Pod Insights Morbid Blanche Taylor Moore, The Oldest Woman on Death Row (Part 2) About this episode (Part 2 of 2) When the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation opened an investigation and Blanche was charged with the attempted murder, the arrest came as a shock to those who knew her. How was it possible that someone they all knew as “a sweet, Christian lady”—was an attempted murderer? And if she had been cunning enough to hide that side of herself from her community, what else had she been hiding?
Transcript 13,832 words · 4 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 On October 30th, Dexter Morgan is back. In this season, he's facing the scariest threat yet: Middle age. A lifetime of blending in gets to you. And now Dexter is up against two rival killers stealing the spotlight. Taking them down means changing his MO. And things are gonna get messy. Starring Michael C. Hall, Uma Thurman, Dan Stevens, and Brian Cox. Dexter: Resurrection. New season, October 30th on the Paramount Plus Premium Plan.
0:30 Speaker 01 From leaky faucets to faulty ovens, home breakdowns are inevitable and repair bills add up fast. That's why an American Home Shield warranty is a homeowner sanity saver. AHS can repair or may even replace covered parts of home systems and appliances, no matter how old. And as a benefit with select plans, you can video chat with a repair expert in real time. American Home Shield: Don't worry, be warranty. Get 20% off any plan at ahs.com/morbid and see promo details. See ahs.com/contracts for coverage details, including service fees, limitations, and exclusions. Chilling crime cases are mysterious, but finding coverage shouldn't be. With the State Farm Personal Price Plan, you have options and can personalize your plan
1:14 Speaker 01 to help create an affordable price, so you can get back to cracking all of life's bigger cases. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the Personal Price Plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Head to statefarm.com to get a quote. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Hey weirdos, I'm Ash. And I'm Elena. And this is Morbid.
1:56 Speaker 02 This is morbid.
1:57 Speaker 01 I started that with no warning, so I do have to give you like a little.
2:01 Speaker 02 For just jumping right in?
2:02 Speaker 01 You jumped right in, yeah. I was like, I have to yawn, I have to burp, hold on. And then I was like, okay, hey, weird. And you were like, whoa.
2:10 Speaker 02 I was like, alright, here I am. He said, I'm looking for a fun fact.
2:13 Speaker 01 Here I am.
2:14 Speaker 02 Here she be.
2:15 Speaker 01 Here I do. What's up?
2:17 Speaker 02 Uh, I don't know. Today, Alina said, whatever, I'm getting cheese fries.
2:22 Speaker 01 It's true.
2:23 Speaker 02 I literally said that and then I got cheese fries.
2:25 Speaker 01 We got Wendy's, you guys.
2:26 Speaker 02 And it was right.
2:27 Speaker 01 I didn't get a faux faux faux. I got.
2:30 Speaker 02 Bring it back.
2:31 Speaker 01 Do they sell that still?
2:32 Speaker 02 I don't think they have a faux faux faux anymore, but I don't know. I'm not positive.
2:36 Speaker 01 I don't know either. Wendy's?
2:37 Speaker 02 I'm speaking out of my ass. Like, I don't have any clue if they have a faux faux faux.
2:41 Speaker 01 Well, then why would you tell me that they?
2:43 Speaker 02 Because it felt like a long-running little special.
2:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:47 Speaker 02 You know, if they still have a faux faux faux.
2:49 Speaker 01 But maybe it's like the dollar menu and it's just always there.
2:51 Speaker 02 Maybe.
2:52 Speaker 01 Oh, I used to fuck so heavy with that when I was in high school.
2:55 Speaker 02 We love a dollar.
2:56 Speaker 01 Broke as hell. We were like, oh, minimum wage.
2:59 Speaker 02 Let's go.
3:00 Speaker 01 Let's go. Get us some dinner at Wendy's for a dollar.
3:04 Speaker 02 Those were the days.
3:05 Speaker 01 They were, and so were the faux faux faux days.
3:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
3:08 Speaker 01 Now, I just got a Dave's Single, like with a combo.
3:11 Speaker 02 Which was great.
3:12 Speaker 01 I think it was probably like nine dollars.
3:13 Speaker 02 I got spicy nuggets.
3:15 Speaker 01 Because she's reckless.
3:16 Speaker 02 Spicy nuggets are my favorite.
3:18 Speaker 01 I know. You always get spicy nuggets.
3:21 Speaker 02 I love a little spice. We know. We know, mama.
3:24 Speaker 01 A little spice. A little spice. I can't do the spicy nuggets because of IBS.
3:30 Speaker 02 Yeah.
3:31 Speaker 01 You know.
3:31 Speaker 02 You know, IBS girlies, rise up.
3:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I got heartburn. I know. Yeah.
3:37 Speaker 02 That sucks.
3:38 Speaker 01 You don't get heartburn.
3:38 Speaker 02 No, I don't. Which is like, I feel precarious saying that.
3:43 Speaker 01 How does it feel to be John's favorite?
3:46 Speaker 01 I know. To be forty and say that you don't get heartburn, that life is like, oh, we haven't given that to you.
3:50 Speaker 02 Oh, we forgot.
3:51 Speaker 01 Fuck, here you go.
3:52 Speaker 02 I'm like, oh. So I'm like, thank you, universe.
3:56 Speaker 01 I just thought of something that I've never gotten, but I'm not gonna say it. Because I'm not gonna.
4:00 Speaker 02 Well, shit, now I wanna know what it is.
4:01 Speaker 01 I'll tell you later, maybe. I'll like, I'll sign it to you.
4:04 Speaker 02 Okay.
4:04 Speaker 01 But I'm not saying it. I'm not gonna speak it into existence. It's just a task that most people have to fulfill.
4:10 Speaker 02 Oh, I know exactly what it is.
4:12 Speaker 01 By the time you turn eighteen, like when you turn eighteen.
4:13 Speaker 02 You said it.
4:14 Speaker 01 I didn't know, I didn't, no, I didn't say it. No, I didn't say it.
4:17 Speaker 02 You said it without saying.
4:18 Speaker 01 But I didn't say it. So, husha, husha, husha.
4:22 Speaker 02 I think you all know what she's talking about, what task she has not been given.
4:26 Speaker 01 Called for.
4:27 Speaker 02 Called for even more.
4:28 Speaker 01 Don't call me. I'm busy.
4:31 Speaker 02 Guys, say it to her.
4:32 Speaker 01 No, I'm gonna kick you. I'm gonna kick you in the shin. I'm gonna come over there and I'm gonna hya your foot.
4:38 Speaker 02 Just fill it with.
4:39 Speaker 01 What?
4:40 Speaker 02 Just fill the comment section with.
4:42 Speaker 01 No. Don't. What are you doing?
4:45 Speaker 02 I'm just kidding.
4:46 Speaker 01 What are you doing?
4:47 Speaker 02 I'm just kidding.
4:48 Speaker 01 No, I'm not going. I'm not, I won't go.
4:51 Speaker 02 It's gonna be legally.
4:52 Speaker 01 I think you get arrested. All right, all right, moving on, moving on. Moving away from that task.
4:57 Speaker 02 Oh, you're screwed.
4:58 Speaker 01 You're screwed. Anyways, this is part two of a, of a, of a two-part series. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. It kinda reminded me of that song where you're like. Standing up high with my mouth open wide. Ah, ah, ah, ah.
5:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, we need help.
5:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's been, it's been, you know, it's been a crazy day.
5:18 Speaker 01 It has been a crazy day.
5:19 Speaker 02 A good day.
5:20 Speaker 01 Yeah. Good day.
5:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, a good day, just like a little kooky day. We've been a little silly.
5:24 Speaker 01 It's been a kooky week.
5:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:26 Speaker 01 It's weird because I think it's, is today Thursday?
5:29 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:30 Speaker 01 Something.
5:31 Speaker 02 I don't know.
5:32 Speaker 01 I think it's Thursday.
5:32 Speaker 02 Days don't have meaning anymore.
5:33 Speaker 01 I woke up and I thought it was Monday.
5:35 Speaker 02 I mean, yeah.
5:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:37 Speaker 02 I think every day is a weekend when the kids are out of school, so.
5:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's true.
5:40 Speaker 02 It's none, nothing makes sense to me anymore.
5:42 Speaker 01 There am I.
5:44 Speaker 02 Yep.
5:45 Speaker 01 All right, well, speaking of kooky, um, days.
5:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:49 Speaker 01 This is a kooky part two. It's obviously very tragic, but my god, this woman.
5:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, already, I'm like, whoa.
5:57 Speaker 01 Blanche.
5:59 Speaker 02 Nothing like my pup.
6:00 Speaker 01 Nothing like your pup. Really, only a little bit like Blanche Devereaux, the character.
6:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:05 Speaker 01 And the fact that she was a flirt, but she wasn't a, she wasn't a murderess.
6:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's where the comparison ends.
6:11 Speaker 01 So at the end of part one, Blanche's long-term boyfriend passed away suddenly. Uh, that was Raymond, Raymond Reed. And it seemed it could have been from Guillain-Barre syndrome. Her husband, James, had also passed suddenly not too long ago. And they thought that was potentially due to heart problems. And before that, her father passed away under strange circumstances. But at the time of each death, nobody really looked at the death as anything other than, you know, just a tragedy. They didn't think any foul play was involved or anything like that. But Ms. Blanche, let me remind you, now the oldest woman on death row. Her luck was gonna run out eventually. And can I just tell you, it's kind of like an episode of The Pit, but like even better.
6:52 Speaker 02 Oh.
6:53 Speaker 01 It's like The Pit with arrests.
6:55 Speaker 02 Oh.
6:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:56 Speaker 02 There was an arrest on The Pit.
6:59 Speaker 01 Wasn't it a bad arrest, though?
7:00 Speaker 02 It was a dumb one. What's her name? The red-headed one?
7:04 Speaker 01 Oh, McKay?
7:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, fuck that arrest.
7:06 Speaker 02 When they arrested McKay and I was like, pfft.
7:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, fuck that. I hated that.
7:09 Speaker 02 I was pissed about that.
7:10 Speaker 01 Oh, you know what? You haven't finished season two yet.
7:12 Speaker 02 No.
7:13 Speaker 01 There's a good arrest in season two.
7:14 Speaker 02 Okay, cool.
7:15 Speaker 01 I think he gets arrested. So yeah, it's like The Pit with arrests.
