Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - “The Giggling Granny” Pt. 2 - Nannie Doss

Episode Date: August 28, 2017

Behind the cheerful demeanor of a sweet southern grandma, lurked a vicious killer. Nannie Doss poisoned her husbands, killed her children, and even went after her own mother. This week, Greg explores Nannie’s use of the lonely hearts columns to find victims, and Vanessa examines how social conformity and societal norms helped this killer fly under the radar for so long. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And now you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash killers. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash killers. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed and there was a full of blood. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 is out now with new episodes every Thursday.

Listen on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Due to the graphic nature of this killer's crimes, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes dramatizations and discussions of murder and assault that some may find offensive. We advise extreme caution for children under 13. I want you to picture the best pie you've ever eaten. Think about it carefully. The golden, flaky crust, the warm and gooey center. Maybe it was a chilled delight on a warm summer day.

Or maybe you had it served warm with a big dollop of ice cream, slowly melting next to it on the plate. Remember how it smelled. The sweet sugary scent that filled the kitchen and lingered in the air. Imagine a generous helping of that same pie being served you by someone you trust. Maybe it's a parent, grandparent, or a spouse. Maybe a longtime friend. This person smiles as they serve you the pie. Oh, and it looks amazing.

It seems like a pretty sweet scene, right? Makes you feel right at home? There's nothing in this scenario that should provoke any suspicion. It's just a slice of pie. The only damage it could do is to your waistline. But now, imagine in that scenario, the person you trusted has been lying to you, and the pie is absolutely deadly. Realizing the pie was poisoned hurts, but not as bad as the realization that you'd been betrayed by someone you thought you knew, someone you loved. What you just imagined was the last moments of Nanny Doss's victims.

By the late 1940s, she had already murdered five people in her home state of Alabama, two children and two grandchildren, and her second husband, Frank Harrelson. For most of these murders, Nanny had kept the same modus operandi, arsenic, hidden in a nice home-cooked meal. Her prune pie was a particular favorite by her husbands, which made it the perfect delivery system for a lethal dose of poison. All of these deaths had been ruled as natural common, and nobody suspected that Nanny was anything other than an unfortunate widow.

But as Nanny widened her net, the body count was about to grow very quickly. While it had taken her 18 years to kill her first five victims, the next six would come in very quick succession. In this episode, you learned how Nanny Doss evaded capture for 27 years. What mistake finally led to her getting caught? And about that last prune pie she ever baked. Stay tuned. Hi, I'm Greg Polson, and this is serial killers, a podcast diving into the minds and motives

of the world's most notorious serial killers. This week, we will conclude our investigation into the life and crimes of Nanny Doss, the grandmotherly black widow who killed multiple husbands and family members over 30 years as easily as she would poison a rat. If you want to listen to any episodes of serial killers, You can find them all on your favorite podcast directories or in our website, parcast.com.

Spelled p-a-r-c-a-s-t-t-com. Don't forget to subscribe because a new episode comes out every Monday. Now I'm here with my criminal psychology-loving co-host, Vanessa Richardson. Hi, Vanessa. Hi, Greg. Thanks. It's important to note that Vanessa is not a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, but like me, she's fascinated by the psychology of serial killers, and has done a lot of research to answer our questions for the show.

Thanks, Craig. You're welcome. As we discussed in our last episode, much of Nanny Doss's horrific crimes stemmed from the abuse she suffered throughout her childhood and early adulthood at the hands of her father, her husbands, and at least one of her in-laws. Her apparent total lack of empathy may have also been caused by a head injury she sustained when she was only seven years old. So that covers both the environmental factors that could turn someone into a cold-blooded killer,

as well as possible internal or physiological factors like brain damage. Right. If I've learned anything from my years of studying the psychology of killers, it's that there is no one factor that guarantees someone will grow up to commit the unspeakable. There are plenty of people in the world who grow up with abusive families and later go on to do great things, helping others who may be in need. But there is also a clear link between serial killers and child abuse. A 2005 study from Radford University about the incidence of child. abuse in serial killers reported that 68% of the serial killers studied had been abused at some

