Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Giggling Granny serial killer

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

Picture a serial killer in your mind’s eye. What do you see? More often than not it will be a man.Statistically that’s accurate, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Whilst it’s perhaps not the most worthy feminist cause to jump behind, the issue of gendered narratives is a fascinating one - and what better way to look at it than through the lens of serial killers?Kate is joined by Tori Telfer, author of Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History to explore the story of one of America’s most notorious female serial killers: Nannie Doss, aka the Giggling Granny. She killed 11 people, four of which were husbands, leading to her also being known as the Lonely Hearts Killer, due to her supposed search for love.Nannie Doss interview clip courtesy of Pea Hicks. View the full interview and more on their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@peahixProduced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer Charlotte Long. Mixed by Stuart Beckwith. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Be tricksters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here once more to make sure that everything is above board, I'm safe, I'm sensible, and sane, because this is your fair do's warning. Fair do's, this podcast contains adulty themes spoken to adults by other adults about adulty subjects,

and you should be an adult too. And if you continue to listen after that warning, then you can't even get mad. You can't even get mad if you happen to get upset because tough tits, you were warned. 1950s America, the peak of the cult of the housewife. So if you happen to be in a kitchen in Oklahoma and there was a pot bubbling away on the stove and lovely smells wafting towards you from the oven, you might be forgiven for thinking you were in for a yummy treat.

You might say, what's for dinner, Kate? Well, you don't want any part of what this housewife is cooking up for. you. No, no, no, no, no. Because we are in the kitchen of Nanny Doss, a serial killer who murdered her husband, Samuel, with arsenic-laced prunes, prunes that she later put into a cake. And he wasn't the only husband that she killed. No, no, no, no, no. It's thought that she bumped off four out of her five husbands. Why? What was the reason for this? Well, she later told the police she did it because she was looking for the perfect partner. Huh.

But it can't have been about romance. It just can't because as well as partners, it believed that she killed about 10 people, including her grandson, her daughter, her mother-in-law, and her mother. Known as The Giggling Granny, Nanny Das got her nickname and reputation from a series of interviews that she gave to the police and the press,

where she spoke with a smile on her face and a really disturbing twinkle in her eye. Why are you in the penitentiary now? All the kind, I'm the husband. Which is your last husband? Yes. Did they say you killed any more? Yes.

And your other husband? Which other? Very other. Chilling indeed. Today we are betwixt the sheets to find out about her backstory and how she came to be one of the most notorious serial killers in American history. What do you look for a man?

Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Close your eyes, dear betwixtas, and join me in a thought experiment. Show your eyes, do it right now.

Unless you're driving. Unless you're driving. Don't do it if you're driving. But if it's safe, close your eyes. Okay, now, I want you to imagine a serial killer. Don't get too scared. If you're too scared, open your eyes and just have some sweeties. But, but if you can do this, what do you see in your mind's eye?

What does this figure look like? What are they doing? What are they wearing? I'm going to guess that you're picturing a man, right? And it's no wonder that you would be picturing a man when so many of the most well-known, infamous serial killers are men. Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer. Do we have to go on?

But they're all men, right? So why wouldn't you be thinking of a man? Now, as feminist causes go, I want to be very careful here before suggesting we need more female serial killers. That's a weird cause, and I'm not saying that. But doesn't that just show us there are very, very gendered narratives around how we imagine crime? Hmm.

And the topic of gendered narratives and female serial killers is, fascinating. Today, we are joined by our guest Tori Telfer, author of Lady Killers, Deadly Women Throughout History, to examine all of this through the case of Nanny Dos, aka the Giggling Granny. Print Cakes at the Ready, kids, let's do this. Hello, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Tori Telfer. How are you? Hello, I'm doing well. I'm excited to be here. Not as excited as I am because any hint or sniff of true crime history and I am just all about that. And then I sometimes get a bit embarrassed about how excited I am about true crime. And I'm just like, people actually died, Kate.

