomy, and that put the wedding off.

SPEAKER_00 43:15

I didn't realize that.

SPEAKER_01 43:16

They planned a nice church wedding for right after Thanksgiving in 1988. And then just before the wedding, he got sick. He was throwing up and weak and just kind of in and out of the hospital. But the doctors said that it was a blockage in his intestines, and so they operated on him twice. Finally, that spring in April 19th, 1989, they had a simple little ceremony with two church members as witnesses, and they got married. And they said the two of them were just beam. You could feel the electricity between the two of them, and they looked so in love, especially him. I think he really just was excited to be. Getting married again. I think he'd been divorced for a long time. It wasn't like he had married several women. So they went to New Jersey for their honeymoon because Dwight had just had a brand new grandbaby that he really wanted to see and he was so excited about. So he took his bride up there to meet his son and his new grandbaby. But they had actually stopped to get a chicken sandwich, and within hours he was deathly sick. Dwight told the doctors, well, he had been spraying weed killer at the church. And so he wondered if that was maybe what was making him sick. He had thrown up for days. On April 28th, he was actually admitted to the hospital, the Alamance County Hospital. Then he was sent to Baptist, the same hospital where Raymond died. And then back again. And finally he ended up in North Carolina Memorial Hospital at Chapel Hill. By then he was on a ventilator. His liver, his kidneys, and his heart were failing. And they did not think he was gonna live. Because of the weed killer, the doctors they went ahead and tested him for poison. And the test came back with more arsenic than they had ever seen in a living human being. Golly. One account says that it was about 20 times what should have killed him. Oh man. And he lived. That's crazy. The hospital then, of course, they called the police and the State Bureau of Investigation. They're required to do that. Detectives went into the hospital and they talked to Dwight in his hospital bed. They asked him, has anybody close to Blanche ever died before? And he thought about it and he said, Well, her boyfriend, Raymond Reed, they said he died of something called Gillian Bar.

SPEAKER_00 45:52

I was earlier wondering, did he know about Raymond and him dying and that kind of thing? I was wondering if how much he knew.

SPEAKER_01 46:00

And that's when Blanche's whole story just kind of started to unravel. It also came out while Dwight was in the hospital that Blanche had tried to change his pension so that she would get the money. Well, how did how did she attempt to do that? Do you know? Actually, I think she forged some papers, but anyway, she tried. Gracious. Arsenic stays in your hair, though. And so the SBI they wanted a hair sample from him, but Blanche had already cut his hair.

SPEAKER_00 46:29

Oh, well, that's pretty convenient.

SPEAKER_01 46:32

And so she's right there at his bedside, being sweet, the voted preacher's wife. The doctor said that he had just an unusually strong constitution. And I I really do I think that God kept him alive for more than one reason. So they ended up exhuming Raymond from Pine Hill. They exhumed James Taylor, her first husband, her daddy, and her mother-in-law. And they exhumed a man that she used to work with named Joseph Mitchell. Huh. So they dug Raymond up on July 13th of 1989, three years to the day after he was moved to Baptist.

SPEAKER_00 47:16

Okay, and let me just say, I can remember that being on the news. Really? Yes. I was a senior. Oh, I had just graduated high school. Wow. And I can remember the news coverage about that.

SPEAKER_01 47:27

Wow. Well, I don't think it took long for them to get these results back. You know, it actually doesn't kill fast. It kills kind of slow. An excruciating tears. Excruciating tears up the stomach, throwing up, diarrhea, cramps. And then it goes to your nerves, which explains why you couldn't stand for your feet to be touched, hands, feet burning, your skin can break out. You get the white lines across your fingernails. But the first guy, the coworker, did not have any arsenic in his system. Okay. Her dad and her mother-in-law had high levels. Not enough to say for sure that it killed them, but very high levels. James Taylor had about 60 times the normal amount. So that heart attack was definitely arsenic. And Raymond, he he had about 30 times the normal amount of arsenic in his liver and about 67 times the normal amount in his brain.

SPEAKER_00 48:30

Gracious.

SPEAKER_01 48:31

A chemistry professor from California tested his hair, and it showed that he had been given arsenic over just this long period of time. Not one big dose, but just meticulously. And they were even able to put dates on it because your hair grows about half an inch a month. And so you can read it almost like a calendar. Raymond's arsenic would peak around June 24th in 1986 at about 70 times normal. And that was three days after his heart stopped while he was laying in Baptist Hospital on a ventilator. So when the investigators asked Blanche about it, she told them that James and Raymond were both depressed, and they probably were taking the arsenic themselves. So two men years apart. That's believable. That's crazy. And then Dwight, through all of this, had been defending her.

