Blanche Taylor Moore

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When a God-fearing woman and a charismatic preacher fall in love, it's a match made in heaven.

He's got this awesome voice and he's singing these hymns and she felt that connection.

She was a great pastor's wife, very comforting, and she was very knowledgeable of scripture.

But the honeymoon is cut short for these North Carolina newlyweds.

He's very ill.

He was on the threshold of death.

The mysterious illness will lift the veil on a black widow who spent decades covering their deadly poison with good old-fashioned southern sweetness.

It was surreal.

It was truly so far out of the realm of anything this town had ever seen.

And when the truth comes to light, investigators will expose a string of deaths left in the killer's wake.

There was a steady succession of exhumations that were coming out of the ground in Alamance County.

You don't know how evil somebody is if they put on this holier of the now religious southern hospitality.

We have our own picture in our mind of what a cereal color looks like.

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June 13th, 1989, Burlington, North Carolina.

A lot of folks here know each other, and it's a very friendly town.

Around these parts, churches outnumber bars, and people like it that way.

So Burlington, I think, is just sort of your typical North Carolina town.

It's a small town, it's a rural community.

But in the sticky summer heat of this June day, Something other than Sunday's sermon is about to set the town of Burlington abuzz.

Reverend Dwight Moore was well known and well liked in the community, and he had left North Carolina for a long weekend honeymoon in New Jersey.

While being in New Jersey, he became deathly sick and they decided to come home.

His wife, 56-year-old Blanche Taylor Moore, does her best to rush him back to their home in North Carolina.

He crawled up into a ball in the backseat of the car and said, Blanche, like, take the shortest route back to Burlington.

She told me he is just vomiting.

He is projectile vomiting.

It was that bad.

And I said, Mom, he needs to go to the doctor.

Blanche drives straight to the hospital in Burlington, where doctors are immediately concerned over 55-year-old Dwight Moore's condition.

The symptoms that he had were numbness and neuropathy in his hands, in his feet, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, shortness of breath, excruciating pain all over the body.

And his health continued to decline.

While he was very ill, he was on the threshold of death.

Born in 1934, Dwight Moore never thought twice about what he wanted to do with his life.

Dwight Moore was a beloved minister and he took it very seriously.

He put a lot of thought into his preaching and in the message.

While Dwight had great success as a minister, his first marriage failed.

In the wake of divorce, Dwight moved to North Carolina for a fresh start.

Dwight Moore was a pastor with the Carolina United Church of Christ in Hopedale, North Carolina.

The Alamance County Church was a good fit for charismatic Dwight, but the handsome 51-year-old preacher was lonely.

Then, one faithful Easter Sunday in 1985, Dwight found himself caught off guard by a fresh face among his flock, 52-year-old Blanche Taylor.

It was, for all intents and purposes, probably love at first sight.

Born in 1933, Blanche Kaiser grew up watching her father at the pulpit.

He was an evangelical type preacher.

He had no papers to be a preacher.

He was just a preacher.

You just go out and start preaching.

He had a bit of a sketchy background.

He was a drinking man and was hard on his family.

And he was particularly hard on Blanche.

My grandfather, he was a pastor and what on the outside it looked like a really nice, good family.

But there were some other dynamics, I think, that were going on there that people just were never aware of.

Blanche couldn't wait to leave home.

As soon as she was old enough, she secured a job at a local grocery store.

Blanche was a cashier for a major food store.

There's stories that people would stand in line.

when other checkers were available just to talk to Blanche.

She went to college, got her business degrees and stuff, and then then she moved on up to where she was more in a management level.

When Blanche wasn't working long hours at the store, she could be found at church.

She was very spiritual.

She probably wouldn't talk to anyone that

seems any more spiritual.

She was very active in her church.

She visited the sick and taken them food.

As if her steady job and godly works weren't enough, Blanche was was also blessed with good looks.

She was quite attractive, and so she wore clothes that showed that off.