7:18 Speaker 02 It's like The Pit.
7:19 Speaker 01 And it's also kind of like, um, House. It's a, it's a little bit like House.
7:23 Speaker 02 Okay.
7:23 Speaker 01 Okay.
7:24 Speaker 02 I'm locked in.
7:25 Speaker 01 So we'll get there. It's a little toward the end.
7:27 Speaker 02 Whoa.
7:28 Speaker 01 Now, whoa. You said you were locked in and then it felt like you were backtracking.
7:31 Speaker 02 I'm like, can I be locked in for that?
7:33 Speaker 01 You have to be. It's your literal job.
7:35 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:36 Speaker 01 Alright, so Raymond's death removed one obstacle from Blanche and don't forget Pastor Dwight. Pastor Dwight going public with their relationship. And when the lawsuit against Kroger was settled in the summer of 1987, they were finally able to be together without fear of consequences. Because remember, part of the reason that they were kind of like living their relationship out in the shadows was that Blanche said her ordeal with Robert Hutton at Kroger made it so that she couldn't be with men.
8:02 Speaker 02 Oh, yes.
8:03 Speaker 01 So she gets the settlement and all of a sudden she's cured.
8:05 Speaker 02 Yes.
8:05 Speaker 01 After the lawyers were paid, the settlement left Blanche with about a hundred thousand dollars. So for now, her money problems were also gone. That summer, she and Dwight planned to get married, but that plan had to be put on hold when, just one month after the settlement, Blanche was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctor told her it was luckily still early enough that the cancer could be treated if she had a double mastectomy. And the idea of surgery was obviously devastating to her, but she went ahead with it and it was successful at removing her cancer. After that, she got some reconstructive surgery done and in the end, nobody could really tell that she had gone through this in the first place. Now with her surgery out of the way, Dwight slowly started introducing
8:46 Speaker 01 Blanche to his family and his friends. They found her to be somewhat strange and not really anything like his previous wife. Blanche told them that she was a devout Christian, but she also didn't seem focused on the things that like, I guess supposedly good Christian women do.
9:03 Speaker 02 Oh.
9:04 Speaker 01 I don't know what that is.
9:05 Speaker 02 I was gonna say.
9:06 Speaker 01 It just makes me think of that TikTok where it's like, she reads, she's a Bible girl who reads her Bible.
9:12 Speaker 02 What?
9:13 Speaker 01 I think I misquoted it.
9:15 Speaker 02 I've never got that.
9:16 Speaker 01 What does he say? Go home and read your Bible. I think it was a Vine. I'm gonna find it.
9:23 Speaker 02 I've never received that on my free page.
9:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, you should.
9:27 Speaker 02 As he said.
9:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:30 Speaker 03 I wanna church girl that go to church and read her Bible.
9:36 Speaker 01 That's what it is. I wanna church girl that goes to church and read her Bible.
9:45 Speaker 02 I love that.
9:46 Speaker 01 That's what his family wanted.
9:47 Speaker 02 Oh, that makes so much sense.
9:49 Speaker 01 His episode might be unhinged because we're unhinged.
9:51 Speaker 02 We're very unhinged right now.
9:53 Speaker 01 So however off putting they might have found her, it was obvious that Dwight really adored Blanche. So his family was like, okay, let's try to give her a chance. And nobody really went to him and was like, she, we wish she was a church girl who went to church and read her Bible.
10:06 Speaker 02 And read her Bible.
10:07 Speaker 01 Read my Bible. Now Blanche, while she was getting to know her soon to be family, she was also increasing the distance between herself and Raymond's family, her boyfriend that had passed away. They'd been together for over 10 years at that point. So she had become very close with his children, Ray and Stevie. But after they all agreed to split up the inheritance three ways, Ray and Stevie just really didn't see or hear from Blanche all that much anymore. Now, at the time, they were obviously grieving the loss of their father and really not in any place to be dealing with his estate. So they considered it a blessing that Blanche was there. Sweet Blanche to help them with everything.
10:44 Speaker 02 Sweet Blanche.
10:45 Speaker 01 But after several months had passed and they were out of the initial stages of grief, things were starting to look pretty fucking suspicious.
10:52 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:53 Speaker 01 When Raymond died, Blanche told his sons that he had written a will and it dictated that his estate, which included a pension from Kroger and a life insurance policy, was to be split between all three of them.
11:05 Speaker 02 Ah.
11:05 Speaker 01 That's what she said.
11:06 Speaker 02 Okay.
11:07 Speaker 01 Once they had time to go over their dad's documents, though, their opinion of Blanche started to change. They weren't as thankful for her anymore.
11:14 Speaker 02 Oh, no.
11:14 Speaker 01 For one thing, when they went to see a lawyer with a copy of Raymond's will, they learned that it said absolutely nothing about splitting anything with Blanche.
11:23 Speaker 02 Oh.
11:24 Speaker 01 Yeah. Their father had left everything to the two of them and made Blanche the executor.
11:30 Speaker 02 Oh.
11:31 Speaker 01 She didn't get anything. She was just supposed to see to it.
11:34 Speaker 02 Yeah. Oh, damn.
11:35 Speaker 01 So by the time they got around to seeing the will, most of the estate had already been divided, though. Now, not long after Blanche finished her reconstructive surgery, Stevie Reed called and confronted her about the money. Not wanting to make things any more difficult, he actually took a pretty reasonable position. He was like, what was done was done. You've already got some piece of it.
11:55 Speaker 02 Like, that's fucked up.
11:56 Speaker 01 We're not going to take the money back. But the life insurance money hadn't been paid out yet. I think it was just the pension. So he was like, when that gets paid out, we're not giving you a third of it.
12:06 Speaker 02 No.
12:06 Speaker 01 Because you're not entitled to it.
12:07 Speaker 02 You're not in the will.
12:08 Speaker 01 As far as the estate went, there wasn't really much to speak of. The real payout was the life insurance. So when Stevie told Blanche that they weren't splitting it with her, she lost her fucking mind.
12:19 Speaker 02 Oh, man.
12:20 Speaker 01 She went on a tirade about the will and the letter that Raymond had supposedly written before his death, laying out his wishes. This tactic of high-pressure insistence had always worked for her in the past.
12:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
12:31 Speaker 01 But Stevie held his position.
12:33 Speaker 02 Good.
12:33 Speaker 01 And insisted, something about this all just wasn't right.
12:36 Speaker 02 Yep.
12:37 Speaker 01 So when she realized that he wasn't going to back down, she yelled at him to keep the damn money and basically never speak to her again.
12:43 Speaker 02 Okay.
12:44 Speaker 01 That was really the last time that his Raymond sons ever heard from Blanche.
12:47 Speaker 02 Honestly, good.
12:48 Speaker 01 Yeah. But it's like bullshit that she did get money from the estate.
12:53 Speaker 02 She got stuff.
12:54 Speaker 01 Like, and she wasn't entitled to it.
12:55 Speaker 02 No.
12:56 Speaker 01 And honestly, big of them to let her have it.
12:58 Speaker 02 Honest, I was gonna say, that was really big of them.
13:00 Speaker 01 But the sad thing is, if they sued her for it, they probably would have spent all the money that they were getting in fees.
13:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's honestly not worth it.
13:08 Speaker 01 No, it's not, unfortunately. Now, the money she had received from Raymond's estate had already run out. And with all the hospital bills and the time that she had been out of work for her reconstructive surgery, the money from her settlement with Kroger wasn't gonna last her much longer. So a few days after her conversation with Stevie, Blanche brought up the potential of marriage with Dwight, cuz she's like, I gotta hitch my fucking ride to somebody.
13:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, of course.
13:32 Speaker 01 And he was just as enthusiastic as he had been in the past. But before they went forward with their marriage, he said he wanted to tell her about his past relationship.
13:42 Speaker 02 Oh.
13:43 Speaker 01 So they drove into the mountains for the weekend to get away. And Dwight told Blanche the full story of how his marriage had fallen apart, about his seventeen year affair with his secretary, and about how he had lost his congregation as a result. But also, Blanche doesn't have a leg to stand on because she cheated on her husband for the better part of their marriage.
14:04 Speaker 02 Exactly.
14:04 Speaker 01 With multiple men.
14:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:05 Speaker 01 She also cheated on her mister with other men.
14:08 Speaker 02 On her mister.
14:09 Speaker 01 Yeah. Now Dwight knew that the affair was wrong, he said. But he also said he, he knew how much he loved Eileen and genuinely believed that they would end up married, that was his mistress. So he said while he wasn't proud of the affair, he didn't regret the relationship. Now, given how close they'd become over the previous year, Dwight probably expected some amount of sympathy and compassion from Blanche. She, I mean, she does wanna marry him after all. So he was stunned when she just quietly called him a sinner and like, kinda shut down.
14:39 Speaker 02 Whoa.
14:40 Speaker 01 Rather than listening to his story without judgment or disapproval, she was devastated. And she insisted that he turn the car around and take her home immediately. Instead, he pulled over and he gave her a minute to collect her thoughts and then listened as she told him about her father and all the awful things that he had done throughout his life. Clearly, she was feeling triggered by the honesty.
15:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:00 Speaker 01 Because remember, her dad was like a huge womanizer. Now, after the confessional car ride, things between Dwight and Blanche kinda went back to normal, or at least Dwight thought they did.
15:10 Speaker 02 Hmm.
15:11 Speaker 01 Blanche, on the other hand, was still harboring very intense feelings of betrayal. And she was pretending everything was okay when they were together, but she couldn't help let some of her anger seep out around Dwight's family. One afternoon, she and Dwight's daughter Debbie went out together shopping. And Blanche kinda started to pry about how Debbie and her brother Doug felt about their father's divorce and all the events that had led up to it. And Debbie said they really didn't have any anger towards their father. And both she and Doug understood that sometimes things don't work out.
15:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:41 Speaker 01 With people. That kind of should have put the matter to rest, you would think.
15:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:45 Speaker 01 But Blanche pressed on. She outright called Dwight's previous mistress a slut.
15:50 Speaker 02 Whoa.
15:51 Speaker 01 And said that Debbie's mother must absolutely hate her dad for what he did. But Debbie insisted, everybody moved on amicably, like, we're all over it.
16:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, let it go.
16:00 Speaker 01 Let it go, exactly. It really wasn't your situation.
16:03 Speaker 02 No.
