The ex-lover of a Charleston banker is making another attempt to have her sentence overturned in an infamous hired murder case that led to their arrest.
Wendy Moore, 45, is just under five years old before being released, but she hopes that a motion filed in the United States District Court in March will get her out of federal prison much sooner.
Moore has already made an unsuccessful attempt at resentment after his traditional pleas failed. But a judge gave her the go-ahead to make a new argument that her prison sentence should be overturned due to questions about the constitutionality of a law for which she was convicted. Prosecutors must submit a response by May 9.
Moore and his ex-lover, former banker Chris Latham, were convicted in 2014 for their roles in a failed rental murder conspiracy targeting Latham’s now ex-wife Nancy Cannon, a real estate brokerage and state lottery employee. Moore is serving 15 years behind bars on four charges, and Latham was sentenced to 10 years on one charge.
Latham was an executive at Bank of America in Charleston when a romance blossomed between him and Moore, a secretary in his office. Amid the contentious divorce, they planned the death of his wife, officials said.
The plan was unveiled in April 2013, when a Charleston police officer stopped Aaron Wilkinson, a Kentucky man who intended to buy heroin on the city’s East Side. After the police found a gun in his car, Wilkinson revealed the death plot and led investigators into a “successful package” with important details about Cannon. Wilkinson became involved in the scheme through a connection to Moore’s ex-husband Samuel Yenawine, who later committed suicide while awaiting trial.
Wilkinson became the government’s chief witness and reduced his potential for arrest when testifying against Latham and Moore. The case quickly caught national attention and became the subject of an episode of Dateline entitled “The Charleston Affair”.
Moore is serving time in a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, scheduled to be released in January 2026. Latham is incarcerated about three hours away in Wildwood, Florida. He could be released in February next year, according to the federal government’s Prison Department.
Moore has used a variety of arguments to overturn his conviction and sentence, from allegations by an ineffective lawyer to claims that Latham had made her a pawn in his illicit plans. Latham also challenged his conviction, claiming that the plot was fiction, invented “straight from a movie script” by a sociopath. None of these arguments worked.
This time, Moore is betting on a complex legal argument that hitchhikes on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2019 in a Texas burglary case involving a series of cigarette thefts. The assailants were convicted under the same federal conspiracy law that helped put Moore and Latham behind bars.
The law in question allows for stricter criminal penalties for the use, possession or possession of a firearm in relation to any federal “crime of violence or crime of drug trafficking”. But the court ruled that a part of that law that defines violent crimes was unconstitutionally vague and provided “no reliable way to determine which crimes qualify as crimes of violence”. Therefore, the court concluded that this section of the law is invalid.
Taking that decision into consideration, Moore’s conviction should be overturned and his sentence unoccupied to comply with the superior court’s conclusions, his lawyer argued in a March 26 motion.
District Judge Richard Gergel gave Moore’s attorney, Columbia attorney Elizabeth Franklin-Best, until April 9 to file the supplementary paperwork in connection with her motion, and prosecutors will have 30 days from that point to file a response.
Franklin-Best did not respond to an email from The Post and Courier requesting additional comments on the matter.
Michael Mulé, a US public prosecutor in South Carolina, said prosecutors had no comment on the case at the time.
To reach Glenn Smith at 843-937-5556. Follow him on Twitter @ glennsmith5.