She made sure that they were stylish, her hair was always done.

In 1952, Blanche married a man named James Taylor and had two daughters.

But after 21 years of marriage, she was left widowed and alone.

After dad was gone, she was just always very strong in handling, you know, situations.

It was that strength and charisma that caught the eye of Dwight Moore as he delivered the Easter sermon that faithful Sunday in 1985.

There was a breakfast after the service, and he went over and introduced himself with great enthusiasm.

Mom would have been one of those women that would have made a great pastor's wife, you know, because she was very comforting and she was very knowledgeable of scripture.

to blanche dwight was a gift from god and the feeling was definitely mutual i think he was very smitten with mom i think that i had heard that he had made the comment before that mom being on any man's arm would make them look better because she was very beautiful another thing that had warmed dwight's heart to blanche was her divine southern cooking Blanche fit the stereotype of a wonderful wife who would look after her man by fixing him his favorite foods.

Iced tea is like the most southern of southern drinks, and she knew how to make sweet tea with the best of them.

Blanche was very fond of making banana pudding.

Apparently, she did quite a nice job with it.

After a nearly three-year courtship in 1987, the couple got engaged and quietly married on April 19th, 1989.

I did not know that they they were going to get married.

We were actually finally told,

I think the day before.

They were getting married that next morning.

Dwight and Blanche took a honeymoon trip to New Jersey.

They'd enjoyed this time together there, and they had planned to take the scenic route back from New Jersey.

But on the way back to North Carolina, Dwight came down with a mysterious illness and was rushed to the hospital.

They start to try to figure out what the heck is wrong with this guy.

They had actually had a doctor with a group of students coming around.

There was actually a student that said I would do a heavy metals test on him and they did.

After almost a week with no diagnosis, doctors get the results from the heavy metals test.

and a shocking answer to their questions.

So they do this toxicology test and it comes back that this guy is loaded with arsenic.

Coming up, a new discovery leaves doctors stunned.

He's got more arsenic in his system than they have ever seen on record.

He actually got worse, and he probably wasn't going to live through the night.

And investigators spring into action.

The police immediately put Dwight on a lockdown.

They wouldn't allow anybody into his room.

By the spring of 1989, Pastor Dwight Moore and his newly appointed First Lady Blanche should have been enjoying the love they both had waited decades to find.

Dwight and Blanche married and they did go up to New Jersey.

And he got sick.

He asked Blanche to take him to the hospital, take him to the emergency room, and she did.

They admitted him.

He was in terrible shape.

Now Dwight's life hangs in the balance.

He was hospitalized where it was determined that he had heavy metals in his body, which turned out to be arsenic.

Dwight was pretty much on death's door.

He's got more arsenic in his system than they have ever seen on record.

The word was that Dwight Moore had survived the largest dosing of arsenic ever recorded in medical history, at least that they knew of.

It was stunning to the doctors.

One of the reasons that arsenic often isn't diagnosed is that so many of these symptoms sound like a viral illness or the flu.

So you feel lousy, you develop nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, you get muscle weakness.

These are symptoms that fit perfectly well with a variety of viral illnesses.

One of the worst ways to be poisoned is with arsenic, because it gets into your system and it goes into your stomach and it starts to cause these blisters.

And the blisters sort of eat their way through the lining of your stomach.

It causes unbelievable pain.

Not only is arsenic poisoning commonly misdiagnosed, it is easy to miss for those who are poisoned.

Arsenic, again, being tasteless, odorless,

is not that difficult to conceal on things.

Arsenic could be purchased at your grocery store, hardware store in a form used to kill ants.

Dwight's doctors immediately begin treating him for the poison, and his condition begins to stabilize.

At a certain point at the hospital, you know, when you're faced with a situation like this, the doctors eventually had to call on the police to start an investigation.

The first thing detectives do is impose strict rules on all of Dwight's visitors, including Blanche.

