Samuel Doss had already been in the hospital once that fall. He was admitted in Tulsa in September 1954 with what looked like the flu, and the doctors diagnosed a severe infection of the digestive tract. He spent weeks recovering and was sent home on October 5. On the evening of October 12 he was dead. His physician did not believe it and did not want to sign anything. He asked the widow's permission for an autopsy, and, by one account, got it by telling her that finding out what had killed her husband might save other lives. The autopsy found arsenic in Doss's body in quantities the papers would describe as enough to kill twenty men. The doctor went to the police.
The widow was forty-eight, plump, cheerful and talkative, and she was about to become the most famous prisoner in Oklahoma. Samuel Luther Doss was a Nazarene minister who had lost his family to a tornado in Carroll County, Arkansas, and she had met him through lonely-hearts correspondence; the records disagree on whether they married in June 1953 or on July 13, 1954. He was her fifth husband. Three of the others were dead too. She was arrested on the night of Friday, November 26, 1954. Under questioning by Tulsa detectives she denied everything, and then, reportedly in exchange for being allowed to keep a romance magazine, she began to talk. She laughed as she did it. On Sunday night she signed formal statements in the county attorney's office, smoking a cigarette as she described how she had put liquid rat poison into the food and drink of husbands in four states, and after each one, the county attorney said, she declared, "My conscience is clear." She broke off long enough to sit for a filmed interview with television cameramen, and insisted on making herself presentable first. On November 29 the front page of the Tulsa World told readers she had confessed to poisoning four of her husbands. The papers had names for her within days: the Giggling Granny, the Jolly Black Widow, the Lonely Hearts Killer, Lady Bluebeard, and, in one paper, the self-made widow.
She had been born Nancy Hazle, or Hazel, on November 4, 1905, in Blue Mountain, Alabama, a small place between Anniston and Jacksonville that is now part of Anniston. Her mother was Louisa Holder Hazle, called Lou; her father, Jim, had worked on the railroad before taking up the farm, and one Alabama history notes that he may not have been her biological father. Accounts give her either four siblings or five. Both she and her mother hated him. He was controlling and abusive, kept the children out of school for long stretches to work the farm, and forbade his daughters makeup, good clothes and dances, on the stated ground that it would keep men away from them. She said later that she had been raped more than once as a girl, and that her father refused to believe it. When she was seven, she said, a train she was riding stopped short and she hit her head on the metal frame of the seat in front of her, and for the rest of her life she blamed that blow for her headaches, her blackouts, her depression and, in the end, for everything she did. What she loved as a girl were her mother's romance magazines, and in them, most of all, the lonely-hearts columns.
At sixteen, in 1921, she went to work at the Linen Thread Company in Anniston, met a co-worker named Charley Braggs and, with her father's approval, married him after about four months. Braggs was the only son of an unmarried mother who went on living with him after the wedding and, as Nannie put it later, took over her life. "She would not let my own mother stay all night," she wrote. They had four daughters between 1923 and 1927. She began drinking and became a heavy smoker, each of them suspected the other of infidelity, with reason, and Braggs would disappear for days. In 1927 the two middle girls died after eating breakfast, and the deaths were put down to food poisoning. Braggs took the oldest, Melvina, and left, leaving the newborn, Florine, behind. His mother died not long afterward, and Nannie went to work in a cotton mill to support herself and the baby. In the summer of 1928 Braggs brought Melvina back, along with a divorced woman and her child, and he and Nannie divorced. He always said he had left because he was afraid of her. He was the only one of her husbands who lived.
Her second husband, Robert Franklin Harrelson of Jacksonville, answered a lonely-hearts notice; he wrote her poetry. They married in 1929, and she soon learned that he drank heavily and had a record for assault. The marriage lasted sixteen years. In that time Melvina had a son, Robert Lee Haynes, in 1943, and then a second baby, a boy by one account and a girl by another, who died soon after birth. Melvina, exhausted from labor and groggy from ether, thought she had seen her mother push a hatpin into the baby's head, and when she asked her husband and her sister, they told her that Nannie had said the baby was dead and that they had noticed a pin in her hand. The doctors could not explain the death. Melvina's marriage came apart, and she began seeing a soldier her mother disapproved of. On July 7, 1945, while Melvina was away visiting her father after a bad fight with her mother, Robert, two years old, died in his grandmother's care of asphyxia from causes nobody could name. Two months later Nannie collected on a five-hundred-dollar life insurance policy she had taken out on him.
That same year, by her own account, Harrelson came home drunk from a night out with friends back from the war and forced himself on her. The next day she poured rat poison into one of the jars of corn whiskey he kept hidden. In her 1954 statement she said simply that he beat her, and that she poured the poison into his jug of corn whiskey. He died on September 15, 1945, and the death was put down to food poisoning or something like it. She chose the inscription for his gravestone in Alabama: "God be with you till we meet again."