16:04 Speaker 01 Blanche lost her shit, though. When Debbie was like, it's fine, like, everything is cool. She told Debbie her father, AKA the man Blanche is about to marry, was a wicked evil man who deserved whatever karmic retribution he got.
16:19 Speaker 02 What?
16:21 Speaker 01 Yeah. So Debbie was like, what the fuck?
16:24 Speaker 02 Debbie's like, I'm sorry, what?
16:26 Speaker 01 But she chalked Blanche's response up to her religious upbringing, because Dwight had told his daughter that Blanche had been raised in a fundamentalist religious community that had very outdated views. So Debbie was like, okay, maybe her outburst is just like a result of those views, I guess.
16:43 Speaker 02 People are so much more understanding than I am.
16:46 Speaker 01 Same. I would have lost my shit. I would have lost my shit.
16:49 Speaker 02 Cause I'd be like, that's insane what you just said.
16:52 Speaker 01 It's also her father.
16:53 Speaker 02 How you reacted.
16:53 Speaker 01 I'd be like, you're not gonna marry my dad now.
16:55 Speaker 02 I'd be like, nah, I'm gonna make sure of it.
16:58 Speaker 01 So she was like, okay, like, I'm gonna let that go. But she put that in her back pocket. She never forgot that shit.
17:04 Speaker 02 Smart.
17:05 Speaker 01 And she really never felt entirely comfortable around Blanche again.
17:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, I imagine.
17:09 Speaker 01 I wouldn't either. Now, I, this is, I, I think it's like sweet, she never told her dad that this happened.
17:14 Speaker 02 I mean, that was kind of her to not.
17:17 Speaker 01 She just didn't wanna fuck things up for him.
17:19 Speaker 02 And, and hurt him.
17:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, and hurt him, except that, cause he really loved Blanche. Like, he was, like, he wanted to marry her. He wanted to continue his life with her.
17:28 Speaker 02 Cause if you... I imagine in her case that she's like, well, he's not gonna not marry her.
17:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:35 Speaker 02 Like, he loves her.
17:36 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
17:36 Speaker 02 So all I would be doing is hurting his feelings.
17:39 Speaker 01 Exactly.
17:41 Speaker 02 Is that really worth, if he's gonna go through with it anyways, am I gonna pile on hurt feelings as well? Which, again, she's, she's, that's pretty smart and pretty like, kind.
17:51 Speaker 01 It's also just like such a shitty position.
17:53 Speaker 02 A dreadful position.
17:54 Speaker 01 And I also wonder if she was like somewhat afraid of Blanche because that was very wild behavior to display.
18:00 Speaker 02 Freak me out.
18:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'd be like, I don't wanna be involved in this.
18:03 Speaker 02 I don't like when people are over the top like that. It's like, dude, get it together.
18:06 Speaker 01 So she never said anything about Blanche's outburst. So as far as Dwight was concerned, things couldn't have been better. He didn't know anything about karmic retribution that he was in for.
18:14 Speaker 02 Eee.
18:14 Speaker 01 So in the summer of nineteen eighty-eight, they started making plans, like official plans for their wedding. It was to be a fall wedding at Dwight's congregation just after Thanksgiving. Everyone in Dwight's family was pretty excited when they heard the news. Dwight's sister Nola said, "We thought Blanche would be a tremendous asset to Dwight's ministry." Blanche's daughters, on the other hand, were less enthusiastic about their fa- their mother's new fiance.
18:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:37 Speaker 01 Cindy said, "We're capable of a good deep belly laugh. He's capable of a giggle." Like, they just didn't feel like he really fit in.
18:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:44 Speaker 01 It also didn't help that her daughters were really attached to Raymond after their father passed, because he was a huge part of their lives.
18:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:50 Speaker 01 And they kinda always hoped that Raymond and Blanche would end up together. So this was a little tough.
18:55 Speaker 02 Tough for everybody.
18:56 Speaker 01 Yeah. Now, as with, uh, as they were planning the wedding, Blanche revealed to Dwight that her daughters were gonna be the ones paying for the reception.
19:04 Speaker 02 Oh.
19:05 Speaker 01 Up until that moment, Dwight had never considered Blanche's finances or her source of income, which is wild, because like, I'm not blaming him, but like, when you are getting married to someone, please get an idea of their financial picture.
19:16 Speaker 02 Just for future reference.
19:17 Speaker 01 Because you're tying yourself to their debt.
19:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, your stuff is their stuff. Their stuff is your stuff.
19:22 Speaker 01 Now, he knew that she got some money from Raymond's death and the settlement from the Kroger suit, but that was really all he knew. I don't know that he knew how fast she was running out of that. When it came to his finances, the complete opposite was true. Once they decided to get married, he gave every detail about his income sources to Blanche, including his life insurance policy and retirement package.
19:45 Speaker 02 Oh, boy.
19:45 Speaker 01 She had a full view of everything.
19:47 Speaker 02 Oh, boy.
19:48 Speaker 01 Now, as Thanksgiving approached, Dwight was getting more and more excited about the wedding. But just a few weeks before the wedding was supposed to take place, his enthusiasm was cut short when he suddenly became very ill. It started with a terrible case of nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. And what was weird was that he never really had stomach issues before this. So he kind of chalked it up to just nerves and excitement and stress leading up to the wedding. But a few days later, he was still experiencing these kind of GI symptoms. And then his symptoms elevated to also include a skin rash and numbness and tingling in his arms and hands.
20:26 Speaker 02 Oh, that's not good.
20:27 Speaker 01 So the new symptoms concerned him enough to go see his doctor, who diagnosed him with shingles, the same illness that Raymond had been diagnosed with prior to his death.
20:36 Speaker 02 Okay.
20:37 Speaker 01 Weird.
20:37 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:38 Speaker 01 One week before the wedding, Dwight and Blanche managed to make it out to go to dinner and then returned home and went to bed. Dwight's stomach had been bothering him since they got home, which he figured maybe he just ate something weird.
20:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:50 Speaker 01 So he went to bed. But unfortunately, not long after laying down, he bolted upright and projectile vomited across the room.
21:00 Speaker 02 Oh, my God.
21:01 Speaker 01 And then just collapsed on the bed in pure agony.
21:03 Speaker 02 Holy shit.
21:04 Speaker 01 The next morning, he was still in too much pain and too sick to do his usual visits with parishioners. And strangely, to his surprise, Blanche, who ate the same exact meal that he had the night before, was the very picture of health.
21:18 Speaker 02 Oh.
21:19 Speaker 01 So it wasn't the food.
21:20 Speaker 02 Weird.
21:21 Speaker 01 Yeah. Now, the theory that Dwight had been experiencing some sort of food poisoning became even less plausible as his symptoms persisted for days at a time.
21:29 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:29 Speaker 01 After a while, he would get better and think that whatever it was had passed, only to have the painful nausea and the agonizing symptoms return at the worst possible times, like when he was driving or giving a sermon.
21:41 Speaker 02 Oh, no.
21:42 Speaker 01 Imagine you're in the middle of church, like trying to... Like lift people up and then you just have to go vomit. Oh, that's awful. Yeah. So things became more alarming on the afternoon of Blanche's physical with her doctor for the marriage license, which by the way, I looked this up, this, it's been phased out since, but up until like the eighties slash nineties, you had to get a physical before you got married to get your marriage license. Really? They wanted to rule out like syphilis and like Oh shit, I didn't know that. infectious diseases. Interesting. Isn't that crazy? Hmm. It's not a thing anymore, but you used to have to get a full blood, blood test. Damn.
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25:26 Speaker 01 Now, the doctor gave Blanche a clean bill of health, but he was slightly concerned about how Dwight looked. He was like, "You don't look so good."
25:33 Speaker 02 You look like shit, my guy.
25:34 Speaker 01 He was like, "I might not give you this fucking license." The reverend assured the doctor that he was just experiencing a flu, like a terrible flu.
25:40 Speaker 02 A really bad one.
25:41 Speaker 01 Yeah. And he said, "I'm gonna take some medication. When I get home, I'll be all right." As they were driving, he felt another wave of nausea that washed over him, and he quickly pulled over to the side of the road with just enough time to get his door open to vomit. And behind him, he could hear Blanche laughing at the fact that she was the one coming from the doctor, but he was the one vomiting.
26:02 Speaker 02 Imagine you're vomiting and your partner is laughing at you.
26:05 Speaker 01 Your fiance. Well, you're due to marry in like, six days.
26:12 Speaker 01 If Drew ever laughed at me while I was vomiting.
26:14 Speaker 02 Oh, my god.
26:15 Speaker 01 There wouldn't be, I love you, babe. There would be a safe corner on this earth. I'd lose my shit.
26:19 Speaker 02 Are you kidding me?
26:20 Speaker 01 Like, what?
26:21 Speaker 02 That's awful.
26:22 Speaker 01 No, he might have found it humorous as well, but when he looked at the ground, he saw streaks of red blood in his vomit.
26:29 Speaker 02 Oh, no.
26:30 Speaker 01 So things were escalating here. In the days that followed, it became abundantly clear that he was far too sick to go through with the wedding. So they pushed it back six weeks to give him time to recoup.
26:39 Speaker 02 You gotta go to the hospital.
26:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:41 Speaker 02 Like, why is no one going to the hospital?
26:44 Speaker 01 He's about to go to the hospital.
26:45 Speaker 02 Okay.
26:45 Speaker 01 Things only continued to get worse. Within a day or two of that doctor's appointment, that was Blanche's, Dwight's symptoms became much worse. He was nauseous pretty much constantly, and now his abdomen was starting to swell.
26:59 Speaker 02 Oh.
26:59 Speaker 01 So this time, he didn't bother with just going to a doctor, like a doctor's appointment. Instead, he had Blanche drive him straight to the hospital.
27:06 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:07 Speaker 01 They waited in the emergency room for hours. The ER doctors ran some tests, they took an x-ray, and they diagnosed him with a bowel obstruction.
27:15 Speaker 02 Oh, shit.
27:16 Speaker 01 Now, they recommended that he go home and rest, consume a liquid diet, and then it would eventually pass. I don't think it was, like, super big at this point. Also, it was, what, the eighties, like, almost the nineties?
27:27 Speaker 02 Guys, that's pretty serious.
27:29 Speaker 01 He did as they suggested, but less than 24 hours passed before he was back at the hospital.
27:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:34 Speaker 01 More x-rays were taken, more tests were run, but the doctors were pretty confused about what this was.
27:40 Speaker 02 Maybe you should keep him in the hospital.
27:42 Speaker 01 Maybe you should admit him.
27:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:44 Speaker 01 And the x-rays, they could clearly see a mass, but they couldn't figure out what it was, because it had gotten bigger. But no cancer that they knew of grew with, like, that exponentially within 24 hours. So, weirdly, so he's told he has a mass, he's told it's getting bigger. Despite not having any explanation for what this mass in the x-ray is, Blanche immediately ran to the phone and called Dwight's sisters to tell them that it was cancerous. Huh, the mass in his intestines was cancerous.
28:14 Speaker 02 She loves to call family members and prematurely diagnose or call for time of death.
28:21 Speaker 01 Yup, she sure does, before calling anybody for emergency services.
28:25 Speaker 02 She's wild.
28:26 Speaker 01 She's a wild lady.
28:28 Speaker 02 Like, whoa.
28:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, so after talking over their different options for what they could do here, the ER doctors explained that they did want to do surgery to remove the mass, but the problem was, his heart was showing signs of stress that were very concerning.
28:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:44 Speaker 01 And that came as a surprise to Dwight, because as far as he knew, his heart was strong, he never really smoked or drank to excess, and like, he exercised, like-
28:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, like never had a problem before.
28:54 Speaker 01 No, he never had an issue, but when doctors looked at the results from his EKG, the results appeared to be the profile of a much older person who had suffered heart problems for years. So he was like, what the fuck is happening to my body?
29:07 Speaker 02 What is going on?
29:08 Speaker 01 Now, he agreed to do the surgery, and a few days later, he was administered the anesthetic and wheeled into the OR, but when the surgeon cut into his intestine, they were stunned to find that contrary to the x-ray, there was no cancerous mass or mass at all in Dwight's intestine.
29:25 Speaker 02 What?
29:26 Speaker 01 There was no sign of any kind of blockage either, his intestines were just inflamed.
29:33 Speaker 02 What the fuck?
29:34 Speaker 01 But there was no mass, and they had seen a mass on the x-ray, the inflammation didn't account for what they saw on the x-ray.
29:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
29:40 Speaker 01 Nothing about this made any kind of fucking sense.
29:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, apparently.
29:44 Speaker 01 And, like, they would have known if he had passed the blockage, so it wasn't bad either. Now, just to be certain that they didn't miss anything, this is so gross, the surgeons pulled out the entire length of Dwight's intestines and inspected them from one end to the other.
30:01 Speaker 02 Holy shit.
30:02 Speaker 01 You know how long intestines are.
30:04 Speaker 02 Yeah.
30:04 Speaker 01 They inspected them.
30:06 Speaker 02 And that's just tedious.
30:07 Speaker 01 And like, also recovering from that?
30:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
30:10 Speaker 01 Having your fucking, like, you're literally being disemboweled.
30:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, literally.
30:13 Speaker 01 And then reboweled.
30:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
30:15 Speaker 01 They found nothing. So they put everything back and they sewed him up.
30:20 Speaker 02 Wow.
30:21 Speaker 01 When he came out of surgery and was conscious enough to speak to the doctors, they explained that they hadn't found anything during his surgery. And the best they could estimate was maybe he had a kink in his intestines and they worked that out.
30:32 Speaker 02 Wow.
30:33 Speaker 01 Now, the news that he was cancer free obviously came as a relief, but a surgery like this had been very traumatic and it was also going to take a long time to recover. So he was gonna need to take it easy. Now fortunately, he had Blanche by his side.
30:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, thank goodness.
30:48 Speaker 01 And she said she would be there to help him through. She told his family, Dwight and I are gonna live in sin for a while because I'm gonna have to move in with him to care for him.
30:57 Speaker 02 Okay.
30:57 Speaker 01 So they did.
30:58 Speaker 02 Great.
30:59 Speaker 01 As the weeks passed after the surgery, Dwight started talking about the wedding again, but Blanche insisted he was too ill to think about that. She was like, we don't need to talk about wedding.
31:07 Speaker 02 We don't need that.
31:09 Speaker 01 She might have been right, but he was insistent that they at least kind of restart any kind of preparation. But unfortunately, before they could get to that, Dwight's doctors found another mass in his x-ray during a follow-up visit. Initially, they expected to find evidence of some kind of intestinal problem, but when they looked at the new x-ray, they found an entirely new mass in a different area, roughly roughly the same size as the previous one. Now, since it wasn't possible for that original mass to have worked its way back up to the original spot, they knew it was different. But since it wasn't long enough after the initial surgery, they couldn't do another surgery.
31:47 Speaker 02 Oh, okay. Yeah, they can't just keep opening you up.
31:50 Speaker 01 So after the follow-up appointment, they kept an eye on the mass. But since Dwight's symptoms seemed to have improved a little bit, they weren't as concerned.
31:58 Speaker 02 Okay.
31:59 Speaker 01 Then, in winter, as the new wedding date approached, Dwight's previous symptoms appeared with a ferocity that he had not yet experienced. Blanche rushed him to the hospital. He was admitted immediately and hooked up to a ton of machines to monitor his very erratic vital signs. By that time, there was fluid amassing in his lungs and he was experiencing painful diarrhea and vomiting a quote unquote milky foam.
32:26 Speaker 02 Ugh.
32:26 Speaker 01 Yeah. So once he was stable enough for surgery, his doctors opened up his intestines for a second time and for a second time, found absolutely nothing. No mass, no blockage, just irritation.
32:42 Speaker 02 This is horrifying.
32:43 Speaker 01 It really is. So he managed to recover much faster than he had before and he was able to be discharged after two weeks in the hospital. But in that time, he had the opportunity to consider his relationship with Blanche. It occurred to him that she hadn't been as present at the hospital as she was the first time. It's weird because he got better faster when she wasn't there. Weird. Also, for that matter, she didn't really seem as committed to being his nurse during what was expected to be another long recovery now that he was out of the hospital. Now, he's just thinking like, maybe she doesn't want to be there for me anymore. He's not thinking the worst. So he decided not to bother Blanche with his recovery for the second time. And instead, he took up his sister Nola on the offer
33:27 Speaker 01 to come stay with her and her husband. To his surprise, when he told Blanche his plans, she kind of seemed offended. She was like, you can't, you don't think you can rely on me?
33:36 Speaker 02 No.
33:37 Speaker 01 And he was like, well, you didn't seem interested at all. So I thought I was like taking something out of your plate or off your plate. But she was like, whatever.
33:46 Speaker 02 It's like, okay.
33:46 Speaker 01 So he went to stay with his sister.
33:48 Speaker 02 I have to like, try to survive this. Like, Jesus.
33:50 Speaker 01 Also, mind you, this is his fiance.
33:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
33:54 Speaker 01 Like, and he's like, okay, I'm sorry for bothering you with my intestinal issues.
33:59 Speaker 02 Damn.
34:00 Speaker 01 So.
34:01 Speaker 02 I feel bad.
34:02 Speaker 01 I feel so bad for him. During the weeks that he was with his sister, Blanche never visited and she barely, she, I don't, she, she didn't call him, he called her.
34:11 Speaker 02 My god.
34:11 Speaker 01 Mm hmm. They only spoke a handful of times when he called, and each time Blanche was distant or dismissive. So Nola, his sister and her husband, kind of read these, like, Blanche's behavior as signs that their relationship was on the decline and they probably weren't going to get married. But Dwight assumed it was just Blanche's personality. He was like, that's just how she is.
34:34 Speaker 02 Very forgiving.
34:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:35 Speaker 02 Better people than I.
34:36 Speaker 01 He's very forgiving. If he was overly optimistic, it might have had something to do with his speedy recovery. Because not only was he healing quickly from the surgery itself this time, but all of his other agonizing symptoms also seemed to be clearing up because he was staying with his sister and Blanche wasn't visiting.
34:53 Speaker 02 Exactly.
34:54 Speaker 01 As far as he was concerned, though, everything was on track to getting back to normal. And maybe they could get married.
34:59 Speaker 02 Oh, man.
35:00 Speaker 01 This poor man.
35:01 Speaker 02 Run away.
35:02 Speaker 01 I know. So by February 1989, the last of Dwight's symptoms had faded and he was finally feeling like himself again. And now that his illness was behind him, he really was so excited to get back to Blanche. He really missed her.
35:14 Speaker 02 That's so sad.
35:15 Speaker 01 In March, he got a call from his son Doug, inviting his dad to come to New Jersey and visit and meet his new grandchild.
35:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
35:23 Speaker 01 Dwight could not have been more excited. But before making plans to travel, he talked to Blanche and he said, I really want you to join me. Like, I want you to meet my grandchild. But as my wife, I really want to marry you.
35:34 Speaker 02 Oh.
35:35 Speaker 01 So with all the talk of marriage they'd been through and all the times that Blanche had declined, or just put him off, he expected her to have some other reason why they couldn't get married this time. But to his surprise, she accepted the invitation.
35:48 Speaker 02 It's because she's not done yet.
35:50 Speaker 01 Yeah. Now, rather than go through with yet another potentially frustrating experience of planning like a bigger wedding, only to keep pushing it back, they did get married in a very small ceremony on April 19th with Dwight's friend Reverend Jim Rossar officiating. With all the chaos of the doctors and hospitals in the recent months, there wasn't time and there really wasn't money for a lavish honeymoon. So they decided to consider the trip to New Jersey their honeymoon. The next day, Blanche and Dwight got into his car, they drove to visit Doug, finally as husband and wife. Now, shockingly, the visit to New Jersey passed without incident. And after a few days with Doug's family, Blanche and Dwight were on the road headed back to North Carolina. For several weeks at this point, Dwight had been
36:35 Speaker 01 symptom free, felt like he was finally getting his life back, got to meet his grandchild, hang out with his kids, no issue. But that all came to an end on the trip back home. While they were on the Cape May ferry, Dwight was standing by the railing and he was just looking out at the water. And all of a sudden, he got hit with a super intense wave of nausea. At first, he was like, okay, maybe I'm just seasick. But
37:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
37:00 Speaker 01 Within a few minutes, there was no point in denying the obvious. As soon as they got home, he went to lay down. And the next morning, he was feeling slightly better. The next, that same morning, he visited some parishioners, he returned home, he put on his gardening clothes, he went out to spray the weeds and the dandelions with weed killer. Around noon, Blanche returned home from shopping and she called Dwight into the house to have some lunch. She made, uh, she picked up chicken sandwiches on the way home.
