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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did and how. Episode 160. I am your Norwegian host, Samas Rosland Weyberg Thun. And tonight, I once again treat you with a stand-alone episode covering a less famous serial killer.
But fair not. This killer was not some run-of-the-mill killer whose crimes can be said to be clichéd. For one thing, I present to you tonight a female serial killer. We travel once more to the United States of America, and we travel back in time. Nancy Doss, née Hazel.
was an American serial killer probably responsible for the deaths of 11 people during the 1920s up until her capture in 1954. Nanny Dawes was referred to as the Giggling Granny, the Lonely Hearts Killer, the Black Widow, and Lady Bluebeard. And this is her saga. Enjoy.
As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Their names are...
Lisa, Lisbeth, Madeline, Meow, Nick, Operation BP, Robert, Russell, Sabina, Samira, Skortnia, Shauna, Ted, Tim, Tony, Trent, and Val. You are the backbone of the Serial Killer podcast, and without you, there would be no show. You have my deepest gratitude. Thank you.
I am forever grateful for my elite TSK Producers Club, and I want to show you that your patronage is not given in vain. All TSK episodes will be available 100% ad-free to my TSK Producers Club on patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast. No generic ads, no ad reads, no jingles. I promise.
And of course, if you wish to donate $15 a month, that's only $7.50 per episode, you are more than welcome to join the ranks of the TSK Producers Club too. So don't miss out and join now. On the 4th of November, 1905, Nancy Nanny Hazel was born on a small farm in the small town of Blue Mountain, Alabama.
Nanny had four siblings, and their father, James Hazel, constantly forced them to work on the farm instead of going to school. According to the history page, Alabama Heritage, he was a strict and violent father. If the children at all acted in a way he did not approve of, severe penalties would await. Nanny's mother, Louisa, was cold and absent, and did as her husband commanded.
At the age of five, Nanny had to chop wood and plow fields alone. In the sixth grade, she left school altogether because her father demanded that she would work full-time on the farm. Five years earlier, when Nanny was seven years old, the whole family took the train to visit relatives in southern Alabama. When the train suddenly abruptly stopped,
Nanny hit her head hard on a metal bar on the seat in front of her. For a number of years following this, she struggled with severe headaches, memory loss, and depression. As soon as the long and hard-working day on the farm was over, Nanny would hide in her room to crochet and read her mother's magazines.
Her favorite magazine was called True Romance, and it consisted of love stories, intimate personal tales, personals, and contests. She also read erotic books, which in recent times are called housewife porn. Nanny dreamt of meeting her one true love, and that a knight in shining armor would ride in on a white horse and save her from her father.
She read the personals over and over again, hoping fervently that there would be someone out there she could marry. Nanny had no opportunity to get to know the boys in the village on her own, since her father refused both her and her sisters to talk to them. He also refused them to wear makeup and what he thought of to be overly challenging clothes.
Going to the local dance was completely out of the question, because the father was afraid his girls would end up getting raped. When Nanny turned sixteen, she started working at the linen factory, Linen Thread Company. There she met Charlie Braggs. He was just like the men she had read about in her mother's magazines. Tall, broad-shouldered, attentive and kind.
After Nanny's father approved of him, Charlie proposed. Just four months after they met, Nanny and Charlie had become husband and wife. Charlie's mother was unmarried and single, and demanded that the newlyweds move in with her to help.
Nanny reacted strongly. This was not how she had envisioned a marriage. In a memoir she wrote in Life magazine just before she died, Nanny described her mother-in-law as, and I quote, a demanding hypochondriac of a mother who demanded my husband and I spend every single night at home with her, end quote.
Nanny felt that her mother-in-law was at least as dominant as her own father, and decided to take control of her own life. While Charlie and his mother were at home, she left the house more and more often. She went to bars alone, was unfaithful, drank large amounts of alcohol, and became a chain smoker. Charlie wasn't any better.
He too was unfaithful, but would later explain this by saying that he was scared. He stated, and I quote, Nanny was a beautiful girl and incredibly funny. Our marriage started well, but after a few years she went completely off the rails. End quote. Nanny wrote in Life magazine the following, and I quote,
In 1921, as my father wished, I married a boy I had only known for four months or maybe five. He had no family except for a mother who was unmarried and who took over my life when we got married. Despite the fact that Nanny felt that marriage was not something she dreamed of as a child, she and Charlie had four daughters in just four years.
In 1927, two of the girls suddenly died after eating breakfast. The doctors found no other explanation than that they had been food poisoned. At the funeral, Nanny, who had collected large sums due to the girls' life insurance, seemed shattered.