Arlie Jackson Lanning of Lexington, North Carolina, was another lonely-hearts correspondent. She married him in 1946, three days after they met. He drank, and he ran around, and in that marriage she was the one who disappeared for months at a time, though when she was home the town saw a model wife, and it stood by her at his funeral. She told investigators in 1954 that she had been jealous because he was popular with women, and that she had put the poison in his food on a Tuesday or a Wednesday and he had died the following Friday. He was fifty-two when he died in Lexington on February 16, 1952. The death certificate said heart failure; he was a heavy drinker, there was influenza in town, and no autopsy was done. Soon after, the house, which had been left to Lanning's sister, burned down, and the insurance money went to Nannie, who banked it at once. Lanning's mother died in her sleep. Nannie moved on to her sister Dovie's home, where Dovie, who was bedridden, died; most accounts put that death soon after Lanning's, but an Associated Press report from Lexington in December 1954 gave the date as June 30, 1953, and investigators were also asking that month about another sister, Sula Bartlett, who had died on August 14, 1953.
Lanning had been buried in the cemetery of Mount Carmel United Methodist Church near Thomasville, under a stone whose inscription she had chosen: "We will meet again." On the afternoon of November 29, 1954, under a court order, gravediggers opened the grave while officers, a reporter from the High Point Enterprise and a few onlookers watched. The lid of the casket had decayed and nearly caved in when the men tried to lift it, so surgical instruments were rushed out from Lexington, and the coroner, Dr. Plummer, climbed down into the grave and removed the organs there, with bystanders leaning over the edge. The tests showed a heavy dose of arsenic.
She met Richard Lewis Morton, a native of Okmulgee, Oklahoma, whom the Associated Press described as being of Indian descent, through a dating service called the Diamond Circle Club and married him in Emporia, Kansas, in 1952. He did not drink, but he spent long stretches in town with other women. In January 1953, after Nannie's father died, her mother came to live with them. Within days Louisa Hazle had severe stomach pains, and she died. That is the usual account; the contemporary record is less settled. An Associated Press report in December 1954 said her mother had died while visiting her, and a Kansas paper that week placed the death at Lexington, North Carolina, where she was said to be buried near Arlie Lanning. Her body was exhumed that week and found to contain arsenic, and North Carolina issued a murder warrant for her death as well as Lanning's. Nannie denied it. Three months later, on May 19, 1953, Morton, sixty-four, died after drinking from a thermos of coffee his wife had laced with arsenic. "I lost my head and blew up when I found out he had been running around with another woman and had bought some rings," she was quoted as saying. Then she got on a bus to Tulsa to meet Samuel Doss.
Doss did not drink and did not hit her. He disapproved of the romance stories she loved and of any magazine or television program that was not educational. She left him for a while in protest and came back after he put her name on his bank account and took out two life insurance policies with her as beneficiary. She told the county attorney she had poisoned him twice "because he was so mean to me." The first time she poured a lot of poison over his prunes. "He sure did like prunes," she said. "I fixed a whole box and he ate them all." Other accounts describe it as a prune cake; either way it put him in the hospital for twenty-three days instead of the grave. The day after he came home she stirred a tablespoon of poison into a cup of his coffee. The dates are not consistent: when the county attorney filed the murder charge in November 1954 he gave Doss's age as fifty-eight and the date of death as October 6, while the later accounts, including the hospital dates, put it on October 12.
The confession had a boundary. She admitted to her husbands, and by some accounts to her mother, her sister, her grandson Robert and Lanning's mother as well, but she maintained that she had never harmed her own blood kin, and she never admitted her daughters or Melvina's baby. Investigators in several states came to believe otherwise. The count usually given is eleven deaths: four husbands, her mother, her sister Dovie, Lanning's mother, her grandson Robert, Melvina's second baby, and two of her own daughters. The Encyclopedia of Alabama puts the likely number as high as twelve. Exhumations confirmed arsenic or rat poison in several bodies. Two investigators, Ray Page of Tulsa and Wayne Owens of Emporia, followed the trail from North Carolina into Alabama in December 1954, where Page meant to exhume Harrelson and the little boy, called Robert Lee Higgins in that report and Robert Lee Haynes elsewhere, whose stone read, in words she had picked, "Darling how we miss thee." North Carolina, Kansas and Alabama all brought charges of their own, but she was never tried outside Oklahoma, and Oklahoma charged her only with the murder of Samuel Doss.
Her public defenders did not contest the facts so much as her mind. They told the court she was mentally incompetent and tried to have her committed, and in December 1954 a judge ordered her placed under psychiatric examination; she spent about ninety days under observation at Eastern State Hospital in Vinita before the case went forward.
The prosecutor was J. Howard Edmondson, who would later be elected governor. She sold Life magazine the rights to her story to help pay for her defense. On May 17, 1955, she pleaded guilty. The question left was whether Oklahoma would make her the first woman it had ever sentenced to death. Judge Elmer Adams would not; it would be, he said, a poor precedent, and the state did not press for it because she was a woman. On June 2, 1955, he sentenced her to life in prison, and she appeared delighted.
At the state penitentiary in McAlester she was, by the staff's account, a model inmate. She kept joking about her case. She complained to a visiting reporter that the only work they would give her was in the laundry, and that her offers to help in the kitchen had been politely declined. After a couple of years she said she wished they had executed her instead.
The Doss case changed one thing in Oklahoma law. The legislature passed a statute requiring examination by a medical examiner of anyone who died without a physician in attendance, the kind of death, at home and after a meal, that had been certified as natural so many times across four states. Nannie Doss died of leukemia in the hospital ward of the penitentiary on June 2, 1965, ten years to the day after her sentencing, and is buried in Oak Hill Memorial Park in McAlester.