Town note
Native people were there first; the early settlers were groups of Quakers, followed by German farmers and Scottish and Irish immigrants.
about 0:07:16The story
Her father worked in the mills and was also an ordained Baptist minister, a fire-and-brimstone preacher who drank, gambled and chased women whenever he stepped away from the pulpit.
On 29 May 1952, aged nineteen, she married James Napoleon Taylor, a Korean war veteran and furniture restorer described by everyone as a decent and ordinary man, quite unlike her father. They had two daughters, Vanessa Dale in 1953 and Cindy in 1959. In 1962 she met the store manager, Raymond Carlton Reed, a married father, and began an affair with him that lasted more than twenty years. In the summer of 1966 she made peace with her father and began visiting him again. On 18 September 1966 he died at sixty-two, officially of a heart attack, after violent stomach cramps, projectile vomiting, delirium and a face that turned bright blue. On Thanksgiving Day, 25 November 1970, her mother-in-law Isla Taylor died aged eighty-three.
In September 1973 James Taylor developed flu-like symptoms and on 2 October 1973 he died at forty-five, recorded as heart failure following a severe bout of flu. By the 1980s the romance had soured, and she told her psychiatrist that she could no longer stand him. In January 1985 her house burned down; it was insured, and she used the money to buy a trailer. A month later the trailer burned down too, and she told police that a pervert had been stalking her. In October 1985 she sued Kroger and the manager Robert Hutton for sexual harassment, alleging that he had reached up her dress and exposed himself to her; Hutton was forced to resign, and on 29 July 1987 she accepted an out-of-court settlement of $275,000.
On New Year's Eve 1985 she cooked a pot of potato soup for Raymond Reed. In the early hours of 1 January 1986 he became violently ill, and over the following months he suffered repeated bouts of nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea, missing about four weeks of work. On 30 May 1986 he was admitted to Wesley Long Hospital in Greensboro under Dr Norman Garrett, first diagnosed with acute gastroenteritis and later with multiple systems failure, then with Guillain-Barré syndrome. He briefly improved, then collapsed again, and on 13 June was transferred to North Carolina Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem under the kidney specialist Dr Robert Hamilton. On 21 June he coded, was put on a ventilator and became almost completely paralysed; a course of plasma pheresis helped a little. On 27 and 28 June a urine sample was taken and sent to the laboratory, where it showed quite elevated levels of arsenic, but a rotating resident left and the result was filed away and never reached his doctors. She brought iced tea, milk shakes, soups, frozen yoghurt, banana pudding and casseroles, and the hospital food went untouched. He signed a will making her a one-third beneficiary of his estate, and later a power of attorney, nodding his answers while a lawyer signed his name for him. In the autumn he relapsed again. Two days later he was in acute respiratory failure and begged a nurse to help him or he would die. On 6 October his son Stephen found him so swollen that his skin was splitting, and on 7 October 1986 Raymond Reed died. He was buried at Pine Hill Cemetery in Burlington.
She told him in 1987 that she had breast cancer, and later a mysterious intestinal illness requiring two surgeries, and the wedding was postponed more than once. They honeymooned in New Jersey. Five days after they got home she brought back curtains and a chicken salad sandwich for him; two hours after eating it he became violently ill. He was admitted to Alamance County Hospital and moved between there, North Carolina Baptist Hospital and North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill, where a toxicology screen found twenty times the lethal dose of arsenic in his system, the most ever seen in a living patient at that hospital.
In 1989 the state obtained court orders and exhumed P.D. Kaiser, James Taylor, Raymond Reed, Isla Taylor, the Kroger meat cutter Joseph Mitchell, Eina P. Vinson, John W. Rieber and the Kroger cashier Mabel Parsons. Reed was exhumed on 13 June 1989; the autopsy found clearly recognisable Mees lines across his fingernails, arsenic in his liver at thirty times normal and in his brain at sixty-seven times normal, and Dr John Butts concluded that he died of the complications of arsenic poisoning. The chemist Vincent Gwynn analysed the hair and found a long period of repeated ingestion, peaking at seventy parts per million, about seventy times normal. James Taylor was exhumed on 6 July 1989 and had also died of arsenic poisoning; Joseph Mitchell had no arsenic and died of natural causes.
When detectives questioned her she denied everything, said the men must have taken the arsenic themselves, and claimed she never brought Raymond Reed food in hospital, although the nurses said all he ate was her cooking. Detectives also compiled a list of about twenty-two dead acquaintances. The judge allowed evidence of the other poisonings under North Carolina's Rule 404(b), ruling that they showed a signature pattern, motive and opportunity, but kept out the arsenic levels found in her father.
Janet Branch, later Janet Downing, left the district attorney's office in 1991, lost guardianship of her daughter after a breakdown, and died on 10 October 2015 when she walked into traffic on Interstate 485 in Charlotte; the medical examiner ruled it suicide.