Nannie Doss was 49 when she was arrested in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in November 1954. An autopsy had found poison in the body of her fifth husband, Samuel Doss, who had died that October. After nearly 24 hours of questioning on and off, she told police she had put rat poison in his coffee, and within days she signed statements saying she had poisoned three earlier husbands as well: one in Alabama, one in North Carolina and one in Kansas. "My conscience is clear," she said after each account, according to the Tulsa County attorney.
The case drew national attention because of her manner as much as her admissions. The Associated Press described her as a plump, jovial widow who smoked as she talked to investigators and broke off her questioning to appear before television cameras. Exhumations followed in three states, and murder charges were filed in Alabama, North Carolina and Kansas. She was tried in none of them. In Oklahoma she was charged only with the death of Samuel Doss. After a stay at a state mental hospital, a jury finding that she was legally sane and a change of plea, she pleaded guilty to his murder in May 1955 and was sentenced to life in prison. She died in custody in 1965.
What follows draws on wire reports printed in 1954 and 1955 and on the Encyclopedia of Alabama, whose entry on her is by the historian Gordon Harvey of Jacksonville State University. Where these sources disagree on dates and names, as they often do, both versions are given.
Nancy Hazle was born in 1905 in Blue Mountain, in Calhoun County, Alabama, a community between Anniston and Jacksonville, the Encyclopedia of Alabama says. She was one of five children of Jim Hazle and Louisa "Lou" Holder Hazle. The encyclopedia notes that Jim Hazle may not have been her biological father. It describes him as abusive and says he kept the children out of school for long periods to work, and that he forbade his four daughters to wear makeup or dress clothes. Her mother is remembered in the same account as loving and gracious.
Two details from her childhood later became part of her own explanation for what she did. She said that when she was seven, a train she was riding slowed suddenly and she struck her head, and she blamed that injury for headaches she suffered all her life and for her later behavior. She was also, the encyclopedia says, devoted to romance magazines, and in particular to their "lonely hearts" columns, through which strangers placed notices to find a partner. Several of her husbands came to her that way.
In 1921, at 16, she was working at the Linen Thread Company in Anniston when she met Charles "Charley" Braggs. She married him within months and moved in with him and his mother, the Encyclopedia of Alabama says. She later told Tulsa questioners that the marriage took place in 1921 and ended in divorce in 1929; the 1954 wire reports and the encyclopedia give the divorce as 1928.
The couple had four children in quick succession. In 1927 two of them died suddenly after breakfast, and their deaths were attributed at the time to food poisoning. According to the encyclopedia, Braggs left after an anonymous warning and took their oldest daughter, Melvina, with him, while the newborn, Florine, stayed with her mother. He returned in late 1928 with Melvina and a new partner, and she moved back to her parents' home and went to work in a cotton mill.
Braggs was the only one of her five husbands still alive in 1954. The Associated Press found him living in Alabama City, Alabama, as reporters traced her marriages. In December 1954 the Alabama Bureau of Investigation reported that he had asked authorities to look into the deaths of the two children of their marriage. No charge over those deaths, and no test result on them, was reported.
Her second husband was Robert Franklin Harrelson, known as Frank, of Jacksonville, Alabama. The Encyclopedia of Alabama says they met through a lonely-hearts column and married in 1929, and that the marriage, troubled by his drinking and violent temper, lasted 16 years. His brother, Ernest Harrelson, gave a different account to Alabama authorities in 1954: he said she had married his brother in 1945, the year Frank died.
Frank Harrelson died on September 15, 1945, and the death was put down at the time to food poisoning or another illness, the encyclopedia says. When the Tulsa County attorney first heard of the death in November 1954, the report he received was that Harrelson had died of what was believed to be food poisoning.