point in their childhood, as opposed to the 30% reported in the general population. The study also broke the types of abuse down further into physical, sexual, and psychological abuse and neglect. The percentage of serial killers who had been sexually abused, like Nanny Doss had been, was 23% higher than the general population. Now, this is referring to Nanny's later confession that she had been raised. by several local men while living at her father's farm, correct? That's right. And we also know that Nanny was sexually abused as an adult,

since it was the reason she gave for killing her second husband, Frank Harrelson. Of course, none of this excuses Nanny's brutal acts, especially the poisoning of her own children and grandchildren. However, Nanny's history of sexual abuse does shed light on her underlying psychological motivations. She, like many other serial killers, perpetuated a cycle of abuse. So what you're saying is it's common for people who grow up in violent or neglectful homes to believe that that kind of behavior is normal. It certainly seemed to be the case for Nanny Doss.

The common thread between most of her five eventual husbands was that they were alcoholics, verbally or physically abusive, or womanizers, all traits that Nanny would have found normal if she saw them in her own father growing up. It was just that she had never experienced a more compassionate kind of love, that is, outside of the lonely hearts columns, and romance magazines she obsessed over all her life. Although it's unclear whether she gravitated towards the Lonely Hearts column to feed her own romantic fantasies or scout her next victim.

Hmm, maybe it was a little bit of both. In any case, after poisoning her second husband, Frank in 1945, Nanny skipped town, traveling nearly 400 miles away from her home with Frank in Jacksonville, Alabama, to start fresh. On her journey, she turned once again to the Lonely Hearts pages to find her next bow. For the next few years, Nanny traveled throughout the South, never staying in one location for too long, but always stopping to check the local papers for a glimpse of her ideal mate.

She finally stopped in Lexington, North Carolina, when an ad by a man named Artie Lannning caught her eye. She sent him a letter back, the two met up, and three days later, Nanny was the new Mrs. Lannning. The speed with which Nanny attached herself to another monogamous relationship can tell us a few things about her. First, Nanny wasn't as picky in finding a man as she may have claimed. Despite her insistence that she was looking for true love with a man who would finally treat her right,

Nanny's actions spoke otherwise. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it tells us that she was ready to kill again. After she killed her own grandson Robert in order to collect his insurance money, Nanny's priorities seemed to have shifted. She began to realize that there was financial gain to be had from her murderous impulses. And after three years spent traveling without a husband to support her, Nanny must have felt increasingly desperate for cash. At first, it was enough for her to settle back into married life and rely on her husband to take care of both her emotional and monetary needs. But that would never be enough for Nanny.

Soon, she would see the cracks in the exterior of the Prince Charming she saw in the lonely hearts column. Ardy was just like the others. Although he didn't physically abuse her, he still drank and cheated on her regularly. Nanny began taking longer and longer trips away from home herself, reluctant to play the role of housewife to win alcoholic womanizer yet again. And she started thinking that Artie might be worth more to her dead than alive. Nanny's marriage to Artie lasted about two and a half years, just a fraction of her last marriage of 16 years.

It ended with Artie's death in 1950 of what appeared to be heart failure. After a meal of stewed prunes and coffee fed to him by Nanny, Artie's illness had started with what looked like the flu that had been going around town. He had a fever, vomiting, and stomach pains. But his condition worsened, and Artie died shortly thereafter. Doctors noted Artie's long history of drinking and came to the conclusion that his body was simply too ravaged by alcohol to fight off the virus, and no autopsy was performed. But as he died, Artie seemed to realize the true cause of his sudden illness.

