Nannie Doss: the ‘Giggling Granny’ who confessed to poisoning four husbands

• Born1905, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama; grew up in Blue Mountain, Calhoun County, Alabama
• Known asThe ‘Giggling Granny’ or ‘Giggling Grandma’
• ConfessedPoisoning four of her five husbands with rat poison, 1945–1954, in Alabama, North Carolina, Kansas and Oklahoma
• ArrestedNovember 1954, Tulsa, Oklahoma
• ConvictedOne murder, of her fifth husband, on a guilty plea in Tulsa, May 1955
• SentenceLife imprisonment, 2 June 1955
• Died2 June 1965, of leukaemia, while serving her sentence

Nannie Doss was a grandmother living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who in November 1954 confessed to poisoning four of her five husbands with rat poison, in Alabama, North Carolina, Kansas and Oklahoma, between 1945 and 1954. She was caught because her fifth husband died in hospital of a cause his doctor could not find, and she agreed to an autopsy that found arsenic. She was charged with murder in four states but prosecuted in only one: in May 1955 she pleaded guilty in Tulsa to killing her fifth husband, and on 2 June 1955 she was sentenced to life imprisonment. She died in custody of leukaemia ten years later to the day.

Much of what is usually said about her goes beyond what was proven. She admitted four killings and denied harming her own family. Authorities suspected her in the deaths of several relatives, and later accounts put the total at eleven or twelve, but none of those cases came to court, and in December 1954 toxicologists found no poison in two of the relatives they examined.

This account rests on contemporary reports by the Associated Press and United Press from 1954, 1955 and 1965, read in digitised newspapers, on LIFE magazine, the Encyclopedia of Alabama and a 2007 report by United Press International, all listed at the end. Where they disagree, it says so. In line with this site’s rules, the people she killed or was suspected of killing, her husbands among them, and her relatives are not named.

Blue Mountain

According to the Encyclopedia of Alabama, Nannie Doss was born in 1905 and grew up in Blue Mountain, a small place in Calhoun County, Alabama, between Anniston and Jacksonville. Her age in 1954 reports, 49, fits that year. She told Tulsa investigators that she had known her first husband since childhood in Blue Mountain and married him in 1921, while still in her teens.

They had four daughters. Two of them died young, and their deaths were put down to food poisoning. Her first husband left her and divorced her, and in 1954 he told police that he had been suspicious. United Press put it plainly: he was the only one of her five husbands who survived. No charge was ever brought over the deaths of the two girls.

Four husbands, four states

Her second husband lived in Jacksonville, Alabama. He died in 1945. She later told investigators that he had been violent towards her and that she put rat poison in his corn whisky. Her third husband lived in Lexington, North Carolina, and died there; his death was put down to heart failure.

Her fourth husband lived in Emporia, Kansas. He died there in 1953. According to the Associated Press, she told questioners that she poisoned him after finding out that he had been seeing another woman. Her mother had died earlier the same year.

She met her fifth husband, a Tulsa man, through a ‘lonely hearts’ club correspondence and married him in 1953. Several of her marriages began with that kind of correspondence, and the Encyclopedia of Alabama lists ‘the Lonely Hearts Killer’ among the names she was later given.

The autopsy

By her own account, as reported by the Associated Press, she first tried to poison her fifth husband in 1954 with prunes. He was taken to hospital and spent more than three weeks there; the Encyclopedia of Alabama says about a month. The day after he came home, she said, she put rat poison in his coffee. He died in hospital in October 1954.

A physician reported that he could not find the cause of death. She signed the authorisation for a post-mortem examination herself, telling a doctor she wanted to know what had killed her husband because it might kill someone else. According to a 2007 UPI report based on the Tulsa World, the young intern who had treated him at Tulsa’s Hillcrest hospital refused to sign the death certificate until an autopsy was done. Tests found arsenic, enough, as LIFE put it, to kill a horse.

The confessions

She was arrested in Tulsa in late November 1954. After many hours of questioning over the following weekend she admitted poisoning her fifth husband and after him the second, third and fourth. The Tulsa County Attorney, J. Howard Edmondson, filed a charge of murder over her fifth husband’s death. After each statement, investigators said, she repeated that her conscience was clear.

The motive was never settled. Each husband had left her small insurance policies. In November 1954 Edmondson told United Press that the money was too little to explain the killings and that she seemed to have killed the men simply because they rubbed her the wrong way. When she died in 1965, the Associated Press wrote that the state had claimed insurance money, in policies of $500 to $1,200, as the motive.

The nickname came from her manner. Reporters described a plump, cheerful woman who smiled through her questioning and giggled as she answered officers. United Press described her as a woman who habitually giggled. The papers called her the ‘giggling grandmother’, and the name stuck as the Giggling Granny.

Exhumations in three states

The investigation turned to Kansas, North Carolina and Alabama. The bodies of her second and fourth husbands were exhumed within days, and that of her third husband soon after. Toxicologists reported arsenic in all three, and also in the body of her mother. By the middle of December 1954 murder charges had been filed against her over all four husbands and over her mother’s death: in Oklahoma, Kansas, North Carolina and Alabama.

She admitted the husbands but denied ever giving poison to her mother, and she kept to that for the rest of her life, saying she had never harmed her own blood relatives. Authorities also looked into the deaths of two of her sisters, an infant grandson and a mother-in-law. On 24 December 1954 the solicitor in Calhoun County, Alabama, announced that tests on the bodies of one sister and the grandson had found no arsenic. None of these deaths ever led to a charge.