She could visit Reverend Moore, but it had to be supervised by a nurse or nursing staff.

As doctors work to reverse the effects of the poison, detectives speak to Blanche.

Blanche was interviewed, and she denied

being the person that poisoned her husband, Reverend Moore.

Such a sweet little Christian lady, she couldn't have done it.

If Blanche didn't poison Dwight, then who did?

There was a lot of speculation about who did it.

He was a nice guy.

There was no reason to poison Dwight Moore.

Blanche said Dwight was having a very hard time.

She suggested that he was depressed and that he probably poisoned himself.

Did Dwight really ingest the arsenic on purpose or was someone else trying to take his life?

For detectives, suicide by arsenic seems unlikely.

In my experience, I have never known or read about or heard of anyone committing suicide by arsenic.

Arsenic poisoning is a very painful death.

When investigators pay a visit to 55-year-old Dwight's hospital room, it's clear that this is a man who is still fighting for his life.

He could not get up by himself.

He couldn't walk by himself.

He was constantly complaining about his hands being numb and his feet being numb.

He had problems still eating and keeping stuff on his stomach.

Dwight denies trying to take his own life and tells police he has no idea who would want to kill him.

Dwight was absolutely dumbfounded to learn that this illness was actually possibly intentional.

Like he had to get his head around that.

Dwight was really well liked.

Dwight didn't have enemies and he was a genuinely good guy.

With no prime suspects, police pay a visit to Dwight's home looking for anything that could have contributed to his poisoning.

They went to the house and checked out all the herbicides, yard, chemicals there were and didn't find anything that would do to him what was in his body.

With no other scenarios fitting the evidence, investigators come to a grim conclusion.

That's when authorities realize they have an attempted murder on their hands.

As detectives hit the ground running, they received disturbing news from Dwight's doctors.

His arsenic level had went up some while he had been hospitalized.

If they're in the hospital and their levels are going up, then you would be concerned that they're getting more arsenic.

The police immediately conferred with the nurses and the doctors and put Dwight on a lockdown.

They wouldn't allow anybody into his room except for hospital personnel and detectives.

So that includes Blanche.

They would not allow her into the room.

This got to a level where the local police, it was really sort of beyond their expertise.

And so the SBI, the State Bureau of Police, got involved to try to figure out who exactly was doing this.

It's only after police ban all visitors that Dwight's health finally begins to stabilize.

He was lucky to be alive.

He certainly had been given a significant amount of arsenic.

It could well have killed him, but in this case, of course, it didn't.

With Dwight in the clear, detectives work to pinpoint his nearby assassin.

It could be anyone that has access to that patient.

We did follow-ups with family members, friends, people in the community.

Desperate for a lead, detectives continue to push Dwight for answers.

They started asking him if anybody

related to him and had any problems, all that,

or died mysteriously, and he said, well, my wife's previous boyfriend died.

Dwight explains that before he and Blanche got together, she had been in a relationship with a man named Raymond Reed.

He had died not too long after they had met.

Blanche would just say, well, the doctors could never figure it out.

Blanche said he died of really mysterious circumstances.

Coming up, a small town secret comes to light.

My reaction was we've got a serious problem on our hand.

And a chilling discovery will leave the good people of Burlington sweating more than a sinner in church.

It was possible we had a serial killer on our hands.

We needed to escalate things quickly.

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After interviewing 55-year-old Dwight Moore, detectives in Burlington, North Carolina now fear his wife Blanche may be responsible for his poisoning.

and he may not be her only victim.

When the Alamance County Sheriff's Department interviewed Dwight, Dwight said that Blanche's previous boyfriend, Raymond Reed, died suspiciously in 1986.

It was a shocking thing, but she had to be considered a suspect.

With no other leads, detectives obtain Raymond Reed's medical records.

What it details sends chills down their spines.

The symptoms between Dwight and Raymond were eerily

the same.

The sickness, the vomiting.