According to Nanny, Artie's last words, were. It must have been the coffee. Still, neither the doctors nor Nanny's Lexington neighbors suspected a thing of the Widow Lannie. After all, how else could Arty have died if his doting wife had been at his bedside the whole time? Of course, if anyone had been able to follow Nanny at the time, they would have seen striking

similarities between Arty's flu symptoms and the illnesses that led to the deaths of Frank Harrelson and two of Nanny's daughters. But since no one in Lexington had any idea of Nanny's shady past, but since no one in Lexington had any idea of Nanny's shady past, they overwhelmingly supported her at her late husband's funeral. And yet, even with husband number three dead, Nanny still wasn't done taking every last bit of money from him that she could. Just a few days after the funeral, Ardy's house burned down, and the insurance money went to his recent widow, Nanny. Had the house survived, it would have gone to Artie's sister instead. Her home with Artie, now destroyed, Nanny went to live with

Artie's mother just a few blocks away in Lexington. Artie's mother was an older, gracious woman, so easily allowing her widow daughter-in-law to stay with her until she got back on her feet. Unfortunately, her generosity was her undoing. Artie's mother died under mysterious circumstances just days after the death of her son, and Nanny left town shortly thereafter. Like most of Nanny's other victims, no foul play was suspected in Arty's mother's death until Nanny confessed to her murder four years later. Since the elder Mrs. Lannning was an elderly woman, unable to fight back against her daughter-in-law, it is most likely Nanny killed her simply because she was a loose end. In that case, Nanny would have poisoned her to make sure no one else could claim the insurance money from the house

or connect her to Arty's death. Even in her confession, Nanny gave no real explanation as to why Mrs. Lanning had to die. As she left with a trail of devastation in her wake and a great deal of extra money in her bank account, Nanny returned to Alabama to live with her bedridden sister, Dovey. Although it's natural to want to be with your family after the death of a loved one, Nanny was no grieving widow. Once again, she was an opportunistic killer. As soon as she heard her sister was dying of cancer, Nanny found the window of plausible deniability she needed to kill again. For Nanny, the benefits of using arsenic to kill her victims were obvious. The symptoms of

stomach pain and vomiting could be pinned on any number of causes, allowing her to shift the narrative in the direction she needed while still seeming like she did everything to help her victims before they died. We'll return to our story in just a moment from the Pardcast Network. And now, back to serial killers. Nanny Doss was fixated on the idea of being a caretaker. In our last episode, we touched on how Nanny's case shows signs of Munchausen by proxy, a disorder in which caretakers deliberately fake or create illnesses in their victims in order to garner sympathy from others. But another factor to note is that Nanny's role as a caretaker may have also been a survival mechanism. Knowingly or unknowingly, Nanny was hiding behind societal norms

in order for her crimes to pass unnoticed for over three decades. In her role as a mother, grandmother, housewife, and caretaker. Nanny's deception relied on the implicit bias of observers that someone in those roles would never harm those under her care. The psychology behind societal norms has a lot to do with group psychology. As humans, we generally want to be accepted by the larger group in order to strengthen our social bonds and keep society functioning as a whole. Humans are social animals, I mean, right?

That's exactly right. This human tendency to conform can sometimes cause us to overlook things we know to be wrong, simply because everyone else goes along with it. We can see this societal conformity in experiments, like the first. famous 1956 Solomon Ash Conformity Experiment. Oh, I've heard of this one. This was the experiment where they brought together a group of what seemed like random individuals to answer a simple question.

But the group was actually made up of one test subject and several other people were told to give the wrong answer to see if the test subject would go along with it. That's right. The group was told to judge the lengths of three lines labeled A, B, and C, and asked to state which one was the same as the comparison line. The test was designed to be obvious, but the group was made to answer in a certain order. Four people working with the experimenters would give the same wrong answer first, and then the test subject would have to decide whether to give the answer that was obviously correct,

or go along with the group. At first, the test subject showed a bit of hesitation, but went along with the group anyway. He didn't believe the facts that were staring him right in the face, because four other people before him seemed to agree on another answer. In fact, 75% of test subjects in Ashes' experiment were swayed by the answers of the rest of the group. So they trusted the group more than they trusted their own intuition? Yes, and there's evidence to suggest that this impulse to follow the herd is a primal one. In a recent study of South African vervet monkeys, researchers looked to establish a local tradition in four monkey populations.

