(Born as: Nancy Hazel),
this serial killer, used Poison(arsenic) as her method of killing to collect
insurance money - Search for "the real romance of life, she killed between
8 and 11 people in the 1920s through to
October, 1954. In the States of: Alabama - North Carolina – Kansas – and
Oklahoma, USA. The victim include: Four of her husbands, her mother, her sister
Dovie, her grandson Robert and her mother-in-law, Arlie Lanning's mother. She pleaded
guilty on May 17, 1955, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. But died of
leukemia in the hospital ward of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary on June 2,
1965
Bio:
On the outside Nannie Doss of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a
friendly and happy neighbor, wife, and parent. On the inside lurked a
cold-blooded murderess who nearly wiped out her entire family single-handedly. Her first victims her own children. Her first
husband, George Frazer arrived home one day in 1920 and found the kids lying on
the kitchen floor dead. Doss claimed it had been an accidental poisoning but
evidently Frazer was not convinced. He left and never went back. Relatives and
husbands continued to die of "stomach problems" and other such
ailments until Doss' fifth husband, Samuel Doss suddenly passed away. The
doctor in the case was not as gullible as the previous ones were evidently and
didn't simply take Doss at her word. He ordered an autopsy be done, which
revealed massive doses of arsenic in the man's system.
The bodies of doss' husbands, relatives, and children were
exhumed and tested. It was found that Doss' two infant children, four of her
husbands, two of her sisters, her mother, and a nephew had all been killed by
arsenic poisoning. Armed with this information police soon convinced the
poisoner to confess and she was sent to prison for life in 1964. She succumbed
to Leukemia the following year.
Doss, Nanny Hazel
A daughter of Dixie, born in 1905, Nanny Doss had been
molested by a string of local men before she reached her middle teens. At age
16, she married Charles Braggs, bearing him four children in rapid succession.
Braggs was mystified when two of them died suddenly, a few months apart, but
Nanny could offer no explanation. Each child had seemed healthy when Charles
left for work, but they cried at his leaving and died in convulsions not long
after breakfast. Small insurance
payments eased the pain, but Braggs became increasingly suspicious of his wife.
One afternoon, he took their oldest living child and struck off for parts unknown,
leaving Nanny behind with their daughter, Florine. Packing up their meager
belongings, Nanny moved to Cedar Town, Georgia, where she met and subsequently
married Frank Harrelson. Florine was barely two years old when Harrelson and
Nanny hit the road, leaving the child alone in their abandoned house. Neighbors
managed to track down Charles Braggs and he came for the child, but Nanny would
not see her daughter again for nine years. Their reunion evidently smoothed things over,
and by 1945, Florine now married -- felt secure enough to leave her infant son
at Nanny's home in Jacksonville, Alabama, while Florine took off to see her
father. Baby Lee survived three days in Nanny's care, his death producing
anguished speculation that he accidentally "got hold of some rat
poison." Three months later, Frank Harrelson fell suddenly ill and died
within the week. Nanny used the insurance money to buy ten acres of land and
build a small house for herself outside Jacksonville. The early 1950s were a lethal time for Nanny's
relatives. Her third husband, Arlie Lanning, died at Lexington, North Carolina,
in 1952. A few months later, in January 1953, her mother died while Nanny
nursed the woman for a broken hip. Two of her sisters died the same year, in
different towns; each collapsed while Nanny was visiting, each with the same
mysterious symptoms of stomach cramps and convulsions. In 1953, it was husband
number four -- Richard Morton -- laid to rest at Emporia, Kansas.
Nanny married her fifth and last husband, Samuel Doss, in
Tulsa, Oklahoma, during July 1954. He died a month later, and the obligatory
autopsy revealed enough arsenic to kill twenty men. Confronted with the
evidence of guilt, Nanny Doss issued confessions spanning three decades and at
least ten murders, drawing a term of life imprisonment for the Tulsa case in
1955. She served ten years before succumbing to leukemia in 1965. Throughout her various confessions and the
years in jail, Nanny insisted that money played no significant role in her
crimes. Despite various insurance payments, her murders were actually motivated
by marital boredom, a dream of discovering the ideal husband, as described in
her favorite "True Romance" magazines. "That's about it,"
Nanny told her interrogators. "I was searching for the perfect mate, the
real romance of life."