Charlie was by then convinced that his wife had something to do with the deaths. Therefore, he ran away, taking their firstborn daughter, Melvina, with him. He did this wisely, because he would turn out to be the only husband who ever survived Nanny.
By then, Nanny was left alone with her newborn daughter, Florine, and mother-in-law. Every spare second she had, she spent on the magazine through romance, and she dreamed of finding a new man who was as handsome and caring as the men she read about. In 1928, Charlie Braggs and Melvina suddenly returned to the city, and with them they had Charlie's new girlfriend and her son.
Charlie demanded a divorce. Nanny wanted the same thing. Braggs and Nanny completed the divorce, and she got her daughter Melvina back. Lonely and penniless, Nanny took her two surviving daughters with her and moved in with her parents. In 1929, she came across a personal ad in True Romance, in which Frank Harrelson was looking for a woman to marry.
Nanny wrote a letter to him, and he responded with a picture of himself and several love-poems. Nanny was blown away by this, and was convinced that this time she had met her soul-mate. What she didn't know was that he had been an alcoholic all his adult life, and that he had been arrested a number of times for loitering and drunkenness.
head over heels in love, Nanny married Frank as soon as possible, and they moved to Jacksonville, Florida, with Melvina and Florine. Nanny was devastated when she realized that Robert was not the man of her dreams either. Every week she found liquor bottles hidden in the house and buried in her rose garden.
She also found out that Frank had amassed a huge debt and that he had also been convicted of violence several times. Still, she chose to stay with him. Nanny's daughter Melvina had by then grown up and in 1943 had a son named Robert. Nanny was often a babysitter and was often photographed with him on her lap.
The boy had big attentive eyes and cute chubby bun cheeks. Nanny smiled from ear to ear with her arms around him in those photos. When Melvina was about to give birth to her second child, a girl, Nanny was in the hospital to help. While Melvina was giving birth, Nanny ran back and forth to fetch juice and cold cloths for her.
The newborn girl screamed and wriggled when she was born, just as babies are supposed to, but still died shortly after birth. The doctors did not understand anything. Melvina, who was very dazed after a long and hard birth,
told her husband and mother-in-law that she thought she saw, or perhaps had nightmares about, that her own mother had stuck a hat-pin into the girl's head at the hospital. Melvina's husband and mother-in-law excitedly said that indeed they both saw Nanny holding a hat-pin in her hand the same day the girl was born, and that she had twisted it around her fingers.
Still, Melvina rejected the idea that her own mother had killed the girl and thought that she was simply imagining things following the difficult birth. When Nanny babysat for Melvina's two-year-old son Robert on the 7th of July, 1945, he too died under mysterious circumstances.
The doctors believed that the boy died of lack of oxygen, but once again they were unable to find out why. Melvina was devastated after losing both children, but she did not dare to think that it was her own mother who had murdered them. Nanny's turbulent marriage to Frank Harrelson lasted for sixteen years.
When he came home drunk one night after partying with comrades he had served with during World War II, he raped Nanny. The day after the rape, Nanny found a bottle of moonshine that Robert had dug into her rose garden. At discovering this, she finally snapped. This life was the opposite of what she had dreamed of as a child, and now she wanted him to suffer.
She poured rat poison and arsenic into the bottle and dug it down again, knowing that at some point Harrelson would dig it up and drink what's in it. The next day he did dig it up and emptied the contents. That same night Harrelson got cramps and abdominal pain and suffered a painful death in bed while Nanny lied next to him and stroked him over the head. There, listener.
Let us pause for a brief moment to examine in more detail what it means to die by arsenic poisoning. The symptoms of arsenic poisoning vary according to dose and form. However, the typical symptoms are initial irritation and a burning sensation in the throat, faintness, nausea, and depression.
This is followed by the regurgitation of food and subsequently mucus specked with blood. Abdominal pain follows, which may be aggravated by the merest touch, and which feels as though red-hot coals have been applied to the stomach. By now, the victim experiences throat constriction, and the tongue is covered by a layer of something that looks like a coating of white fur.
Within 12 to 18 hours, the symptoms progress to violent diarrhea, accompanied by more pain, especially from the cramp in the calves, and the victim experiences a frequent and urgent feeling of needing to defecate. The pulse becomes weak, rapid and irregular. By this stage, collapse will come rapidly, and the victim dies while still conscious.
There is a marked manifestation of a bluish-purplish coloring of the skin caused by lack of oxygen, and post-mortem will reveal that the lining membrane of the stomach is badly inflamed and ulcerated. It is an extremely painful, torturous, and drawn-out way to kill someone. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up.