SPEAKER_00 49:31

That's what I was wondering earlier about the whole thing, how much he knew. So he really was believing it.

SPEAKER_01 49:36

Oh, he really believed that he had breathed that poison in, like when he was spraying the yard. And even his sister Nola said the whole family really thought that it was an accident at first.

SPEAKER_00 49:48

So when very curious to hear how he takes it when he hears about this.

SPEAKER_01 49:53

Well, investigators, of course, they came and told them the results of Raymond Reed. And that's when he finally believed it. And he did accept it at that point. And just tore him up. He was probably crushed. He was devastated. But he when she came back to see him at the hospital, he told Blanche that their marriage was over. And he didn't take any food from her that time. Exactly. And she ended up in tears leaving the hospital. So her daughter would say at first, they because they had to ask the daughters if they could exhume their dad. Okay. And they said, Sure, you're not going to find anything. Oh. Poor girl. So Cindy, she actually her husband took her out of town when they were doing that, just so she wouldn't, you know, all the media and all that stuff. So she actually went out of town and her other sister called her and was like, You better come back.

SPEAKER_00 50:47

Imagine getting that phone call.

SPEAKER_01 50:49

Oh, and she said though that her mom hadn't told them how seriously she was being looked at.

SPEAKER_00 50:54

Part of me thinks, but how could they're the ones that are with her throughout these years? You would think that at some point you would be thinking, man, this person and that person, and they all had the same symptoms. But then on the other hand, they're your daughters. You're you're obviously not going to be thinking, my mom is poisoning people.

SPEAKER_01 51:12

Well, they were saying, like, our mom was a good Christian. She was in church every Sunday. She loved our loved us. They just couldn't.

SPEAKER_00 51:20

You just never don't think that about your loved one or whatever. Somebody that you really love and trust. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:25

And the the daughter Cindy said that she just went out to a field one day and she just prayed and was like, Lord, help me have peace one way or another. If she did it or if she didn't do it, just please give me peace. And then on July 18th, 1989, they arrested her at her daughter's house. And she was charged with the first degree murder for the deaths of James Taylor and Raymond Reed. And assault with a deadly weapon for what she'd done to Dwight. And they held her in Alamance County at the jail with no bond. And this was pretty big news, as you can imagine. You know, when she went to hearings in the courthouse and Graham, there were cameras and reporters everywhere. I've seen a lot of those pictures myself. Everybody in North Carolina is talking about this.

SPEAKER_00 52:17

Like I said, that and I was seeing this on the news. I remember those images as well. And she's being called a black widow.

SPEAKER_01 52:23

And if you look at the pictures back then, she was just this tiny, I don't know, like little woman in her 50s, like a school teacher, or like somebody would go to church with, or I don't know, your Aunt Wanda. Somebody printed up a t-shirt for a Blanche Taylor Moore cookbook with aunt poison recipes. The lead detective said that it was really the most talked-about crime that that county had ever seen. And her friends said she's the sweet Christian lady. She still thought there was a way out of it. And her family stood by her. Every Sunday, her daughters came to the jail for their 15 minutes. They'd kiss her through the glass. Sometimes they'd bring one of her grandbabies. Vanessa told a reporter that whatever the headline said, her mom was not capable of this. And Cindy said that nobody wanted the truth more than they did. And Blanche's brother, Sam, swore before God that he had never once seen a dark side of his sister. And he said she'd rather give than to receive. Once investigators started digging, a whole lot of things looked different, though, about Blanche in hindsight. So that sexual harassment lawsuit against Kroger, it turns out it's a good chance she was actually dating or CN, probably sleeping with Robert Hutton herself before things went bad. So they probably were he was thinking they were going to be having sex. And then she runs out with his clothes. I wonder what that was all about, though.

SPEAKER_00 53:57

Why did she do this? Well, it sounds like was she planning this sexual harassment loss? Sounds like it. I think it could have been a setup for sure. Okay. Or do you think maybe they just got into the middle of things and had some sort of a disagreement and she got mad and did it spur of the moment? Either way, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 54:14

And and I can't prove that he didn't do it.

