Nannie Doss (born Nancy Hazel, November 4, 1905 – June 2, 1965) was an American serial killer responsible for the deaths of 11 people between 1927 and 1954.
[1] Doss was also referred to as the Giggling Granny, the Lonely Hearts Killer, the Black Widow, and Lady Blue Beard.
[2] Doss finally confessed to the murders in October 1954, after her fifth husband died in a small hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
James would force his children to work on the family farm, refusing to let them attend school, which resulted in Nannie's poor academic performance.
During childhood, her favorite hobby was reading her mother's romance magazines and dreaming of her own romantic future.
Nannie's father forbade his daughters to wear makeup and attractive clothing as he believed it would prevent them from being molested by men.
Both unhappy partners correctly suspected each other of infidelity, and Braggs often disappeared for days on end.
Exhausted from labor and groggy from ether, Melvina thought she saw her visiting mother stick a hatpin into the baby's head.
When she asked her husband and sister for clarification, they said Nannie had told them the baby was dead—and they noticed that she was holding a pin.
The death was diagnosed as asphyxia from unknown causes, and two months later Nannie collected the $500 life insurance she had taken out on Robert.
The next day, she put rat poison in Harrelson's corn whiskey jar, and he died that evening.
Nannie met her third husband, Arlie Lanning, through another lonely-hearts column while travelling in Lexington, North Carolina, and married him three days later.
But when she was home, she played the doting housewife, and when he died of what was said to be heart failure, the townspeople supported her at his funeral.
Looking for yet another husband, Nannie joined a dating service called the Diamond Circle Club and soon met Richard L. Morton of Jamestown, North Carolina.
She pled guilty on May 17, 1955, and was sentenced to life imprisonment; the state did not pursue the death penalty due to her sex.