The Truth About Serial Killer Nannie Doss

The profile for serial killers tends toward white males, but they're not the only ones who can go on a killing spree. There have actually been quite a few female serial killers who murder with an attitude of "anything you can do I can do better." One such murderess was Nannie Doss. According to ThoughtCo, the heartless murderer killed so many people in her own family that she ended up earning herself the nicknames "The Giggling Granny," "The Giggling Nanny," and "The Jolly Black Widow." The old maxim "blood is thicker than water" apparently meant diddly-squat to Nannie Doss, as no one in her family tree seemed to be off limits.

She was born Nancy Hazle in 1905 in Alabama, according to ThoughtCo. Possibly in hopes of escaping an overly strict home life, Doss married her first husband when she was just 16 years old. He was the lucky one. The next four wouldn't make it out alive. By the end of her decades of killings, Doss had killed as many as 11 people, all of them related to her in some way.

Doss' first victims were her very own children. She had four with her first husband, Charley Braggs. When the middle two mysteriously died of "food poisoning," Braggs had his suspicions, so he took their oldest child and hit the road, leaving the youngest with Doss. She went on to remarry four times, and each subsequent husband ended up dead due to "inexplicable" stomach problems.

According to Murderpedia, Doss also killed her grandson Robert when he was just a newborn baby, her sister Dovie, a mother-in-law, and even her own mother. You know what they say — "fool me once...." For doctors back then, it apparently was "fool me four or five times." By the time her fifth husband died of that unexplainable stomach malady, a doctor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, smelled something fishy. He did an autopsy and found that the husband had been poisoned with enough arsenic to kill 20 men. Doss was arrested and ended up confessing to at least 10 of the murders she'd committed over the course of three decades. She died in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary of leukemia in 1965.