In her 1954 statements she said she had poured liquid poison into Harrelson's jug of corn whiskey. Her stated reason, as the county attorney gave it to the press, was that he beat her. The Encyclopedia of Alabama gives her later, fuller account: that he came home drunk after a night out with friends who had come back from the Second World War and forced her to have sex with him, and that the next day she poured rat poison into the moonshine he kept hidden.
In December 1954 Harrelson's body was exhumed at Jacksonville. In a report dated December 10, Calhoun County Sheriff A. A. Pate said that "a good deal of arsenic" had been found in it, and that Ernest Harrelson would swear out a murder warrant during the day. The Associated Press reported on December 11 that the first-degree murder warrant had been signed and filed, and the sheriff said a copy and a hold order were being mailed to the authorities in Tulsa.
Two months before Frank Harrelson died, a small boy in the family died. Sheriff Pate was quoted in November 1954 as saying that the child had died of a cause similar to Harrelson's. The wire reports describe him as Harrelson's grandson and also as Nannie Doss's grandson, and give his name as Robert Lee Higgins (once as Richard Lee Higgins) and his age variously as two or two and a half. The Encyclopedia of Alabama calls him her two-year-old grandson, Robert, and says he died of asphyxia while in her care, and that several months later she collected on a 500-dollar life insurance policy on him.
His body was exhumed at Jacksonville in December 1954, with Harrelson's and that of her sister Dovie. The Associated Press reported on December 11 that the toxicologist's report on the boy and on Dovie Weaver was still awaited. No result was reported afterward. Nannie Doss denied any part in his death, and she was never charged with it.
The encyclopedia adds that family accounts suggest she also caused the death of a newborn granddaughter shortly after birth. No investigation of that death, and no charge, was reported.
Her third husband was Arlie Lanning of Lexington, North Carolina. The Encyclopedia of Alabama says he answered her lonely-hearts notice. The Associated Press gave his name as Harley Lanning in its first reports and said he was 54 and had married her shortly before he died in 1952. Later wire reports called him Arlie Lanning, husband No. 3, who died in 1952 in Lexington. The encyclopedia gives his death year as 1950.
His death had been attributed to a heart condition, and no autopsy was done. In her 1954 statements she said she had poisoned him through his food. She told the county attorney that she had been jealous of him because he was popular with women.
Investigators from Oklahoma left for Lexington within days of her arrest. By early December, charges had been filed against her there over Lanning's death, and the Associated Press listed Lexington among the places where she stood accused. Any test on Lanning's body went unreported.
Two of her sisters had also died in the years before her arrest. The first wire report on her confession named them as Mrs. Dovie Weaver of Anniston, who died in 1951, and Mrs. Sula Barttee of Gadsden, Alabama, who died in 1952. Later reports gave Dovie Weaver's death as 1950 and called her of Gadsden, and spelled the other sister's name Sula Bartlett, with a death year of 1953. The Encyclopedia of Alabama says that after Lanning's death she went to live with Dovie, who died soon after she arrived.
The Alabama Bureau of Investigation chief, Joe Smelley, treated both deaths as suspicious. Another sister, Mrs. Annie Mae Higgins, who lived near Springville, Alabama, told reporters that the two sisters who died had been cancer victims. Nannie Doss denied harming either of them.
Her fourth husband was Richard L. Morton Sr. of Emporia, Kansas. The Encyclopedia of Alabama says they met through lonely-hearts correspondence and married in Emporia in 1952, and that he spent long periods with other women.
Her mother's death came first. The encyclopedia says Lou Hazle moved in with the couple in January 1953, after Nannie's father died, complained of severe stomach pains and died within days. The 1954 reports place the death differently. Tulsa's county attorney said in November 1954 that her mother had died the day before she left for Emporia to marry Morton, and an Associated Press report in December gave the death as 1953 at Lexington, North Carolina, and the mother's age as 75.