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That's BlueNile.com. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As a family man with three kids, I know firsthand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care. But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night.
For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.
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Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. Once again, the doctors were confused. But no one suspected Nanny. They concluded that Frank had also been food poisoned. Nanny continued the search for her one true love.
and placed several personals in local newspapers. In this manner, she became a pen pal with Arlie Lanning, whom she was convinced was her dream come true. Just three days after Nanny and Arlie met for the first time, they got married and moved in together in North Carolina. Unfortunately, just like Harrelson, Lanning was an alcoholic.
When Nanny discovered this, she started going out on the town again. Sometimes she disappeared for several months in a row. The pleasant housewife lived in many ways a double life. When she was at home, she would be the perfect housewife. To look after the children, make dinner, hang clothes to dry in the garden, make cakes for the neighbors and keep the house spotless.
When she was gone, however, Harrelson had to take care of the children while she stayed in a hotel, drank moonshine, chain-smoked, and had sex with a lot of other men. Suddenly, Lanning also died of what the doctors thought was heart failure, and a few days later, the Harrelson house burned down.
The neighbors were shocked, and Nanny, with tears in her eyes, explained, and I quote, "'He just sat down one morning to drink a cup of coffee and eat a bowl of prunes I had made for him. Until then he was in good shape. Then, two days later, he was dead. I nursed him, believe me, but I failed.' She pulled a handkerchief up from the pocket of her apron and wiped away a tear that ran down her cheeks.'
As she did so, she told of how his last words apparently had been that it had to have been the coffee that did him in. Nanny moved in with her mother-in-law, but only days later she also died. Nanny and the children thus moved in with her sister, Dovey. No alarms went off when Dovey also died after a short time.
Looking for a new husband, Nanny joined the singles club Diamond Circle Club. There she met the retired salesman Richard L. Morton. Morton fell head over heels for Nanny's smile, sending a letter to the singles club to unsubscribe. In this letter he stated, and I quote, Thank you for introducing me to the cutest and most amazing woman in the world. End quote.
In 1952, Nanny and Morton married in Emporia, Kansas. The bliss of new love quickly subsided and Morton began a secret relationship with a woman he met just before he met Nanny. Nanny, on her end, had not resigned from the singles club at all and had secretly started writing letters to other men.
She made sure that she was always the one who picked up the mail. She locked the bathroom door and read all the letters she received. She answered many and asked if they were ready for marriage. One early morning she poured rat poison and arsenic into the thermos Morton always carried with him.
In the evening, he got terrible cramps, great stomach pains, and died, screaming and moaning in utter agony. Morton had five life insurance policies, all of which Nanny collected shortly after his death. When Nanny's father died of natural causes, her mother Louise moved in with Nanny. It does not take long before Louise also got great stomach pains,
and died in a mysterious way. No one suspected that good kind Nanny had anything to do with all the deaths around her, but soon after she was revealed by pure chance. Nanny fell in love with the conservative priest Samuel Dawes. He had just lost his family in a tornado that ravaged Arkansas. They got married, but were often arguing.
Nanny found that Samuel was stingy and boring. He, on the other hand, thought she was lazy and too fond of money. Samuel liked to keep it dark and cold in the house to save electricity, and he only had a small reading lamp on when he read the newspaper in the old worn chair he had had for a very long time. Nanny had almost no money herself and became frustrated that her husband kept his wallet tightly shut.
To make matters worse, Samuel Doss had a very low opinion of TV, which had just revolutionized the world, and he could not stand Nanny's love of TV series, romantic magazines, and books. He told his wife that Christian women did not need TV and romantic magazines to be happy.
Nanny left him then, saying that she would not return until he stopped being so stingy, and at least not before he put her name in his bank account, so that she too could use it. She also demanded that Samuel order two life insurances, which meant that she would be paid large sums if he eventually died. Samuel, still head over heels in love with Nanny, begged her to come back.
it would turn out to be the biggest mistake of his entire life. In September 1954, Samuel was hospitalized with seizures and severe abdominal pain. By the skin of his teeth, he pulled through and was then sent back to Nanny. He proved unable to absorb food and lied in bed while Nanny stroked his head.
served him prune cakes and said that he would soon be well. Samuel believed her. But then, just seven days later, he got terrible cramps and abdominal pains again and collapsed to the floor where he died. Nanny was quick to reap the benefits of his life insurance policies. The bank account was promptly emptied.
