Nannie Doss - The Giggling Grandma

January 5, 2015

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Hello There! I'm glad that you've chosen to come pay another visit to my nice little blog.

You know

Not all Human Monsters are men.

Throughout History, there have been many a female who has

given in to her dark side and on this occasion, allow me to introduce you

to just one of them.

ENJOY!
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Nannie Doss
The Giggling Grandma

     Nannie Doss was born Nancy Hazle on November 4, 1905, in Blue Mountain Alabama, which is now a part of the town of Anniston just west of Birmingham. On the outside, she was a friendly, happy and likable neighbor, wife and mother, but on the inside there lurked the heart and mind of a cold blooded murderess who almost completely wiped out her entire family which goes to show that not all serial killers are men.

     She was one of five children born to James and Louise Hazle, and her childhood was an unhappy one. Both she and her mother hated her father who was a strict and controlling man with a nasty streak in him who would keep her and her siblings out of school for long periods of time in order for them to work on the family farm. Starting at the age of five, Nannie as she came to be called even at an early age, was made to cut wood and clear the fields of weeds and debris in order to make it ready for planting. And if her or her siblings, who were right beside her working the field or barn or house didn’t do their fair share as her father James saw it, then the belt was used on them. Nannie’s mother too was not left out of the strict way James ran the household. If the house was not clean to his liking or dinner was late on the table, Lou (Louisa) would also suffer from a beating. Louisa feared her husband but in those days, wife beating was ignored for the most part.

     At Seven, Nannie suffered a head injury while traveling by train and for many years after, she suffered severe headaches, blackouts and bouts of depression. When she was allowed to go to school, she was a poor student who never learned to read well due to the erratic amount of education she received. Rules and life was strict for her, there was no “fun times” in her life she would later say; No dances, no parties, and few friends. Adding to this dark childhood were the numerous molestations she had to suffer by a string of local men before she’d reached the age of 15.

     Her first marriage took place in 1921, at the age of 16 to a man named Charley Braggs whom she’s met at the Linen Thread factory. The marriage was blessed by her father after 4 months of she and Charley dating. Braggs was lived with his mother and never knew his father and even after the marriage, Braggs mother continued to live with her son and had taken over Nannie’s life completely, replacing if you will, the role of Nannie’s over-bearing father, James. Braggs mother took up a lot of his attention and often kept her from doing things she wanted. However, the marriage produced four children between 1923 and 1927, all girls. Under the stress of having to deal with her over bearing mother-in-law, the children and her relationship with her husband, she began to drink and smoke heavily. Both suspected the other of having affairs, which they were. Braggs would vanish for days at a time. It was an unhappy marriage.

     In the early part of 1927, the two middle daughters died and it was suspected their deaths were from food poisoning. Suspecting that his not-so-happy wife had killed them, Braggs fled from her, taking the eldest daughter, Melvina with him and leaving their newborn, Florine with Nannie Doss. It was also around this same time that Braggs mother died as well.

     Braggs returned in the summer of 1928 to the area and with him, a divorcee with her own child. Doss and Braggs divorced shortly after his return to town and she returned to her mother’s home takin her two surviving daughters with her. Braggs always maintained that he’d left because he was frightened of his wife.

     Living and working in Anniston, Doss eased her lonliness by reading True Romance magazine and other such material. She also began to once more read the lonely hearts column in the paper and wrote to men advertising there. It was there where she found her second husband, Robert (Frank) Harrelson, a 23 year old factory worker from Jacksonville,. He would send her romantic poetry and she would send him a cake. They finally met and married in 1929 when she was 24 and 2 years after her divorce from Braggs. A few months following their marriage, Doss discovered that Frank was an alcoholic and had a criminal record for assault. But despite this, the two stayed married for 16 years.

 

     In 1943, Nannie's eldest, Melvina, gave birth to Robert Lee Haynes in 1943. Another baby followed 2 years later but died soon afterward. 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 doctors, however, couldn't give a positive explanation. The grieving parents drifted apart and Melvina started dating a soldier. Nannie disapproved of him, and while Melvina was visiting her father after a particularly nasty fight with her mother, her son Robert died mysteriously under Granny's care on July 7, 1945. The death was diagnosed as asphyxia from unknown causes, and 2 months later Nannie collected the $500 life insurance she had taken out on Robert. It was also the same year in which Doss’s husband, Frank died. After an evening of heavy drinking, he raped Doss. The following day, as she was tending to her garden, she came across Harrelson’s whiskey jug. Topping it off with rat poison, she placed it back where she’d found it and Harrelson died a painful death that evening.

     Nannie’s third husband was Arlie Lanning and the two were married three days after meeting through another lonely hearts column. He 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.

     Next came Richard L. Morton of Emphoria, Kansas and while he did not have a drinking problem like the two before him, he was a womanizer. However, before Doss could poison him, she ended up killing her mother in 1953 when she came to live with them. Morton was not spared however and met his death three months later. Husband five came in June of that year; Samual Doss He was a clean cut, church going man and disapproved of Nannie’s romance novels and stories. In September he was admitted into hospital with flu-like symptoms and was diagnoses with severe digestive tract infection. On October 5th, he’d been treated and released and Nannie killed him that evening in her rush to collect the two life insurance policies she’d taken out on him. It had been his sudden death that alerted his doctor and who ordered an autopsy, which revealed a huge amount of arsenic in his system. Nannie was promptly arrested.

     At first, Nannie refused to acknowledge her role in Sam Doss' poisoning. He was her husband, she said, and wouldn't have harmed him. But, the police wouldn't let up. Arsenic, they reminded her, does not come naturally with pork meat or coffee beans. In fact, when Sam was admitted into the hospital a month earlier, he had just devoured a plateful of her prunes.

     "Were they poisoned, too, Nannie?" they asked.

     I don't know what you're talking about," she giggled at the ridiculousness of their line of questioning. "Me? Poison?"

     Hours upon hours went by of detectives questioning her and trying to get her to tell them the truth. Ordinarily, the police wouldn’t have let the interrogation go on for the length that it did, but it was all too difficult to them to get rough with her, this sweet grandmotherly type woman with an innocent giggle. Finally however, she opened up to the police and admited first to killing Sam Doss. And then about Morton, Arnie Lanning, her sister Dovie and nephew Robert, her mother, the list went on. From Kansas to North Carolina and Alabama, the bodies were all exhumed and tests made. Each one was found to contain Arsenic.

     She pled guilty on May 17, 1955 in the Criminal Court of Tulsa, Oklahoma during a brief hearing. She received a life sentence and it was in prison where she spent the remainder of her days, finally dying of Leukemia in a prison hospital ward in 1965.