SPEAKER_00 54:16

It still could have been very valid. Like I said, I don't have a hard time believing that that could have happened.

SPEAKER_01 54:22

Well, it was funny though, because in court, her lawyer said she was just too traumatized to be around men. And I'm no, she was not too traumatized to be around men because she's still seeing how many. So then there's those two fires in her mobile home. You know, there's a good chance she probably said those herself.

SPEAKER_00 54:41

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 54:43

And then Dwight remembered back in the summer of 1985 when they were just still friends. Blanche showed him a bottle of anti-ant, and it was an ant killer that you could buy right off the shelf, and it was made with arsenic. And she had asked him to buy her some. Oh gosh. And she probably poisoned him with the bottle that he bought. She probably poisoned Raymond with the bottle that he bought. And then Dwight, he had no reason, so he went on down to the Birds Food Center and Glen Raven and bought it for her. Now, while Blanche was waiting on her trial, a letter showed up. It was a confession from a man named Garvin Thomas. He was homeless, disabled, he was an alcoholic, and he had recently died. In the letter, he supposedly confessed to poison and raymond, and the story was that he was in love with Blanche. The letter was dated May 19th, 1990, and it came to Blanche at the Alamance County Jail. A few months before that, a jailer named Carolyn Henshaw remembered a man coming to visit her, Blanche, and he signed his name as Garvin Thomas, and he was carrying a teddy bear. A secretary in one of Blanche's lawyers' offices said she'd set up a meeting with him, too. He told her he knew that he was gonna die and that Blanche had not done what they said she'd done. And so you can make decide, I guess, what to make of that. It sounds like he was just trying to get her off. But it also says that the handwriting expert says he didn't even write the letter. I don't know. He definitely didn't do it. No. And Garvin's stepmother said it was not his handwriting, and that he and Blanche didn't even know each other.

SPEAKER_00 56:39

She was just setting him up. Maybe he came to visit and took an opportunity to set him up.

SPEAKER_01 56:45

And it's pretty convenient to put them on a dead man. Pretty convenient. But anyway, the handwriting experts said he did not write that. But her trial started October 21st, 1990, in Winston, Salem, because that's where Raymond had died. And she was being tried for Raymond's murder. A few days before it started, the judge ruled that the jury could also hear about James Taylor and Dwight Moore. And that that made a big difference. When they were picking the jury, they wanted to pick people who like her, conservative, who were churchgoers, who you know who would be sympathetic to her. Exactly. And so keep that in mind. You know, they're they're picking a jury. They want to relate to her. Yes. And to believe like she couldn't have done that, you know. So anyway, the state ended up calling 53 witnesses, doctors, nurses, people from Kroger, a lady named Brenda Green who had heard Blanche recommend anti-ant to a customer at the register. And Dwight testified that he went to Byrds and bought that anti-ant for her. The prosecutor broke down and had to leave the courtroom. The judge sent the jury out, and afterwards, he asked every one of them whether it would affect their verdict. Because the the prosecutor just starts breaking down crying. That's so weird.

SPEAKER_00 58:20

That is weird.

SPEAKER_01 58:21

I don't know if she did it.

SPEAKER_00 58:22

Was it a tactic? It's weird.

SPEAKER_01 58:27

So you have to be able to but she was describing Raymond laying in the hospital bed crying and waiting on Blanche to come see him.

SPEAKER_00 58:35

Maybe she was just hormonal that.

SPEAKER_01 58:37

Maybe she told the jury he was crying because his murderer wasn't coming to see him. And I don't know. I bet you could have heard a pin drop though. I bet. And then Blanche, she was able to take the stand. The courtroom was packed, standing room only. There was about 260 people in there. I don't know. I've seen the picture of her wearing those tortoise shell glasses and this blue suit.

SPEAKER_00 59:03

I was gonna bring those glasses up a minute ago. And I and I thought, I'm not gonna say that because I bet she's gonna talk about those glasses.

SPEAKER_01 59:08

Yep. She had on a white blouse and she held onto a tissue the whole time. She told the jury that she had never physically harmed anybody in her life. She said she was a very given person who tried to help whenever she could. And she denied everything. She said that she never even fed Raymond in the ICU, which that's they knew that that wasn't true. She said she'd never told anybody not to do an autopsy and that she wouldn't have minded one. She said she'd heard of Auntie Ant, but she'd never bought it for anybody or asked anyone to buy it, and she'd never poisoned anyone.