They did this by giving each group two trays of corn, one dyed blue, the other died pink, In two of the groups, the blue corn was made to taste unpleasant to the monkeys, and in the other group, it was the pink corn that was tampered with. Eventually, the first two groups of monkeys learned to avoid the blue corn, while the second two groups avoided the pink. The adults even taught their young about which corn was best for them to eat. With me so far? Okay. A few researchers taught monkeys to avoid certain colors of corn.

Now, why would they do that? Well, the real interesting part is what happened next. After the initial pattern was established, the researchers removed the unpleasant taste from the corn in all groups, so that pink and blue corn would taste exactly the same. Of course, the monkeys didn't know that, and kept on eating the one color of corn that they deemed to be safe. Next came the real experiment. The researchers studied monkeys moving from pink-only groups to blue-only groups and vice versa.

Amazingly, they found that the monkeys who had moved began to adopt the customs of their new group, eating the color of corn they had previously thought to be distasteful or possibly even harmful. Here's Seth Borenstein, science writer for the Associated Press, giving an explanation of the researchers' findings. Nine out of ten monkeys that went from one color to the other instantly changed foods. The scientist said, ah, this shows either that they're just wanting to eat what the locals eat, sort of when in Rome, do as the Romans, or most likely it's the peer pressure. The only one that didn't do it was an alpha male monkey, and they think that he just didn't need to fit in since he was the top of the heap.

Wow. So even monkeys can feel peer pressure to eat something they might find dangerous, just because everyone else around them is doing it. That's what the research seems to show. It's clear that even in humanity's distant cousins, there is a pressure to conform. That might say something about the reason why we feel that pressure so deep down in ourselves. So what does all this say about the people around Nanny Doss? Because it was normal to see a mother or wife as a caretaker, people around Nanny were conditioned to see her as a kind and loving person who only wanted the best for her family.

They could overlook the deaths that seemed to follow her because societal norms told them she wasn't a threat. Plus, there was the additional societal stress over being the first person to accuse this seemingly normal housewife, one who had suffered so many tragedies of anything close to impropriety. So even Nanny's own sister couldn't see that she might be inviting a killer into her home? And even if she did begin to realize what was happening, Dovey was too sick to do anything to stop her sister from poisoning her as well. What an absolutely horrifying situation. Although it's not uncommon to find serial killers who consider themselves mercy killers, that is, someone who only kills people they believe to be suffering in order to put them out of their misery, it's very clear that this was not Nanny's intent. Her use of arsenic only served to make Dovey's death prolonged and painful,

although there's no record to show how long it took for Dovey to finally succumb to the poisoning. It can take weeks for a victim of arsenic poisoning to die if the dosage is small enough. And on top of all that, Nanny had only returned to see her sister in her final days. She hadn't been there to support Dovey at any other time in the last 30 years. We can safely conclude that the prodigal daughter had only returned to collect on her dying, sisters' insurance money. In any case, Dovey didn't last long under Nanny's care, and Nanny went back on the prowl for her next husband. Unable to wait for the happenstance of the perfect lonely hearts ad, Nanny decided to widen her net and sign up for a dating agency. Perhaps she thought that going to

an agency would net her a better caliber of man that she could truly fall in love with, or maybe she realized that the more exclusive agency system would have richer suitors, with more bankable assets that she could inherit after their untimely demise. Whatever the reasoning, Nanny's ploy worked like a charm. In 1952, she netted a man from Kansas named Richard Morton. At first, Richard seemed to be a better prospect than Nanny's last three husbands. Not that it was a very high bar to begin with. That's true.

But the dating agency seemed to have done its job matching Nanny with a respectable suitor. Richard rarely drank, and he treated Nanny well. Compared to the rest, Richard was a real charmer. And the couple was married in Kansas in 1952. So Richard was her next victim? Not exactly. Well, for the first few months, Richard seemed almost too good to be true. In fact, he was such a catch.