Morton died on May 18, 1953, of what was believed at the time to be a heart ailment, the county attorney said. The wire reports gave his age as 69 and as 64. Her statement said she had put rodent poison in his coffee. "I lost my head and blew up," she was quoted as saying, after finding out that he had been "running around with another woman." The encyclopedia says he died three months after her mother, from coffee she had laced with arsenic.
Morton's body was exhumed in Kansas and tested in November 1954. In December the Associated Press reported that she had been charged in Emporia with poisoning him.
Samuel Doss of Tulsa, her fifth husband, was 58 when he died, according to the 1954 reports; reports in 1955 gave his age as 59. He worked for the state highway department, the Associated Press said in March 1955. She met him through a lonely-hearts club. The encyclopedia gives the date of their marriage as June 1953, while an Associated Press report of December 1954 said she had married him five months before his death.
The Encyclopedia of Alabama says he was neither abusive nor a heavy drinker. She left him for a time, it says, and he then added her name to his bank account and took out two life insurance policies naming her as beneficiary. Authorities said in 1954 that each of her husbands had made her the beneficiary of small insurance policies; she told investigators she had not collected on Samuel Doss's.
By her own account to the county attorney, she poisoned him twice. The first time she put poison on his prunes. The encyclopedia describes it as an arsenic-laced prune cake and says it put him in the hospital for a month. She later stirred a tablespoon of poison into his coffee. Asked why, she said "he was mean to me," as the county attorney put it. Capt. Harry Stege, the police officer quoted by the Associated Press, reported her as saying she gave him the poison five days before his death.
The wire reports give two dates for that death. The first stories, in November 1954, said October 6. From December 1954 on, the charge, the hearings and the sentencing reports all gave the date as October 10.
What brought the case to light was an autopsy on Samuel Doss. The Encyclopedia of Alabama says his physician suspected foul play and persuaded her to allow it, and that it found enough arsenic to kill a horse. The county attorney put it more simply in November 1954: "It was Mrs. Doss herself who permitted the autopsy starting the investigation that led to her confession," the Associated Press reported.
The pathologist was Dr. Leo Lowbeer. He performed the original autopsy, and the Oklahoma Health Department later reported finding poison. At her preliminary hearing in December 1954 he was the only witness the prosecution called. He testified that in his opinion Samuel Doss had been given two doses of poison before his death.
She was arrested in Tulsa in late November 1954. An Associated Press report dated November 27 said she had been arrested the day before; a later report described the arrest as taking place on a Friday night. At first, the county attorney said, she denied knowing anything about how her husband had died. She was held without charge while nearly a dozen officials, including officers from Oklahoma and Kansas, questioned her. County Investigator W. A. Land took part in the interrogation.
In a report dated November 27, Capt. Stege said that after nearly 24 hours of questioning on and off she had admitted dropping the poison into Samuel Doss's coffee. The interrogation on the night of her arrest was tape-recorded, a detail that became important months later at her sanity hearing.
The Associated Press described her as stocky and imperturbable. In its report dated November 29, it said she had signed further statements the night before in the office of the county attorney, J. Howard Edmondson. Edmondson had become Tulsa County attorney in 1954 and later served as governor of Oklahoma from January 1959 to January 1963, according to the National Governors Association.
By the morning of November 29 the story was national news. "Grandmother Tells of Slaying 4 Husbands With Rat Poison," the Evening Star in Washington headlined the Associated Press report. According to Edmondson, she described poisoning Frank Harrelson in Jacksonville, Alabama, in 1945; Arlie Lanning in Lexington, North Carolina, in 1952; Richard Morton in Emporia, Kansas, in May 1953; and Samuel Doss in Tulsa. She calmly smoked a cigarette as she told how. Each time, Edmondson said, she declared, "My conscience is clear."
She interrupted the questioning long enough to appear for television cameramen and sat through a filmed interview in which only the authorities asked the questions. The reports that week called her a talkative grandmother whose mood swung between cheerful and fretful.