37:26 Speaker 02 Oh no, don't eat what she's giving you.
37:28 Speaker 01 No. Over lunch, he listened to Blanche talk about the plan she had to fix up their small house. And then, without any warning, Dwight stood up from the table and projectile vomited so violently that the force struck the far wall.
37:45 Speaker 02 My god.
37:46 Speaker 01 He literally projectile vomited across a room and hit another fucking wall.
37:50 Speaker 02 This is torture.
37:51 Speaker 01 It is torture. It's slow.
37:53 Speaker 02 Like, this is so slow and, yeah, this is awful.
37:58 Speaker 01 It is. So when that finally stopped, he fell to his knees, then flat on the floor, face down, which like, I would never allow my husband to fall on the floor face down while he was vomiting. I'd be right there holding him. But he vomited again, face down on the floor.
38:14 Speaker 02 Oh.
38:15 Speaker 01 Throughout that entire vomit stream, across the room, and then when he fell to the floor, Blanche never stopped talking about hanging curtains and blinds and fixing up the house. Even as she finally helped him get off the kitchen floor and walked him to the bedroom, she was just going on and on about home renovations, despite the full-blown fucking crisis unfolding before her.
38:39 Speaker 02 She is an evil, evil lady.
38:43 Speaker 01 To be able to be that removed from a situation that I think we all know she created.
38:49 Speaker 02 Inhuman.
38:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:52 Speaker 02 Cause even if she didn't create that, um, obviously she's on death row.
38:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:56 Speaker 02 But, but even still. Even if she didn't create that, to be that insensitive to the suffering of someone you are claiming to love.
39:05 Speaker 01 Someone you're married to.
39:07 Speaker 02 Is inhuman in a way I cannot comprehend.
39:10 Speaker 01 No.
39:11 Speaker 02 Like, it's, that's so scary.
39:13 Speaker 01 It is.
39:14 Speaker 02 To think of this man just suffering like that for so long.
39:18 Speaker 01 It's so sad.
39:19 Speaker 02 And she's not only indifferent, she's just like. It's not even like it doesn't hit her in any way.
39:25 Speaker 01 No.
39:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
39:26 Speaker 01 Not at all.
39:26 Speaker 02 Like, that's horrifying. That's so brutal. That's
39:30 Speaker 01 So sad.
39:30 Speaker 02 This is brutal in such a different way than what we usually see with these kind of things.
39:35 Speaker 01 And like violent in a different way.
39:37 Speaker 02 Very gruesome.
39:38 Speaker 01 Cause it's, it's like slowly killing somebody and watching it all happen.
39:42 Speaker 02 For months and months and months and months. Like, holy shit.
39:46 Speaker 01 It's remarkable.
39:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
39:47 Speaker 01 That he made it through some of this.
39:49 Speaker 02 Oh.
39:50 Speaker 01 Now, the next day Dwight went to the ER but found little help there. The attending physician consulted with a doctor who originally diagnosed Dwight with the bowel obstruction. And after hearing the whole story, he just prescribed medication and sent him home. But it's like, guys, something is wrong here. Later that night, Blanche was sweet enough to make Dwight some soup. But then he became violently ill again.
40:11 Speaker 02 Oh my god.
40:12 Speaker 01 Almost like the medication wasn't in his system at all. He begged Blanche to take him back to the hospital. And once there, it was a repeat of the day before. The doctor looked him over, discharged him with medication. Dwight begged the doctor to please admit him. He was like, no, something more is going on here. But the doctor told him he didn't have time to do the required work of referring him to another doctor, so he had to go home.
40:38 Speaker 01 The healthcare system.
40:39 Speaker 02 I was literally just gonna say, healthcare in America, everybody.
40:41 Speaker 01 Yeah. People in other countries are probably like, what the fuck?
40:45 Speaker 02 How the fuck did this happen? Like, yes, we are asking the same thing. How the fuck did this happen?
40:50 Speaker 01 This same thing is probably happening right now as we speak.
40:52 Speaker 02 It's 2026 and it's probably still happening. This is, that's fucking ridiculous.
40:57 Speaker 01 To look at somebody and just be like, yeah, sorry, I don't have the time. Okay.
41:01 Speaker 02 Like, what the fuck?
41:02 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's, it's such an awful system. So that night, he's discharged again. The scene replays itself all over again. Blanche made Dwight soup. He ate it. Almost immediately, he became violently ill. Begs Blanche to drive him to the ER for, and what is this, the third time? She begrudgingly agreed to do so. That's the other thing. She was like, oh, he had to beg her to drive him.
41:25 Speaker 02 My god.
41:26 Speaker 01 This time, though, he insisted that they drive 40 miles to North Carolina Memorial Hospital. Unfortunately, the doctors there at the new emergency room were no more sympathetic than they had been at the last hospital.
41:40 Speaker 02 This is disgusting.
41:41 Speaker 01 And they did the exact same thing. Medication, go home to rest.
41:45 Speaker 02 That's horrific.
41:47 Speaker 01 And it's like, guys, it's well documented that the medication is not doing anything. Two days passed and by that Friday morning Dwight was barely able to move or stand up and he was just in constant pain, like
42:01 Speaker 02 That's awful.
42:01 Speaker 01 True agony.
42:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:03 Speaker 01 Blanche dismissed his complaints for hours, but eventually relented and drove him back to the hospital. This time, the attending doctor took one look at him and immediately admitted him into the ICU.
42:16 Speaker 02 Finally.
42:17 Speaker 01 It's sad. Like, I love, I've, I've had great experiences with like doctors and everything. But I've heard these horror stories where some of them don't have the time and they're overworked.
42:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, I was gonna say, it's not even that they don't care, it's that they can't care.
42:29 Speaker 01 Exactly.
42:30 Speaker 02 You know what I mean? Which is even
42:31 Speaker 01 They're so overloaded.
42:32 Speaker 02 I mean, you literally see it on the pit. They're understaffed, they're underfunded, they're not supported, they're working these long hours, like, the healthcare system is fucked in this country. And meanwhile, we have a trillionaire that could fix it all in the blink of an eye.
42:47 Speaker 01 Where you at, boy?
42:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:49 Speaker 01 Now, once he was finally settled in the hospital, in the fucking ICU, the intensive care unit.
42:55 Speaker 02 They don't just throw anyone in there.
42:57 Speaker 01 No, it takes a lot to go to the ICU. Dwight became the responsibility of Dr. David Wans, a third year fellow in the cardiology department at the University of North Carolina. Now, unlike some of the other doctors who'd seen Dwight, Wans was young and he was very eager to prove himself on a complicated case that had baffled other, more seasoned professionals.
43:17 Speaker 02 Honestly, best case scenario.
43:18 Speaker 01 It really is.
43:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
43:20 Speaker 01 So the day after, this is where it starts to remind me of a pit episode. The day after admittance, Dr. Wans sat down with Blanche, who was more than happy to fill in the details of her husband's medical mystery. She gave Wans a list of medications that Dwight had been on and tried to remember anything he had eaten right before becoming sick this time. And she also mentioned that he had been out in the garden spraying the weed killer. The mention of gardening got Dr. Wans to think that Dwight may have been inadvertently poisoned. Blanche told the doctor she didn't think that could be it, but she still agreed to return home and gather up all the pesticides they had in the house and come back with them. As soon as she left, Dr. Wans ordered a full toxicological workup for his patient.
44:01 Speaker 02 Badass.
44:02 Speaker 01 Yeah. So Blanche arrived home that afternoon to the phone ringing. It was Debbie on the other end calling to check on her father. Blanche seemed nonchalant and said her dad was in the hospital, but don't worry, it's just for some tests.
44:14 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
44:15 Speaker 01 And she said, it's really just because he didn't, he didn't trust the other doctors. I'm like, no, but she's been admitted to the ICU.
44:22 Speaker 02 Yeah. Like, wow, not telling his children that.
44:26 Speaker 01 Well, luckily Debbie still wasn't comfortable with Blanche after her experience with the whole shopping thing. And there was something in Blanche's voice that made Debbie suspicious.
44:36 Speaker 02 Oh, she knows.
44:37 Speaker 01 So after hanging up with Blanche, Debbie called a friend who was more familiar with hospital systems and explained that she was hoping the friend might be able to call the doctor and ask the right questions to get some answers here. So Debbie's friend called and left a message for Dr. Wans, who returned the call a few hours later and absolutely insisted that Debbie and her brother should get to the hospital right away because they weren't sure if her father was going to make it.
45:00 Speaker 02 Oh, my God.
45:01 Speaker 01 Yeah. That's how down bad he was.
45:03 Speaker 02 Holy shit.
45:04 Speaker 01 Again, he's in the fucking ICU.
45:06 Speaker 02 Yeah.
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46:37 Speaker 00 Here's a quick podcast for all you true crime fans. The case of the missing Reese's. It was me at the store with my mouth. Motive, um, they're Reese's. What was I gonna do? Stop myself? Tune in next time to see if I do it again. Spoiler, I will. Wow, that had everything. Reese's, suspense, Reese's.
47:08 Speaker 01 The Hulu original series Phony is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ Sunny's life is pretty great until he wakes up from a car accident to a world that looks exactly like his, but with one exception, his mom. Starring five-time Emmy nominee Connie Britton and Sam Nivola, this small town is hiding the mother of all mysteries just beneath the surface. Watch the Hulu original series Phony, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.
47:42 Speaker 01 Now Dwight continued to deteriorate over the next few days to the point that death seemed inevitable and frankly imminent. The doctors could not figure out what was happening and they were powerless to do anything more than slow the progress of whatever was killing him. Then, on May 13th, they got the break they needed when the toxicology report came back in. If there had been a different doctor on when the results arrived, maybe they would have dismissed the results as an anomaly or a false positive, who knows? But this time, the results came to that young hospital intern who took one fucking look at those results and was shocked that, so shocked, that he couldn't help but show everybody.
48:24 Speaker 01 Dwight's results showed a level of arsenic in his system that was 20 times the lethal dose.
48:31 Speaker 02 Oh my gods.