This is bad. Do you feel like that? Yes, but you should know you're not alone. There are millions of people who feel the exact same way you and I do. Yes, conflicted but fascinated. You wrote a book about it though. So I think that kind of gets you off the hook as like a proper historian and not just like a rubber-necked gawker at these crimes, which I think that I am.

Professional rubber-necked cocker, maybe. A professional rubber-necker. But it kind of elevates it, doesn't it? I'm fascinated by this, so now I've turned it into a book. So you can't come at me now because I'm a proper academic. I'm assuming it wasn't that that made you want to write your book, which is Lady Killers, Deadly Women Throughout History. What made you want to write that?

Well, I had this sense that no one was really writing about female serial killer. I mean, I don't want to say I'm the first to ever do it. It has been done before, but I wasn't seeing like the encyclopedias of female killers the way there are about men, at least not ones that went really in depth in each story. Often it was like, this hot chick took an axe to her lover, you know, and then we move on to the next one, whereas the male serial killers were getting all this in-depth psychological treatment. And then the stories are just so interesting, despite being horrible. I mean, I don't think I have to justify that part to you.

You seem to also be interested. If we're looking for interesting stories about people who have done narratively huge things, true crime is full of those. You know what I mean? That's the one, isn't it? Yeah. It's so true. When you said there about the female serial killers, like your proper serial killers,

not some cross lover that kills somebody in a rage, then women don't seem to get as much attention as men. And I noticed that this afternoon because I thought, I've heard of Nanny Doss, who we talked about today, I'm going to go and just brush up on my DOS information. And I thought, I'll just sit down and I'll put a documentary on. There'll be a documentary. Not really. Like, she appears in documentaries about Poisoners as like a little bit part. I'll say, how many documentaries is Ted Bundy got or John Wayne Gasey?

Oh, don't even get me started. It's so frustrating. There's still stuff coming out about Ted Bundy. I know. You want to be very careful with that before getting a feminist cause of like, female serial killers matter too, bitch. Yeah, no, I know it is a weird feminist stance because... It's a weird one, isn't it?

It's a weird one. The coverage seems sexist. However, we don't want to say, we need more female serial killer, you know? We need less of all of the types of murder. Yes. And I actually, I'm going to just go right ahead and applaud women for not murdering as much as men do. I'm very proud of us. That's very good.

Gold stars for us. We need to keep on this track as women. We do not need to increase the percentage. But yeah, it is a twisty thing, I get what you're saying. The woman that we're talking about today did not take heed of that particular piece of advice, did she? No. Nanny Doss. Now, the first thing I'll say about her is, for some reason, I thought she was Victorian.

Like, I've heard the name kind of bandying around. Interesting. I think it's because I associate mass poisoning with the Victorians. Well, they had arsenic even in their wallpaper. So, I mean, Victorians were just surrounded by arsenic. Too easy to get hold of. Too easy. But no, she was American.

She was American. And she lived well into the 20th century. Yes, I think of her as quintessentially 1950s Americana, like little string of pearls around her neck, cat-eye glasses, cute little housewife dresses, you know, with a nipped waist, your classic 1950s housewife in certain ways, and then in other ways not. You can see interviews with her on YouTube

because it was obviously in the 20th century and clips of this survive. And she's just this really nice, older lady who looks like a grandma, she's got a real southern drawl, and she's just talking to the interview, and he's going, see you murdered all your husbands? And she's going, yes, sir, I did. That's what they say. That's what they say. God. Yes. Set me the scene then. Who was Nanny Dust? Where did she come from? What's her origin story? To be frank, I wish we knew more, but she was born in 1906, and she was a farm girl.

And the legend is that her parents were very strict, especially her father. Some say abusive, at the very least, kind of a, you will not date any boys until I say so. And she was boy crazy. So there was tension there. The other important thing to know is that probably the most important thing to know is that she had a head injury at the age of seven. You know this, right? The head injury, serial killer pipeline. Explain for those listening.

