Blaise Taylor Had Already Asked One Woman to Help Him Drug Another

He had two college degrees, an NFL job, and a coach's pedigree, the kind of life people can't imagine a man risking. He also had an unwanted pregnancy that he could not undo.

On the last night of her life, Jade Benning painted a canvas for her daughter’s nursery.

She was nearly twenty-four weeks pregnant with a girl she had already named Ivy. That night, her best friend, Nijaiha Jackson, came by with another friend to eat the chicken alfredo Jade had made and talk about the nursery. Blaise Taylor, the baby’s father, was there too. Jackson, who had known Jade since they were both six years old in Little Rock, was meeting him for the first time; he had been absent for most of the pregnancy.

twenty-five-year-old Jade Benning

The plan for the night was to paint. Two canvases, to hang above the crib. Jade’s filled with color, wavy lines of green and yellow and pink, the words love, hope, and peace. Then, as the four of them talked about the baby’s room, Jackson would later testify, Taylor’s mood changed. His canvas, he told them, was going to be a black hole. He would call it midnight, he said, and the further you looked, the deeper you would go.

When he finished, it was exactly that: a solid black canvas with a single gray circle at its center. Jackson found the whole thing strange. She and her friend left not long after.

The photographs capture the rest of the night that the jury would later see. At 9:25, Jade and Taylor held their paintings up and posed, both smiling. In one, Jade is kissing his cheek.

A few minutes after that photo was taken, her phone dialed Nijaiha Jackson. She never said a word.

The Résumé Was Flawless

On paper, Blaise Taylor was a catch, the kind of man a woman feels lucky to match.

He was a four-year starter at defensive back for Arkansas State, a team captain, a four-time all-conference honoree, and a National Football Foundation Scholar-Athlete. He still holds the school’s career records for punt return yards and pass breakups. He finished his bachelor’s and master’s degrees before his senior season even started, which, by his program’s own account, made him the only player in major college football at the time to have done so. After college, he spent four years with the Tennessee Titans, working his way up to full-time pro scout, an NFL job at an age when most of his peers were still trying to get a foot in the door.

It was in his blood. His father is Carl “Trooper” Taylor, a coach with more than thirty years in the sport, on the Auburn staff for its undefeated national championship in 2010, a three-time top-25 recruiter, a fixture at Tennessee and Oklahoma State and half a dozen other programs. Blaise played for his father at Arkansas State, where Trooper coached the defensive backs. This was a football family with a name, and Blaise was a son who carried it well.

None of that is a character reference, though people treat it like one. It answers the question most people stop at: why would a man with everything going for him do something like this? It never occurs to them that everything is the answer. The résumé is not evidence of innocence. It is a measure of how much a man had to protect.

Jade Benning Fed People for a Living

Jade Tristen Benning was born in Little Rock on March 6, 1998. She attended Little Rock Central High, completed culinary school at Brightwater in 2020, and built a career as a chef in Nashville. She was a head pastry chef and ran her own catering business. She was, by every account presented at trial, good at caring for people, and she was excited to care for a daughter.

She met Taylor on Hinge in early 2022. It was casual, on-and-off, non-exclusive, with both of them seeing other people. It was not a great romance, and no one has pretended it was.

When Jade found out she was pregnant, near the end of September 2022, she was not looking for a husband. She was looking forward to being a mom. Friends described a woman who had stopped drinking, stopped using, and turned her whole attention toward the pregnancy, getting her apartment ready, planning the nursery, counting down. Investigators testified they found no sign she was using anything while she was pregnant. She was doing everything right.

That fall and winter, Jade was not bracing for anything. She had a career she had built, a daughter on the way, a best friend she had known since childhood, and plans for the life she wanted. She was strong, not vulnerable, in a season when she needed one thing from the father of her child and could not get it.

She Told Him the Baby Was His on November 4

Jade told Taylor the child was his on November 4, 2022. She wanted to keep the baby. He did not want her to. A former Titans coworker, Mical Johnson, later testified that Taylor had been plain about it, that he was not ready to be a father, not yet and not anytime soon. Jade’s mother, Bridget Burks, testified that if Jade had the baby, Taylor wanted nothing to do with it, did not want it to carry his name, did not want the child to ever know who he was.

She let him go. She told him, in writing, that he was free. “You said how you felt and stated that moving forward you want no part, so I will let it be that,” she wrote him. “I will not involve you at any point. I will love this child unconditionally with or without you.”