Nanny even decided to introduce him to her family. In 1953, Nanny invited her mother, Louisa Hazel, to visit her and her new husband. However, the visit didn't go very well. Perhaps Nanny and Louisa had a falling out, or Louisa didn't care for her new son-in-law. or Nanny simply seized an opportunity to make some quick insurance money. You don't mean... That's right. Only a few days into her visit, Louisa complained of stomach pains,

and her condition quickly worsened. Just like that, Nanny's own mother was dead. But unfortunately, that didn't mean Richard was safe. If he seemed too good to be true compared to Nanny's other husbands, it wasn't without reason. Soon after her mother's death, Nanny found out that Richard was still seeing one of his old girlfriends on the side. Three months after Louisa's death, Richard Morton died much the same way.

The bodies surrounding Nanny were starting to pile up and quickly. Although there was a span of 16 years between the deaths of her first victims, her two daughters and her next victim, her grandson, Robert, by the 1950s, Nanny's murders were grouped much closer together. At the time of Richard's death, Nanny had killed five times in three years. Vanessa, do you think you could speak to what was happening with Nanny here? Certainly. The refractory period between a serial killer's individual murders is a topic that has been of interest to both scientists and mathematicians.

A 2012 study by mathematicians at UCLA investigated the length of time between the 53 murders committed by serial killer Andre Chiquatillo, the butcher of Rostov. A killer who certainly merits his own investigation on this program. In order to draw conclusions about his brain activity just before. for and just after each killing. The scientists hypothesized that Andre's neurons were most excited just before he killed his next victim, which caused a chain reaction of neural excitation that could only be sedated by further killings. This explains why most of Andre's murders happened in clumps, within a very short time frame,

followed by longer intervals where no killing occurred. Basically, when the firing of neurons in Andre's brain reached a certain threshold, he would have found it nearly impossible not to do. to state his murderous urges, but each murder he committed had a sedative effect that brought his bloodlust down to a more manageable level, where he could lay low for a few months. The paper compared this heightened level of neuron firing to an epileptic fit. As soon as brain activity crosses a certain threshold, it creates a domino effect throughout the brain that makes its effects impossible to ignore.

The mathematical model theorized by these scientists was remarkably accurate at the timeline of Andre's actual murders, and it seems to fit Nanny's case as well. That's true. After Nanny committed the first suspected murders in 1927, poisoning her two middle daughters, she didn't kill again until dispatching two of her grandchildren in 1943. That was quickly followed by her second husband, Frank, and another dry spell until the end of the 1940s. The next murder, Artie Lannning, took place five years later, and was followed by Artie's mother, Richard Morton, Dovey, Anne-Louisa, all within a three-year span. The rate of Nanny's murders was increasing exponentially, just as it had with André Chiquitillo.

Each time she killed, she needed more to satisfy her. However, her killing streak was about to come to its end. Nanny's next victim would prove to be her undoing, bringing 30 years of violent crime to its final conclusion. Nanny Doss killed five of her 11 victims between 1950 and 1953, doubling her previous body count in only three short years. Getting away with all those murders must have made Nanny feel like she was invincible. After all, there was no ongoing investigation searching for a serial killer, no unsuspected foul play.

Police had no idea that Nanny existed, much less suspected that the string of tragedies in her wake were all her own doing. In light of this, it's easy to see how she could have gotten cocky. By 1953, Nanny was getting older. She was approaching her 50s, already a grandmother, and had been married four times. By this point, eligible bachelors were getting harder and harder to come by. So it seemed like fate when she met Samuel Doss. Samuel, like Nanny, had recently lost his spouse.

Unlike Nanny, however, Samuel's wife had actually died in a tragic accident. She and nine of their children had perished in a tornado that tore through their home in Arkansas. He had recently moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma to escape his grief. But instead of meeting someone who could help him turn his life back around, his path crossed with nannies. Poor Samuel Doss was about as unlucky as you could get. Nanny used her own husband's recent death to get close to Samuel, strategically omitting the fact that she had been the cause of his death. Grief-stricken Samuel saw a kindred spirit in his life.

