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Chapter 1: What is the background story of the woman in Burlington, North Carolina?
This week in Burlington, North Carolina, a series of deaths over a long period of time seems like unavoidable tragedies until a man survives a horrible illness, leading detectives to look at the most unlikely murder suspect possible, a grandmotherly church lady with a history of calamity and misfortune. Welcome to Small Town Murder. Hello everybody and welcome back to Small Town Murder.
Yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petrigallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you, folks, so much for joining us today on another crazy, this is a crazy-ass episode, let me tell you. If the intro didn't give away that it's a crazy episode, it is crazy and there's a lot of death here. Wild stuff here. So thank you so much for joining us.
You will not be disappointed. Before we get started, head over to shutupandgivememurder.com.
Oh,
Chapter 2: What tragic events unfold in the woman's life?
Get it all there. First of all, all of your merchandise, everything like that, everything from skateboards to shower curtains. It's all right there. Then also get your tickets for live shows, live shows starting up again after the summer, September 18th in Milwaukee at the Pabst. That's going to be great. Not a lot of tickets left for that, too. So get those right now.
Then September 19th in Minneapolis at the State Theater. Get those tickets right now. Don't let Milwaukee punk you, Minneapolis.
It's one of the best venues in the country.
It's great. Yeah, we love going to Minnesota, too. We love the crowd, and we like especially the weather in September. It'll still be nice. It's going to be good. Then we'll be in Dallas on October 3rd. October 16th, 17th is San Jose, Sacramento. Get those tickets. And then November 13th and 14th, Tarrytown in Boston. And Tarrytown is...
getting close so I would get those tickets soon if you want to go to that even though it's in December so that said definitely shut up and give me murder.com listen to our other two shows of course crime in sports where we're doing a large series on the Yahweh cult from the 80s in Miami there Yahweh Ben Yahweh and all the murders because one of the guys who killed a lot of people happened to be an NFL player so remember we're doing all that then your stupid opinions is just hilarious get in there and listen to that get yourself patreon as well everybody and
Patreon.com slash crime in sports is where you get all of the bonus material. All you have to be is $5 a month or above and you get every damn tiny whatever we put out, including as soon as you subscribe, hundreds of back bonus episodes you've never heard before. Almost 400 to be exact. And then new ones every other week. One crime in sports, one small town murder.
And you get them all, everybody. You get it. You get it all. This week, what we're going to talk about, for crime and sports, it's the craziest hostage situations that have happened. These are crazy. The Stockholm Syndrome one gave me this idea to look up others, and there's a lot of wild hostage situations, and they resolve in wild ways.
And then for small-town murder, looks like right now, as the poll stands, it's probably going to be the crash and all the McKenzie-Sherilla stuff, but still time to get your vote in for Corey Richens, if that's what you want. So, There is that, and then the week after it'll be Corey Rich, so it doesn't matter. So there you go, everybody. There is Patreon.
Patreon.com slash Crime in Sports is where you get all of that, and you get every show we put out. Crime in Sports, Your Stupid Opinion, Small Town Murder, all ad-free with that Patreon as well. And you get a shout-out at the end of the show, too. Jimmy will go ahead and mispronounce your name for you, even though he would love to get it correct. Trust me on that. I'm trying so hard.
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Chapter 3: How does the podcast introduce the theme of comedy in true crime?
People's old underwear and shitty $86 coats. $86 parkas that are normally $199. That's what they saw going by. From three years ago. From three years ago. Well, yeah, obviously. I was in a Burlington like five years ago, and they had tons of members-only jackets.
Real?
Tons of them.
Yeah, they did have a resurgence there for a minute.
They had like, I felt like I was a member. I must have been a member being in this place because there was all of them. They had leather ones. I was like, who the fuck? I saw a white leather members only jacket. Not white. What kind of a, this is like Jesse Gemstone wouldn't even wear that. This is insane. Who the fuck would wear this? Not white. White, Jamie. Don't get a white one.
White leather members-only jacket. White coats are fascinating. But white.
I'd like to wear this for two days. I just got a white puffy one. I'll never wear it.
No. Two days. That thing is filthy and gross.
I'm going to order a coffee and I'll never wear this again.
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Chapter 4: What unusual symptoms does Raymond Reed experience after New Year's Eve?
And it's the way they dress, the way they do things. She has gray hair in the perm. She's got the gray hair. She's got the big glasses like the old ladies have.
She's wearing a fucking ascot.
With the chain, with the, you know, the glasses chain. She dresses in, like, white lacy shirts like a church lady. She looks like she's, like, now if you saw her, you'd go, eh, she's probably, like, 72. Right. But she was, like, 53. So it's very interesting.
I never saw my grandma's cleavage, ever.
Chapter 5: What diagnosis do doctors initially give Raymond Reed?