As with Dwight, Raymond's doctors struggled to pin down a diagnosis.

Raymond Reed's health continued to decline, and then he died October the 7th, 1986.

In the case of Mr.

Reed, the death had been attributed to complications of Guillain-Beret disease.

Detectives learned the symptoms of Guillain-Beret could mimic something else.

Arsenic poisoning could be mistaken for Guillain-Beret disease, which is an autoimmune-type phenomenon that often shows up after a viral infection.

Was arsenic the true culprit in Raymond's death?

On June 13th, 1989, detectives arrive at Pine Hill Cemetery with a backhoe.

After receiving the court order, which was signed by a Superior Court judge, we exhumed Raymond Reed's body.

They dig him up, they pull him out, and they ship him to Chapel Hill, where the medical examiner is located.

I'd conducted an examination.

The most important part of that examination was the obtaining of samples of various tissues and hair for toxicology testing that is to look for arsenic itself.

When my mom told me that they think Blanche may have poisoned your dad, my initial reaction was:

damn.

I'm thinking, how are they going to find that?

It's been in the ground for, you know, three, four years.

While detectives await the test results, they interview Raymond's family about his 15-year relationship with Blanche.

They met at the grocery store, and she was a cashier.

He was an assistant manager.

Blanche is very likable.

She was more than than welcoming to, you know, anybody.

Raymond's family says the Reverend's wife definitely had a sweet side and a salty side.

She had this way of making you feel comfortable, but at the same time, she could turn that off in a heartbeat.

She was very good at manipulating to get her way, and she could snap.

The Reed family's surprising portrayal of Blanche heightens investigators' suspicions, so they press for more detail surrounding Raymond's health crisis in 1986.

Raymond Reed starts to get these gastrointestinal attacks where he is just as sick as a dog.

And they take him to the hospital.

It seemed like it was like close to six months, five or six months.

That was a roller coaster.

I mean, I think he coded three or four times.

Through Through it all, Blanche was right by his side.

She would do a nice thing and bring his favorite dish or milkshake.

And the nurses and everybody thought that was nice.

I thought it was nice.

Investigators learn that upon Raymond's death, Blanche's behavior changed.

While his doctors and family were eager for answers as to what killed Raymond, Blanche was not.

She said, your dad's been cut up enough, he wouldn't want this.

The convincing way that

she told us it made 100% sense.

And he didn't do one.

In that moment, it all made sense because you had six months of poking, prodding, cutting,

and you couldn't figure it out.

I had no reason to really think, why would it matter at this point to go in and do an autopsy?

He would have been the perfect candidate for an autopsy, but Blanche wouldn't have it.

Blanche said, absolutely not.

The odd behavior didn't end there.

Raymond Reed didn't have a lot.

He had some savings.

He had a small pension and he had an insurance policy.

It amounted to, I think, about $125,000.

The sons, Stephen and Ray Jr., were supposed to get that and expected to get that, but she impressed upon both of them that she should get half of theirs and that essentially be split three ways.

That was was Blanche's thing to us, that your dad wanted everything split in thirds, and she had a piece of paper that said that.

And I'm like,

okay,

that's what he wanted.

It's his stuff.

As detectives dig deeper into Blanche's past, more secrets emerge.

Before Dwight, she was married for a number of years to James Taylor.

Mom and dad only dated a few months before they got married, which was maybe like in 50.

James Taylor was Blanche Taylor's husband that died in 1973 of an apparent heart attack.

Detectives are now concerned they may have a black widow in their crosshairs.

Before they can dig into their theory, they receive news from the medical examiner.

Examination of Mr.

Reed's tissues revealed elevated levels of arsenic.

Not just a little more than normal, but concentrations associated with fatalities.

The cause of death was arsenic poisoning.

With confirmation that two of Blanche's lovers suffered arsenic poisoning, detectives anticipate a third victim is already buried.