Well, a lot of serial. killers had some sort of a frontal lobe front of the head injury in childhood. John Wayne Gacy was hit by a swing, tons of others. And of course, having a head injury doesn't mean you're going to be, you know, but I'm not a neuroscientist, but the frontal lobe, you know, controls impulse and things like that. So Nanny Doss was in a train accident at seven. And for the rest of her life, she complained of headaches and a sense that she was sometimes thinking crooked. And the reason and she wore the cute little cat-eye glasses, actually, is because of the headache kind of eye issues she got from this accident.

So we can't ignore that. So there's the accident, there's the strict dad, and then she gets married really young. I think she was 15 when she was married for the first time. Yeah. I mean, remember, this is 1920. So it's not like getting married today at 15, but of course it's still young. Could you imagine if you married the person that you fell in love with her when you were 15? Oh, my gosh.

I'm so glad I did it. So we've got this quite powerful and familiar mix of that she has what seems to be an abuse of childhood, particularly from her father, and there's a head injury. Yeah, sadly, we've seen this story before. So she gets married, she has kids with her first husband, Charlie Braggs, and a couple of her children die very young, and Charlie Braggs was always a little bit suspicious about this. He always kind of had a bad feeling. How are you a little bit suspicious that your partner's,

murdered your children. I know. It's weird. My interpretation is Charlie Braggs is kind of like, well, motherhood giving birth. That's the woman's world. I don't really know. I have some weird feelings. That's my interpretation of his actions because, yeah, how are you a little bit suspicious of this? Or maybe it was the type of thing that in retrospect, he started realizing things were odd. Who was Charlie? Was he a good husband? Was he like attentive to his family? Well, this is the ultimate question because there are two narratives. Nanny had five husbands total. And if you listen to her, they were all abusive drunks and womanizers. And the last one was a real bore. And if you listen to friends and neighbors, they were decent men. So I know we generally like to believe the wife.

However, I will say in this case, the wife definitely poisoned a lot of people more than just husbands. Spoiler alert. So, and Nanny knew that painting her husbands as bad guys made her look more sympathetic. So that's my long-winded way of saying, who's Charlie Braggs? I feel like Nanny wants you to think he was really bad. I don't want to say he was a saint, but I also don't totally trust Nanny. It doesn't seem like any red flags were raised at the time other than whatever Charlie was thinking and later talked about. It wasn't like the whole community was like, child killer.

And Nanny was also, seemed disinterested in being a mother. She was always running off for days or weeks. And I think she was sometimes jaunting off with other men. And eventually, spoiler alert, the marriage did not last. They got divorced. So Charlie survived. Yes, Charlie survived. And the two surviving kids didn't go with Nanny, which is kind of unusual, right?

It's usually the mother. So that says something about Nanny. Can I ask you, what is Nanny shortwave? It's such a weird name. That can't have been a name. Oh, that's... It's for short for Nancy. Oh, right, of course, right.

That's a good question, though. For a minute, my mind went totally blank. It makes it sound more ominous somehow. It's nanny, because that's like a nanny to a child. It's like... So she's not ideal wife material. Kids that have died weirdly and a husband that goes, yeah, I kind of wondered if she was bumping them off,

and then they got divorced. Who is the next victim in this? Her second husband is Frank Harrelson and Nanny says he's a mean abusive drunk. And they were married for 15 years, if you can believe it. Really, that's, I don't know why I'm saying that that's quite a long time. Like I have any concept of how long a serial killer would be married for. But that strikes me as a long time. Well, it is a long time.

Yeah, she put up with him for a long time. And she says that one day he came home drunk and he said, if you don't come to bed with me now, I ain't going to be here next week. and then in Nanny's words, I decided I'd teach him and I did. And so she knew where he kept his secret whiskey stash under the floorboards and she poisoned it. So the next time he snuck away to have a drink, he imbibed the arsenic and he died. So that was her first husband to die. Okay.

