Lorna Anderson Moore’s parole status remains undecided.
Bill Miskill, spokesman for the Kansas Department of Corrections, said that the parole board has not yet announced a decision on whether she will be released. Her earliest parole date is Thursday.
“There are actually three general parole board decisions they can make,” Miskill said. “Release, remain in prison until some date that we set in the future, or what they call ‘continued status.’”
Continued status means that “the board just hasn’t made a decision by the parole date, and at this point, since she hasn’t yet hit the parole date, she’s not even on continued status,” he said.
The parole board has been considering Moore’s parole since three public hearings were held in December.
Moore, known as Lorna Anderson when she lived in Emporia, was convicted of criminal solicitation to commit first-degree murder in Lyon County and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Geary County in the mid 1980s.
The Lyon County charge involved her participation in a plot to kill Sandra Bird, the wife of former Emporia minister Thomas P. Bird. Sandra Bird died in July 1983 in a case that initially was ruled an accident. Later, her death became the subject of a criminal investigation. Bird was convicted in 1985 of criminal solicitation and first-degree murder of his wife. Anderson was Bird’s secretary at church, and they allegedly were having a love affair.
Anderson pleaded guilty in Geary County District Court in connection with the November 1983 shooting death of her husband, Martin Anderson, who died in a plowed field along Highway 177, about five miles south of Interstate 70 in Geary County.
Anderson, in entering the plea in her husband’s case, agreed to cooperate with Geary County officials in exchange for her cooperation in identifying the gunman that shot her husband. Anderson named the Rev. Bird, who subsequently was acquitted of first-degree murder in Martin Anderson’s death.
Bird was paroled in 2004 from that conviction and was featured on “City Confidential,” an A&E network program, in a story about the case. He told interviewers at that time that he was working as a marriage counselor.
In parole comment sessions in December, Anderson-Moore’s husband, Terry Moore, and her father, Loren Slater, were among those who presented remarks.
Several of Anderson-Moore’s four daughters from her marriage to Martin Anderson also have testified in their mother’s favor at parole hearings.
At the comment session on Dec. 15 in Wichita, the Wichita Eagle-Beacon reported that Terry Moore said that his wife had earned an associate’s degree while in prison, has been a leader in inmate drug-treatment programs, and is active in a women’s church group.
Moore has been working since April 2006 in the private sector in Topeka. The name of her employer is not public information, according to Miskill.