Nannie Doss

Serial Killer

Nannie Doss: The Giggling Granny and Her Trail of Poisoned Husbands

Nannie Doss was an American serial killer whose crimes unfolded quietly inside homes and marriages rather than in the public places more commonly associated with serial murder. Born Nancy Agnes Hazel on November 4, 1905, in Blue Mountain, Alabama, she became known by a collection of sensational nicknames, including the "Giggling Granny," the "Giggling Nannie," the "Jolly Black Widow," and the "Lonely Hearts Killer." By the time authorities finally investigated her in 1954, suspicious deaths had followed Doss through several states and through nearly every stage of her adult life. Although Doss has frequently been credited with as many as eleven murders, the historical record requires some distinction between what she actually admitted, what investigators established through toxicology, and what later writers have attributed to her. Contemporary reports are especially clear that Doss admitted deliberately poisoning four of her five husbands. Authorities also investigated the deaths of her mother, sisters, children, grandchildren, and a mother-in-law. Some of those bodies were exhumed and tested for poison, while others remained suspicious but were never conclusively proved to have been murders. Doss was ultimately convicted of only one murder: that of her fifth husband, Samuel Doss.

Early Life and First Marriage

Doss grew up in rural Alabama in a strict household and received relatively little formal education. As a girl she reportedly became fascinated with romance magazines and the lonely-hearts advertisements printed in them. The romantic fantasies presented in those publications became a recurring part of her adult life. She repeatedly sought husbands through personal advertisements and correspondence, apparently imagining that each new marriage might finally provide the idealized romance she wanted. At sixteen, she married Charley Braggs. The couple had four daughters. In 1927, two of their middle daughters died within a relatively short period, with the deaths attributed at the time to food poisoning. Decades later, after Doss had been exposed as a poisoner, Braggs asked authorities to investigate the deaths of the children. No criminal case was ever established against Doss for their deaths, and surviving records do not provide the same certainty that exists for the husbands she later admitted murdering. Braggs eventually left Nannie and survived. He became the only one of her five husbands who did not die while married to her. Their divorce was finalized in 1928.

Frank Harrelson

Doss met Robert Franklin "Frank" Harrelson through a lonely-hearts advertisement and married him in 1929. Their marriage lasted approximately sixteen years. Harrelson reportedly drank heavily and could be violent. According to Doss's later confession, the marriage ended not through illness or accident but through deliberate poisoning. Harrelson died on September 15, 1945, in Alabama. Doss later said she placed rat poison in his corn whiskey. His death did not immediately provoke a murder investigation. At the time, the illness preceding his death could be interpreted as being connected to his drinking or another natural explanation. Only after Doss's arrest years later did investigators return to Harrelson's death and recognize it as part of a much larger pattern. ...

Confirmed Victims: (6)

Robert Franklin Harrelson , Date of Death: 1945-09-15

Suspected Victims:

Robert Lee Haynes , Date of Death: 1945-07-07

Sarah Elizabeth Lanning , Date of Death: 1950

Nannie Doss - Wikipedia