Where is Nanny getting arsenic from? Because if I decided to try and get hold of arsenic today, I think that would be quite difficult. I think that would be more than an eBay late-night purchase, right? So like, but even in 1920, how did you get hold of arsenic? It was easy. I actually have a vintage bottle of rat poison. It's empty now from Nanny's era, and she could have used that. You could get it at the pharmacy.

I don't think you would buy a jar of straight arsenic, but you could buy rat poison. Or, you know, it was in a lot of household products. One of my other cereal, my other cereal killers, another lady in my book, use a soap and arsenic mixture to clean and kill. So it was like a household project, but before we knew better, it was kind of been a lot of stuff. So it wouldn't have been suspicious for Nanny to own arsenic.

So she bumps off, I was going to say poor Frank, but did she accuse him of sexual assault? Is that right? Like she decided to do this after he assaulted her. I think that is what that quote is. Did they have any kids? They did not have kids that I know of. I think she stopped having kids after the first husband.

Okay. And was anyone suspicious? about Frank just suddenly. Frank had a grandson who died. So Nanny's step grandson. He died. He had a little grave in the graveyard. And a friend much later told the press that Frank and the friend were walking past this little grave.

And Frank just looked at it and said, I'll be next. So Frank himself was suspicious. Isn't that chilling? Why are all these people like suspect? Oh my God. What I take from that is Frank was pretty sure she killed his grandson. and Frank knew he was next and he was. I mean, I suppose trying to frame that,

that just seems bonkers to me, that you'd be walking around with any kind of suspicion in your head of like, yeah, I think she probably killed my grandchild. Or like, I think she probably murdered the kids, but, you know, we'll see how this goes. But then if you think about domestic abusive relationships, the psychology that goes on between them is actually very powerful. And it's not uncommon for victims of domestic abuse to say,

I think these are going to kill me. I think they're going to kill me. Yes, absolutely. She must have had some kind of power and hold on. them, right? She did. She was charming. She was smart. You know, she wasn't an educated woman. She was just this country girl who got married at 15, but she definitely had power, especially over men, and she knew how to entice and control. You see that in a lot of these female serial killers. You might see a picture of them and think, what's so special about her or whatever?

It was something. There was something. When they were in the room with you, there was some power there. So poor old Frank then, he has actually vocalized, I'll be next. And after he suddenly dropped down dead, did anybody go, oh, hang on? If I know small towns, I would guess people were whispering, but no, there wasn't an inquest. And nanny's also moving around between husbands, which I think is helpful. You don't want to leave all your bodies in the same town. So that was in Alabama. Now she's popping over to North Carolina to marry Harley Lannning, who was also a drinker, according to her.

This is husband number three. she says that when she was away, Harley threw basically an orgy that had to be broken up by the police. So of course he had to die. This story was later undercut by someone who knew about the party and it was just a family visit. The police were like, what's that strange car doing in the driveway and, you know, popped by. But in nanny's telling it was an orgy that the police had to interrupt. So she poisoned a plate of his food. I'll be back with Tori after this show break.

Join me, Dallas Campbell on Patented, a podcast by History Hit, where we bring you the fascinating histories of the world's most impactful inventions. We uncover the exceptional stories behind everyday objects. Snakes and Ladders is really a game about a karmic journey through stages of existence towards liberation. Look back in time to understand technologies of the future. One of the really interesting things about it is that it showed just how hard a, in the real world really is. And we examine unexpected origins. Who or what invented sex?

Yeah, fish. Fish were the ones that invented copulation and made sex intimate for the first time. For the answer to those questions and a whole lot more, subscribe to patented on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Join me for new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. Soon after bumping off Frank, did she do this?