We obtained James Taylor's medical records and found his medical records was consistent with the cause of death of

Raymond Reed.

I went ahead and recommended to the district attorney that we get a petition to exhume in and the district attorney did so and the judge granted it and we went ahead and then had Mr.

Taylor exhume.

My reaction was we've got a serious problem on our hand.

We were convinced that Blanche was the number one suspect and that it was possible we had a serial killer on our hands and that we needed to escalate things quickly.

Coming up, detectives return to Pine Hill Cemetery.

Is everybody buried in this Alamance County cemetery loaded with arsenic?

And new evidence threatens to turn the investigation upside down.

He had just received some mail where somebody else had confessed to poisoning Dwight Moore.

Is she guilty or is she not guilty?

While detectives are zeroing in on 56-year-old Blanche Taylor Moore Moore for the attempted murder of her husband, Dwight Moore, members of the community have second thoughts about the Belle of Burlington.

It was an absolute buzz almost like from a science fiction story that, what is this?

We don't believe this at all.

She's a very nice Christian lady.

She wouldn't do this.

Despite the buzz around town, Detectives stay focused.

This was becoming suspicious to them because Raymond Reed had died of arsenic poisoning and Dwight Moore was showing high signs of being poisoned.

So they decided to go look at her first husband.

We exhumed James Taylor's body in Hind Hill Cemetery, same cemetery that Raymond Reed was buried in.

While detectives wait for the results of the autopsy, they dig into Blanche's relationship with James.

Blanche was probably around 19 when she married James Taylor and they had

a good marriage.

Growing up as a child, I actually thought I was very lucky.

We were well taken care of and

I appeared to live in a in a happy household.

According to their daughter, Cindy Chapman, everything seemed fine until their lives took a sudden turn.

on October 2nd, 1973.

I was 14 at the time, and my dad had been sick the whole week.

He actually was feeling better or appeared to feel better that night.

He went to bed and we did too.

And the next morning, the alarm clocks went off and dad's not turning it off.

And I think I immediately knew something was wrong.

So she got up and I heard her say, oh no.

And then I got up and she told me to stay back, but she didn't get the door closed.

And so when I looked, he was just lying there on his side, looked very peaceful and just had a trinkle of blood that was coming from his mouth.

45-year-old James lay dead in his bed, having passed away in his sleep.

For dad to have a heart attack so young was very surprising because the longevity of his family is

like 84, 85, 90, 90 years of age.

He was actually the only one that passed away as young as he did.

But maybe there was another reason why James was struck down in his prime.

Dr.

Butts completed the autopsy and the results was that he had a high level of arsenic in his body and that that was the cause of his death.

I was just blown away.

I never, never in my wildest dreams thought that he died from anything other than than a heart attack.

With three confirmed cases of arsenic poisoning tied to the men of Blanche's life, on July 18th, 1989, detectives placed Blanche Moore under arrest.

They arrested her at her home, and they informed me that she went peacefully in and she went to the Alamance County Jail.

She was charged in all three of those cases.

Two charges for murder and one for attempted murder.

It was like a punch in the gut.

That makes sense now when she said what she did, or, you know, makes sense why she didn't want to autopsy.

What idiots are we for not figuring this out earlier?

It's kind of how you feel.

It was a very confusing time and a very

emotional time for my sister and myself.

My dad's family was very angry.

Blanche is booked at the Burlington Police Department and held without bond.

She never confessed.

She always come up with the reason why she was not responsible.

Now detectives face a daunting question.

If Blanche poisoned Dwight, Raymond, and James, are there other victims?

It was surreal.

It was truly so far out of the realm of anything this small small southern town had ever seen.

We were looking at any and all people that A, had an association with Blanche, and B, their medical records somewhat indicated that they died of a little unusual circumstances.

We had a list at that time of 22 people.

that we had obtained corruptors on to obtain their medical records.

After the medical records of the 22 people was reviewed by Dr.

Butz, a determination was made by him to obtain court orders on P.