By then, Jade had already made up her own mind. She told a friend she was going to keep the baby, and that Taylor could get the idea of an abortion out of his head. She was not chasing him. She was not demanding support, or a ring, or his name on anything. She was handing him the exact exit he said he wanted, no strings, and telling him she would carry the whole thing alone.

It was not enough. Jade could release Taylor from every fatherly duty. She could not release him from the one fact underneath all of them. A child was going to exist, provably his, a permanent claim on the life he had built and the name he carried. From his perspective, he had not chosen it and could not undo it, and the decision that set it in motion was hers, not his. For most men, that is a hard adjustment. For a certain few, it is intolerable.

twenty-six-year-old Blaise Taylor

In 2017, He Had Rehearsed This

The poisoning was not a man snapping. It was a man resorting to a solution he had reached for once before.

At trial, prosecutors called a former girlfriend named Apple Dennie, who dated Taylor on and off in 2017. Some of what she told the jury was her own history with the defendant: Taylor had gotten her pregnant, and she had an abortion. The rest was about another woman and what Taylor had been willing to do about her.

That woman was Xavier Winford, who had also gotten pregnant with Taylor’s child. Xavier did not want to terminate her pregnancy. The two had argued about it.

Dennie said that’s when Taylor started looking for a way out that did not depend on Xavier’s cooperation. He was googling things, Dennie said, looking up whether there was something you could do to make a woman have an abortion. He asked Dennie to get abortion pills so he could make Winford take them or slip them into her drink without her knowing. Dennie had to talk him out of secretly dosing a woman who was refusing to end her pregnancy, so that he could cause the abortion without her ever knowing.

Xavier eventually decided to terminate on her own.

So by the night of the pink lemonade, three women had carried Blaise Taylor’s pregnancies, and the pattern was in what happened when one of them would not end it. Dennie’s ended in an abortion. Winford did not want to end hers, and that was when Taylor went looking for a way to do it through her body without her consent, until Dennie talked him out of it. Jade would not end hers either, and this time no one talked him out of anything. Six years before Jade poured that glass, he had already described, out loud, the idea of secretly dosing a pregnant woman’s drink to be rid of a pregnancy he did not want. The method was not improvised on a February night. It was on the shelf.

The judge let the jury hear it as pattern evidence, and it is hard to imagine a cleaner example of why that category exists.

On New Year’s Eve, He Came Back

For weeks after Jade told him, Taylor kept his distance, as she had offered. Then, on December 31, 2022, he contacted her again. On New Year’s Day, they met at a park and talked for hours. They agreed to get to know each other, to co-parent if the child turned out to be his.

On its surface, it reads like a man coming around. A reconciliation. A father deciding to show up after all.

The timing tells a different story. By the time Taylor came back, Jade was months along. The pregnancy could not be quietly ended anymore. The route he had rehearsed in 2017, the covert pill in the drink, was gone; you cannot chemically undo a pregnancy this far in without the woman knowing exactly what is happening to her. Whatever else the reunion was, it put him back in the room, and it reopened the one thing the calendar had otherwise taken away. I am not going to tell you what was in his head when he texted her on New Year’s Eve because no one can, and he has never said. We know he came back, they got close again, and seven weeks later, she was clinically dead in her bedroom.

The Pink Lemonade

The date on February 25 was Jade’s idea. Around 3:50 that afternoon, she invited Taylor to come at seven to eat and paint. She cooked. They painted the canvases and posed for pictures. She kissed his cheek.

The prosecution’s account of what else happened that night is that Taylor put cocaine, dissolved in alcohol, into Jade’s pink lemonade. Jade, a chef, in her own kitchen, drank from a drink prepared by a man she saw no reason to distrust. The medical examiner would later testify that the concentration of cocaine in her blood, 1,787 nanograms per milliliter, was the highest her office had ever measured, a level she could not recall seeing in any prior case. She also said that the way it entered Jade’s body pointed to something swallowed, not snorted, taken by mouth by someone who did not know it was there.

She Dialed Her Best Friend and Said Nothing

Nijaiha Jackson had stopped at a gas station on her way home. She was finishing filling up her car when Jade called.

All she heard was Jade talking to Blaise. “What did you do? What did you put in my drink?” Then, “Blaise, you’re scaring me.” Jackson heard him answer, but he did not answer the question. He only said, “You’re scaring me,” turning her words back on her. Jade said she knew he had put something in her drink. She said her drink had tasted funny. At one point, she told him to empty his pockets.