She poisoned Harley Landing in 1952. I think her murders are getting closer together. So she's married to Frank for 15 years and then Harley just for a couple years. She's not going to give every one of these guys 15 years of her time, especially once she realizes how easy it is. How was she mating them, by the way? Her first two husbands seem to know each other, which is funny. The guy she's about to be, husband number four,

she signed up for a male order, lonely hearts club. So sort of early online dating almost. She paid a little bit of money and she would get a list of eligible bachelors, which is a serial killer's dream. Isn't it? Yeah. And she picked one Richard Morton, a Kansas man. Oh, Richard.

Oh, unlucky. Unlucky Richard. He sent a little note back to the Lonely Hearts Club. He said, will you please take our names off your list? We have met and are very happily married. She is a sweet and wonderful woman. I can't help but wonder if Nanny forged that note, though, because it would be something she would do. But yeah, Richard honestly seems harmless.

Nanny said that she thought he was seeing another woman because he would put on a suit sometimes. That's all the proof that I need, quite frankly. If I see a man who's wearing anything more than gross dirty pajamas, I assume a fair. Right? Yeah, absolutely. Kill first, ask questions after. So she marries Richard pretty swiftly. and then bumps them off swiftly again. And has anybody noticed?

Does anybody draw any parallels? Has anybody said, hang on a minute, I knew her back in Alabama or anything at this point? Not yet. At least not that we know about. And think about it, this is pre-internet, no digital footprint. You can't keep track of people like you could now. The people in Richards, Kansas, hometown aren't reading the papers. No.

And even if they were, they probably don't have really great photographs in them, do they? Yeah, exactly. And I don't think these deaths are even. making the papers yet because again no one's thinking that they're poisonings it's just too easy isn't it just upsticks move to another state and just reinvent yourself yeah and that's what nanny's learning she's learning it's so easy she's killing them faster and faster she's on husband number four now she kills him by poisoning his coffee and then she meets her final husband sam dos who she doesn't even bother with a narrative that he was a drunk or a womanizer she's just like he was boring this is a direct quote

from her, he got on my nerves. Poor Sam Doss, he was stingy, he wouldn't let her have a TV, he didn't believe in dancing, he was just a boring guy, and Nanny wanted to flirt and dance and smoke her cigarettes, and so she poisoned his prunes, a big pot of boiled prunes, and he ate the whole pot. Wow, as if prunes couldn't get any worse. I know, it's so depressing. He survived the prunes somehow. he comes back from the hospital and she just immediately poisons his coffee and he dies.

And this is how Nanny gets caught because the doctor who treated Sam was like he was just in the hospital and now he's dead. I think we need an autopsy. Oh, finally. Well done. Somebody. Okay. And weirdly, Nanny agrees to this. And she's like, absolutely because we need to make sure whatever killed him won't kill someone else. She's calling her bluff, isn't she? That's a very cool customer. Yeah, I think she's kind of like, hmm, this is some attention for me. Nanny, I think, saw herself as the star of the show, really. I mean, we all see ourselves as the star of our own show, but Nanny is like, I want the spotlight on me, because I look good. That was her vibe. And so she's like, absolutely, let's do an autopsy. She hangs around for this, because the plan might

have been for like, you know, yeah, there's an autopsy. I've just got a taxi that I need to get into, but like, she hangs around. She doesn't, she hangs around. It is odd. I don't know if she was ready to be caught, if she wanted the attention of an inquest. Maybe she was too confident and she thought, whatever, they'll never pin it to me. I think she knew that an autopsy would turn up poison. In fact, he had enough poison inside him to kill 23 men.

Holy shit. Wow. Okay. So she really thoroughly killed him. I suppose it's like when people are like guilty of sin, they've committed something and then in America, then somebody says, will you take it? a lie detector test. And for some reason, they say yes, and then they fail it. Maybe it's like that. Like, I don't really know what they thought was going to happen there, but maybe they were just

playing for time or something, or hoping. Feeling cocky. All right, okay. So finally, somebody has noticed there's an awful lot of arstick in this fellow's system. Too much, even if he'd licked the wallpaper by accident. It's a lot. Way too much. Do they pin it on her straight away? Does she get brought in for questioning? What happens? Yes, and she gets brought in for an epic night of questioning, and this is where we start to see the nanny Doss as like, Nanny Doss comma, serial killer because she just starts crafting her image right away. She flirts with the police.