SPEAKER_00 59:44

See, that's stupid on her part because that those lies can be proven to be lies, and so she just makes herself look more like a liar. So when you say I didn't do it, people have reason not to believe you. Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 59:59

The prosecutor asked her if the men in her life reminded her of her daddy. What did she say to that? She said no. The prosecutor pointed out that she'd been out of work and her bank account kept getting smaller and smaller. And Dwight had testified that he and Blanche had started sleeping together back in 1985 when she was still with Raymond. Blanche said it wasn't true, but he had no reason to lie at that point. It only made him look bad. She said nothing happened between them until 1988. And when the prosecutor brought up what she had told her psychiatrist that she'd come to hate Raymond, Blanche said she never even remembered ever saying anything bad about him. She said that if he'd lived, she would have married him. Dwight sat there and listened to her afterward. He told a reporter she's got a very good memory of the things she likes to remember. Her daughters thought she did real well. Vanessa said that she was proud of her. Reporters said she just sat there with this little tight smile for the cameras, calm, composed, no emotion. On November 14th in 1990, the jury found her guilty of first degree murder. And finally, for the first time, she found it in her to shed a tear.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:21

For herself.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:23

We know who that was for. And remember how I said that her defense wanted to find a jury that was conservative and that were a lot like her. But the thing is that a lot of conservatives are also not opposed to the death penalty.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:48

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:49

And so it can really come back to bite you as it did for her, because on November 16th, 1990, the judge sentenced her to die by lethal injection because she'd killed for money, and it was especially a heinous and atrocious and cruel murder. And so the jury recommended death. Her lawyer said that she told him the end has to come, so let it come. Her family, of course, her daughters. I cannot imagine because they've lost their dad, and now they're having to come to some understanding or their their mother. It happened at the hands of their own mother.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:35

It sounds like they really don't want to believe that, but at some point I think you're gonna have to allow yourself to see the truth.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:43

And her daughter Cindy ultimately did. She said that after the sentencing, that she just said, okay, Lord, the jury found her guilty. And the evidence was there. I think it took her time to really process it all, but at this point she knows. And she actually still has a relationship with her mother. Really? But 10 days after she was sentenced, the court put her execution on hold, you know, of course, for her to appeal and all that. In 1994, the North Carolina Supreme Court, this is what they wrote. Three different men either married to or intimately involved with the defendant died or barely escaped death from arsenic poisoning, an unusual cause of death. And they just laid everything out. And every time she had a money motive, every time she had access to that anti-ant, every time the poison was given slowly, she was alone with the man in the hospital feeding him. And with James and Raymond, she was already seeing the next man while she poisoned the last one. And so the court also pointed to the fake confession letter and they upheld her conviction. And after that, the charges for James Taylor's murders, they were dropped because they ultimately already had what they needed. And there were a few twists to the story. The first one is her lawyer, David Tamer, was later convicted of embezzling money from his clients, and she was one of them.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:15

Hmm. Well, that's that is a little interesting. And you know what? I don't feel a bit bad about that because she stole from Dwight, or was it Raymond's sons, or Dwight's? It was Raymond's sons. Raymond, yes, because he was the one with the stole from all of them. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:28

But doing that to those kids makes me mad. That's right. The second one is about Dwight because he filed for divorce in December of 1990. He never ever got the full use of his hands and feet back. And he was still dealing with problems from the poison in 20 years later. He did eventually remarry. He moved to Virginia and passed away from natural causes in 2013. One time when she was trying to have her death penalty, whatever, commuted to a life sentence. They asked him, How do you feel about that? And he said, I don't care if she tries. I think he really tried to move on from that. In 1993, there was a TV movie made about her called The Black Widow Murders. I've actually seen that years and years ago before I even moved to North Carolina. It was the Blanche Taylor Moore story, and Elizabeth Montgomery, Samantha from Bewitched, yeah, played her. So now Blanche has been at the North Carolina Correctional Institute for Women in Raleigh since November 16th of 1990. That's the year my parents were divorced. Which that feels like such a long time, and it is a long time ago. She writes poetry and music. She's had chemotherapy and radiation. In over 30 years, she's only gotten two write ups. She had one for disobeying an order in 2008. And then back in 1996, she had One for misuse of medicine. North Carolina has not executed anybody since 2006. When Blanche turned 90 in 2023, she was the oldest woman on death row in the whole country. Wow. As of right now, she is 93 years old. And I don't at this point, what even I was going to say, a death sentence that never gets carried out is not a death sentence. No. It's a life sentence. And if North Carolina, if we're not gonna go through with executions, then why say it? Why get in front of their family? Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:39

