Continuing our Serial Killer Trail
Nancy Hazel also known as Nannie Doss, The Lonely Hearts Killer, Giggling Granny, Black Widow, and Lady Blue Beard. was born on Nov 4, 1905 in Blue Mountain Alabama. She was born to Louisa Holder and James F. Hazel. She was one of five children, 1 boy and 4 girls. Both Nannie and her mother hated James, who was described as being controlling and abusive, to Louisa and the children. James would refuse to let the children go to school and force them to work on the family farm instead. James forbad the hazel sisters from wearing make up and attractive clothes as he believed it would keep them from being molested. They were not allowed to go to dances or any social events. Nannie would spend her free time reading her mother's romance magazine and dreaming of romance. Her favorite thing to read was the lonely hearts colomn as well.
At age 7, while the family was taking a train to visit relatives in southern Alabama, Nannie hit her head on a metal bar on the seat in front of her when the train suddenly stopped. For years after, she suffered severe headaches, depression, and blackouts. Doss blamed these and her mental instability on that accident and her low academic performances.
Nannie was first married at age 16 to Charley Braggs, her co-worker at a linen factory. With her father's approval they married after four months of dating. Braggs was the only son of a single mother who insisted on continuing to live with him after he married. Braggs' mother took up a lot of his attention and limited Nannie's activities. The marriage produced four daughters from 1923 to 1927. The stressed-out Nannie started drinking, and her casual smoking habit became a heavy addiction. Both unhappy partners correctly suspected each other of infidelity, and Braggs often disappeared for days on end. In 1927, the couple lost their two middle girls to suspected food poisoning. Soon after, Braggs took firstborn daughter Melvina and fled, leaving newborn Florine behind. Braggs' mother died not much later and Nannie took a job in a cotton mill to support Florine and herself. Braggs brought Melvina back in the summer of 1928, accompanied by a divorcée with her own child. Braggs and Nannie soon divorced, with Nannie taking her two girls back to her mother's home. Braggs always maintained he left her because he was frightened of her.
Her second husband was Robert Franklin Harrelson. They met and married in 1929. They lived in Jacksonville with Melvina and Florine. After a few months, she discovered that he was an alcoholic and had a criminal record for assault. Despite this, the marriage lasted 16 years. In 1945, after heavy drinking he raped Nannie. The next day she saw his corn whiskey jar buried in the ground so she took the jar and put rat poison in it and her husband died that evening.
Nana Nannie met her third husband, Arlie Lanning, through another lonely-hearts column while travelling in North Carolina and married him three days later. Like her dead husband, Lanning was an alcoholic womanizer. However, in this marriage it was Nannie who often disappeared—and for months on end. But when she was home, she played the doting housewife, and when he died of what was said to be heart failure, the townspeople supported her at his funeral. Soon after the funeral, the house that had been left to her dead husband's sister, burned down. Nannie collected the insurance money and put it in the bank. Not long after that, Lanning's mother died in her sleep and Nannie went to stay with her sister Dovie who was bedridden. She died soon after Nannie came.
Looking for yet another husband, Nannie joined a dating service called the Diamond Circle Club and soon met Richard L. Morton of North Carolina. They married in 1952 in Emporia, Kansas. He didn't have a drinking problem, but he was adulterous and cheated on her multiple times. Before she poisoned him, she poisoned her mother, Louisa, in January 1953 when she came to live with them. Morton died three months later on May 19, 1953.
Nannie then married Samuel Doss of Oklahoma in June 1953. Doss was a Nazarene minister who had lost his family to a tornado in Arkansas. Samuel disapproved of the romance novels and stories that his wife adored. In September, Samuel was admitted to the hospital with flu-like symptoms. The hospital diagnosed a severe digestive tract infection. He was treated and released on October 5. Samuel died on October 12, 1954. Nannie killed him that evening in her rush to collect the two life insurance policies she had taken out on him. This sudden death alerted his doctor, who ordered an autopsy. The autopsy revealed a huge amount of arsenic in his system. Nannie was promptly arrested.
She was not a very good grandmother either. Melvina, her daughter, gave birth to Robert Lee Haynes in 1943. Another baby followed two years later but died soon afterward. Exhausted from labor and groggy, 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 as to what happened or what caused the baby's death. 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 Nannie's care on July 7, 1945. The death was diagnosed as asphixia from unknown causes, and two months later Nannie collected the $500 life insurace she had taken out on her grandson.
Doss confessed to killing four of her husbands, her mother, her sister, her grandson, and her mother-in-law. The state of Oklahoma centered its case only on Samuel Doss. Nannie Doss pleaded guilty on May 17, 1955, and was sentenced to life in prison and the state did not pursue the death penalty due to her being female. Doss was never charged with the other deaths. Doss died from cancer in the hospital ward of the Oklahoma Jail in 1965.