***
Nannie Doss (November 4, 1905 – June 2, 1965) was a serial
killer responsible for the deaths of eleven people between the 1920s and 1954. She
finally confessed to the murders in October 1954, when her fifth husband had
died in a small hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In all, it was revealed that she
had killed four husbands, two children, her two sisters, her mother, a grandson
and a nephew.
Her early life:
Doss was born in Blue Mountain, Alabama as Nancy Hazle, to
James and Lou Hazle. Nannie was one of five children; she had one brother and
three sisters. Both Nannie and her mother hated James, who was a strict, often
controlling father and husband with a nasty streak. There is evidence that Doss
was conceived illegitimately, as James and Lou married after 1905; census
records also show that in 1905 she and her mother were living on their own. She
had an unhappy childhood. She was a poor student who never learned to read
well; her education was erratic because her father forced his children to work
on the family farm instead of attending school. When she was around seven years
old, the family was taking a train to visit relatives in southern Alabama; when
the train stopped suddenly, Nannie hit her head on the metal bar on the seat in
front of her. For years after, she suffered severe headaches, blackouts and
depression; she blamed these and her mental instability on that accident. During
childhood, her favorite hobby was reading her mother's romance magazines and
dreaming of her own romantic future. Later, her favorite part was the lonely
hearts column. The Hazle sisters' teenage years were restricted by their
father; he forbade them to wear makeup and attractive clothing. He was trying
to prevent them from being molested by men, which happened on several
occasions. He also forbade them to go to dances and other social events.
The first marriage:
Doss was first married at age sixteen, to Charlie Braggs.
They had met at the Linen Thread factory where they both worked, and with her
father's approval they married after dating for just four months. He was the
only son of his unmarried mother, who insisted on living with them. Doss later
wrote. I married, as my father wished,
in 1921 to a boy I only knowed about four or five months who had no family,
only a mother who was unwed and who had taken over my life completely when we
were married. She never seen anything wrong with what he done, but she would take
spells. She would not let my own mother stay all night... Braggs' mother took
up a lot of his attention, and she often prevented Nannie from doing things she
wanted to do. The marriage produced four daughters over a four-year period of
1923–1927. Under a lot of stress, Doss started drinking and her casual smoking
habit became a heavy addiction. The marriage was an unhappy one, and both
suspected each other, correctly, of infidelity. Braggs often disappeared for
days on end. In early 1927, they lost their two middle daughters to suspected
food poisoning. Suspecting she had killed them, he fled from her, taking eldest
daughter Melvina with him and leaving newborn Florine behind. His mother also
died around this time. Doss took a job in a cotton mill to support Florine and
herself. Braggs returned in the summer of 1928, with him and Melvina was
another woman, a divorcée with her own child. Doss and Braggs soon divorced,
and she returned to her mother's home taking her two daughters with her. He
always maintained he left her because he was frightened of her.
The second marriage:
Living and working in Anniston, Doss soothed her loneliness
by reading True Romance and other such reading matter. She also resumed poring
over the lonely hearts column, and wrote to men advertising there. A particular
advert that interested her was that of Robert (Frank) Harrelson, a 23-year-old
factory worker from Jacksonville. He sent her romantic poetry, and she sent him
a cake. They met and married in 1929, when she was 24, 2 years after her
divorce from Braggs. They lived together in Jacksonville, with Doss's two
surviving daughters. After a few months, she discovered that he was alcoholic
and had a criminal record for assault. Despite this, the marriage lasted
sixteen years.
