Blanche Taylor Moore

Blanche Taylor Moore (née Kiser; born February 17, 1933) is an American convicted murderer and possible serial killer from Alamance County, North Carolina.

Blanche Taylor Moore was born Blanche Kiser in Concord, North Carolina on February 17, 1933.

Her parents were Parker Davis Kiser, a millworker and ordained Baptist minister, and Flonnie Blanche Kiser (née Honeycutt).

On May 29, 1952, Moore married James Napoleon Taylor, a veteran and furniture restorer; they had two children, one in 1953 and another in 1959.

In 1954, she began working as a cashier at a grocery store.

By 1959, she had been promoted to head cashier.

In 1962, Moore began an affair with Raymond Reid, the store manager.

Moore's father was a womanizer and alcoholic who, she later claimed, forced her into prostitution to pay his gambling debts; he died, reportedly of a heart attack, in 1966.

As a youth, Moore was known to switch from quoting scripture to sexually explicit topics in the same breath.

Taylor died on October 2, 1973; and, as with her father seven years earlier (1966), the cause of death was reported as a heart attack.

After her husband's death, Moore and Reid began dating publicly.

By 1985, however, the relationship had soured.

There are indications that she began to date Robert J. Hutton, the store's regional manager for the Piedmont Triad area; however, that relationship ended, and she filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Hutton and the store in October 1985.

Hutton was forced to resign, and the store settled the case out of court two years later for $275,000.

In 1985, Moore also accused an unknown "pervert" of starting two fires that damaged her mobile home.

On Easter Sunday, Moore met the Rev. Dwight Moore, the divorced pastor of the Carolina United Church of Christ in rural Alamance County.

The two began meeting for meals.

Moore had to conceal this relationship because her lawsuit against Kroger maintained that she was "completely alienated and antagonistic towards men and has not been able to maintain any meaningful social contacts with the opposite sex."

While she was dating Dwight, she asked him to procure some arsenic-based ant killer.

She is awaiting execution in North Carolina for the fatal poisoning of her boyfriend in 1986.

In 1986, Reid developed what initially was diagnosed as a case of shingles.

He was hospitalized in April and died on October 7, and Moore and Dwight began seeing each other publicly.

Doctors indicated the cause of death was Guillain–Barré syndrome.

The lawsuit with her previous employer was settled one year later.

Moore and Dwight planned to marry, but she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1987.

The wedding date was pushed to November 1988, but Moore developed a mysterious intestinal ailment that required two surgeries to correct.

She is also suspected of the death of her father, mother-in-law and first husband and the attempted murder of her second husband in 1989.

On April 19, 1989, the couple were married and had a honeymoon in New Jersey.

Within days of their return, Dwight became severely ill and collapsed after eating a fast-food chicken sandwich that Moore had given him.

After several days of extreme nausea and vomiting, Dwight was admitted to Alamance County Hospital on April 28, 1989.

For the next two days, he was transferred between Alamance County and North Carolina Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem.

He was then admitted to North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill, where his condition deteriorated to the point of near-death.

Dwight had told doctors he had been working with herbicide soon after the honeymoon.

Doctors Lucas Wong, Jonathan Serody, Mark Murphy and George Sanders, after discussions with the hospital toxicologist, ordered a toxicology screen to check for herbicide poisoning.

The results came back on March 13, showing Dwight had 20 times the lethal dose of arsenic in his system–the most arsenic found in a living patient in the hospital's history.

He had a particularly robust constitution and survived, but still suffered after-effects in his hands and legs as recently as 2010.

The hospital and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) notified the police of Dwight's toxicology results.

When interviewed by police from his hospital bed, he mentioned that a former boyfriend of Moore's died from Guillain–Barré syndrome, which presents similar symptoms to arsenic poisoning.

Investigators also discovered Moore had attempted to change Dwight's pension to make herself the principal beneficiary.

In light of these revelations, exhumations of Taylor, Reid and her father were ordered by investigators.