She never dressed like, you know what I mean, like a going out lady. She was always. My grandmother was a huge slut, popping cleavage everywhere.
You saw titty? No, absolutely not.
She always had a fucking ascot and a brooch.
My grandmother, Italian grandma would show a little cleavage, but she's Italian. I mean, you know what I mean?
They wear a shirt, a v-neck.
They're not shy about that kind of shit. My other grandmother, I don't think she had any body at all. I think she was just a... You know, I think she was just smooth under there. Just a head. Just an old lady. That's all.
Just a head that yelled at me.
Just an old lady who shouted racial slurs. That's all she was. I don't know. Yeah. So she, you know, she's hanging out with this Reverend Dwight Moore and she's seen as very grandmotherly. That's it. She is a grandmother at this point and she acts like it and looks like it. Sure. New Year's Eve, December 31st, 1985. Okay. Raymond Reed and Blanche are spending New Year's Eve together.
It's a real night. She's making a pot of homemade potato soup. Nice. I fucking love a potato soup. Oh, yeah. Potato and soup together. Count me in. That's great.
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Chapter 6: What evidence leads to the suspicion of poisoning in Raymond Reed's case?
Well, potatoes, turnpike chicken, everything, eggs. So he gets very sick and he's going to kind of stay pretty sick for the next few months.
Oh, no.
And he's a guy who never missed work. He's known to never miss a day of work. And he all of a sudden misses over the next three months. He misses like four weeks of work all put in together. Oh, just goes through periods of being sick. He'd be OK. He'd recover. He'd go back. Then he'd be sick again.
And so, I mean, and he's not a guy that likes to go to the doctor and people are telling him he might have a stomach tumor or something. You got to get real sick. You get this checked out like you could have a gastrointestinal problem here. Because, I mean, he'd be for days, he wouldn't be able to keep food down. Yeah. Terrible. And then he'd come back and say, I must have caught a bug.
I don't know. Even when I'm egg poisoned, it's like two hours of. Yeah. Insane sick. But it's never like that.
It's never.
I'm not throwing up blood and stuff.
Yeah. Yeah. And it looked tough. And he was like, I mean, you know, he's like 50 at this point, too, in his early mid 50s. So he's thinking, Christ, I'm probably just my body falling apart. That's all just getting old type of thing. He takes it as he couldn't quite make out the menu up at McDonald's there like he used to. What does it say for Big Mac? Was that 419? Okay. Having a problem.
Big Mac looks like Big Mag now. What is that, Big Mag you guys got there? So May 30th, 1986 here, that's when he finally goes to the hospital to get checked out.
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Chapter 7: What evidence leads to Blanche's arrest for murder?
I'm still making 70 grand.
I can still afford it. It's like my math joke. I can get that one bedroom.
I can do it. Oh, fuck yeah.
And so then the cop said, well, it's obvious that he must have really loved you. So I bait her a little. She said, well, I think he did. And another thing that I have to honestly say about this with this thing with Dwight was that he knew knew that Dwight says Raymond knew about Dwight. Oh, that's what she says. So she wasn't really having an affair. It's not an affair.
It's an open relationship. It's just fine.
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Chapter 8: How do the witnesses describe Blanche's actions?
Yeah. They're just freaky church people. It's all good. They said, we cannot ignore the fact that you got a husband here with arsenic in him. If Raymond Reed had got it in him, you're the only connection between the two. She said, what do you mean the only connection when I, I, I went all that span of time and did not see Raymond before he got sick?
And they said, you know, Blanche, you visiting him the whole time in the hospital, the whole time he was there. And she said, when Raymond was in the hospital, he had one nurse with him all the time. You went in for five minutes, meaning you don't know what was going on. Ask the nurse, basically.
Right.
So they go, tell you what, turn around. Let's test and see how small these cuffs go with your little bony wrists. You're under arrest. So she's arrested, charged with first degree murder in the deaths of James Taylor and Raymond Reed. with an assault with a deadly weapon with the intent to kill for the poisoning of Dwight Moore. Okay. Oh, because he survived. Yeah.
They're going to deal with the rest of it if they have to later, and just these are the ones they can prove pretty definitively, and those are the ones they're going for. And so, yeah, she's held in the county jail for 14 months before trial. Whoa. Just knitting. Yeah. Making pudding. Dwight Moore said that if he had died, Blanche might have inherited as much as $75,000. Okay.
But this is the – he's such a nice man, this guy. He said he didn't believe that was her reason for poisoning him though, was for money. The fuck else? In his mind, he's like, who would do that? Oh, she didn't do it for money.
She's a cold-hearted bitch.
Yeah, she's nasty. Listen to this. He said, quote, I think her motive was her inability to actually express her dissatisfaction with folks. And it was easier for her to do this than to say no.
Very non-confrontational.
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