There was a line she would not cross. Edmondson said she denied any connection with the deaths of her sisters, her mother or the grandson. When she was told that tests had found poison in her mother's body, she vehemently denied giving her a lethal dose, according to a wire report printed on December 4. In every later report she held to the same position: she admitted the husbands and nothing else.
The Encyclopedia of Alabama records the nicknames the press gave her: the Giggling Granny, Giggling Nannie, the Jolly Black Widow, the Lonely Hearts Killer and Lady Bluebeard, and, in one paper, the "self-made widow". It also says that she agreed to confess in exchange for being allowed to keep a romance magazine. The 1954 wire reports do not mention the magazine.
Within two weeks of her arrest, prosecutors in four states had filed charges. Edmondson filed the Oklahoma murder charge over Samuel Doss's death. In North Carolina, the county coroner at Lexington, David E. Plummer, said murder charges would be filed after the report on her mother's body came back, and she was accused at Lexington of poisoning both Lanning and her mother. In Kansas, she was charged at Emporia with poisoning Morton. In Alabama, the warrant in Frank Harrelson's death was reported by the Associated Press on December 11 as the fifth murder charge against her.
The inquiries reached further. In early December Edmondson said investigators would probably look into the deaths of at least 10 of her relatives, apart from her husbands. Oklahoma and Kansas crime bureau agents said that on a planned visit to Jacksonville they would ask for the exhumation of Harrelson and the grandson. In Alabama, Joe Smelley of the state Bureau of Investigation said that if arsenic were found in the bodies at Jacksonville, three more would be exhumed: another sister, another grandchild and a woman who was not related to her and whose name was withheld. Smelley said she had been present with each of the Alabama residents who died in suspicious circumstances at the time of the deaths and held small insurance policies on most of them.
The case was one of the year's biggest stories in North Carolina. A review of the state's top stories of 1954, printed in The Lincoln Times in January 1955, listed the Doss case sixth, behind Hurricane Hazel.
At her arraignment in Tulsa's Court of Common Pleas, reported by the Associated Press on December 1, 1954, her public defenders refused to enter a plea. They told the court she was mentally incompetent and asked, for the second time, that she be sent to a mental hospital for observation. Judge Lloyd H. McGuire refused, at Edmondson's request, and entered a plea of not guilty on her behalf. Edmondson said he did not object to an examination at the proper time. "If she is bound over to District Court we'll join with the defense attorneys in asking that she be sent to an institution for examination," he said.
At the preliminary hearing on December 15, Dr. Lowbeer testified, the defense called no one, and she was held for trial in District Court. Both sides expected her to be sent for 90 days of observation at the state hospital at Vinita.
She was admitted to Eastern State Hospital at Vinita on December 15, 1954. In mid-March 1955 the hospital's psychiatrists reported that she was insane and recommended that she be recommitted. The superintendent, Dr. F. M. Adams, wrote that she was "mentally defective with marked impairment of judgment and will power," and his report said she had been insane when she poisoned Samuel Doss as well. A wire report printed in The Daily Record of Dunn, North Carolina, said she was by then suspected of killing nine relatives.
The finding could have stopped the prosecution. Edmondson did not dispute it, but he said he would still seek a murder trial. Her court-appointed lawyer, Gordon Patten, said he would ask at once for a sanity hearing that would cancel the trial.
The question went to a District Court jury in Tulsa in early May 1955. For three days the jurors heard psychologists and psychiatrists, who were about evenly divided. One group described her as mentally defective. A psychiatrist called by the state testified that her intelligence fell in a range shared by 30 million other Americans, and another called her "a shrewd, calculating female trying to feign insanity to escape the electric chair." She was heard to chuckle at that. Edmondson called her an "expert liar." Patten told the court she was a "victim of society."
