Posted by Nannie Doss, nicknamed the “Giggling Granny”, killed 11 people between 1927 and 1954, mostly with rat poison and arsenic: four husbands, her mother, a sister, a mother-in-law, two daughters and two grandsons. She confessed in 1954 after the death of her fifth husband, but was tried only for that murder. Sentenced to life in 1955, she died of leukemia in prison in 1965.
Nannie Doss was an American serial killer responsible for the deaths of 11 people, including four of her five husbands. She giggled as she told the police about her crimes, but she was tried for only one of them.
The life of Nannie Doss
Nannie Doss was born on November 4, 1905 in Blue Mountain, Alabama, as Nancy Hazel, daughter of Louisa and James Hazel. She had one brother and four sisters and her childhood was far from happy. Her father was a violent, controlling man, hated by both her and her mother, and he forced his children to work on the family farm instead of sending them to school. Because of this, Nannie never learned to read and write well.
When she was seven, she was traveling by train with her family to visit relatives in southern Alabama when, after a sudden stop, she hit her head on the metal bar of the seat in front of her.
In the following years she began to suffer from severe headaches, blackouts and depression, and she always blamed that accident for her mental instability too.
As a teenager her father forbade her and her sisters to wear makeup or pretty clothes and to go to dances or parties. So her favorite pastime became reading her mother’s romance magazines, especially the lonely hearts column, dreaming of the perfect love story. A passion that, years later, would bring her almost all of her husbands.
First marriage and first murders
In 1921, at 16, Nannie married Charley Braggs, a co-worker at the linen factory where she worked, after only four months of dating and with her father’s approval. Charley was the only son of a single mother who insisted on living with him even after the wedding. Nannie herself later wrote that her mother-in-law had “taken over” her life completely.
Between 1923 and 1927 they had four daughters. Stressed out, Nannie started drinking, and her casual smoking turned into a heavy addiction. Both cheated on each other and Charley sometimes vanished from home for days.
In 1927 the two middle girls died of what looked like food poisoning.
Soon after, Charley fled, taking their eldest daughter Melvina and leaving newborn Florine with Nannie. Not long after, Charley’s mother died too. Alone with a daughter, Nannie found work in a cotton mill. In the summer of 1928 Charley came back with Melvina, but with him were also a divorced woman and her child. The two divorced and Nannie went back to her mother’s with the two girls.
Charley was the only husband to survive, and he always said he had left her because he was afraid of her.
Second marriage
Back to reading the lonely hearts column, Nannie answered a few ads. One was from Robert Franklin Harrelson, a laborer from Jacksonville. They met and married in 1929 and Nannie moved in with him along with her two daughters. A few months later she found out that her husband was an alcoholic with a criminal record for assault, but the marriage still lasted 16 years.
In 1943 Melvina, Nannie’s eldest daughter, gave birth to a son, Robert Lee Haynes. Two years later a second baby was born, with Nannie in the house to help. The little one died soon after birth.
Exhausted from labor and groggy from the ether used as an anesthetic, Melvina believed she had seen her mother harm the newborn with a hatpin.
When she asked her husband and sister, they told her that Nannie had come out of the room to say the baby was dead and that she was holding a hatpin. The doctors, however, could not give an explanation and no further investigation took place.
The death of her grandson and of her second husband
After this loss Melvina and her husband drifted apart until they separated, and she started dating a soldier, a relationship Nannie strongly disapproved of. After a particularly nasty fight with her mother, Melvina went to visit her father for a few days, leaving little Robert with his grandmother.
On July 7, 1945 the boy died while in Nannie’s care. The cause was given as asphyxia from unknown causes.
Two months later Nannie collected the $500 life insurance she had taken out on her grandson.
That same year, at the end of the war, Harrelson came home drunk after the celebrations and, according to Nannie, raped her. The next day she found the jar of corn whiskey her husband kept hidden and poured rat poison into it.
Harrelson died that very evening.
Third marriage
Nannie met her third husband, Arlie Lanning, through another lonely hearts column while in Lexington, North Carolina, and married him three days later. He too was a drunk and a womanizer, but this time it was Nannie who disappeared from home, sometimes for months.
When she was home, though, she played the perfect wife, and when Arlie died of what seemed to be heart failure the whole town rallied around the poor widow at the funeral.
Soon after, the house they lived in, which was supposed to go to Arlie’s sister, burned down. The insurance money, however, went to Nannie, who quickly banked it. After her mother-in-law died in her sleep, Nannie left North Carolina and went to live with her sister Dovie, who was bedridden. Dovie died shortly after her arrival.
Fourth marriage
Looking for a new husband, Nannie joined a dating service called the Diamond Circle Club and met Richard L. Morton of Jamestown. They married in 1952 in Emporia, Kansas. Morton did not drink, but he cheated on her.
In January 1953 Nannie’s mother, Louisa, came to live with the couple and died of poisoning. On May 19, three months later, Richard died too.
Fifth marriage
In June 1953 Nannie married Samuel Doss, a Nazarene minister from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who had lost his family in a tornado. Samuel was a strict man who disapproved of the romance novels and stories his wife adored, and he would not let her have a TV or a radio.
In September 1954 Samuel was hospitalized with flu-like symptoms that turned out to be a severe digestive tract infection. He was treated and released on October 5. Once he was home, Nannie poisoned him again, in a rush to collect the two life insurance policies she had taken out on him, and Samuel died on October 12.
This sudden death made his doctor suspicious, and he ordered an autopsy.
The autopsy found a huge amount of arsenic in Samuel’s body and Nannie was arrested.
Confession, trial and death
She was taken to the police station and questioned. At first she denied everything, saying she had never poisoned anyone and had a clear conscience. But once the newspapers ran the story, the police received many calls from people who had known her and reported the suspicious deaths of other husbands and relatives.
During questioning Nannie giggled while talking about her crimes, and the press nicknamed her the “Giggling Granny”. Other nicknames were “the Black Widow” and “Lady Bluebeard”.
Nannie admitted killing Samuel because he annoyed her and, in October 1954, confessed to killing four husbands, her mother, her sister Dovie, her grandson Robert and her mother-in-law. Investigators attributed 11 victims to her in all, including her two daughters and her second grandson.
The state of Oklahoma, however, tried her only for Samuel’s death. The prosecutor was J. Howard Edmondson, who later became governor of the state. On May 17, 1955 Nannie pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment: the prosecution did not seek the death penalty because she was a woman. She was never tried for the other murders.
She died of leukemia on June 2, 1965, in the hospital ward of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, and is buried in McAlester.
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