D.

Kaiser Sr.

Blanche Taylor Moore's father, Isla Taylor, which was Blanche Taylor's mother-in-law, and James Taylor's mother.

These were all people that Blanche had had close contact with, according to

witnesses.

We exhumed the bodies and they were transported to the medical examiner's office in Chapel Hill, North Carolina to Dr.

Butts.

An autopsy was done on all the bodies.

By August 1989, the results of the autopsies on Blanche's father and mother-in-law are in.

There was a high level of arsenic in P.

D.

Kaiser Sr.

and Isla Taylor's autopsy.

However, not enough

to cause death.

Some of the levels were a little bit higher than we would have expected in a normal individual, but again, not in the toxic range.

You can obtain levels of arsenic from certain fruits, certain vegetables that you eat or consume, but it would not be enough to cause your death or even to make you deathly sick.

Detectives theorize that Blanche may have poisoned them, but age and illness finished the job before she could.

They did have significant medical problems, so it may well be that an episode of poisoning pushed him over the edge, so to speak.

The evidence is not enough to charge Blanche with the murders of Isla Taylor and Parker Kaiser.

With no other tests coming back positive, investigators focus on helping prosecutors bring Blanche to justice for her other crimes.

Raymond Reed was the best of the homicide cases.

It was the freshest.

It was the one where the evidence was clear, cogent, and convincing, and could be done with scientific evidence.

There would be nurses that could testify.

There would be family friends.

There would be Raymond Reed's sons and his ex-wife.

They also hope Raymond's case will land Blanche on death row.

Raymond Reed died a horrifying death.

Blance Taylor Moore did this with premeditation and a forethought.

It means like the textbook language for

premeditated murder that

rises to the level of a capital offense and the death penalty.

Then, in May 1990, investigators get a phone call from Blanche's attorney that threatens to turn the case upside down.

He stated that he had just received a handwritten letter signed by Garvin Thomas.

A brief summary of the letter was that he was in love with Blanche Taylor Moore and that he had committed these murders, that in Raymond Reed's case, he dressed up like a chaplain.

He went in and poured it in his water pitch.

He would go into Dwight Moore's room and poison him.

Coming up, investigators scramble for answers.

That made a really strange and weird case all the stranger.

And a small town braces for big city exposure.

It was just a spectacle, an absolute spectacle.

By the spring of 1990, North Carolina prosecutors are trying to put 57-year-old Blanche Moore on death row for poisoning three men with arsenic over the course of 16 years, leaving two of them dead and one seriously ill.

I was confused the whole time This all was happening.

I think I was heartbroken when she was arrested.

Then, a surprise letter to Blanche's attorney claims Blanche's admirer, Garvin Thomas, is responsible.

There was explicit detail about how much he loved her and how much he pined for her, how jealous he was of all these relationships.

He didn't believe that any of these men were worthy of the lovely, beautiful Blanche Taylor Moore.

If the letter was legitimate, it would have meant that she would have probably been released.

But when investigators try to track Garvin down, they immediately find a problem with this scenario.

He had died a week prior to the letter being supposedly mailed.

Did Blanche pen the letter herself in a desperate attempt to regain freedom?

Investigators bring in a handwriting expert to answer that question.

The conclusion is clear.

It was pretty obvious that the letter was wrote by Blanche Moore.

Blanche had sent letters to a friend of hers while she was in jail.

The lady kept all those letters.

It was a treasure trove of letters to compare.

And some of the phrasing and the abbreviations.

That was just astounding and made a really strange and weird case all the stranger and all the weirder.

By now, the case has caught the attention of the national media, who seemed to be captivated by Blanche's southern charm.

Geraldo Rivera, Phil Donahue, Sally Jesse Raphael, it just, it became a force into itself.

Blanche Moore, there was a song about her, the ballad of Blanche Moore.

There was recipes.

Blanche Moore's banana pudding with arsenic in it.