And say But what's the holdup? Why has she been sitting there that many years and they haven't done it? That's just ridiculous. Especially if you guys go back and listen to our Barfield episode, one of our earliest episodes. It was a very the whole time you've been telling this story, I'm like, oh, that's just like Velma, like Velma. Very similar. Those were episodes four.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:00

Except for she admitted everything. And I do believe that she was truly repentant. Blanche has yet to confess, which is just, I don't know. That's just a few. And at 93, she should get in on that. Even for your daughters. Like, but the victims, I just want to go back and circle back to them because there's James Taylor, who was a Korean War veteran who fixed up old furniture and raised two little girls that he adored, and he died at 45 years old. And then there was Raymond Reed, who was a hardworking Kroger guy who loved Blanche with his whole heart and spent the last nine months of his life suffering. Nine months with her sitting right beside him. And then Petey Kaiser and Isla Taylor. We're never really gonna know for sure, but I feel like probably she also killed them. And then Dwight Moore, who, you know, for it in his body for their issues from the arsenic poison for the next 20-something years. And then Raymond's sons, who lost their dad. And Cindy and Vanessa. Yeah. Because they're both victims too. They lost their dad very young and they loved Raymond too. In fact, Cindy would say we were robbed too because she said, I feel so bad because what, of course, the actual murder victims went through was horrific. She said, but Raymond's sons and her and her sister, they didn't have grandparents to see their kids grow up. They were just robbed of a lot of themselves. And so it's just sad. And then of course they you have to watch your mom on the six o'clock news or whatever. And so I just feel like they were also victims. But going back to her dad, Petey Kaiser, that didn't come out about the sexual abuse until she accused her dad of sexual abuse, saying that he forced her to sleep with men that he was in debt to, have these gambling debts to. But she didn't say that until her trial.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:11

And that's interesting because if she's not admitting to it and denying it, then why is she offering that as you would think that would be offered as an excuse of why I did what I did. And if you're not saying you did what you did, what is the purpose of that? Now, I'm not saying it's true or not, but it does make me wonder because she's made this accusation about this man at Kroger, and she's made this accusation about her dad. Both could be could be true, and if so, horrendous. But if not, if she's making those up to get sympathy or whatever, then she's ruined the reputation of one man, which he wasn't that great of a man to begin with, her dad. But this man at Kroger, she could have ruined his life and his reputation and also in this lawsuit. So if she did that and it's not true, that would be another crime, horrible crime of ruining somebody's life. But again, we don't know it could still be true. Exactly. In which case they got what they've they reaped what they sowed too, but how do you know?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:08

But she's still awful.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:09

Awful.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:10

Awful. Whether she whether that happened or not, if it if it did, that's terrible. But no excuse. I don't know. Pray for these families who I'm sure are still suffering from the effects. But I did think about this. The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart. His words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords. Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee. He shall never suffer the righteous to be moved, but thou, O God, shalt bring them down into the pit of destruction. Bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days, but I will trust in thee. And I think David's point is not up to how it all comes out, but it's because some people do get away with things here on earth. You know, for a long time. Raymond didn't get to live his life out, James didn't get to live their lives out, and then she's celebrating her 90th birthday on death row, but still every one of us is gonna stand before God one day, and they're not gonna be any appeals and no lawyers and true justice will take place. Exactly. We just have to trust God with it. But I did want to say that my main source for this episode was the book Preacher's Girl, The Life and Crimes of Blanche Taylor Moore by Jim Schutz, S-C-H-U-T-Z-E. Schutz. Schutz. That came out in 1993, and it's a really good read if you just want to go deeper into this case. I also read a lot of old newspaper articles and the North Carolina's Supreme Court's ruling on her appeal, which lays out a lot of evidence. Yeah, I'll put them in the show notes and on our website. Okay, those were some hard times. Yes, they were.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:10

As always, hard times and true crimes, we'd like to thank you for your listener's support. And I'd like to remind you to like, share, and subscribe to every single episode. And buy the girls a coffee or ten. And let everybody you know, even if they're a linthead, to check us out. Till next time, goodbye.