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Nannie Doss aka the "Giggling Granny"
20 Plays1 year ago
This week, it’s Part 1 of 2 very sinister sister stories!
Felicia covers the American true crime case of Nannie Doss, otherwise known as the Giggling Granny (aka the Lonely Hearts Killer, the Black Widow, and Lady Blue Beard) - a rare female serial killer responsible for the deaths of 11 people around Oklahoma between the 1920s and 1950s. But they didn’t call her granny for nothing, as each murder was someone closely related to her, including 4 husbands! But she didn’t stop there at the old family tree…find out how fun her family reunions were on this week’s episode!
If you have requests for future episodes or just want to hang out, follow us on Instagram @sinistersisterspodcast
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Theme
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome to the Sinister Sisters podcast. I'm Felicia. I'm Lauren. We're best friends. And we like spooky stuff. Oh, yeah. And today I know, because we texted about it, we're both talking about stories of women
00:00:29
Speaker
True stories. So no proven true stories this week of two very different women. So I'm excited for that. Only the facts. Only the facts, baby. Maybe a little gossip. Yes.
Personal Media Experiences
00:00:44
Speaker
Yeah. So I guess first recommendations, I probably, I don't have anything really. I've been rewatching Grey's Anatomy. Oh, wow. I mean, I say rewatching. I never actually made it past
00:00:56
Speaker
maybe the fifth or sixth season when I originally watched it. Did I tell her to tell you this because I started getting so paranoid about me having medical issues? Stop, really? I got a mole removed because one of the characters, yeah, because one of the characters gets like skin cancer from a mole that she finds in her back. And so I said, I have moles. I'm insane. And so I stopped watching it. And now for some reason, I've decided to watch it again.
00:01:24
Speaker
Why? I don't know. If you see, if you see Felicia in the hospital, you'll know why. Yeah, you'll know why and she's probably fine. A mysterious unknown, yeah, an unknown illness. The doctors can't find anything. Oh my gosh, the doctors can't find anything. Okay, do you have any real recommendations?
00:01:43
Speaker
I love that. I need to watch Grey's Anatomy, but I've never watched it scandal a lot. It's fine. It's okay. It's a big undertaking, but I finally saw the whale, which I had been really excited about seeing. I want to see that. Brendan Fraser. I really liked it. Did you see the play? I never saw the play. No, I didn't either.
00:02:04
Speaker
It feels like it would be a good play. Yeah. Yeah. It's okay. But it was a hard watch. It's a very sad. It's a hard watch. I will say it did not like, I sort of thought it would hit me more. It's very sad. It's hard to watch, but like I honestly like didn't cry even though I thought I would. So I don't know. It's a great performance. I love Sadie Sink and she's so good in it too. I didn't even know she was in it. That's great.
00:02:31
Speaker
She plays his daughter and she does a really good job and he's obviously amazing and I hope he wins. And then my real recommendation is I saw a scream last night, the new scream. I was wondering if you saw it last night. Well, I haven't seen it yet, but tell me the gist. Do you want me to say anything? I know. Should I say anything or not? Just say, yeah, no spoilers, obviously, but just tell me your general thoughts, I guess. I liked it a lot. Oh, good. I liked it a lot better than the last one.
00:03:01
Speaker
Really interesting. I know. I know and I feel bad. That's pretty good. Yeah, I feel bad because I am sad that Nev Campbell is not in it. Right. And I thought I would miss her a lot more. I mean, I do miss her. Like you still want her in it. But honestly, like the way that the plot goes, I would be so fascinated. You're not thinking about her not being in it.
00:03:23
Speaker
No, I would be so curious as to see if there was ever a script that had her in it, like where she would fit in. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. And it takes place in New York.
00:03:36
Speaker
So was that fun? It was really fun. I'm nervous you're going to have some of your old anxieties brought back to life, but maybe not. You can't wait. I'm sure there's going to be a subway moment where I'm just like, oh, God. There was like I had a moment, but not like the part that you see in the trailer is obviously really good and really scary. But there's like a part where there's just a bunch of people on the subway that I was like,
00:04:02
Speaker
Can't do it. The public transportation anxiety is so real. It's like, I understand it's such a blessing to have a public transportation system in New York City, but oh my God, it's also like hell. If I die and go to hell, you better believe they will put me on a subway full of people I don't want to be around.
00:04:26
Speaker
I know that for a fact, so I have to be really good in this life to not end up there.
Introduction to Nanny Doss
00:04:32
Speaker
I love that. It's true. I will say, obviously, Jenna Ortega is amazing. I still don't like Melissa Barrera, but what are we going to do? Nothing. She's in it. She's just there. She's just hooked. Yeah, and obviously, Hayden Pantier. Love her being back. Love Kirby being back. That's so great. So great. Love Kirby.
00:04:56
Speaker
Yeah. I don't know when I'll see it. My dream would be tomorrow, but we'll see what happens. I'll keep you posted. I want to see it in theaters. I don't want to wait. So, yeah. But I'll let you know. I love that. Please do. Amazing. Amazing. All right. I'm going for it. Here we are. Do it.
00:05:17
Speaker
Today I'm covering a woman that is known by the
Nanny Doss's Early Life
00:05:21
Speaker
name The Giggling Granny, which makes me very uncomfortable.
00:05:26
Speaker
Yes. You already know something is wrong with that. Yeah, I don't like it already. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is the story of the American serial killer, Nanny Doss, who was born in 1905, died in 1965. And she is responsible for the deaths of 11 people between the 1920s and 1954 when she was finally caught into jail.
00:05:53
Speaker
That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people, Nanny. The name she was actually born was Nancy Hazel, but from the time she was a child, they started calling her Nanny. She was born in Blue Mountain, Alabama.
00:06:13
Speaker
and she was one of five kids. Her and her family lived on a farm that they worked on. She went to school up through like the sixth grade, but even then was like a little bit interrupted education wise because her family, and this is like very just average of the time with farming families, she was pulled out of school a lot to work on the family farm. And by the time
00:06:38
Speaker
she finished sixth grade, she just stopped going all together. She had
First Marriage and Family Tragedies
00:06:43
Speaker
a very strict family. So her father was apparently very controlling, abusive. He didn't let the daughters wear makeup or wear, they say any attractive clothing, but I guess just like
00:06:56
Speaker
They wanted them to look very like plain Janey because they he believed that that was going to protect them from men in the world. So he was very concerned about them getting molested specifically, which is strange. I mean, I understand. But like, but according to Nanny, that throughout her childhood, she had been molested by multiple grown men. So I'm like, whoa, I wasn't working. It seems like it did not work.
00:07:27
Speaker
She also, her and her sisters were not allowed to go to any like town dances or any social events. So she spent a lot of time inside and her favorite hobbies were reading her mother's romance magazines.
00:07:40
Speaker
Oh, shit. Oh, yeah. So this nanny loved a romantic story. And in particular, she was very into the Lonely Hearts column of magazines at the time, which were sort of like what we call it, like, personals or classifieds or whatever. But people looking for someone to date or to marry. So.
00:08:07
Speaker
These personal ads were put in newspapers back from the beginning of our country, which I think is really interesting.
00:08:21
Speaker
What? What is that song called? The Pina Colada song? If you like Pina Colada. When he talks about he puts the ad in the newspaper and then his wife ends up being the other side. I don't think it would work out. Wouldn't you be like, you're cheating on me. You're trying to cheat on me.
00:08:43
Speaker
Oh my God. So Lonely Hearts Clubs, they were basically, yeah, they're just lists of personal advertisements for people that were looking for someone to love. Sort of the old version of dating apps, I guess. Yes. So yeah, she was really into reading those.
00:09:00
Speaker
And she obviously loved like romance novels and romance magazines. Like all this stuff was like amazing to her. And she just dreamed of finding love and finding a man to marry was like her whole goal.
00:09:15
Speaker
And then she ended up being married many, many times. Nailed it. Yeah. So she nailed it. Her first marriage at age 16. So she had been working in a linen factory. And this is not so unheard of at the time. Like my Mima is from Georgia and she was married at 15.
