POISONING GRANNY DECLARED INSANE: THE DAILY RECORD, MARCH 15, 1955

By March 1955 the Tulsa grandmother who had laughed through her confession looked likely never to face a jury at all. Nannie Doss had been held at the Oklahoma mental hospital since December 15, and its superintendent, Dr. F. M. Adams, had reached his finding. "It is our findings that Mrs. Doss is mentally defective with marked impairment of judgment and will power," he said, and he recommended that she be committed there permanently. The United Press carried the news from Tulsa, and The Daily Record of Dunn, North Carolina, set it on page five under a headline that did not need her name: "Poisoning Granny Declared Insane."

The story treats her as a figure its readers already knew. It calls her "fat and jovial" and "the chubby housewife," a 49-year-old grandmother suspected of killing nine relatives, and says she would probably escape trial for poisoning her four husbands. Oklahoma had charged her with only one of them, Samuel Doss, who died in Tulsa in October 1954. She said she had sprinkled rat poison on his breakfast prunes. Doss, a Nazarene minister she met through lonely-hearts correspondence, was her fifth husband, and three of the others were dead too.

The doctors' word was not the last one. Prosecutor J. Howard Edmondson did not attack the finding of insanity, but he said he would seek a murder trial the next month anyway, while her court-appointed lawyer, Gordon Patton, promised to press at once for a sanity hearing that would cancel it. No trial was needed. On May 17, 1955, Nannie Doss pleaded guilty to the murder of Samuel Doss, and on June 2 Judge Elmer Adams, unwilling to make her the first woman Oklahoma had ever sentenced to death, gave her life in prison. She died there ten years later to the day.

This short wire report, written while doctors still had the last word, called the outcome wrong: the case went forward, Doss pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life. Judge Elmer Adams, who sentenced her, is a different man from the Dr. F. M. Adams quoted here. The paper's version of the poisoning is also too simple. By her own account the poisoned prunes put Doss in the hospital for twenty-three days, and the fatal dose went into a cup of his coffee the day after he came home. The paper counts nine relatives; eleven deaths are usually attributed to her. She confessed to poisoning four husbands and was convicted of one murder, her fifth husband's.

The Daily Record page is dated March 15, 1955. The Library of Congress believes Chronicling America's newspapers of that period are in the public domain, but it cautions that issues this recent may contain some copyrighted third-party material; nothing in this United Press story is marked as separately copyrighted. The scan is the Library's copy, and its citation and rights statement are given in full beneath it.

The page was hard to read. The impression is light and uneven, and many letters, the s and the i above all, are only half printed, so words were enlarged until each one could be read with confidence; in the end none had to be marked illegible. Two slips are kept as set: "She i charged," with the s dropped from "is," and "a sanity haring" for hearing. The headline falls just above the article image and was read from the full-page scan. Hyphens that only break a word at the end of a line are closed up.

Transcription

Transcribed word for word from the page scan. Original spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and typographical errors have been kept exactly as printed. Unreadable words are marked [illegible]. Nothing has been modernised or corrected.

Poisoning Granny

Declared Insane

TULSA, Okla. (UP)—Authorities said today fat and jovial Nannie Doss probably will escape trial for the fatal poisoning of her four husbands.

The 49-year-old grandmother, suspected of killing nine relatives, has been in the Oklahoma mental hospital since Dec. 15, and Dr. F. M. Adams, superintendent, said she should be committed there permanently.

"It is our findings that Mrs. Doss is mentally defective with marked impairment of judgment and will power," Adams said. "It is our recommendation she be recommitted for care and treatment."

Adams' report said the chubby housewife was insane now and insane when she poisoned her latest husband. She i charged in Oklahoma only with murdering her latest husband, Sam Doss, in October. She said she sprinkled rat poison on his breakfast prunes.

Prosecutor J. Howard Edmondson did not attack Adams' ruling of insanity, but said he nevertheless would seek a murder trial next month.

But Gordon Patton, her court-appointed attorney, said he would try immediately to get a sanity haring that would cancel her trial.

Transcriber's notes

- Readability: the hardest of the four. The impression is light and uneven — whole letters, particularly "s" and "i", are grey or half-printed throughout both columns — so several words had to be enlarged before they could be read with confidence. Even so, every word resolved. No [illegible] markers were needed.

- The headline was clipped off the top of the tiles: the tile crop begins at the first line of body type. "Poisoning Granny / Declared Insane" was read from the full-page scan, `doss.fullpage.jpg`, which shows it set in two lines of italic sans-serif spanning both columns 5 and 6. It is given here in the two lines as printed; each line runs the full width of the pair of columns and is not a headline split by the crop.

- Printers' errors kept as printed: "She i charged in Oklahoma" — the "s" of "is" has dropped out of the line, leaving a bare "i", enlarged and confirmed. "a sanity haring that would cancel her trial" — "haring" for "hearing", also enlarged and confirmed.

- "Howard" in "Prosecutor J. Howard Edmondson" is printed with a battered final "d" that has slipped below the line of the other letters. It is still a "d" and is transcribed as "Howard".

- The wire-service credit is the United Press logotype, a condensed joined "UP" inside parentheses rather than ordinary letters, and is transcribed as "(UP)". The dateline carries no date, only "TULSA, Okla."

- Words broken by the column rule are joined without the hyphen where the hyphen is only a line-break hyphen: "perma-/nently", "re-/committed", "Octo-/ber", "neverthe-/less", "in-/sane", "Edmond-/son". "court-appointed" is broken at its own hyphen and the hyphen is kept.

- The article runs from the top of column 5 to the foot of its column, then continues at the top of column 6 and ends there. Nothing is missing between the two columns, and there is no jump line, no continuation beyond the last tile and no photograph.

- The paper gives the number of relatives Nannie Doss was suspected of killing as "nine" and her age as 49. The accepted record puts the number of deaths attributed to her higher. The transcription is left as printed.

- Unrelated matter inside the crop, not transcribed: at the foot of column 5, below a rule, the tail of another item consisting only of a list of names, beginning "ry Mabe, Tommie Wilson, Lewis Tew..." and ending "Ronnie Cox and Allen Pope."; in column 6, below the article, a boxed display advertisement for "BENNETT'S TRADING POST / New and Used / FURNITURE & CLOTHING / East Erwin". The full-page scan shows a "Hatcher & Skinner Funeral Home" advertisement below both, outside the crop.