Nanny, and the two were married in June of 1953, just months after their original meeting. Samuel was very unlike Nanny's other husbands. He wasn't an alcoholic, abuser, or womanizer. Samuel was instead a Nazarene minister who couldn't stand the foolishness of romance novels. Worse for Nanny was that he kept tight control over their money, giving her very little to spend on alcohol and other frivolous pursuits. Of course, this didn't sit well with Nanny, and she even threatened to leave him if he didn't give her access to his checking account. Hmm, that should have been the first red flag for Samuel that Nanny was in this marriage for something other than true love.

But not only did she manage to convince Samuel to let her into his bank account, she also took out two life insurance policies on him that left her as the sole benefactor. Red flag number two. With her finances now in order, Nanny moved quickly along to the next stage of her now well-practice plan. In September of 1954, she fed Samuel one of her, her special prune pies, and he immediately fell ill. To her dismay, however, Samuel realized his symptoms were bad enough that he went to the hospital, where he eventually recovered. On his

return, Nanny decided she wouldn't make the same mistake of slowly dosing him again and put a much higher dose of arsenic in his morning coffee. This time, Samuel died in mere minutes. Nanny's impatience turned out to be her fatal mistake. Samuel's sudden death after his recovery in the hospital, made doctors suspicious enough to finally perform an autopsy. However, doctors needed consent from the family in order to perform an autopsy. In that case, Samuel's closest family member was Nanny. But she didn't consent to an autopsy, right? I mean, it would prove he'd been poisoned.

Actually, Nanny signed the consent forms in a heartbeat. She seemed all too eager to find out the quote-unquote true cause of her husband's death. Though at first glance, this may seem like an incredibly short-sighted move for Nanny, She had plenty of reason to believe police wouldn't be able to pin anything on her. After all, she had survived this long by hiding in plain sight. She simply followed the path any grieving widow would take. She wanted to get to the bottom of her husband's death and clear her name. She did exactly what was expected of her until the aura of suspicion cleared,

then left town to start again. A risky plan maybe, but it had worked for her in Jacksonville, Lexington, and Jamestown. So what was different about this time? Well, a more thorough investigation, for one, Nanny's ploy had worked before because her methods were subtle, and her motives were unclear to investigators. Also, the longer she stayed in one place, the more time she had to make the impression on friends and neighbors that she wasn't the type of person to murder her husband. But Nanny had only been in Tulsa for about a year, so she wasn't as well known.

And perhaps, more importantly, she had failed to kill Samuel Doss on her first attempt. His first trip to the hospital aroused unavoidable suspicion, and his death, shortly thereafter, only raised more questions about Nanny. Questions she wasn't able to explain away with a smile and a giggle. Mrs. Doss, do you believe there should be an autopsy to determine your husband's cause of death? Of course there should be. It might kill someone else. Whatever the reason for submitting to an interview, this time Nanny's charm wasn't enough to keep detectives from looking closer at her husband. Our story will continue in a moment after a brief message. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's

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news. So the investigators found the poison that Nanny Doss used? Oh, yes, they did. Coroners found enough arsenic in Samuel Doss's system to kill 40 horses. With so much arsenic in a system, foul play was obvious. And fingers quickly pointed to the woman who had served him coffee just before his death. At first, Nanny tried to play innocent. For once, the detectives weren't buying it.

However, when police brought Nanny in for questioning, she wasn't quite what they experienced. She didn't know quite what to make of the widow, Doss. She didn't seem to be grieving, but she also didn't seem like a murderer with a guilty conscience. She laughed, she made jokes, she chatted with the officers as if they were old friends. She seemed perfectly harmless. Every bit the kindly grandmother she portrayed to friends and neighbors, but every time they tried to get a confession out of her, she would dodge the question. After doing some digging into her past, police finally started to see a few

pattern, a trail of bodies following Nanny all throughout the southern United States, Alabama, North Carolina, Kansas, and Oklahoma. When they asked her about Richard Morton, her fourth husband, Nanny claimed she'd never heard of him before. Finally, they were able to catch her in a lie. And you say you've never heard of a man named Richard Morton? No. Well, this marriage certificate we found in Kansas says otherwise. Well, then I guess I wasn't telling the truth. I was married to him.