48:33 Speaker 01 20 times the lethal dose. According to author Jim Schutz, who again, we'll link his book in the show notes, it was the most arsenic that had ever been found in any living human being in the history of the hospital. Enough to kill a large mammal.
48:51 Speaker 02 Wow.
48:53 Speaker 01 Enough to kill a large mammal is crazy.
48:58 Speaker 02 That's nuts.
48:59 Speaker 01 I'm literally picturing a bear.
49:00 Speaker 02 Literally.
49:01 Speaker 01 Like, like 20 times the lethal dose. How the fuck did this man survive?
49:07 Speaker 02 I mean, he was suffering, like holy shit.
49:10 Speaker 01 Like, we can't actually even put into words how much he must have been suffering.
49:14 Speaker 02 Can't even comprehend it.
49:15 Speaker 01 Now, thinking that had to be a mistake, Dr. Wong's called the lab, but they insisted that there was no mistake, they themselves were so shocked that they triple-checked the results.
49:24 Speaker 02 Wow. Yeah, because I mean, I'm sure they never saw that before.
49:29 Speaker 01 No. So suddenly, everything started to make sense. Arsenic tends to behave like a chemical, but it's actually a heavy metal. So when they looked at the x-rays over and over, what the doctor, the original doctors thought was a bowel obstruction, was actually arsenic that had pooled in Dwight's intestines.
49:46 Speaker 02 Oh.
49:47 Speaker 01 Because it's a metal, the x-rays didn't penetrate the pool of arsenic. So that's why it looked like a mass.
49:52 Speaker 02 That makes sense.
49:53 Speaker 01 It also explained why, when those original doctors cut into him to remove the mass, there was nothing in it.
49:59 Speaker 02 There was no mass.
50:00 Speaker 01 Arsenic will work through a person's system in a matter of days and would have been gone by the time the specialist followed up.
50:06 Speaker 02 God damn. This young doctor.
50:09 Speaker 01 A fucking winner, baby.
50:10 Speaker 02 Like damn.
50:11 Speaker 01 So the test results were the critical missing piece of the puzzle. But while they may have been the key to solving the medical mystery at hand, they now raised a new question. How the fuck did the arsenic get there in the first place?
50:23 Speaker 02 I, I bet I know.
50:25 Speaker 01 No, you're stumped.
50:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, I have an idea.
50:27 Speaker 01 Maybe.
50:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's gonna be crazy.
50:29 Speaker 01 Now, after asking the family members to step out into the hall, Dr. Wong sat right now, uh, right down next to Dwight's bed and explained what he found and asked that very question. He was like, how do you think this got into your system, buddy?
50:41 Speaker 02 How'd you get so much arsenic?
50:43 Speaker 01 Dwight was still in bad shape, but he had regained consciousness and appeared to be improved enough to think and talk. He told Dr. Wong's that he'd been spraying weeds that afternoon just before lunch, so he thought maybe that was it. But the doctor was like, no, no household chemical contains that amount of arsenic. And if the heavy metal had been the problem all along, that meant that he would have had to have been consistently consuming it for almost a year.
51:08 Speaker 02 So like, who's feeding you arsenic? Who's feeding you?
51:12 Speaker 01 Yeah. Dwight would spend more than a month in the ICU. Luckily steadily improving as the arsenic just worked its way out of his system. Given the unusual nature of the circumstances, though, he was moved to an isolation unit and assigned a sitter.
51:27 Speaker 02 Wow.
51:28 Speaker 01 So that meant somebody was in the room at all times, day and night.
51:31 Speaker 02 Wow.
51:32 Speaker 01 At no point could his family or hospital staff be allowed in that room without that sitter there.
51:38 Speaker 02 Wow.
51:38 Speaker 01 Because they knew somebody's gonna get in here. Somebody in your fucking circle is poisoning you.
51:45 Speaker 02 More arsenic. They're gonna finish off the job if we leave you alone.
51:48 Speaker 01 Exactly.
51:49 Speaker 02 That's actually terrifying.
51:50 Speaker 01 Isn't it?
51:51 Speaker 02 Oh my god.
51:52 Speaker 01 So Wong's and his supervisors contacted the police, uh, to report their findings. But the department was small and overworked, so they left a message and they waited for a return call.
52:01 Speaker 02 Is anyone doing their job besides Dr. Wong?
52:03 Speaker 01 No. Several days passed with no word back, so they decided to call the State Bureau of Investigation. A few days later, the case was assigned to investigators Dave McDougal and Phil Ayers. The first thing that the investigators did after speaking to the doctors was obviously to interview family members and people in Dwight's circle. Pretty much everybody was fucking baffled by the situation. Like, they were like, I don't know how that amount of arsenic got into him. But Blanche seemed the most invested in them being wrong. She dismissed the idea that anyone would try to kill Dwight. And instead, she insisted, no, it must have been the chemicals that he used on the garden. She even went so far as to say that after spraying the lawn, Dwight wiped his hands on a kitchen towel.
52:48 Speaker 01 And she then used that towel to dry her face and had a bad reaction.
52:52 Speaker 02 I doubt it.
52:52 Speaker 01 But when she was reminded that the poison would have to be legitimately ingested, she came up with a news story about Dwight possibly having eaten tainted grapes just before their trip. But the doctors were like, nah, he wouldn't ingest 20 times the lethal dose of arsenic by eating a couple of grapes.
53:11 Speaker 02 It's like, good try, being someone who knows absolutely nothing about this, trying to tell people who knows, who know absolutely everything about this, that they're wrong.
53:21 Speaker 01 She thought that she could out fucking smart anything, because she always found a way to get what she wanted, usually by exhausting people.
53:29 Speaker 02 But hey, girl, you fucked up.
53:30 Speaker 01 You done fucked up. Because here's the thing, her strategy would work when she dealt with store clerks, with the children of romantic partners that she had probably killed and strangers. But one group that that's not really going to work on is fucking law enforcement.
53:44 Speaker 02 Exactly. And it's like, babe, you have a whole drag path behind you of men that have gotten violently, irrevocably ill and then died.
53:55 Speaker 01 More than you think.
53:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, I imagine.
53:58 Speaker 01 Not just men.
53:58 Speaker 02 Oh, I'm sure. Oh, okay.
54:00 Speaker 01 More than you think.
54:00 Speaker 02 All right.
54:01 Speaker 01 So the deeper doctors and investigators dug into Dwight's case, the more theatrical and Her emotional Blanche became. She fought with the doctors in the ICU about not getting to be alone with
54:12 Speaker 02 I'd be like, there you go.
54:14 Speaker 01 She accused the nurses of administering the poison and she came up with an endless number of new theories as to how the arsenic got there in the first place.
54:21 Speaker 02 Oh my god, I could never be around this woman.
54:24 Speaker 01 She also though, like it was great that she was doing this because she couldn't have been more suspicious if she tried.
54:29 Speaker 02 It's true.
54:30 Speaker 01 Now, once Dwight was well enough to speak with the investigators, they sat down for a lengthy interview. Dwight couldn't think of anybody who would have wanted to kill him. He didn't think he had any enemies. They asked if he had life insurance though, and he said, yeah, but hardly enough that would make a murder worthwhile. Like, I'm not worth millions.
54:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
54:48 Speaker 01 Then they got to the question of former spouses. Dwight was honest and he said, I have an ex-wife. Our marriage ended because I had an affair. But we remained on good terms. Like she wouldn't poison me. And also, I don't think they really saw each other all that often.
55:02 Speaker 02 Like, and when they, and when they talked to Debbie, they were just kind of like, we all put it in the past. We're just moving forward and doing our own thing. Like they honestly, they handled it in the most healthy manner I could imagine.
55:12 Speaker 01 They really did.
55:12 Speaker 02 As a family, to be honest, they're like very impressive.
55:15 Speaker 01 It really is. So as for Blanche, she had been married, but her husband died of a heart attack.
55:21 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
55:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
55:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
55:23 Speaker 01 There was also her friend Raymond Reed, who died of something called Guillain-Barre syndrome.
55:26 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
55:27 Speaker 01 Yeah. So this was the first time that the agents had heard Raymond's name, but that wasn't what immediately jumped out to Agent McDougal. It was actually the mention of Guillain-Barre syndrome. While most agents probably wouldn't have been familiar with that, McDougal had a family member who had it. So he knew a little more than the average person. And most importantly, he knew that it's rarely fatal and it's usually manageable with the right treatment.
55:52 Speaker 02 I, I also thought that.
55:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
55:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
55:54 Speaker 01 So in the first few weeks of June, the agents started digging into Blanche's past and they were surprised to learn that not only did her husband James and her longtime boyfriend Raymond Reed die under unusual circumstances, but there were two other people relatively close to Blanche who had died also under suspicious, strange circumstances. Her father, P D, and a former coworker. A former. Coworker. We didn't hear about that till now.
56:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
56:20 Speaker 01 So about a week into June, the investigators returned to Dwight and they had more questions about Raymond. As far as Dwight knew, Blanch and Raymond were just coworkers, friends at most. But the detectives corrected his understanding of Blanch's relationship and for the first time, he got the full view. A few days later, Dwight confronted Blanch about her relationship with Raymond, which also must have been fucking like, you gave me all this shit for me being honest with you about my past.
56:49 Speaker 02 And this is what you were out there doing?
56:51 Speaker 01 The same past.
56:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
56:52 Speaker 01 Lit almost exactly the same past. You were cheating on your husband.
56:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
56:55 Speaker 01 With a man you worked with for over a decade.
56:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, except yours also includes suspicious deaths that are all around you. So I think yours is worse.
57:03 Speaker 01 Yeah. According to Dwight's sister, Nola, she said, he told Blanch that she had betrayed him about Reed and said, I won't be able to trust you again regardless of how the investigation turns out. This marriage is over.
57:14 Speaker 02 Good for him.
57:16 Speaker 01 Now, the end of Blanch and Dwight's relationship was just the first domino to fall. In mid-June, McDougal and Ayers got a warrant to exhume Raymond's body from the Pine Hill Cemetery.
57:25 Speaker 02 Oh.
57:26 Speaker 01 When the body was.
57:27 Speaker 02 Bet she didn't think that was gonna happen.
57:28 Speaker 01 No. When the body was examined, the medical examiner did find trace amounts of arsenic and Raymond's liver, brain, kidneys, muscles, bones, and stomach.
57:40 Speaker 02 Holy shit.