She is chain smoking all night. She is giggling. Her nickname is eventually the giggling grandma. Even though she's only 49, by the way. But, you know, she was a grandma that actually. And her eyes are sparkling. I mean, she is in her element. She is in this sweaty little interrogation room

surrounded by handsome young police officers. And you can see photos of her with the homicide captain kind of like grinning. And I think she charmed him, quite frankly. Like, he is smiling in these photos too. Yeah, so she does this epic long interrogation. And finally, she's basically like, you caught me, fellows. I've had five husbands and I've killed four of them. She just straight out confessed.

She confessed to only her husband killings. Because then people start digging figuratively and literally. and realizing, oh, Nanny has had an awful lot of people around her die. The kids. Her mother died when Nanny was there nursing her. All sorts of random relatives. Mother, two sisters, the step-grandson I told you about. So people are like, wait a minute.

This woman is surrounded by death. Now, Nanny easily confessed the husband killings. She is offended at the insinuation that she would have killed a mother figure. And I think it's because she... She knew that her narrative of looking for Mr. Wright and killing all these Mr. Wrongs, that was kind of okay. It was palatable in a way. It went down more smoothly than, oh, I don't know, killing babies or being a matricidal maniac,

killing your own mother, who you were supposed to be nursing. Is that what she said? She said that she did this because she was just trying to find the right husband. Yes. She did say that. And the media ate it up. mean, it made for great headlines. She looked so cute and grandmotherly.

She got headlines like, calm, affable grandmother, tells of poisoning four or five spouses. Tulsa Grandma charmed them, poisoned them. The mix between the violence and the cuteness was always there. It is quite staggering. I would urge anyone to go and look at her being interviewed on YouTube. And this is a lady that if she turned upon your doorstep and you'd never met, before and she had a pie. You'd go, thank you. Like, she's so sweet looking. She's so sweet, and her pie would be good. She was a good baker. In fact, when she was arrested, she was already

seducing husband number six and sent mailing him a cake. And you know that cake was delicious. But it's interesting that there's this kind of like weird moral code almost of like killing the husbands, that's okay, because I can say that they were all mean, drunk and horrible, and I was just in the pursuit of love. But she isn't going to accept this crime. of murdering a mother, murdering children, murdering, well, anyone that hung around long enough, it seems. Yeah, she knew that there was like a line in the sand, even in serial killing, that she wouldn't cross, that she wouldn't admit to having crossed.

And I will say her mother was exhumed, and there was arsenic in her mother's body. So I personally will boldly say, I think she killed her mother. I will accept that argument. So like the press are already losing their heads around this. They would today as well, wouldn't they? It's just so bizarre what's happened. What was the trial like? Well, there wasn't much of a trial, actually.

Really? Sadly for the headlines. What happened was there was a lot of debate if she was going to be considered sane or insane. She was sent to an asylum. The doctors loved her. One of the doctors said, in what I find the most chilling quote in my whole book,

he said something like, if you had small children, you'd be delighted to have her as a babysitter. But he shouldn't have said that knowing what had happened. That's completely. It's bonkers. It's bonkers, yeah. So she charms the doctors, you know, as usual, she's charming everyone. After much back and forth among psychiatrists, she is declared sane, fit to stand trial. She agrees. She chuckles and tells the journalist, oh, I'm as sane as anybody, fit to stand trial,

but then she suddenly pleads guilty. Kind of surprises everyone. So there's no trial. She, like, pleads out. And maybe she was hoping for a lighter sentence by just admitting to her. her final husband's murder, Sam Doss's murder. And then the death penalty is on the table, kind of. But she would have been the first woman in Oklahoma. She's in Oklahoma by then to get the electric chair. And I think the judge didn't want that on his record. So she gets life in prison.