At this point, investigators had enough evidence to charge her with the murder of Samuel Doss. Once that became clear to Nanny, she agreed to give them a confession, on one condition. They had to return the romance novel they'd confiscated from her when she entered the station. This was a very classic trait of Nannies. She was more focused on the ideal of romance than on empathy for other people. That book was more important to her than her own late husband had been. Yes. After Nanny's book was returned to her, she confessed to everything. Not just the murder of Samuel Doss that the detectives expected, but to four of her husbands, her mother, her sister, her grandson, and mother-in-law.

She even confessed to being in correspondence with a potential sixth husband that she would have met up with as soon as Samuel Doss was dispatched. Whoever that man was, I'm sure he realized soon how close he had come to meeting his own demise. Investigators were initially shocked by revelations, but when several of the bodies were exhumed, arsenic was found in each of their systems. Once they realized Nanny had been telling the truth, her case exploded in popularity. People were shocked to hear that the woman newspapers called The Giggling Granny could have carried out so many cold-blooded murders without authorities suspecting a thing. Not only were readers shocked that Nanny could have gotten away with her crimes for over three decades, they were horrified by her complaint. complete lack of empathy. Not only did she confess to killing innocent members of her own family, she laughed while she did it. What the giggling nanny did while in the interrogation room was an

interesting thing for the press to pick up on. Laughter is overwhelmingly a social action. We laugh at jokes other people make. We laugh when being tickled by a friend. We might laugh nervously during an awkward conversation, but we're unlikely to laugh when we're alone. A study published in a 2004 article in current directions in psychological science found that people are 30 times more likely to laugh in social situations than when alone. Laughter is a signal we sent to others, a signal of camaraderie, of agreement and of being at ease. So when laughter seems inappropriate, as it did in Nanny's case, it can be very jarring to the outside observer. Maybe that's what fascinates and terrifies us about Nanny the most. Her laughter in the face of her own atrocities and

certain capture. She didn't seem to be concerned with what she had done or what was coming next, a lifetime in prison, or even the electric chair. I might be able to shed some light on her reasoning. It's true that by the time she confessed to police, that it was clear to everyone involved, she would never be a free woman again. However, Nanny may have actually wanted to be captured in order to die by the electric chair. During an interview she gave at the Sarasota Herald Tribune in 1957, two years after she'd been sentenced to life in prison, she admitted to losing the will to live. Time passes slowly here at the prison. Behind my smile is a heavy heart. I've always made people think I was happy even though I wasn't. My daughter is ill in North Carolina and that worries me. I should

be at her side nursing her back to health. I've just lost my desire to live. You know, while I was in here, I had two heart attacks. Mild ones, you know, nothing that could keep me down. Maybe the Lord will take me soon. Is there anything that you do look forward to while in prison, Mrs. Doss? I attend church here in prison every Sunday. My last husband was a minister, you know. And I work in the prison laundry.

It's the only place they'll have me. When they get short in the kitchen, I always offer to help out, but they have never let me work there. Perhaps Nanny intended to confess to her crimes in gruesome detail in order to force the judge in her case to sentence her to death. However, her plan backfired, as her fits of giggling and her apparent lack of understanding of the gravity of her situation caused the judge to doubt her mental faculties. Not wanting to set a poor precedent by executing a woman, much less one whose abnormal psychology may have been caused by brain. damage in her youth, the judge spared her the chair and sentenced her to life in prison instead.

Vanessa, what do you think? Is there a psychological reason you know of that would cause someone to prefer death row to living out their life in prison? I can think of at least one phenomenon that might support your theory. The term suicide by proxy refers to an incident in which a suicidal individual causes his or her death to be carried out by another person. Usually this is because the individual cannot, for whatever reason, bring themselves to commit suicide unassisted. There's certainly reason to believe that this may have been the case with Nanny Doss. If, in the end, she had felt enough remorse over her crimes to become suicidal, she could have easily poisoned herself with the same arsenic she gave her victims.