The grandchildren:
Melvina, Doss's oldest daughter, gave birth to Robert Lee
Haynes in 1943. Doss came to help, and after a painful few hours a baby boy was
born, but died soon after. Melvina, exhausted from labor and groggy from ether,
thought she saw Doss stick a hatpin into the baby's head, and later told Mosie
and Florine. They told her how Nannie had said the baby was dead, and they
noticed she was holding a pin. However, the doctors could not come up with an
explanation for the death. After this, Melvina and Mosie drifted apart and
Melvina began to date a soldier. Doss disapproved of him, and while Melvina was
visiting her father after a particularly nasty fight with Doss, her son Robert
died mysteriously under Doss's care on July 7, 1945. The cause of the death was
diagnosed as asphyxia from unknown causes, and two months later she collected
the $500 life insurance she had taken out on Robert.
The death of Frank:
In 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allied powers at the end
of World War II, and Harrelson, Doss' second husband, was one of the many
people who celebrated rather robustly. After an evening of particularly heavy
drinking, he raped Doss. The following day, as she was tending her rose garden,
Doss discovered Harrelson's corn whiskey jar buried in the ground. The rape had
been the last straw for her, so she took the jar and topped it off with rat
poison. Harrelson died a painful death that evening.
The third marriage:
Doss met her third husband whilst travelling in Lexington,
North Carolina. He was Arlie Lanning and she married him within three days of
meeting him through another lonely hearts column. Lanning was in many ways like
his predecessor, Harrelson: he was an alcoholic and a womanizer. However, in
this marriage, it was Doss who often disappeared for months on end. When she
was at home, however, she played a doting housewife, and when her husband died
of what was said to be heart failure, the whole town turned up to his funeral
in support of her. Afterwards, the house the couple lived in burned to the
ground. It had been left to Lanning's sister, and had it survived it would have
gone to her. As it happened, the insurance money went to Doss, and she quickly
banked it. She soon left North Carolina, but only after Lanning's elderly
mother had died in her sleep. She ended up at her sister Dovie's home. Dovie
was bedridden and soon after Doss's arrival she died.
The fourth marriage:
Doss had joined the Diamond Circle Club, looking for another
husband. She had met Richard L. Morton of Emporia, Kansas. While he did not
have the drinking problem of his predecessors, he was a womanizer. Before she
could poison him, she ended up poisoning her mother, Louisa, on January 1953
when she came to live with them. Morton met his death three months later.
The fifth marriage:
Doss met and married Samuel Doss, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in
June 1953. A clean-cut, churchgoing man, he disapproved of the romance novels
and stories that Nannie adored. In September, Samuel was admitted to the
hospital with flu-like symptoms. The hospital diagnosed a severe digestive
tract infection. He was treated and released on October 5. Nannie killed him
that evening in her rush to collect the two life insurance policies she had
taken out on him. This sudden death alerted his doctor, who ordered an autopsy.
The autopsy revealed a huge amount of arsenic in his system. Nannie was
promptly arrested.
Her confession and the conviction:
Nannie confessed to killing four of her husbands, her
mother, her sister Dovie, her grandson Robert and her mother-in-law, Arlie
Lanning's mother. The state of Oklahoma centered its case only on Samuel Doss.
The prosecution found her mentally fit for trial. Nannie pleaded guilty on May
17, 1955, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The state did not pursue the
death penalty due to her gender. Doss was never charged with the other deaths.
She died of leukemia in the hospital ward of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in
1965.
***
The Giggling Grandma
Nannie Doss, dubbed by the popular press of the time as “The
Giggling Grandma” and “Arsenic Annie,” loved to read the pulp magazine True
Romance, and she spent most of her life searching for “the real romance of
life.” However, when Nannie didn’t find the love affair she was seeking, she
had a strange way of ending the relationship. Nannie enjoyed killing, and it
didn’t matter who the victim was. Born Nancy Hazle and known popularly by the
moniker “Nannie,” she was linked to the murders of four husbands, her mother,
two sisters, two of her children, a grandchild, and a nephew. She had a
successful 30-year murder spree in several states across the south before she
was finally brought to justice. “Very likely there were others who also sampled
Nannie’s stewed prunes,” wrote criminologist Eric W. Hickey. “Each of her
victims died agonizing deaths after being fed large amounts of rat poison laced
with arsenic.” Nannie was first married in 1921 when she was 15 years old. It
turns out that that husband, who by various accounts is named Charles Bragg,
Charles Braggs, and George Frazer, was the only one of her five husbands who
managed to survive marriage with Nannie. Three of their five children weren’t
so lucky. (Hickey uses Charles Bragg as the name of her first husband, while
Colin Wilson uses Frazer. Sherby Green, a relative of Nannie, reports that her
first husband was Charles Braggs.)
