Preacher's Girl: The Life and Crimes of Blanche Taylor Moore Book

Loving wife and mother, doting grandmother, born-again Christian - Blanche Taylor Moore was the model of respectable Southern womanhood. When her husband, the Reverend Dwight Moore, was stricken by a violent, wasting, mysterious disease, the community admired the way she cared for him. While doctors continued to test him for every possible disease, Blanche practically lived at the hospital, wiping her husband's brow, feeding him his beloved homemade peanutbutter milk shakes. As Moore's condition deteriorated in wild swings of improvement followed by new, startlingly brutal symptoms, the doctors remained puzzled. But then, desperate for a solution, they ran a toxic screen and found the simple, chilling answer. He was full of arsenic - at twenty times the lethal level - which could have been given to him only before and during his hospital stay. The conclusion was unavoidable: Dwight was being slowly, methodically poisoned by someone close to him. When the local police were called in, their investigations revealed the truth: Blanche's previous long-term boyfriend had died of the same bizarre symptoms. Under her shield of respectability, Blanche Moore was a clever and patient killer, a woman who could lovingly nurse a man to his death while family, friends, and doctors looked on. Preacher's Girl takes us into the world of a perfect psychopath - totally camouflaged, completely accepted, utterly amoral. Through hundreds of interviews with those who knew Blanche Moore and those who helped stop her, investigative reporter Jim Schutze reconstructs Blanche's sad and violent history: a traveling preacher father who sold her adolescent body to pay off his gambling debts, a twisted fascination with Jesus and oral sex, and a deadly inability to accept the shortcomings of the men in her life who loved her. With gripping intensity, Preacher's Girl tells a classically Southern tale of a father's evil and a daughter's pathological revenge.