It was Dr. Schwellbein who treated Samuel when he was hospitalized in September with cramps and abdominal pain. Schwellbein learned that Samuel was dead, and he did not understand how that came to be. He demanded to know how Samuel actually died and ordered an autopsy of the body. The autopsy showed that Samuel had huge amounts of arsenic in his body.
Nanny was arrested and put in long, heavy interrogations. She tightly gripped an edition of the magazine True Romance in the interrogation room, and said she did not understand the arrest. She laughed out loud at the accusation of murder. Investigators, however, were in no doubt. They asked her if she was not getting bored by her charade.
They had been in the interrogation room for several hours, and the officers told her they knew she was the killer. Nanny was not moved by the officers' tactic. Instead, with a theatrical smile, she said, and I quote, "'Oh, boys, come on. I did not kill anyone. I do not understand why you think so.' End quote. She giggled like a girl after this statement."
In the book about Nanny Doss and other female serial killers, Deadlier Than Male, author Terry Manners has reproduced a conversation from the interrogation room. So imagine, if you will, dear listener, the following. Chief Investigator Ray Page lights a cigarette and takes a step towards Nanny, and she shakes her head and says she does not understand why she is there.
"'We've taken some calls, Nanny, and I've been told that Mr. Dawes was your fourth husband to die with the same symptoms. We put two and two together, Nanny, and it looks like we've reached, well, four. Arsenic, Nanny. We believe that everyone died of arsenic. It's easier if you just admit what you have done before we find out for ourselves.'
Nanny laughed and slapped her knees. While staring at a page in True Romance, she replied, and I quote, Young man, are you saying that I killed all my husbands? You're a great man, but so stupid, she said.
Officer Ray Page demanded in turn that she put down the magazine. He went on to confront her with other murders and stated that many people around her had fallen dead in recent decades and that their ghosts were returning. He said, to quote him directly, the following, "'They're here, Nanny, in this room. Let them rest.'"
Nanny tutted two okays and straightened her back and took a deep breath. While smiling, she happily said that she not only killed Samuel Dawes, but also three other husbands. She looked at true romance that was by then lying on the table in front of her. She said, and I quote, "'So, there you have it. Can I get my magazine back now?' Then she giggled.
When confronted with why she killed her husband, she coldly replied, and I quote, He did not let me watch my favorite program on TV, and he forced me to sleep without the fan on, on one of the hottest nights we have had. It was horrible. What woman can live under such conditions? End quote.
The police took a closer look at Nanny's life and tried to find answers to how almost all of Nanny's closest, such as her mother, sister, grandchildren, and mother-in-law, suddenly died. Nanny denied having killed them, and the police were unable to find enough evidence that she could be charged with more than one murder.
Dawes stuck to her claim that she had not killed her family, saying that it was impossible for her to kill someone she shared blood with. Even so, at the age of 49, Nanny Dawes was charged with the murder of Samuel Dawes, and she risked becoming the first woman in Oklahoma to receive the death penalty. Two years after she was arrested,
She was declared insane by Judge Elmer Adams. This saved her from the electric chair. The judge said, and again I quote, I do not want to create a bad president by taking the life of a woman, and especially not a woman with a mental illness. In June 1955, Nanny Dawes was sentenced to life in prison, and she smiled broadly when she received her sentence.
After two years in prison, she was interviewed by the local newspaper Sarasota Herald Tribune. By then, she was not as smiling and happy as before. She said that she had lost the spark of life and would like to be sentenced to death. While in prison, she felt time went by too slowly. Furthermore, she said that behind her famous smile lay a heavy heart.
She claimed she had always made people think she was happy, even if she was not. Nanny claimed that she was only allowed to work in the prison laundry, even though she preferred to work in the kitchen. When they lacked people in the kitchen, she always offered to work there, but she was never allowed. Maybe not so strange, considering her background as someone who killed by poisoning the food of her loved ones.
Nanny said that she has had two small heart attacks since she was imprisoned and that she hoped for a kind God who would soon let her die. Ten years after she was sentenced to life in prison, Nanny got leukemia. On the 2nd of June, 1965, after a short illness, she fell asleep in a hospital with her hands folded and died peacefully.
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And thus, we come to the end of the saga of the giggling granny, Nanny Dolls. I hope you enjoyed listening to me telling it to you. Next episode will feature a brand new Serial Killer Expo say. So as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. Finally, I wish to thank you, dear listener, for listening.
If you like this podcast, you can support it by donating on patreon.com slash theserialkillarpodcast, by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, facebook.com slash theskpodcast, or by posting on the subreddit theskpodcast. Thank you. Good night and good luck.
