He killed his girlfriend with cocaine to stop her pregnancy; Mother slain in daylight attack

**Joshua Ritter** (0:11)
Hello and welcome to The Sidebar, presented by True Crime News, taking you inside the courtrooms of high-profile and notorious cases from across the country. I'm your host, Joshua Ritter. I'm a criminal defense lawyer based in Los Angeles and previously an LA County prosecutor for over a decade. We are recording this on Wednesday, July 1st, 2026 In this week's episode, a new trial date for Alex Murdaugh as the disgraced attorney again faces charges for the murder of his wife and son. Plus, a mother's terrifying last moments after she was brazenly ambushed and stabbed to death. But first, a Tennessee jury has reached a verdict for the man accused of fatally poisoning his pregnant girlfriend with cocaine. I'm flying solo today, so let's go ahead and jump right in. First, out of Nashville, Tennessee, a former pro football scout is looking at life behind bars after he poisoned his pregnant girlfriend with a lethal dose of cocaine. Blaise Taylor was convicted on all accounts for the death of Jade Benning and her unborn child. At the time of the incident, Benning was five months pregnant and by all accounts, excited about the pregnancy, a co-worker even testified that Benning gave up alcohol and marijuana in her preparations to become a mother. Tragically, she would never realize those aspirations after a medical event left her in a critical condition, eventually claiming the life of both Benning and the baby. While a toxicology report found Benning died with the highest concentration of cocaine the medical examiner's office had ever seen, the doctor could not ultimately deem the death a homicide, ruling the means of death undetermined. However, before she became unresponsive, the dying woman made a declaration while on the phone with a friend accusing Taylor of tampering with her drink because he didn't want the baby. Taylor opted not to testify in the trial and jurors ultimately sided with the prosecution's theory. They are now deliberating his sentence. This case is a wild one and bizarre. We see cases like this every so often where people just are not happy with the way that their life is headed, and they decided that the only way out of that is to kill someone. We've even seen it tragically before too where that has to do with a pregnancy, an unwanted pregnancy by the father in the relationship who decides that the only way, the option that he has out of it is to take the life of the mother and the child. But I don't know if that was what was exactly that was happening here. I think jurors saw it with a little bit more of nuance as well, because they convicted him of second degree murder for the mother, but first degree murder for the unborn baby. Let's think about that and what that means for a second. Sounds like the theory that the jurors clung to and that really the prosecution went with in this case had to do with the pregnancy itself and not maybe not so much that he wanted to kill both of them, but he certainly wanted to end the pregnancy, which would be the murder of the unborn child. And that the murder of the mother was, I mean, I'm struggling to find a better way of putting this, but almost a collateral consequence of that, that he didn't really intend her death, but put her in such a dangerous position that they're going to substitute that reckless disregard for her life and safety as enough intent to find him guilty of second degree murder. It's a really, really sad case. The other part about it that makes it interesting is the choice of weapon, as it were, in this case. It's not rat poison. It's not fentanyl. It's not something, obviously, that somebody would use to cause another person harm. It's cocaine, a very frequently used and widely available recreational drug that I think there was evidence that even she herself may have taken in a prior time in her life. Now, I think the prosecution did a very excellent job of showing how she had really changed her life. And I'm not trying at all to say that she was living a high-risk lifestyle, but she certainly gave up drinking and any kind of other casual drug use, marijuana use, at least according to the testimony when she had this, when she found out she was pregnant, she was very excited like many, many mothers are. So you imagine she was living a lifestyle to do anything she could to protect that precious baby inside of her. And that was important because when you're dealing with something like cocaine, a widely available recreational drug, there's always the built in argument for the defense that it could have been something that she did to herself, tragically overdosed herself on cocaine. I think the other thing that obviously argued against that was the amount, the medical examiner saying that it was such a, the largest amount of cocaine in a person, in a toxicology report that they had ever seen. That's incredibly powerful evidence. That is not something that somebody would accidentally take. You couple that with the phone call that she makes while she is literally breathing some of her last breaths, by the way. Think about the drama of that. Here's a person who may not even realize it yet, but she's essentially already dying and calls a friend to say that she feels that he put something in her drink. Pretty powerful stuff. One other thing I think worth mentioning is that at one point prosecutors presented testimony from a former girlfriend of Taylor's who claimed that he asked her in 2017 to obtain abortion pills so he could place them in the drink of another woman that he got pregnant. Obviously, this is the type of character evidence, and it's not really character evidence. It's prior bad acts evidence, but it gives us an insight into his common plans, his MO, the way that he operates, and that's when this type of evidence can be used into very great and powerful effect. So what they're saying here, that this is something important for us to all understand, and it is a little bit in the weeds legally, but you cannot present evidence of a person being a bad person and say, listen, this guy's bad because he had asked for apportioned pills, allegedly, to surreptitiously drug a prior girlfriend who had gotten pregnant. Therefore, he's a bad guy and bad guys do bad things. That would be character evidence. But you can use it to say, listen, this guy operates in an incredibly predictable way, that when he's in a situation where he finds that a life choice is being foisted upon him, when he finds out that he had, that he, I mean, you can get his detail to saying, when he finds out that he got someone pregnant in an unplanned way, his way of handling that is to surreptitiously drug that person with something that will stop that pregnancy, that will terminate that pregnancy. And that you can say that in a very similar pattern as to what he did before, if you believe that to be true, then you can believe it to be also true in this case. That is not character evidence. That is prior bad acts evidence. And that is the type of evidence that we do allow. And again, I think it must have been incredibly convincing to the jurors. It was to me, when you look at this prior testimony of that bad acts, when you look at the phone call, you look at the amount of cocaine used, it all is starting to point away from any other explanation for this. What were they left with? They were left with the idea, it's essentially binary, right? Either he did it or someone else did it. And there's never been any other evidence that anybody else was involved, that anybody else was in that room, that anybody else was around. He's the one that called 911 So he himself is placing that choice in front of jurors. It's either me or her that did it. And when you take out the possibility that it could have been her, and you add to that the idea that he is the type of person who's at least tried to do this in the past, from her own conversation with a friend, it sounds like she was aware of how he didn't want this pregnancy. She provides the motive to the jurors, literally a voice from the grave providing the motive for the jurors. That is very, very convincing evidence. So I do think that the jurors got this one right. I do think this is an incredible tragedy. But I think the jurors were balanced enough and perceptive enough to realize that probably what he wanted to do was to terminate that pregnancy, end the life of that beautiful baby, and not really end her life. But because he did, they're finding him guilty for second degree of the mother and first degree of the unborn child. Really sad case.