Nannie Doss

What the record shows

Nannie Doss, born Nancy Agnes Hazel, was a serial poisoner whose victims were members of her own family in Alabama, North Carolina, Kansas and Oklahoma between 1927 and 1954. She was convicted of one murder: on May 17, 1955, she pleaded guilty in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to killing her fifth husband, Samuel Doss, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. According to the Encyclopedia of Alabama, she confessed under interrogation to killing four husbands. The Wikipedia article and an Oklahoma Gazette retrospective attribute as many as 11 deaths to her, among them two of her daughters, her mother, a sister, a mother-in-law and two grandchildren. She was never charged in any death other than that of Samuel Doss.

The Encyclopedia of Alabama records that she married Charles Braggs in 1921, at about 16, after the two met at the Linen Thread Company in Anniston, Alabama. Two of their four daughters died in 1927, with the deaths attributed at the time to food poisoning. The couple divorced in 1928, and Braggs was the only one of her five husbands to survive the marriage. In 1929 she married Frank Harrelson, whom she met through a lonely hearts column. Harrelson died on September 15, 1945; by her later account, she had put rat poison in his whiskey. A grandson, Robert, died of asphyxia at age two while in her care, and she collected a $500 life insurance policy.

Her third husband, Arlie Lanning of Lexington, North Carolina, died of what was recorded as heart failure, with no autopsy performed; the Encyclopedia of Alabama dates his death to 1950, while the Oklahoma Gazette gives 1952. The Wikipedia article states that Lanning's mother died in her sleep while Doss lived in the household, and that her sister Dovie died soon after Doss came to stay with her. In October 1952 she married Richard L. Morton of Emporia, Kansas. Her mother, Louisa Hazle, came to live with the couple and died within days, in January 1953. Morton died on May 19, 1953, after, the Encyclopedia of Alabama reports, drinking coffee laced with arsenic.

In June 1953 she married Samuel Doss, a Nazarene minister, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the autumn of 1954 he was hospitalised with a severe digestive illness, was sent home on October 5 and died about a week later, on October 12 according to the Wikipedia article. His physician insisted on an autopsy, which found a large quantity of arsenic. Doss was arrested in Tulsa in October 1954 and, during questioning, confessed to killing four husbands; the Encyclopedia of Alabama reports she did so in exchange for being allowed to keep a romance magazine. Her habit of laughing while recounting the deaths produced the nickname the Giggling Granny. The same source states that exhumations reportedly confirmed rat poison or arsenic in several of the bodies.

Oklahoma prosecuted her for a single count of murder, that of Samuel Doss. The prosecutor, according to the Wikipedia article, was J. Howard Edmondson, later governor of Oklahoma. She pleaded guilty on May 17, 1955, and received a life sentence; the Wikipedia article and a syndicated history column published by the Albuquerque Journal both report that the state did not seek the death penalty because she was a woman. The Encyclopedia of Alabama notes that North Carolina, Kansas and Alabama also brought charges, but she was never tried outside Oklahoma.

She served her sentence at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, where she died of leukemia in the prison hospital ward on June 2, 1965, at age 59. She was buried at Oak Hill Memorial Park in McAlester. The Oklahoma Gazette has written that her case figures in the history of Oklahoma's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, as an example of suspicious deaths that went uninvestigated before the state had a medical examiner system.

She was born on November 4, 1905, in Blue Mountain, Calhoun County, Alabama, one of five children of Jim and Louisa Hazle. The Encyclopedia of Alabama describes her father as abusive and says he kept the children out of school to work the family farm. At about age seven she suffered a head injury in a train incident, which she later blamed for headaches and blackouts.