Nannie’s first marriage lasted eight years and according to
Bragg(s)/Frazer was stormy from the beginning. Nannie was an insatiable lover
who apparently had never heard of the word “fidelity.” She also had a vicious
streak that Bragg(s)/Frazer described as “high-tempered and mean. When she got
mad I wouldn’t eat anything she fixed or drink anything around the house,” he told
reporters years later. It was his opinion that the only thing that kept him
alive was the fact that he was uninsured. When the law finally caught up with
Nannie, however, she scoffed at the idea that her motive was money. The meager
insurance she did collect backs up her claim that something other than money
drove Nannie to kill.
Before her relationship with husband number one ended, one
of their children died very shortly after birth, and two others died when they
were very young. Some anecdotes report that husband number one returned home
one day to find the children writhing in agony on the floor of the cabin that
served as a home. There is no evidence to confirm this, however. “Back at the
time, I didn’t know about poison,” Bragg/Frazer said. “The undertakers told me
at the time that they were poisoned.” Nannie and Charles Bragg/George Frazer
divorced in 1929, but Nannie wasn’t ready to play the gay divorcee. Placing an
advertisement in a lonely hearts magazine, she quickly hooked up with Robert F.
Harrelson and the two were wed. They stayed together for 16 years until Nannie
decided the romance had gone out their relationship. One day, Harrelson up and
died and when Nannie told the coroner that Harrelson was an “awful drunkard,”
the coroner ruled the manner of death to be natural and put down “acute
alcoholism” as the cause. Harrelson was buried near his two-year-old grandson.
It wouldn’t be for many years that Nannie would admit that
she ended the marriage by putting rat poison in Harrelson’s corn whiskey. At
the same time, she admitted that their two-month old grandson “just might have
gotten hold of some rat poison.” Harrelson knew something was wrong, but he
couldn’t put a finger on it. He did, however, see impending doom. “I’ll be
next,” he said at his grandson’s funeral.
In 1947, two years after burying Harrelson, Nannie met and
married Arlie J. Lanning in North Carolina. He managed to avoid the stewed
prunes for five years before Nannie dispatched him. She later said she did so
because he “was running around with other women.” Just before Lanning died, a
nephew living with him died “of food poisoning.” In 1953, Nannie, using the
tried-and-true stewed prune recipe murdered Lanning’s elderly mother with whom
she was living.
Later that year, again through a lonely hearts magazine,
Nannie met and married Richard C. Morton, Sr. That marriage lasted just four
months before Morton died. Again, when she was finally brought to justice,
Nannie blamed Morton’s womanizing as the cause of her anger.
Nannie collected five life insurance policies on Morton,
worth $1,400 (approximately $10,600 adjusted for inflation over 52 years). In
the summer of 1954, the 49-year-old Nannie married Samuel Doss, 58 after the
two met through a lonely hearts magazine and began corresponding. After they
were married Samuel Doss repeatedly became ill with stomach ailments and in
October he ended up in the hospital with a severe stomach ache. When Sam Doss
recovered and went home, Nannie fixed him a bowl of stewed prunes. Sam was dead
the next day. He and Nannie had been married four months. (Nannie admitted
feeding Doss the prunes around the time of his death, but some accounts have
her confessing that the final dose of poison was administered in a cup of coffee).