Jade never said a word to Nijaiha, who kept trying to get Jade to talk to her. When Jade didn’t respond to her friend’s concern, Nihaija texted Jade to ask if the yelling was directed at her. No response. She heard Jade say she could not walk straight, that she could not feel her legs. And then she said the last clear thing her best friend would ever hear her say: “You did this so something would happen to the baby.”

After that, her words slurred and stopped making sense. The call ran about six minutes. Through all of it, Jackson testified, Taylor barely spoke. He said he “didn’t have anything.” He said Jade was the one scaring him.

By the time an ambulance reached her, Jade Benning was clinically dead.

He Told 911 It Was an Allergic Reaction

At 9:38, Blaise Taylor called 911. He told the dispatcher they had been making cookies and painting when Jade said she wasn’t feeling good. He thought she might be having an allergic reaction to the food. Asked whether she had a rash, hives, swelling, or redness, he said no. He said she had vomited and was not responding to him. He did not know of anything Jade was allergic to, he said. The dispatcher told him to roll her onto her side.

In his own later account to investigators, Taylor said Jade got sick, and that he called his father first, and his father told him to call 911.

When the paramedics arrived, they found something much worse than an allergic reaction. Jade was lying face down, with no pulse and a pink froth around her mouth. One of them, a Nashville Fire medic, testified that Taylor was frantic but gave them no useful information and that his idea of helping was to keep moving Jade himself, which only kept them from reaching her. He would not let them assess her properly inside the apartment, and the scene was too unsafe to work on her there, so they carried her out and started resuscitation in the ambulance.

At the hospital, the panic was gone. When an officer reached the emergency room, Taylor was standing alone in a busy hallway, on his phone. A sergeant from the domestic violence unit interviewed him that night, and prosecutors would play the recording to the jury to show how calm he sounded. He told the sergeant they had recently gotten back together, denied any serious argument, and said Jade had never directly accused him of anything, which was not what her best friend had heard through the phone an hour before. Everyone else who loved Jade was coming apart. Blaise was steady.

Everyone else who loved Jade was coming apart. Blaise was steady.

He had no criminal record, and a clean one is worth more than people think. It does not mean a man has done nothing. It means nothing he did was ever written down. He called the right number, said the plausible thing, cooperated with the detective, and waited. If you did not know what you were looking at, he looked like a frightened boyfriend having the worst night of his life.

She Died on Her Birthday

By the time she reached Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a doctor testified, every clinical sign said she was already dead. They put her on oxygen anyway. The baby’s heart was still going, barely. Ivy died first, on February 27.

Jade stayed on life support while her family waited for a miracle that was not going to come. On March 6, 2023, they let her go. It was her twenty-fifth birthday. One drink, two deaths, nine days apart. That week, a coworker testified, Taylor came in to work and acted completely normal.

What the Defense Wanted the Jury to Believe

Taylor’s attorneys argued that Jade died of an accidental overdose, not a poisoning. They pointed to her history with drugs, marijuana, Adderall, mushrooms, THC cartridges, and to texts showing she used and connected other people with dealers. A woman with that history, they argued, might have used it again. Maybe the cocaine was hers.

They also went after the motive itself. Because the relationship had been open on both sides, they questioned whether the baby was even Taylor’s. And they pointed to things that looked like a man preparing to be a father rather than to kill one, including a diaper subscription he had signed up for.

Their toxicology argument was the one with a real edge. They told the jury the dose cut both ways: too much cocaine for Jade to have taken on her own, and too much for Taylor to have slipped into her drink without her tasting it.

Their lead attorney, Letitia Quinones-Hollins, attacked the notion of premeditation with the clock. Taylor had maybe three hours between Jade’s invitation and the drink, she told the jury, and folding an elaborate murder plot into a spontaneous date night in that window was, she said, a stretch.

And they hammered the investigation, where they had the most to work with. The night Jade was hospitalized, her mother, far away and unable to reach anyone official, asked one of Jade’s coworkers to go into the apartment, take photos, blow out a candle, lock up, and bring her the keys. Friends went in and moved things. The lead detective, Adam Reese, testified that a cup sitting in front of Jade in the first photos was gone by the time police executed their search warrant. The scene was compromised, and no one disputed it.

A defense expert testified that Jade’s symptoms looked more like fentanyl than cocaine. On cross-examination, prosecutors established that the expert was neither a forensic pathologist nor a toxicologist.