Sanity and the guilty plea

From her first appearance in court, at the end of November 1954, her court-appointed lawyers said she was insane and could not help them prepare a defence. According to United Press, she refused to plead, and the judge entered a plea of not guilty for her. In early May 1955, according to the Associated Press, a jury in Tulsa’s district court took 15 minutes to decide that she was sane enough to stand trial.

Later that month, before the trial could begin, she changed her plea to guilty to the murder of her fifth husband. According to the Associated Press, her public defenders advised it in the belief that she would get a life term, while Edmondson said he would ask for the electric chair. On 2 June 1955 District Judge Elmer Adams sentenced her to life imprisonment. He said that making her the first woman sentenced to death in Oklahoma would set a “poor precedent”, and United Press reported that her mental condition weighed heavily in his decision.

That was the only case to reach a sentence. United Press reported the judge as saying that other states could still prosecute her, but the charges in Kansas, North Carolina and Alabama were never brought to court. Every other death attributed to her remains a confession or a suspicion, not a verdict.

Prison and death

She served her sentence at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. She fell ill there in 1965 and died of leukaemia on 2 June 1965, ten years to the day after she was sentenced. The Associated Press gave her age as 60.

Where the accounts differ

• The number of victims: she confessed to four husbands, the figure LIFE and the Associated Press used throughout. United Press in November 1954 reported that she was suspected in eleven deaths in all, including her father; UPI in 2007 wrote that she was eventually linked to eleven killings; the Encyclopedia of Alabama says officials speculate there may have been as many as twelve. Toxicology in December 1954, reported by both AP and UP, cleared her of poisoning two of the relatives on those lists.
• When her fifth husband died: 6 October 1954 in AP and UP reports from November 1954; 10 October in AP and UP reports from May and June 1955; LIFE says only “October”.
• How he was killed: in the AP’s 1954 account of her confession, and in the Encyclopedia of Alabama, the poisoned prunes put him in hospital and a later cup of coffee killed him. UP in 1955 said he died after breakfast prunes seasoned with rat poison, and the AP in 1965 also wrote that she poisoned him with prunes.
• Dates of her marriages: UP in November 1954 reported that she married the four husbands she poisoned in 1929, 1947, 1953 and 1954; the AP gave July 1953 for the fifth marriage, the Encyclopedia of Alabama June 1953. The AP says her third husband died in 1952, the Encyclopedia of Alabama 1950.
• Her first divorce: 1929, by her own account to Tulsa police as reported by the AP; 1928 in the Encyclopedia of Alabama.
• Her mother’s death: the AP reported in 1954 that her mother died in Lexington, North Carolina, the day before she left for Kansas to marry her fourth husband; the Encyclopedia of Alabama says her mother had come to live with the couple and died within days of arriving.
• The infant grandson: two months old when he died in 1945, according to UP in December 1954; the Encyclopedia of Alabama describes a two-year-old.
• Her age, arrest and sanity: 49 in the 1954 reports, 50 in one AP report of May 1955 and 60 at her death; the Encyclopedia of Alabama gives 48, dates her arrest to 1955 and says a judge declared her insane, where the contemporary reports describe a jury finding her sane.
• The motive: not insurance, according to the county attorney speaking to UP in 1954; insurance, according to the state’s case as summarised by the AP in 1965.

The portrait

The portrait above is a detail of the coloring page drawn for Bloody America, which gives one killer to each state. On the full page she raises one hand beside her face against a background of large chain links. A map of the United States in the corner has Oklahoma marked, with the state’s name beneath it. Around her are two open safety pins, a bottle with a skull and crossbones, and a hooded skeleton with a scythe above the number 11. The panel below gives her name, the nickname “The Giggling Grandma” and the dates “1920s – 1954”, with a judge’s gavel and a pair of handcuffs at its foot. For other case files, see Lizzie Halliday, Genene Jones and Graham Young.

If you find an error in this account, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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Questions people ask

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Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

1. Nancy “Nannie Doss” HazleEncyclopedia of Alabama, 29 July 2014
2. Widow admits poisoning four of her husbandsAssociated Press, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 29 November 1954
3. Nannie Doss, grumbling about how cold it was in jail, refused to plead…United Press, in the Hope Star, 30 November 1954
4. A four-time, self-made widowLIFE, 13 December 1954
5. Fifth murder charge filed against Mrs. Nannie DossAssociated Press, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 11 December 1954
6. Clear Granny in 2 deathsAssociated Press, in The Atlanta Journal, 25 December 1954
7. Autopsy reveals no arsenic in 2 of widow’s kinUnited Press, in the Monroe Morning World, 25 December 1954
8. Nannie Doss, who poisoned four husbands, held saneAssociated Press, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 5 May 1955
9. Nannie Doss pleads guilty to murderAssociated Press, in the Lincoln Evening Journal, 18 May 1955
10. Mrs. Nannie Doss gets term in OklahomaUnited Press, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2 June 1955
11. Husband poisoner dies of leukemiaAssociated Press, in the Lincoln Star, 3 June 1965
12. Doctor who unmasked serial killer diesUnited Press International, 30 November 2007

The facts on this page come from public records and the published sources above. If you find an error, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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