Nancy Hazel was born in Blue Mountain, Alabama, on November 4, 1905, to a father who kept his daughters at work on the farm and away from anyone who might marry them. She suffered a head injury as a child on a train and blamed her later headaches and blackouts on it. What she had instead of a social life were her mother's romance magazines, and the lonely hearts columns in them stayed with her for the rest of her life.
She married five times. Charley Braggs left her in 1928 after two of their four daughters died suddenly of what was recorded as food poisoning. Frank Harrelson, an alcoholic she married in 1929, died in 1945. Arlie Lanning died in 1950 and his house burned down, insured. Richard Morton died in 1953. Samuel Doss, a Tulsa highway inspector she met through a lonely hearts club, died in October 1954. In between she buried her mother, two of her sisters, a grandson, and Lanning's mother. The American press called her the Giggling Grandma, after her manner in custody.
What ended it was a doctor's stubbornness. Samuel Doss had been in hospital with what looked like a digestive infection, recovered, went home, and died the same night. His physician insisted on an autopsy, which found enough arsenic to kill a score of men. She was arrested in Tulsa and, over several days of questioning, admitted to four husbands and, by most accounts, eleven deaths in all, laughing steadily through it and complaining about the quality of the men she had married. Asked why, she said she had been looking for the perfect mate, and that she read a great many romance stories.
The press named her the Giggling Granny and the Jolly Black Widow. She pleaded guilty in May 1955 to the murder of Samuel Doss. The prosecutor did not seek the death penalty, and said plainly that Oklahoma was not going to execute a woman. She was sentenced to life at the state penitentiary at McAlester, where she worked in the laundry and asked to be let into the kitchen, and was refused.
She died of leukaemia in the prison hospital on June 2, 1965. Only the Doss killing was ever proved in court, and the total is her own figure.