Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 494: Nannie Doss - The Worst Babysitter of All Time

Episode Date: June 4, 2022

This week the boys are back and were talking about one of the most prolific black widow killers of the early 20th century, Nannie Doss aka The "Giggling Granny", who in her lifelong pursuit for true romance, left a trail of dead family members in her wake. 

Whoa, whoa, whoa, we gotta get these doggies, they're out of the pan, we gotta get them back in the pan. In the pan, sure, it makes sense. We gotta get them over to the last podcast network, Country Jamboree, June 18th, 2022, at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee. Come and check out all the shows that you love on the last podcast network, we'll be in front of you in our meat space and we cannot wait to entertain you and have a great time. And for those of you that can't come in person, go to MomentHouse.com slash L-P-O-T-L and buy

your live stream ticket, yes, you too can watch us perform our jangly Country Jamboree from the nudity of your couch. Absolutely fantastic, I hope you guys enjoy the show, thank you so much for your support and we are so excited to be at the OG Grand Old Operator. Yeah! Hail yourselves! There's no place to escape to, this is the last talk, on the left, that's when the cannibalism started.

What was that? Hi! I'm trying to get into, I gotta get into the nanny, because I'm looking at pictures of nanny man, and you toss a moomoo on me, put some curlers on me, you take my hair back a little bit, especially back in the day when I used that big curly hair, put some lipstick on me, shave my face, I think there's some nanny in me, you know what I mean, I have nanny's silhouette, but I would have been very attractive to many a man in the 1920s through the 1950s, because again, what we have discovered much like Bel Gunness, who's

maybe of the same criminal DNA as nanny Doss, but obviously we'll unpack that, but man, she had something else, she got a swerve, I don't know what nanny does and what Bel does, is it just because they suck dick? Maybe! I mean, it's like you sit back then, then, it's all about the snapper, yeah. Alright, welcome to the last podcast on the left, everyone, the Seafood episode, oh we're talking about the snapper, and a whole series of other crab fish, well this is just fish, fantastic.

What a fun way to start. No, it's look at me, I'm here, it's like you got a little like sexy old lady right next to you. Yes, I do. Come on, let's say nanny can do, nanny can do. Grandpa. No, come on. Okay, that's fair.

Free my pubic bone bumper, guess it, belly button, it's yo. Just get through the lard here so I can feel it. Alright, everyone, today we're on to nanny Doss. I'm sure it's going to be an interesting tale of a wonderful caretaker. Nanny Doss, a.k.a. the Giggling Granny, was an American serial-killing black widow from the deep south who murdered 11 family members between the 1920s and the 1950s. And you know the sex is good when the giggling. Well, we know that, we don't discuss that to you, but that's one of those that we don't

discuss. Oh, what's that whiteboard over there, one of those topics that we don't discuss, Ben's giggling mother. Yeah, that's how you know, when the room is a giggling, don't come a jiggle. Nanny's M.O. was poison-hidden in food or drink, mostly in short, sharp doses. But sometimes she delivered that poison over agonizing periods of weeks or months. Again, we're just here to remind you, women are extremely dangerous. Ooh, just like us, isn't that a unifying factor?

Yeah, that should bring us together. It really should. Nanny Doss, however, is somewhat unique in the world of black widow killers and that she did not necessarily kill for the money, although she certainly did receive a payday or two from her murder. She straight up said it was a lucky set of circumstances. It worked out for her that she got paid insurance money. That's the scariest part, actually, when they don't kill for money.

They kill for passion and they're like, and then it just happens to be, I also get money. That just goes to show you, you work hard, but not for fame, not for money, and you'll get both. Exactly. Perhaps more disturbingly, Nanny's main motive for killing her husbands, children, grandchildren, and relatives was that she either simply didn't like them anymore, or she felt that they were standing in the way of the sort of life she felt she deserved. Nanny Doss sneakily has one of the highest body counts for a black widow murderer that's

not an angel of death. I feel like that's where the asterisk is, because she's not... Black widows and angels of death are two entirely different categories. But there are a lot of times they wear the same size dress. But Nanny Doss, like, she got something out of it besides all of this. She had an interior motive, and you know what it was? Sweet, sweet romance. Oh, indeed.

I'm just looking for somebody to care about me. I'll care about you. Look, somebody come and give me that. Give me some flowers, you fucking dumpy man. Look at the flowers. I got some right here for you. Can you take care of me? Yep.

They're daisies. I deserve the excellence. There you go. It must have been sad, the final family reunion when she looked around and no one was there. No, she actually loved the silence. We'll actually get to that point. See Nanny Doss had a lifelong obsession with romance literature, and as a consequence, her psychopathic fantasy life was not the sexual power fantasy often seen in male serial

killers. Instead, Nanny's fantasy was emotional. For example, while Jeffrey Dahmer's fantasy of having a zombie sex slave caused him to drill a hole in a dude's head and fill it with acid, and that's amongst other atrocities, of course. That's just because he was creative and he was filled with imagination. That's the problem. There's some imagination in there.

Nanny Doss's fantasy, on the other hand, of living in a romance novel, led her to poison almost a dozen family members when her unrealistic expectations clashed with the dreary reality of her existence. I'm sick of everybody telling me that some male ain't going to come out from the field with super long hair. Right. But it could. Like it was cut from the father's alabaster marble, and I can't believe they tell me that

a man just can't appear from the corner and lay me down correctly, and it turned out he's also a millionaire, and he could also write a song, and he also brought chocolates, and he could tell me, I'm being unreasonable. Well, it's just difficult to find your Prince Charming, isn't it? Give me your suck my dick and eat some prunes, all right? No problem. I'm going to suck your dick and eat some prunes till you death. