Prolific Serial Killers: Nannie Doss, The “Giggling Granny”
Bettmann/Getty ImagesNannie Doss was nicknamed the Giggling Granny because she couldn’t talk about the murders she committed without laughing.
Nancy Hazel, better known in later life as Nannie Doss, was born in 1905 to a father who was determined that his four daughters would walk the straight and narrow path of virtue.
He forbade makeup, pretty clothes, and parties — meaning that there was nothing the romantic Nannie longed for more.
She wasn’t destined to be lucky in love, though; she married five times, and none of her husbands stuck. Things might have turned out better if she hadn’t killed four of them.
Her first marriage took place when she was just 16. She wed a local factory boy whose controlling mother made her life a misery. When two of their children died from food poisoning (accidental, as far as history knows), the couple split — making her first husband the only one to escape death at his wife’s hands.
Nannie, now with her two surviving daughters in tow, remarried and stayed with her second husband — a rough, violent man — long enough for her daughters to grow up and have children of their own.
She wasn’t a fan of their kids, though. She stuck a hatpin through the head of her daughter’s newborn, then asphyxiated her toddler while her daughter was away. Both deaths were ruled accidental — and Nannie collected the life insurance.
Shortly after that, she murdered her second husband by dosing his whiskey with rat poison.
The third time wasn’t the charm. She took out an ad in the lonely hearts section of her favorite romantic magazine and married the man she met within the week.
Wikimedia CommonsNannie Doss at the time of her arrest. Tulsa, Oklahoma. October 1954.
But then he died, his house burned down, and his mother perished in a tragic string of events that Nannie had everything to do with. She once again collected the insurance money, then headed off to murder her sickly sister, her mother, and her fourth husband — a man she met through a dating service.
Husband number five proved her undoing. Experience had made her sloppy, and her haste in collecting the life insurance policy she’d taken out on him tipped off the doctor, who decided to perform an autopsy.
His discovery of astonishing quantities of arsenic sent the police after Nannie, who confessed to all her murders — giggling all the while.
