The Life and Crimes of Blanche Taylor Moore - Research Paper Example

North Carolina Death Row Inmate: Blanche T. Moore Blanche Taylor Moore was born on February 17, 1933 in Concord, North Carolina to Parker Kiser, an ordained Baptist minister. Very little is known about Blanche’s mother, which suggests that she did not have an active role in her daughter’s life. Growing up, Blanche was subjected to her father’s alcoholism and gambling addiction. Unable to pay off his own gambling, other personal debts, and family bills, Kiser would often force Blanche into prostitution. This caused Blanche to have an intense dislike for her father, as well as a strong distrust for all men that she suspected did not truly love her, a fact that played a large role in the murders that she would commit as she got older. Prior to the murders that she committed, Blanche had no record of previous crimes. She was an ideal human being, “a wife and mother, deeply religious by most accounts, [and] a pillar of the community (Hiles, 2005).” She had no past convictions and was the last person anyone would suspect of committing such horrific crimes, which is perhaps why she was able to get away with it for so many years. When she hurried and married the first man to ask her, Jim Taylor, no second thought was given. People assumed, and Blanche confirmed, that the marriage might have been rushed, but it was her quickest escape from her dysfunctional, bordering on abusive, family. Blanche and Jim were happily married for quite some time, and two children were the result of their love. After ten years, though, Jim turned more and more to alcohol and less to his wife, revealing shades of a past that Blanche had thought she had left behind her when she moved out of her father’s home. To make up for her husband’s gradual abandonment, Blanche turned to the company of many other men, involving herself in numerous affairs. Unfortunately, the affairs only satiated Blanche’s lust for a couple of years. It came down to the fact that her husband was still an alcoholic, and this brought back too many wanted memories for her to escape from by using other men. Instead of continuing to rely on affairs, Blanche decided to take a different route and rid her life of the people that were making her miserable. Blanche’s first murder was her father, the person who brought nothing but pain to his daughter’s life. When she visited him, she put arsenic into his beer, killing him. Despite doing this, though, Blanche did not feel any better about her life or her situation. She went back to the person she was currently having an affair with, Raymond Reid, a stockman at the grocery store that Blanche was employed at. Now that she was back with someone that she loved, she set her sights on bringing about the same end of her father to her husband. After all, she felt the same way about her husband as she did her father. Because of Jim’s alcoholism, Blanche was shunted to the side, second in Jim’s life, with alcohol taking the lead. In Blanche’s eyes, Jim was deserving of the same death as her father. Before she could get to her husband, Blanch went after her mother-in-law with the thought of at least getting some money from the family before everyone started dying off. Blanche took care of her mother-in-law’s meals and found it quite simple to slip her arsenic until she died. Once the contents of her deceased mother-in-law’s bank account had been deposited into the joint account of Blanche and Jim, Blanche went for her husband. Just like Blanche’s father and mother-in-law before him, Jim’s death was found to be of natural causes. There was no reason to believe that Jim had died of any other cause, especially when he was under the attentive care of his beloved wife. Reid, who had become very serious with Blanche and had become engaged to her, grew less fond of the idea of marrying her due to the “suspicion he felt about the all-too-easy removal of roadblocks on their way to the alter (Geringer, 2009).” At this point, Blanche was not so much concerned with getting rid of people who had wronged her, but getting rid of people who could keep her financially sound for years to come. Reid’s uncertainty about marrying Blanche under the peculiar conditions, though, just gave Blanche more fuel to get rid of him. Once again, she was with a man who was unable to treat her with the respect she believed she deserved. She poisoned Reid slowly, trying to prevent people from catching on to what was happening. When Reid died, doctors assumed that it was due to an anatomical problem. After his death, Blanche also gained an additional fifty thousand dollars. Blanche calmed down for a while after she met Reverend Dwight Moore. She “wrapped herself in the cloak of a wholesome middle-age widow seeking Christian comfort and a happy retirement (Geringer, 2009).” The two became close and they married after four