The Jury Put the Premeditation on the Baby

They did not talk themselves out of it. After about two hours, the jury of four men and eight women convicted Blaise Taylor on all four counts. But the counts did not come back uniform.

For Jade’s death, the jury returned a verdict of second-degree murder. They found he killed her, but they stopped short of first-degree, stopped short of saying her death was the planned object of the night.

They convicted him of first-degree premeditated murder for Ivy’s death.

Twelve people who sat through all of it decided that the premeditation, the planning, and the cold aim of the evening pointed at the baby. Ivy was the target. Jade was how he reached her. The jury located the intent exactly where the evidence pointed it, on the pregnancy he did not want and could not undo, and they graded her killing as the means to that end. Two more counts of felony murder rounded it out. They recommended life.

As Judge Steve Dozier had each juror certify the verdict, Jade’s family, dressed in purple, wept. Sentencing on the remaining counts is set for September 9, when the court will also decide whether his sentences run consecutively or concurrently. Taylor maintained his innocence throughout, and within hours of the verdict, his attorneys said they would appeal.

But the jurors, with no theory of homicide from the medical examiner to lean on, still saw it for what it was. The point was never Jade.

What This Kind of Killing Is

Strip the football shine off Blaise Taylor, and what is left is a pattern that shows up again and again: the death of an expectant mother by someone else’s hand.

In this country, a pregnant or newly postpartum woman is more likely to be murdered than to die of any of the medical causes that medical care is prepared to catch: hemorrhage, preeclampsia, all of it. The person most likely to kill her is a current or former partner.

There was no batterer here who finally went too far, no history of violence, no restraining orders, no record. That is part of why this kind of killing is so easy to miss: the logic is different. He is not trying to punish her, control her, or win her back. He is trying to make a pregnancy stop existing, and when the only way to do that runs through her body, he kills her to reach it. Her life weighs almost nothing against being rid of a problem that would otherwise follow him forever.

The danger is not greatest on the day she tells him she is pregnant. It is the highest on the day she makes it clear that she is keeping the baby and that she has the final say, whether he likes it or not. That is when his options run out.

Jade communicated that decision in writing, releasing him from every obligation except for the one thing he could not stand, the fact that he was going to be a father. Xavier Winford reached it in 2017 and was lucky that the woman he tried to recruit said no. Others reach it and do not survive, and because these men plan for the death to look like something else, an overdose, an allergic reaction, a miscarriage, some of those killings are never counted as killings at all.

Part of my work is evaluating men who kill the people closest to them. They are often so ordinary: accomplished, calm, easy to trust. What gives a man like this away is not a temper or a record. He may have neither. It is the way he operates once she has made that decision, colder or more insistent or more controlling than anything in the situation explains.

And she may never see it. She is too close, too invested, too ready to explain away a man she chose. The people who can see it are the ones around her. The friend. The sister. The person who watches his face go dark while everyone else is talking about the nursery. Nijaiha Jackson noticed the black hole. She thought it was strange. She had no way to know she was looking at the only honest thing Blaise Taylor showed anyone that night.

Jade Benning did everything a person could do. She built a life, got healthy, wanted to be a mother, and handed the man an exit so clean it should have been enough. She was not killed for a mistake. She was killed for a choice she made on her own: that her daughter would live.

There were two canvases from that night. The jury saw them both.

Thank you for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. If you enjoyed this article, please pass it along to a true-crime-following friend. See you next week!

References

Campbell, J. C., Webster, D., Koziol-McLain, J., Block, C., Campbell, D., Curry, M. A., Gary, F., Glass, N., McFarlane, J., Sachs, C., Sharps, P., Ulrich, Y., Wilt, S. A., Manganello, J., Xu, X., Schollenberger, J., Frye, V., & Laughon, K. (2003). Risk factors for femicide in abusive relationships: Results from a multisite case-control study. American Journal of Public Health, 93(7), 1089-1097. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.93.7.1089

Wallace, M. E., Gillispie-Bell, V., Cruz, K., Davis, K., & Vilda, D. (2021). Homicide during pregnancy and the postpartum period in the United States, 2018-2019. Obstetrics & Gynecology, 138(5), 762-769. https://doi.org/10.1097/AOG.0000000000004567

Wallace, M. E., & Jahn, J. L. (2025). Pregnancy-associated mortality due to homicide, suicide, and drug overdose. JAMA Network Open, 8(2), e2459342. https://doi.org/10.1001/ja