57:41 Speaker 01 According to the coroner, the levels were quote, "greater than could be explained by a simple environmental exposure and are within the range of potential lethality."
57:49 Speaker 02 And that's after he's been in the ground for a little while. So.
57:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
57:54 Speaker 01 The discovery only strengthened what the agents had already come to suspect that Blanch had been the one to administer the poison. Based on the new evidence, a superior court judge ordered the exhumation and autopsy of James Taylor's body in early July.
58:07 Speaker 02 Shit.
58:08 Speaker 01 Her ex-husband, or her husband. In a letter to the district attorney, the medical examiner wrote, "There is considerable speculation in regard to whether Taylor might have died of causes other than his known underlying heart disease." And the autopsy results showed similarly high levels of arsenic in his remains.
58:25 Speaker 02 Jesus, this, she's a fucking beast.
58:28 Speaker 01 The coroner told the press, "Given the historical circumstances, the autopsy findings and the toxicological results, it is my opinion that Mr. Taylor died as a result of an episode of arsenic poisoning."
58:38 Speaker 02 Whoa.
58:39 Speaker 01 A few days later, on July 18th, 1989, Blanch was arrested and charged with two. Counts of first degree murder for the deaths of Raymond Reed and James Taylor, and one count of assault with a deadly weapon for the poisoning of Dwight Moore.
58:52 Speaker 02 Wow, good.
58:53 Speaker 01 Her arrest kicked off a frenzy, and it seemed that anyone who had a friend or loved one die of suspicious circumstances sought to connect them to Blanche.
59:02 Speaker 02 Damn.
59:03 Speaker 01 Sheriff Richard Frye said, "It's impossible to pin down the numbers. People are calling us and giving us information, and we're checking on things one step at a time." The bodies of P. D. Kaiser, her father, and Blanche's former mother-in-law, Isla Taylor, were also exhumed. And the autopsy found that they each died with elevated levels of arsenic in their systems. But unfortunately, by the time they were exhumed, the amount wasn't sufficient enough to say if it was the cause of death. But there was the fact that it was there.
59:32 Speaker 02 I mean, I think we can all
59:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:34 Speaker 02 look at that objectively here.
59:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, seriously. Outside of the investigation, Blanche's arrest came as a shock to a lot of people who knew her.
59:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
59:43 Speaker 01 Yeah. Her daughter Vanessa told the press, "My mother is a very good woman." She flatly rejected the accusations, which it's your mom. I'm sure that's hard for you to believe.
59:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, I can understand that completely.
59:53 Speaker 01 Blanche's sister-in-law, Dottie Kaiser, said, "The newspapers have made it very hard. We don't understand how all this could have popped up. It's a puzzle."
1:00:01 Speaker 02 I mean, yeah.
1:00:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:00:02 Speaker 02 For sure.
1:00:02 Speaker 01 But not everybody was entirely puzzled or surprised by her arrest. In talking to reporters, one of Dwight's family members remembered that Blanche, quote, "projected herself very, very well at first, intelligent and thoughtful." But after a while, the family started to see another side of Blanche that was concerning. She seemed to lie about a lot of things, and eventually they weren't sure what she was lying about and what was true. Now, from the moment he stepped in to represent her, her lawyer, Mitchell McIntyre, insisted the investigators had gotten every last thing wrong. The prosecutor, on the other hand, felt very confident that the agents had arrested the right person.
1:00:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:00:38 Speaker 01 How many fucking people in your life are gonna get exhumed and show signs of arsenic poisoning?
1:00:42 Speaker 02 That's the thing. Like, you gotta look at what's happening here.
1:00:44 Speaker 01 Yeah. Regardless about how McIntyre felt with his clients, in a sense, the growing media interest in the story of the good Christian woman who was now a black widow was just as concerning as any evidence. By August, Dwight had recovered enough. Luckily that he was able to speak with the press and he was characteristically compassionate. Despite his full awareness now that Blanch had allegedly tried to kill him.
1:01:08 Speaker 02 Damn.
1:01:08 Speaker 01 He said, I have great sorrow for what she's gonna have to go through and I have great compassion for her well being.
1:01:13 Speaker 02 Wow.
1:01:14 Speaker 01 Which I kinda love that he was just like, I'm a better fucking person than you.
1:01:18 Speaker 02 Well, and he was literally like, yeah, like I'm, you're gonna have to deal with this and I'm sorry for that, but I'm gonna go move on with my life.
1:01:25 Speaker 01 He did tell reporters though, that he hoped to speak with Blanch and maybe even visit her in jail.
1:01:30 Speaker 02 Ooh.
1:01:31 Speaker 01 When he was asked whether he intended to file for divorce, he said, now just doesn't seem like the right time to handle that.
1:01:39 Speaker 02 This is just me. I feel like now's a great time to handle that.
1:01:42 Speaker 01 I would get those papers signed real quick.
1:01:44 Speaker 02 That would be my moment.
1:01:45 Speaker 01 I feel like you'd be granted the speediest divorce of all time.
1:01:47 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
1:01:48 Speaker 01 Who really knows?
1:01:49 Speaker 02 I have no idea. But now seems like as good a time as any.
1:01:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, no.
1:01:55 Speaker 02 But I'm not there, so.
1:01:56 Speaker 01 Who am I to say? By the time Blanch's trial arrived in October of nineteen ninety, Mitchell McIntyre was the picture of confidence, which is shocking.
1:02:04 Speaker 02 Wild.
1:02:05 Speaker 01 He wanted the public to see his client as a good Christian woman who had come from hard beginnings, spent most of her life taking care of the men around her. She was the woman, he said, who was brave enough to take on a large grocery chain, speak up for all the women who had been abused under her male supervisors. She was not a killer.
1:02:25 Speaker 02 Two things can be true at once, too.
1:02:27 Speaker 01 Also, she wasn't in that to stick up for other women. She was in it for money.
1:02:31 Speaker 02 But if you're gonna like, if you're gonna play that game, it's like.
1:02:34 Speaker 01 She could have done that.
1:02:34 Speaker 02 Those are mutually exclusive things, like you can, you can do both of them.
1:02:38 Speaker 01 You can. Get you a girl who can do both, except maybe don't.
1:02:41 Speaker 02 No, yeah, don't. Don't do that.
1:02:42 Speaker 01 So if Mitchell McIntyre's position was that his client was a long suffering, selfless woman, the prosecutor, Warren Sparrow.
1:02:49 Speaker 02 Warren Sparrow.
1:02:51 Speaker 01 I read that name and I said, bitch.
1:02:53 Speaker 02 I said, who are you?
1:02:55 Speaker 01 That's a novel name.
1:02:56 Speaker 02 Who are you, Warren Sparrow?
1:02:57 Speaker 01 Warren Sparrow is the protagonist in a like.
1:03:00 Speaker 02 But he's morally gray, I feel.
1:03:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:03 Speaker 02 Like in the best way.
1:03:03 Speaker 01 But I want him to be.
1:03:05 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
1:03:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, you always want them to be morally gray.
1:03:07 Speaker 01 Warren Sparrow, his mother made a great choice. And he had a different story to tell. He was the prosecutor.
1:03:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:03:13 Speaker 01 In his opening remarks, he told the jury, this trial is about secrecy. It's about pride, good and evil. It's about a woman who took on the power of deciding who shall live and who shall die.
1:03:23 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:03:24 Speaker 01 Over the span of several weeks, the prosecution called dozens of witnesses, doctors, nurses. They called Raymond Reed's family, friends, coworkers at Kroger. Stevie and Ray Reed each testified about Blanch's attempts to swindle them out of a third of their father's estate.
1:03:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:03:41 Speaker 01 The medical examiner, and we'll all laugh together, Dr. Butts.
1:03:44 Speaker 02 Oh, he, we, we've had him before.
1:03:46 Speaker 01 We have, I bet.
1:03:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:03:47 Speaker 01 Uh, he spent hours explaining how arsenic poisoning manifested and could be mistaken for other diseases. And most crucially, Dwight took the stand and gave an account of his relationship with Blanch, and also the agony he went through while being poisoned.
1:04:02 Speaker 02 Truly, he, he has a harrowing tale to tell.
1:04:06 Speaker 01 Also, I would play the fucking lottery after being served 20 times the lethal dose of, dose of Argonist. Yeah, I can't speak Argonist, I just said instead of arsenic.
1:04:16 Speaker 02 Whatever it is.
1:04:17 Speaker 01 But in living. Uh, among other things, he testified that after entering the hospital for the last time, when it became clear about the doctor's suspected foul play, Blanch insisted on cutting his hair. He testified, I could barely lift my hands off the bed. I was so swollen. I was on a ventilator.
1:04:36 Speaker 02 What the fuck? I know why she did that, though.
1:04:38 Speaker 01 Yep. Prosecutor Sparrow suggested Blanch had done this because she knew arsenic could show up in a person's hair long after they died.
1:04:45 Speaker 02 That's diabolical as fuck.
1:04:47 Speaker 01 He couldn't even lift his hands off the bed.
1:04:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:04:50 Speaker 01 And she's ready to give him a haircut.
1:04:52 Speaker 02 She's ready to chop his hair off, so.
1:04:53 Speaker 01 You're an evil cunt for that.
1:04:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, truly.
1:04:57 Speaker 01 On November 7th, Blanch took the stand in her own defense, which was quite a choice.
1:05:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, it certainly is.
1:05:02 Speaker 01 She gave more. More than two and a half hours of testimony. She gave long, rambling answers to her own attorney's questions.
1:05:09 Speaker 02 That's how you win over a jury.
1:05:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, this is a waste of their time.
1:05:12 Speaker 02 They love long, rambling answers. They love it.
1:05:15 Speaker 01 She became particularly heated when she was confronted with evidence or testimony that implicated her in Raymond Reed's death.
1:05:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, evidence is rough.
1:05:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, it is. At various points, she betrayed her attempt at a calm demeanor, like when she just yelled at the assistant prosecutor in the middle of her own testimony.
1:05:32 Speaker 02 Whoa.
1:05:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:05:33 Speaker 02 A choice.
1:05:33 Speaker 01 The defense had clearly been hoping to humanize her, but according to the press, jurors often stared off into the courtroom during Blanche's testimony.
1:05:40 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:05:42 Speaker 01 Nobody wants to hear that shit.
1:05:43 Speaker 02 Some quick, snappy, to the point, give the information and get the fuck out of there.