The jury took 15 minutes to decide unanimously that she was mentally competent and must stand trial. A juror said afterward that the tape recording of her interrogation on the night of her arrest had been a deciding factor; Edmondson said it showed that she had lied and was capable of defending herself. She told a reporter she was satisfied. "It's okay with me if it's okay with them," she said. Trial was set for June 6 on the charge of murdering Samuel Doss, with the defense expected to plead insanity. There was no appeal from the jury's decision, the report noted.
She did not go to trial. In mid-May 1955 she withdrew her plea of not guilty and pleaded guilty in Tulsa County District Court to the murder of Samuel Doss. A wire report dated May 18 said the plea had been entered the day before, after a visit from her daughter, Mrs. Melvina Hedrick, of Lexington, North Carolina, the daughter of her first marriage. The daughter told a reporter that her visit had nothing to do with the decision. Afterward, the report said, Nannie Doss told her daughter not to worry, because "I'm not worried."
Her public defenders, Quinn Dickason and Gordon L. Patten, had advised the plea. They believed, the report said, that she would receive a life term and later be committed to a state mental hospital. Judge Elmer Adams explained the possible punishments to her: life in prison or death in the electric chair. Edmondson said he would ask for death. Adams set May 31 to decide.
On June 2, 1955, Judge Adams sentenced her to life imprisonment for the murder of Samuel Doss. The wire report of the sentencing described her as giggling and chewing gum. The Encyclopedia of Alabama says that at 48 she had faced the possibility of becoming the first woman executed in Oklahoma, that the judge called such a sentence a "poor precedent," and that she appeared thrilled with the outcome.
The life sentence was the only judgment ever entered against her. The charges in Alabama, North Carolina and Kansas remained, but, as the encyclopedia puts it, she was never tried outside Oklahoma.
She served her sentence at the Oklahoma state prison in McAlester. The Encyclopedia of Alabama says that after about two years she came to regret the life sentence and said she wished she had been executed. In a prison interview she complained that the only work she was given was in the laundry, and that her offers to work in the kitchen had been declined. She continued to blame the head injury of her childhood for her crimes.
She died of leukemia on June 2, 1965, the tenth anniversary of her imprisonment, according to the encyclopedia, and was buried at Oak Hill Memorial Park in McAlester.
The legal record is short. Nannie Doss was convicted once, on her own plea of guilty in Tulsa County, of the murder of Samuel Doss, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. No appeal from it was reported.
She confessed to Tulsa authorities that she had poisoned three other husbands. In one of those deaths, Frank Harrelson's, the exhumation found what the Calhoun County sheriff called "a good deal of arsenic." Morton's body was tested in Kansas, but the result was not reported, and no test on Lanning's body was reported either. She was charged in all three states, but those cases never came to trial, so those deaths remain confessed, not proven in court.
Her mother's death is attributed to her by the North Carolina charge and by the finding of poison in her body reported in early December 1954. She denied it to the end of the reported record, and it was never tried.
The other deaths are suspected or attributed only. They include the grandson exhumed at Jacksonville, the two children of her first marriage, her sisters Dovie and Sula, and a newborn granddaughter. The reports give no test result on any of them, and no charge. Counts of her victims have varied from the start. The Tulsa County attorney spoke of at least 10 relatives besides the husbands; a March 1955 wire report said she was suspected of killing nine relatives; and the Encyclopedia of Alabama says officials have speculated that the total may have been as high as 12.
Arrest year. The Encyclopedia of Alabama says she was arrested in 1955. The contemporary wire reports place the arrest in Tulsa in late November 1954.
Insanity. The encyclopedia says that a judge declared her insane, sparing her the electric chair. The contemporary record is different. Psychiatrists at Eastern State Hospital found her insane in March 1955, but a District Court jury found her legally sane in May 1955, she then pleaded guilty, and the judge chose a life sentence over death. She was never found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Lanning's death. The encyclopedia gives 1950; the 1954 wire reports give 1952. The reports also call him both Harley and Arlie.