No big splashy trial. And her notoriety lasts for a little bit, but it does fade. She's in prison for a while until she dies. Do we have any sense of what she was like in prison? Did anyone else mysteriously die of? stomach cramps or anything. No, not that we know, but she made jokes about it. Every now and then a journalist would come by and she would say,

I always offer to help out in the kitchen, but they won't let me. She knew her angles. And she got a marriage proposal. She was either in prison or just still in jail during the trial stuff. But yeah, she got at least one marriage proposal. It's weird people do that, isn't it? It's like a proper thing that happens with lots of serial killers is people decide that they love them and want to marry them

and then write the letters in jail. Yeah, I know. It's like, Sir Nanny will kill you if you marry her. Like, the track record is not good. Do we have an idea of what her body count might be then? Somewhere between 5 and 10, I would say. And how long was she doing this for? This is years, isn't it?

It's like decades. This is years. I mean, if we think that she killed some of her children, this is decades. This would be from the 20s to the 50s. I know that CSI wasn't a thing and forensics were still very much in their infancy. But how did that happen?

How did somebody get away with this for the best part of 30 years? Yeah, good question. Female killers kill for longer than male killers on average. This is not the only time that this has happened where you've had a woman who you look back and it's like people were dying around her constantly. But, okay, the science wasn't great. I think people just don't tend to assume

that a wife and mother and grandma is capable of that. So there's a certain amount of blindness that we all have. Hindsight is a great thing, isn't it? Hindsight is a great thing, yeah. So there's that. There's her moving around. And I think that just all came together for the perfect storm. This is difficult because we probably need like a forensic psychologist to dig this one out.

What was the motivation? I mean, she said that I only killed the husband and it was just somehow quicker than a divorce, apparently, and she just poohs after Mr. Wright. But I'm not buying that. What was the motivation? Did she get money for this? Was that part of it? Nothing significant. No, I don't think it was money. I think she killed people who got in her way, irritated her, crossed her in some way, inconvenienced her like children. I think she probably figured out how easy it was and then it was just like, oh, this is an easy out. And if I find myself in a situation I don't want to be in, I know I can do this. I've done it before. Maybe there's a thrill to it too.

She must have got a kick out of it. Was there life insurance policies that she was collecting? Because I know that there's been cases of that. They used to call arsenic inheritance powder, didn't they? That's how common that was. Yeah, I think there was some insurance, but she was never wealthy. You know, these men that she was marrying were humble souls. All right.

So my final question for you to stay on this one. Honestly, we could talk you about us forever and ever, is why do you think the discussion around female serial killers and male serial killers is so markedly different. It has to be more than just men are more violent statistically than women. The narratives are completely different around them.

Well, the methods of killing are often really different. So I think that enables a totally different narrative. Like, if Nanny had been hacking her husbands apart with an axe, I mean, we don't need to go into the gory details of how men like to kill and what they like to do,

but it's just all more bloody and there's often a more sexual component. So I think that colors the narrative a lot. And then just the stereotypes of women as maternal or as like, they often kill in the home or around the home because that's where women tend to be or at least back in the day. So that colors the narrative as opposed to the roving male serial killer who's going about and hunting down his victims. You have like the creeper in the kitchen killing those around her. Tori, you have been so much fun to talk to today. And if people want to know more about you and more

about your work. And more about Nanny. Where can they find you? Well, everything's on Tori Telfor.com. At least it should be. And my book is Lady Killers. And I have another book, Confident Women about con women. So if you want a little less murder and a little more swindle, you can buy that one. Oh, Tori, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been an absolute treat. This was lovely. Thank you. Thank you for listening. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcast. And if you want to want to be, want us to explore a subject, or if you'd just like to say, hello, maybe send us some prune cake.

Please don't do that. But you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast features music from Epidemic Sounds.