Marriages, Murders, and Motives
00:09:34
Speaker
So it's just that's kind of how it was back in the day. And so she was married at 16 to this man named Charlie Braggs.
00:09:43
Speaker
And she had only known him for a few months, but somehow her father approved, and so she married him. And she directly moved in with him and his mother, so her mother-in-law. And he had, yes. Tough situation. You can guess it did not go well. Too many ladies in the house.
00:10:09
Speaker
Yes. And so and he really didn't have any other family, except for his mother, who was very controlling towards Nanny, wouldn't even let Nanny's mother come and like stay overnight in the house, like was just like very intense. So this being her first marriage, she did have four children between 1923 and 1927. So she had them in rapid succession.
00:10:34
Speaker
Wait, four children in four years? Yes. Wow. Yeah, knocking them out. That was very stressful. They also, even though this wasn't necessarily such a thing at the time, they think she definitely had some postpartum depression. She started heavily drinking and smoking to cope with all of this.
00:11:00
Speaker
the marriage was falling apart. So both partners were unhappy. Both were thinking the other one was cheating on them. Braggs, the husband would disappear for days on it and come back. It was just a very bad situation. And all those little kids. Yes, with all those little kids. And then in 1927, the two middle children
00:11:26
Speaker
one right after the other died to suspected food poisoning. Nanny, nanny. So soon after this happened, Charlie, and so it was ruled accidental. Both deaths, even though they died separately, both deaths were considered accidental by the courts.
00:11:52
Speaker
She got like some some amount of life insurance off of them But and throughout this story like she gets life insurance every time somebody dies But she always said once she confessed to these murders that it wasn't about the money But that does come up again again. So I was just murdering them Sure, I'm not sure which is worse so Charlie her husband Was pretty much immediate like oh my god, you kill her children. So he is
00:12:22
Speaker
took their first-born daughter, Melvina, and Ran, but he left the newborn, Florine, behind with Nanny. Oh my god. And with his stepmother who was still living in the... I'm sorry, with his mother that was living in the house. So he fled with Melvina, peace out. That feels like such a man thing too, right? He's like, I can't deal with the newborn. Yeah, I'm gonna leave the newborn? Oh my god, it's insane.
00:12:52
Speaker
Bragg's mother did die. There doesn't seem to be much suspicion about how she died, but I mean, you never know with Nanny. But she ended up taking a job in a cotton mill to support Florina and herself. And in 1928, a year later, her husband shows up with another woman. Oh. And yes. And to divorce Nanny so that he can marry this other woman.
00:13:21
Speaker
and leaves Melvina and Florine now with Nanny. Oh, God. He's at my team and I need the kids. He basically can't. Even though he knows that she killed two of their children, he came just to get a divorce and drop off Melvina. He sounds like a piece of poop. Yep, that's correct. No one in this story is a good person, to be clear. Okay. That's awful.
00:13:51
Speaker
Yeah. Then, okay, so that was, let's see, 1928, 1929, just the next year. She gets married to another man named Robert Franklin Harrelson. And they live together with their two children. And after a few months, she starts to find things out about him that she didn't know when they got married. For example, he was an alcoholic.
00:14:19
Speaker
And he had a criminal record for assault. And it was not a great marriage, but she was married to him for the longest time, which was 16 years. So that was a long time. So she did. That's a really long time. She got remarried immediately, but they did last for 16 years to the to the point that she actually ended up having a grandchild from Melvina. So Melvina had a child named Robert Lee.
00:14:49
Speaker
Haynes in 1943. This is very dark. Lauren, I'm just preparing everyone listening. I'm just preparing you. It's about to get very bad if you want to skip this part. So she had one child and then two years later she had another baby.
00:15:07
Speaker
who died soon after birth. So after she gave birth, she was groggy from like the medications and exhausted from the labor. And in this kind of like stage, she felt like she saw her, or she says that she saw her mother visiting with the baby and she watched her mother stick a hat pin into the baby's head. Oh my God. I know, it's very dark.
