THORNTON: Remembering a couple killed 35 years ago as execution looms

This Friday marks 35 years since a Gadsden couple, Ernie and Lucille Moore, were attacked, beaten with the bar from a weight set in their home near Noccalula Falls.

By the time their daughter-in-law in Mississippi called neighbors, worried because she couldn’t get them on the phone, two days had passed. Ernie was dead. Lucille was gravely injured and succumbed to those injuries days later.

The man convicted in their deaths is scheduled to die for his crimes this week, as of The Leader ’s press time. As the state of Alabama describes it, the 30-hour window for execution opens at midnight Thursday, Nov. 5 and closes Friday, Nov. 6.

Michael Shannon Taylor was 19 when the Moores were killed. He’s 54 now and he’s been living on death row since his conviction in 1993.

Back in those days, I worked for The Gadsden Times , covering mainly crime and courts, back when there were enough reporters that you could focus on one beat. It was a chilly Wednesday, and by the time word got around that something had happened at the house on Mitchell Boulevard, I’d already driven home to Boaz.

Before driving back to Gadsden, I called the desk sergeant’s office, trying to nose around to see if whatever happened was important enough to make another trip. The sergeant on duty was a good guy, one I knew from coming in on weekends to look at police reports, but he was a by-the-book guy, too. He couldn’t give out any information. I just spelled out the situation, I lived in Boaz; I was just trying to determine if I should make a second trip to the big city that day.

He was quiet for a moment. “You might want to come on down,” he said.

So I ended up standing outside the Moores’ home with photographer Mike Turner, watching as police came in and out of the house, and searched the dark yard.

While we were there, a kid rode up on a bicycle. We talked, and it became clear we had no information yet. “You don’t know what happened?” he asked.

His mother, it turned out, was the neighbor who called to check on the Moores — people he considered adopted grandparents. This 15-year-old went with his mother to check on the couple. He said he pushed open the garage door and saw Ernie Moore’s Cadillac was missing. They couldn’t get anyone to the door, but they heard Lucille calling, “Help us! Please somebody help us!”

She died from her injuries a few days later. It would be weeks, maybe even months later before I was looking at court documents and realized that though the couple was found on a Wednesday, they’d been attacked two days earlier. Thinking about that 79-year-old woman lying on her kitchen floor, unable to help herself or her dying husband for two days, made me sick.

The 15-year-old talked about his close relationship, especially with Ernie. “He was always there when I needed him,” he said, and he wished he’d been there to help Moore. “I’ve lived here all my life and he was always there.

“I hope they get the guy who did it,” he said. “I wish it was that dude lying in there.”

Some days later, they got him. Taylor, 19, AWOL from the U.S. Navy, was arrested in Jefferson County, where he was found with the Moores’ car. As I recall from trial testimony, he’d spend time around the Galleria and a young man in the area let him stay at his place. He’d cashed at least one check on the Moores’ account at a Gadsden-area bank, and he’d come back to Gadsden to buy a newspaper, but his crimes had not been discovered and reported yet.

Investigators testified about the confession Taylor gave, saying he was tired of not having a car. His father testified too, and seemed devastated by what his son had done, and what his son faced.

That 15-year-old — who was first cousin to Taylor — testified as well.

Moores’ adult son was in the courtroom; I remember him getting up and leaving abruptly when jurors were shown large photos of his father’s face, with injuries from the beating he endured, the deep dark bruises.

The district attorney’s assistant told me that it was the first time he’d seen what had been done to his father. After he got out of the courtroom, she said, he completely broke down. She said she’d never seen a man cry like that.

Defense attorneys more or less conceded the crime, focusing their arguments on trying to save Taylor’s life, as the state sought the death penalty. They asked jurors to consider his youth and mental state.

Jurors convicted Taylor and unanimously recommended the death penalty.

More than 30 years later, the state has plans to impose that sentence.

I don’t think anyone from the prosecutors’ team or any of the investigators who worked the case are working now.

That 15-year-old neighbor and I crossed paths with again many years after the trial. We even worked under the same roof for a while; I consider him a friend.

He wears a ring of Ernie Moore’s on his hand every day and he carries the pain of the Moores’ senseless murder in his heart.

In a Facebook post recently, he expressed disbelief that a group seeking to abolish the death penalty in Alabama planned a protest Sunday at the state Capitol and was petitioning to “Stop the Killing of Michael Taylor.”

The couple invited Taylor into their home, offered him water and doughnuts. He came up behind the 83-year-old man and bashed his head with the weight bar. When the 79-year-old woman came in, bending down to check on her fallen husband, he hit her. This former neighbor recalled there being blood all over their kitchen, on the fridge and the back wall.

“Can someone make this make sense, please?” he asked, regarding the protest and petitioning.

I don’t think any sense can be made, not of the crime, or the arguments against or for the death penalty.

I just hope that when the state’s window for the execution closes, it brings down some sense of peace for the people who have grieved since Nov. 6, 1991.

Donna Thornton is the editor of The Sand Mountain Leader. Her email address is [email protected] .

Donna Thornton, now editor of The Sand Mountain Leader, covered the deaths of Lucille and Ernie Moore for The Gadsden Times in 1991.

THORNTON: Remembering a couple killed 35 years ago as execution looms

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