It was just a spectacle, an absolute spectacle.

In October 1990, Blanche's day in court finally arrives.

As she enters the Forsythe County courtroom, 57-year-old Blanche hardly looks capable of murdering her longtime lover, 50-year-old Raymond Reed.

This is a woman, again, who does not look like a serial killer.

This was, you know, a southern church-going woman.

She was immaculately dressed.

She would remind you of your third-grade school teacher or your Sunday school teacher.

She was just a sweet little old Southern lady.

Prosecutors are prepared to show that Blanche is anything but a moral, church-going Southern lady and line up 54 witnesses in their corner, starting with Raymond's nurses.

The nurses would come in and testify that Blanche had brought him banana pudding or some kind of milkshakes he liked, and then he would crash again.

And they didn't know what's wrong with him.

Sometimes she would feed it to him, sometimes he would eat it himself, and it wasn't too long before he got sick again.

The nurse's testimony is powerful, but nothing commands the courtroom's attention like the moment Dwight Moore takes the stand.

You could tell he was somewhat uncomfortable, to say the least.

He didn't really have full control over his limbs.

His hands shook when he was on the stand.

I remember that.

And you could tell he was in great discomfort.

He was devastated.

He just couldn't believe that the woman he loved and married had done that.

It was really sad.

As for Blanche's motive, experts in the courtroom believe it went beyond money.

I don't think she did it for that reason.

It probably turned out that she gained financially from him, but I don't think that was her motivation.

Really, what the lead prosecutor came down to is that sometimes people are just evil.

Like, sometimes, like, bad is bad.

And people do bad things.

And maybe there's no greater explanation than just that, that she was evil.

When a perfectly put together Blanche takes the stand in her own defense, she maintains her innocence.

She had nothing to do with any of these murders.

And she said, I know.

And I believe that there was arsenic in these people, as you've said, but I didn't put it there.

The defense strategy was: one, that Garvin Thomas did it, and two, that this woman is wrongly accused.

But their thinly veiled attempt to convince the jury falls on deaf ears.

The only people in that courtroom that was divided was Blanche's family, who was convinced she was innocent, and everybody else who was convinced she was guilty.

It's a five-week trial.

You know, they had heard enough to be convinced beyond any doubt that she committed this crime and that her punishment should be the death penalty.

I pronounced the sentence and it's always the last part of it, which may God have mercy on your soul.

And I can tell you, it kind of

churns in your stomach when you sentence somebody to death.

God may have mercy on your soul.

For her to get the death penalty was scary.

It just seemed so morbid.

It's just hard for me to wrap my head around.

She was very calm.

She did not let anyone see a lot of her emotion.

She did have a couple of tears run down her face.

How this preacher's wife went from her Sunday best to prison scrubs is a question that may go forever unanswered.

How does this make sense?

How could this woman be so ruthless, so diabolical that she could not only poison these men in her life, but watch them suffer?

Like, who does that?

She was a classic Southern lady.

Everybody liked her.

We couldn't believe she did it.

She's evil in a mask.

You don't know how evil somebody is if they carry themselves around and put on, you know, this holier of the now religious southern hospitality, southern woman.

And then to go out and murder somebody is almost a step further than evil.

Two weeks after Blanche's conviction, Dwight Moore filed for divorce.

Blanche has appealed her conviction three times.

All three have been denied.

Currently, there is an unofficial moratorium on executions in the state of North Carolina.

Blanche continues to serve her sentence on death row.

For more information on Snapped, go to oxygen.com.

How hard is it to kill a planet?

Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere.

When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene.

Are we really safe?

Is our water safe?

You destroyed our town.

And crimes like that, they don't just happen.

We call things accidents.

There is no accident.

This was 100%

preventable.

They're the result of choices by people.

Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime.

These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet.

Stories of scams, murders, and cover-ups that are about us and the things we're doing to either protect the Earth or destroy it.

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