Harrelson's marriage. The encyclopedia says she married Frank Harrelson in 1929 and that the marriage lasted 16 years; his brother Ernest told Alabama authorities in 1954 that the wedding was in 1945.
Her mother's death. The encyclopedia says her mother moved in with her and Morton in January 1953 and died within days; the county attorney said in 1954 that her mother died the day before she left to marry Morton, and a December 1954 report placed the death at Lexington, North Carolina.
Samuel Doss. His death is given as October 6 in the first November 1954 reports and as October 10 in all later ones. His age is given as 58 in 1954 and 59 in 1955. Their marriage is dated to June 1953 by the encyclopedia and to about five months before his death by a December 1954 report.
The grandson. His name appears as Robert Lee Higgins and Richard Lee Higgins, and his age as two or two and a half.
Her sisters' deaths. Dovie Weaver's is given as 1950 or 1951; Sula's as 1952 or 1953, with the surname spelled Barttee or Bartlett.
Her mother's name is spelled Louisa Holder Hazle (encyclopedia), Louisa Holden Hazle and Louise H. Hazel (wire reports).
The romance magazine she is said to have kept in exchange for confessing is reported by the encyclopedia but does not appear in the 1954 wire reports.
1905: Nancy Hazle is born at Blue Mountain, Calhoun County, Alabama.
Childhood: at seven, she hits her head when a train slows suddenly, an injury she later blamed for her headaches and her crimes.
1921: at 16, working at the Linen Thread Company in Anniston, she meets and marries Charley Braggs.
1927: two of their four children die suddenly after breakfast; the deaths are attributed to food poisoning.
1928 or 1929: she and Braggs divorce.
1929: she marries Frank Harrelson of Jacksonville, Alabama (his brother later said 1945).
1945: a young grandson dies two months before Harrelson.
September 15, 1945: Frank Harrelson dies; the death is put down to food poisoning or another illness.
1950 or 1951: her sister Dovie Weaver dies.
1952 (1950 in the encyclopedia): Arlie Lanning dies in Lexington, North Carolina; the death is attributed to a heart condition.
1952: she marries Richard L. Morton Sr. in Emporia, Kansas.
1953: her mother, Louisa Hazle, dies.
May 18, 1953: Richard Morton dies in Emporia; the death is believed at the time to be from a heart ailment.
1952 or 1953: her sister Sula dies.
June 1953 (Encyclopedia of Alabama; a December 1954 report says five months before his death): she marries Samuel Doss of Tulsa.
October 6 or 10, 1954: Samuel Doss dies; an autopsy by Dr. Leo Lowbeer, which she allowed, leads to a finding of poison.
Late November 1954: she is arrested in Tulsa and questioned for nearly 24 hours.
Late November 1954 (AP reports dated November 27 and 29): she admits poisoning Samuel Doss, then signs statements admitting the poisoning of four husbands.
Reported December 1, 1954: Judge Lloyd H. McGuire enters a plea of not guilty on her behalf.
Early December 1954 (reported December 4): she is told poison was found in her mother's body and denies killing her.
December 1954: Harrelson, the grandson and Dovie Weaver are exhumed at Jacksonville.
December 10, 1954: the Calhoun County sheriff reports arsenic in Harrelson's body.
Reported December 11, 1954: Ernest Harrelson's first-degree murder warrant is filed in Calhoun County; charges are by then filed in North Carolina and Kansas.
December 15, 1954: preliminary hearing; she is held for District Court and admitted to Eastern State Hospital at Vinita.
March 1955: the hospital's psychiatrists declare her insane and recommend recommitment.
Early May 1955: a District Court jury takes 15 minutes to find her legally sane.
May 1955: she pleads guilty to the murder of Samuel Doss.
June 2, 1955: Judge Elmer Adams sentences her to life imprisonment.
After about two years in prison: she says she wishes she had been executed.
June 2, 1965: she dies of leukemia while serving her sentence, and is buried at Oak Hill Memorial Park, McAlester.