Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 3, 1993 TAG: 9305020057
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Nonetheless, "Black Widow Murders: The Blanche Taylor Moore Story" (tonight at 9 on WSLS-Channel 10) is a bit of a hoot.
Even its star, Elizabeth Montgomery, agrees: "It borders on a black comedy."
She credits screenwriter and co-executive producer Judith Paige Miller, whose script was based on Jim Schutze's book, "Preacher's Girl."
Montgomery said Miller "didn't realize it was that funny, which is probably one of the wonderful things about it. I give her an enormous round of applause."
Still, it's Montgomery herself, in red hair and makeup, who flounces around just right as a Southern woman who does away with her errant father, her first husband and her longtime boyfriend.
If her second husband, the Rev. Dwight Moore (David Clennon), hadn't recovered from arsenic poisoning, he would have followed them. In the film the law-enforcement officials overseeing exhumation of one body after another begin calling the cemetery "the Blanche Moore landfill."
Although she won an Emmy nomination for "The Legend of Lizzie Borden," Montgomery said she hadn't planned to do any more reality-based movies until she read the script and found herself intrigued by Blanche Taylor Moore.
"She's an incredible woman," said Montgomery. "Here's a woman of extraordinary energy, great warmth, amazing wit, amazing magnetism - incredible stuff that if you were sitting down to write what you'd like to be, you'd find all that in the plus column.
"There's a desperate sadness here. Humanity is so in need of wonderful people that it's just a shame that this one went wrong. She could have done anything."
What Moore did sent her to death row in the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women.
Still, there is all that charm. Even the police investigating the case, who realize that it's likely they're dealing with a murderer, find themselves talking about Moore.
She was a pretty, church-going woman of 53, a grocery cashier with two daughters and a grandchild.
Moore was the daughter of Parker D. Kiser Sr., a self-ordained minister who, if the flashbacks are to be believed, rented out his young child to pedophiles. According to Blanche's account, he then left the family in dire straits to take up residence with his second wife.
Moore never forgot and never forgave her father's trespasses. He died in 1966. When his body was exhumed, it contained sufficient arsenic to have caused his death.
Next on her list was her first husband, James Taylor, who died in 1973. Then she took up with Raymond Reid (John M. Jackson) and continued that relationship for 11 years. Reid admitted that he'd been playing around with other women, and besides, she'd recently met the new guy in town, the Rev. Dwight Moore (David Clennon).
As a repentant Reid lay suffering in the hospital with unexplained stomach pains, Blanche turned up daily to comfort him with homemade potato soup - laced, it appears, with arsenic. He died in 1986.
As sole executor of Reid's estate, she also siphoned off some of his two sons' inheritance. Blanche, who had undergone a mastectomy, informs the sons that she needs reconstructive surgery: "Why, a breast costs an arm and a leg these days!" They agree to fork over some of their money to pay for it.
Dwight Moore seemed to be the person who was everything that her father had not been. He loves her despite her mastectomy and still wants to marry her.
But Moore makes one error. He decides to tell Blanche about the break-up of his marriage because of a long-running affair. "I must confess to you I strayed," he says.
The suddenly cold expression on Montgomery's face is telling.
"If he had really turned and looked at her," she said, "he would have known he'd signed his own death warrant."
Blanche married him anyway and moved from her trailer park into the parsonage. Not long afterward, the minister began suffering excruciating stomach cramps and was taken to the hospital, heading down the same path as Taylor and Reid.
In the case of Moore, Montgomery said, "if she hadn't been so bloody impatient, she would have gotten away with it. At times she was good at covering up stuff, but other times ... "
Having lost a state appeal, Moore is planning to take her case to the U.S. Supreme Court. She spends some of the long hours on death row writing gospel songs.
by CNB