years. The first thing Blanche did was make sure that her name was on Moore’s will and his bank account. On the morning of their honeymoon, Blanche served Moore breakfast in bed, laced with arsenic. Much to Blanche’s surprise, he survived the attack, but doctors believed it to be a simple virus. When he started feeling better, he returned home; Blanche added more arsenic and Moore ended up back in the hospital with the same symptoms of a virus. Unfortunately for Blanche, the doctors at the North Carolina Memorial Hospital started to catch on to the coincidence that Moore would only become sick when in the extended presence of Blanche. They ordered toxicology tests and, lo and behold, found a very dangerous amount of arsenic in the pastor’s body. The fact that he was still alive was a miracle, and if it were not for the doctors, not only would he have met the same end as the people before him, but the doctors also saved the lives of the men that would have come after. After the doctors shared their concerns with the police, the bodies of Reid and Taylor were exhumed for tests and arsenic was found in both of them. Blanche was arrested for first-degree murder on July 18, 1989, with the trial for the murder of Reid officially commencing on October 21, 1990. She was convicted of Reid’s murder on November 14, and on January 18, 1991, the judge made the sentence of death official. Blanche was later charged with the murders of Taylor and her mother-law-in, as well as the attempted murder of Dwight Moore; she was not tried, though, as authorities believed it wouldn’t be worth the time or effort to win more verdicts against someone already sentenced to death. Blanche was not charged in the death of her father because of how he treated her as a child, which brought sympathy from the authorities and the jury (Schutze, 1993). Even after being arrested for the attempted murder of Dwight Moore, Blanche pleaded her innocence. She was sure that no evidence could be found against her, with the exceptions of the reports on the bodies of her other victims. Even then, proof would need to be given that declared Blanche had been the one to give the victims arsenic, despite the fact that their deaths were similar to Moore’s almost-death. However, reports that were filed against the hospital that tended to Reid by Reid’s family aided the state in fully convicting Blanche, as well as fifty-three witnesses who saw Blanche bring food to Reid while he was in the hospital, keeping the man sick as he slowly died. Most of the evidence against Blanche came from the Reid family’s lawyers, though there had been difficulties fighting the Fifth Amendment to get the evidence considered. To this day, Blanche continues to maintain her innocence. On numerous occasions, she has tried to have her death sentence overturned, but to no avail. She claimed that she was sentenced to death because of her race, an opinion that was tossed out without consideration due to its ridiculousness. However, it is speculated that she still has yet to go through with the death sentence, which is to be done by lethal injection, because of her gender. The state of North Carolina, regardless of what its criminals have been charged with, are reluctant to subject women, especially one as old as Blanche, to death. Furthermore, Blanche has since been diagnosed with cancer, and the state believes that she will sooner die from that than from the completion of her death sentence. Many of the accusations against the state’s softness have been denied, though there is some reluctance to actually go through with the death penalty. Blanche has been in prison and on death row for almost twenty-one years, and it is believed that she should have received death by injection almost fifteen years ago. All of Blanche’s appeals have been denied, yet she continues to sit in prison, sick and dying, as she waits for someone else to bring about her inevitable death. Taxpayers are getting fed up with footing Blanche’s chemotherapy bill when she should have already been executed, yet the authorities are simply waiting to see if the cancer claims her first. This, according to many taxpayers, should not be allowed to be the case. Blanche was put on death row for the murder of numerous people and they believe she should die from her punishment, not from her health. They firmly believe in the saying “an eye for an eye.” To let her cancer be the death of her would not be fair to her victims who suffered until their last breath. Works Cited Geringer, Joseph. "Black Widows: Veiled in Their Own Web of Darkness." truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.. N.p., 8 May 2009. Web. 13 Oct. 2011. . Hiles, Joe. "Blanche Moore." Serial Killer Central. N.p., 6 Oct. 2005. Web. 13 Oct. 2011. . Schutze, Jim. Preachers Girl: The Life and Crimes of Blanche Taylor Moore. New York: HarperCollins Publisher, 1993. Print. Read More