1:05:49 Speaker 01 Well, and it's like, you know your client.
1:05:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:05:52 Speaker 01 I'm sure you've seen how she acts. You really want to put that girl on the stand for two hours, two and a half hours?
1:05:56 Speaker 02 Are you sure you were on her side?
1:05:58 Speaker 01 As Tatiana would say, choices.
1:06:00 Speaker 02 Choices.
1:06:01 Speaker 01 Now, Blanche's defense hinged largely on her stated belief that a man named Garvin Thomas had killed Raymond Reed.
1:06:07 Speaker 02 Garvin?
1:06:08 Speaker 01 Garvin Thomas. She presented a letter of confession that she had received from Garvin himself while she was in jail as evidence of her innocence.
1:06:16 Speaker 02 A letter from Garvin, you say?
1:06:18 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:06:18 Speaker 02 Okay.
1:06:19 Speaker 01 The prosecution, though, contended that there actually was no Garvin Thomas at all.
1:06:23 Speaker 02 What?
1:06:24 Speaker 01 And that Blanche herself had written the letter of confession, and it was she who killed Raymond Reed.
1:06:28 Speaker 02 That's shocking.
1:06:29 Speaker 01 Crazy. Sparrow asked the jury, when you combine all the evidence, what hits you directly in the face? This is not circumstantial. This is direct and powerful scientific evidence that points unerringly at the defendant.
1:06:42 Speaker 02 Bravo.
1:06:43 Speaker 01 Like, I just feel like we dug up everyone she was ever involved with and connected to, and they all have arsenic in their systems. Why are we even here?
1:06:51 Speaker 02 And I don't know if you heard that, we dug them up, meaning they all died. So.
1:06:55 Speaker 01 Thank you.
1:06:56 Speaker 02 Can we just look at what's going on here?
1:06:58 Speaker 01 Is everybody ready?
1:06:59 Speaker 02 Come on.
1:07:00 Speaker 01 Now, in the end, the jury obviously found Warren Sparrow's case overwhelmingly compelling, and his name. On November 14th, 1990, after just a few hours of deliberation, they emerged to find Blanche Taylor Moore guilty of the first-degree murder of Raymond Reed. The first trial was just for Raymond.
1:07:17 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
1:07:18 Speaker 01 When the verdict was read, Blanche was overheard whispering, "I can't believe it."
1:07:21 Speaker 02 Really?
1:07:22 Speaker 01 To her lawyer.
1:07:22 Speaker 02 You can't?
1:07:24 Speaker 01 The verdict was obviously a huge relief to Raymond's friends and his family, but the jury's finding left Dwight Moore with a sense of sadness. Not just for Blanche, but for everybody. He said, "In her own distorted way, I think it was easier for her to kill than end a relationship."
1:07:40 Speaker 02 Okay.
1:07:41 Speaker 01 Wild. Raymond's ex-wife, Linda Sykes, was similarly compassionate toward Blanche.
1:07:46 Speaker 02 Whoa.
1:07:46 Speaker 01 She said, "I want to go on, I want to go forward with our lives, but honest to God, I hurt for her family, I hurt for her children."
1:07:53 Speaker 02 I can get behind that.
1:07:54 Speaker 01 I can totally get behind that.
1:07:55 Speaker 02 I can get behind that, for sure.
1:07:56 Speaker 01 Two days later, Blanche was back before the judge for sentencing, and the jury deliberated for a little over four hours before they recommended, as we all know, the death penalty.
1:08:06 Speaker 02 Because she's the oldest lady on death row.
1:08:08 Speaker 01 She do be. When the recommendation was made, all Blanche said was, "Oh, God," as she closed her eyes and just shook her head back and forth. Babe, you killed everyone with arsenic.
1:08:19 Speaker 02 You didn't think that was on the horizon, maybe?
1:08:21 Speaker 01 Girl!
1:08:21 Speaker 02 On the, maybe on the menu?
1:08:23 Speaker 01 Miss girl!
1:08:24 Speaker 02 You didn't think that was a possibility?
1:08:25 Speaker 01 You just thought you could kill everyone forever?
1:08:27 Speaker 02 You get to choose who lives and who dies?
1:08:30 Speaker 01 Not now. So after accepting the sentence, the judge set an execution date for January 18th, 1991.
1:08:35 Speaker 02 Spoiler alert.
1:08:36 Speaker 01 Pending all appeals, yes, spoiler alert. After the sentencing in the Raymond Reed murder trial, the DA decided to drop all the other charges because she's already going to die. Since the sentence was handed down more than 30 years ago, Blanche's appeals and various motions have been hung up in court, ultimately, obviously, delaying her execution. As of today, she does remain an inmate at the North Carolina Correctional Institute for Women, and at 93 years old...
1:09:03 Speaker 01 She's the oldest woman on death row in the United States.
1:09:07 Speaker 02 What is the point?
1:09:08 Speaker 01 And actually, I believe she's the oldest person on death row.
1:09:11 Speaker 02 What is the point? At this point, just let, let time take its course. Like, that's the, like, just, yeah. I mean, which I'm glad. I'm glad that she's had to sit there for thirty years.
1:09:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:09:25 Speaker 02 I don't know if she has the capacity to, to look inward and see what she's done.
1:09:29 Speaker 01 But at least she isn't just like out in the world existing.
1:09:32 Speaker 02 She's not out in the world existing and she wasn't just killed off the bat, you know what I mean? Like, she's had to sit around for thirty years and realize the hurt she caused.
1:09:41 Speaker 01 Hopefully she can.
1:09:42 Speaker 02 And I hope she has figured it out. I hope it's, I hope she's been confronted with it.
1:09:46 Speaker 01 You would hope so.
1:09:47 Speaker 02 I really do.
1:09:47 Speaker 01 Ninety-three years old, though.
1:09:50 Speaker 02 Ninety-three years, and if you look up a picture of her, you're just like, that's just a grandma.
1:09:54 Speaker 01 Literally, she just looks like kind of a sweet grandma.
1:09:58 Speaker 02 She looks, like, she looks like a, she looks like a grandma. But to me, she looks like a grandma that you, she wasn't gonna like, I mean, she definitely wasn't gonna bake you cookies. She wasn't gonna do.
1:10:09 Speaker 01 She would have baked you cookies to kill you.
1:10:12 Speaker 02 Like, I think she was gonna be that grandma that kind of like smokes cigs and like yells at you a little bit.
1:10:16 Speaker 01 You think so? Yeah.
1:10:17 Speaker 02 You know, like, she, she kind of gives me that vibe. Maybe it's because I know too much about her.
1:10:21 Speaker 01 Probably.
1:10:22 Speaker 02 But, yeah.
1:10:23 Speaker 01 Fucking wild, though.
1:10:23 Speaker 02 It's shocking. Ninety-three.
1:10:26 Speaker 01 She's a scary woman.
1:10:27 Speaker 02 Ninety-three.
1:10:29 Speaker 01 And I just picture, like, I just picture Dwight laying on the kitchen floor.
1:10:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:10:34 Speaker 01 And she's just like, so I'm gonna hang up some curtains over there, and I think I'll paint some, paint some pictures on that wall.
1:10:40 Speaker 02 That's a thing, like, that alone.
1:10:42 Speaker 01 And he's just projectile vomiting.
1:10:43 Speaker 02 Shows you that she's got nothing. Like, she's got no compassion for any, because if you can allow that to happen next to you and feel nothing about it, that's wild.
1:10:54 Speaker 01 It's wild. Absolutely wild.
1:10:56 Speaker 02 Whew.
1:10:57 Speaker 01 What a story.
1:10:58 Speaker 02 What a story.
1:10:59 Speaker 01 Do you have a fun fact, honey?
1:11:00 Speaker 02 I do have a fun fact. Uh, so I found this one on BBC Science Focus.
1:11:05 Speaker 01 Oh, that's for real.
1:11:07 Speaker 02 Orcas wear other animals as hats.
1:11:12 Speaker 01 What?
1:11:13 Speaker 02 Yep, scientists have observed dolphins playing catch with pufferfish and octopuses.
1:11:18 Speaker 01 What?
1:11:19 Speaker 02 And orcas wearing dead fish as hats. And no one knows why.
1:11:26 Speaker 01 I know why, it's a fuck you.
1:11:27 Speaker 02 They just like to.
1:11:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a fuck you.
1:11:30 Speaker 02 They wear dead animals as hats.
1:11:35 Speaker 01 That's like on True Blood when Lorena tells Sookie she's gonna kill her and then wear her rib cage as a hat.
1:11:39 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:11:40 Speaker 01 She's an orca.
1:11:40 Speaker 02 An orca said, "I heard that."
1:11:42 Speaker 01 Orcas are low-key fucked.
1:11:44 Speaker 02 They're fucking terrifying. They are too intelligent for, to be in the ocean.
1:11:50 Speaker 01 No, that's why they're in the ocean.
1:11:51 Speaker 02 That's, it makes me scared. That's why I respect the ocean so much.
1:11:55 Speaker 01 I don't fucks with it.
1:11:56 Speaker 02 I don't belong in there.
1:11:57 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:11:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:11:59 Speaker 01 I don't know if that, that's fun.
1:12:00 Speaker 02 They're just out there.
1:12:01 Speaker 01 You have a weird idea of fun facts.
1:12:02 Speaker 02 I mean, like, cause the, the visual is silly if you make it cartoonish. But then you bring it into reality and it gets a little weird.
1:12:10 Speaker 01 I, I immediately got a real vision.
1:12:12 Speaker 02 So this is more of like a, whoa, fact.
1:12:14 Speaker 01 It's a fact.
1:12:15 Speaker 02 It's a fact.
1:12:16 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:12:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:12:18 Speaker 01 Well, with that being said, we hope you keep listening.
1:12:20 Speaker 02 And we hope you.
1:12:21 Speaker 01 Keep it weird. Maybe so weird that you wear your enemy as a hat.
1:12:27 Speaker 02 There you go.
1:12:27 Speaker 01 Just don't kill him.
1:12:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, don't do that. Just wear him as a hat.
1:12:30 Speaker 01 That's a visual and a half, dawg.
1:12:32 Speaker 02 It was a good one.
Previous Blanche Taylor Moore, The Oldest Woman on Death Row (Part 1) Next The Green River Killer - Gary Ridgway (Part 1) Page updated October 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