00:15:37
Speaker
And then when their husband, so then the baby died. And so nobody could see why somehow. I don't know. But Nanny is the one that told them that the baby was dead and that she was holding a hat pin when she told them. Yeah, she's just somehow. And I don't know how this happened. Somehow the doctors could not give a positive explanation for how the child died. I don't know.
00:16:05
Speaker
So the two parents, the Melvina and her husband eventually broke up. She started dating somebody else. Nanny did not like the new man that Melvina was dating. And unclear exactly how this happened, or why this happened, I guess. But she had been watching Robert the other child in 1945.
00:16:32
Speaker
And he mysteriously died under Nanny's care from asphyxiation of unknown causes. She's just murdering children. She's just murdering anyone she comes in contact with.
00:16:48
Speaker
Yes, she's murdering lots of children. So at this point, she's murdered four children, okay? And then she's going to start murdering everyone else. So in 1945, apparently her husband Harrelson, so she's been with him for 16 years, he had been out
Arrest and Confession
00:17:10
Speaker
celebrating the end of World War II, like these like, I mean, drinking with his friends, whatever. He came home super drunk. And and then she says that he was very drunk, came in and raped her. And so the next day she put rat poison in his corn whiskey jar. And he died later that evening to teach him a lesson. Wow.
00:17:41
Speaker
You don't want to fuck with her. Nope. Then, so that was her second husband. So she has one husband that fled because he was scared of her. The second one she killed. Then she meets her third husband, Arlie Laning, through lonely hearts column.
00:18:03
Speaker
Oh, my God, her fav, her fav. So she met him in Lexington, Lexington, North Carolina. Met him, hung out with him for three days, got married after three days, three days. That's all it took. I'm also I can't remember. She might have found her second husband through the Lonely Hearts thing, too. I can't remember them.
00:18:31
Speaker
So just like her last husband, Lanning was also an alcoholic, cheated on her and disappeared and came back and whatever. And eventually he died of what doctors thought was heart failure. And she became this grieving widow in the community.
00:18:55
Speaker
And she found out that when he died, the house that they lived in, in his will, and maybe because they'd only been married for three, they'd only known each other for three days, was not left to her, but was left to his sister. So she had to leave. So he dies. She might have killed him. I think she's going to keep the house. And then she has to leave.
00:19:20
Speaker
Mysteriously, the house soon after that burned down. Unclear how? Probably Nanny. Oh my gosh, she's loose. Nanny ended up getting a hold of the insurance check and cashed it even though it should have gone to the sister.
00:19:43
Speaker
Yes, and then she starts... Oh my god, she's just killing everyone she comes in contact with, it's so crazy. So after this, she goes to stay with one of her sisters, so one of Nanny's sisters, she goes to stay with her because she's in poor health. Shortly after her arrival, her sister dies. Not good. Not good. How is no one on to her?
00:20:10
Speaker
I know, I know. So now she's lost, or she's killed three husbands, four children, and her own sister. But she's single again, so she's gonna join. Ready to mingle. Yeah, she's single ready to mingle in the Diamond Circle Club, which was a dating service at the time, where she met Richard L. Morton of Jamestown, North Carolina. They married in 1952.
00:20:37
Speaker
in Kansas. He did not have a drinking problem, but he was a cheater. And during this time in her life, she poisoned him. Rap Poison and arsenic were kind of her go-tos. She also went home and poisoned her own mother. Just cause? She felt that her mother, so her dad was kind of abusive. He had died already.
00:21:05
Speaker
And people think that she killed her mother because she felt like her mother never did anything to protect the children from their father. So I guess that's what happened. Like a long resentment or grudge holding. Yeah, so a lot of her murders seem to be in her mind for revenge or to teach someone less and ready to get back at them. Except for those two first kids. Yeah, but that was also like, yeah.
00:21:33
Speaker
I mean, all this is horrible, right? But in her mind, I think there was like resentment towards having four kids in four years and being like, yeah, heart depression. And like, once again, these are not sane things. No, but it felt right in her head. I guess so. I guess so. So then she's going to marry her fifth and final husband. She marries a big number now. Yes.