But having seen their suffering up close for so many years, she may have been afraid to take the same painful avenue of death. Instead, she may have believed the electric chair to be a less gruesome option and formulated a plan to let the law organize her suicide for her. But cases of suicide by proxy are almost impossible to confirm without a suicide note or any other form of admission from the suicidal individual themselves. All we have to go on are the few interviews Nanny gave during her life sentence. And by then, her own failing health in prison may have made her rethink her own mortality.

Still, even when talking about her own diminished outlook on life, Nanny managed to throw in a joke or two about working in the prison kitchens. what do you make of that? Well, in her own words, Nanny used her persona as a happy housewife and loving mother to mask not only her greed and lust for killing, but also her own deep-seated insecurities. Her constant search for the so-called perfect man, an obsession with the trappings of romance, conflict with the images we get of her multiple husbands. None of them were close to the kind of lofty suitors she read about in her lonely hearts columns.

Most were alcoholics, cheaters, or abusers, oftentimes all three. The disparity between Nanny's dreams and her reality shows a lack of self-worth. Instead of striving for better men, she played the part of a happy homemaker until the reality of her situation was impossible to ignore. Much of Nanny's life was spent going through the motions

of true happiness, faking an exterior that would fool both the neighbors and herself into believing the lie. But instead of striving for better, Nanny simply killed when reality didn't live up to her impossible, expectations. But her husbands weren't the problem. She was. All the jokes, all the giggling, all of the curated sense of domesticity was a fiction created by Nanny to mask her own insecurities

and crueler tendencies. It's simply tragic that so many people died because of one woman's poor self-image, 11 people in all. And most via the arsenic Nanny slipped in their food. However, she was only officially prosecuted for Samuel Doss's death. Although it was still enough to put away for life, in the end, Nanny Doss spent more time active as a serial killer than she did in prison. In 1965, Nanny Doss died of leukemia in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary Hospital Ward on the 10th anniversary of her incarceration. She was 59 years old.

Interestingly, arsenic exposure is known to cause cancer in humans. Although we have no way of knowing whether Nanny's many years of handling the poison led to her death or not, But it would be a dose of karmic revenge if her murder weapon of choice eventually caused her own demise. One last dose of revenge from beyond the grave. Just as bitter as one of Nanny Doss's special prune pies. Thank you for joining us for a second week of investigation into Nanny Doss, the Giggling Granny. Don't forget to subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or any other podcast directory. Or through our website, parkast.com, spelled...

P-A-R-C-A-R-C-A-S-T-T-com. A new episode of Serial Killers comes out every Monday. Please let us know what you think and join the conversation on our Parcast Facebook page. You can tweet us at Parkast Network. That's P-A-R-C-A-S-T-N-Work. As always, we thank you for listening. Have a killer week. Serial Killers was created by Max Cutler and developed by Ron Cutler.

It is a production of Cutler media and is part of the Parcast Network. It is produced by Max and Ron Cutler. Sound Design by Ron Shapiro with production assistance by Joel Stein and Maggie Admeyer. Serial Killers is written by Jordan Lyric and stars Greg Poulson and Vanessa Richardson. The amazing cast of voice actors includes, by alphabetical order, Janice Leibart and Steve Pinto. Want to hear something spooky. Some monster, it reminded me of Bigfoot. Monsters Among Us is a weekly podcast featuring true stories of the paranormal.

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A beloved 75-year-old man washing up getting ready for bed is brutally beaten and killed. Despite an exhaustive investigation, the killer avoids arrest and then strikes again. I'm Global News crime reporter Nancy Hicks. You might listen to a lot of true crime podcasts this year, but they're not crime beat. Search for and follow the award-winning podcast Crime Beat on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you find your favorite podcasts.