Sam’s doctor couldn’t understand how his patient had died so
quickly when he was on the mend in the hospital and suggested an autopsy be
performed. However, at that time most states had had a very rudimentary murder
investigation process and a great deal of authority was vested in justices of
the peace who also served as coroners. Most of these men were lawyers or
morticians and had little training in death scene investigations. “They’d walk
around it and then come out in the front yard and talk about it, and they’d
say, ‘Oh yeah. Old Harry killed himself. It’s a suicide.’ Then the justice of
the peace would sign off on it,” Ray Blakeney, a former medical examiner told
the Daily Oklahoman in a retrospective on Nannie’s case. In Oklahoma,
authorities who wanted to perform an autopsy needed the permission of the
family or a court order if there was probable cause to suspect foul play.
Dr. N.Z. Schwelbein didn’t know if foul play was to blame,
but that problem was solved when Nannie for some reason eagerly agreed to an
autopsy. “Of course there should be,” she reportedly said. “It might kill
someone else.” Little did authorities know, but Nannie was already
corresponding with a man who she desired as husband number six. John H. Keel, a
60-year-old milkman from Goldsboro, North Carolina had been exchanging letters
with Nannie for some time. “I’m mighty proud I didn’t meet her and she didn’t
come down here,” he told investigators when they contacted him. “From now on I
am through with these women who make their matches by mail.”
When the results of Sam Doss’s autopsy came back,
authorities found enough arsenic in his stomach to kill 10 people. Nannie
played dumb. “How could such a thing happen?” she asked. “My conscience is
clear.” Unsatisfied, but still unsure if Nannie was to blame, police began
digging into her past. They found a string of deaths connected to Nannie Doss
and confronted her. She was caught in a lie when asked about Richard Morton,
saying she had never heard of the man. “Well, I guess I wasn’t telling the
truth,” Nannie confessed with a coy giggle. “I was married to him.”
Over the course of the next couple of days, police were
shocked by her continuous string of confessions. She was adamant, however, that
she only poisoned people “who deserved it” and none of the deaths of her
relatives were due to poisoning. “I never did feed that stuff to my blood kin,”
she claimed. The facts showed otherwise. Belated autopsies of her mother who
died in in 1953 and a sister who passed on in 1950 both had massive amounts of
arsenic in their systems.
Police were amazed at the joy Nannie took in confessing her
crimes and reliving the details of her husbands’ deaths. She laughed and
giggled like a schoolgirl recounting the events of a pleasant summer vacation,
and often gave bizarre little asides that demonstrated her lack of compassion. “He
sure did love those stewed prunes,” she said about one husband. On May 18,
1955, Nannie Doss pleaded guilty to Sam’s murder and was sentenced to life in
prison.
“Take it easy,” she told her daughter as she was taken away
to prison. “Don’t worry. I’m not.”
Nannie died of leukemia in 1965 at the age of 59.
Lonely Hearts Club Lady Loved Her Men to Death - Nannie
Doss:
Recipe for Death
Nannie's Apple & Prune Pie
Approx. Time: 45 minutes
Oven: 350 degree baking temp.
Ingredients: 1 c.
water, 1 c. flour, 1/2 c. butter, 3 eggs, pinch of sugar, 4 apples sliced, 1 c
dried prunes, dash of granulated sugar, 5 tablespoons rat poison
* Bring to boil water, butter, sugar. At boil, stir in
flour.
* Over low heat, continue to stir until able to form doughy
ball. Into dough, mix egg mixture (well beaten) until ball is smooth.
* Grease 9-inch pie tin.
* Roll out pastry, lining bottom and sides of pan with
pastry dough, clipping excess for pie top.
* Add apple slices and prunes in hearty layers. It is best
to soak prunes overnight in rat poison; generic hardware store variety will do
quite well.
* After spreading pears and prunes into shell, pour d lethal
juice of marinated prunes over apple and prune contents. Juice adds extra
flavor - and conceals taste of rat poison. (If sting of arsenic tartness
remains, add extra tbsp. of sugar for good measure.)
* Cover pie with leftover dough in preheated oven for 45
minutes, checking occasionally. Top with granulated sugar while top crust is
fresh from oven.
Guaranteed to be..., ah, a real man-pleasing treat, eh ??
*****
As always, stay safe !
Bird
***