00:22:02
Speaker
She finally married Samuel Doss, which is why her name as we know it from when she was arrested is Nanny Doss in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She also moved around a lot in June 1953, which I think is also part of the reason people weren't catching on to her because she moved states so many times after one of her husband died. And so it's like, yep.
00:22:24
Speaker
At this time, there was no database for crimes, so it's like there was no way for them to know that she had already had a bunch of dead husbands. You could really get away with a lot at the time.
00:22:39
Speaker
Yeah, so Doss, the husband, was some sort of minister and he was very strict with Nanny. So he did not like that she wrote these romance novels and pretty quickly, so in about six months it looks like, he is admitted to the hospital with flu-like symptoms and has some sort of digestive tract infection.
00:23:03
Speaker
Oh gosh, Nanny. Yes. He is sent home October 5th of 1954 and then dies at home October 12th, 1954. So she collected his life insurance policy and his sudden death alerted his doctor. And thank God this doctor
00:23:29
Speaker
If it wasn't for him, she probably would have just kept going. He ordered an autopsy because he thought the death was suspicious. And the autopsy revealed that he had enough arsenic in his system to kill like 20 people. So it was very bad. So then she was arrested. So she did plead guilty, but the state of Oklahoma was really mostly focused on the case of the death of Samuel Dawes.
00:23:59
Speaker
And at the time, they weren't really giving the death penalty to women. So even though she pleaded guilty in 1955, she was just into like life imprisonment. Eventually, she did confess to killing four of her husbands, her mother, her sister, her grandsons and her mother-in-law. Oh, my God.
00:24:26
Speaker
It's so many people. She was actually never charged with those other deaths. She was only technically charged of the death of Samuel Doss.
Psychological Insights and Conclusion
00:24:34
Speaker
She was in prison for about 10 years and then she ended up getting leukemia and died in prison in 1965. Wow. Yes, so we already talked about some of the emotional reasons that this woman used in her mind to
00:24:53
Speaker
you know, explain these murders, or that she's mentioned in interviews that happened to her when she was a kid that might explain her murderous tendencies.
00:25:04
Speaker
is sort of a classic serial killer thing that we've heard about time and time again. She was on a train with her family as a young child and the train at some point abruptly stopped and she flew forward out of her seat and had tried on a metal pole. Yep. Banged her head on a metal pole and from that point started to suffer from like these crazy migraines blackouts and
00:25:30
Speaker
a lot of depression issues. So a lot of people think that that also contributed to her murdering everybody she came in contact with. Wow. And that is the story of Nanny Dawes. Nanny. She's got a lot going on. That was a lot of people and a lot of stealthy poisoning. Yeah, I mean, she just got away with it for so long. But I really think it's because she was just moving states every time.
00:26:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're right, especially at that time. She was just like moving on. And I feel like that's like one of the more interesting, like, you know, I feel like there's like a lot of stories or maybe I just, I don't know. I feel like you hear a lot about women marrying men and killing them, but there was like a lot of children and mothers. Yes. Yes. There's also a really great, you can watch an interview of her being talked to in jail about
00:26:28
Speaker
I mean, she's denying the murders in the interview, but it is like very spooky to hear her talk. Yeah. But there's also, you know, this day where she's talking about like the this not in the interview, but this is separate about the Lonely Hearts Club stuff and the romance stuff where it's like every time she got married, she felt like she hadn't found the right mate. And so she would just kill him and try again. Clean cut, you know, just it's clean slate.
00:26:55
Speaker
And the only one that got away was the first one, because he was like, uh, you're a murderer and ran. But left the kids. I still can't believe that. Left the kids. Left the kids. It's terrible. Man, that is a wild story, but it was so good. Yeah. Just so interesting. Yeah, that's it. That's nanny. Man, nanny. All right. Well, that was wild. And it was like, yeah, it was pretty salacious somehow, too.
Episode Wrap-up and Teasers
00:27:25
Speaker
Hey guys, this week got a little lengthy so we decided to split it into two episodes. Until then, we hope you have some sweet, sweet nightmares. Bye!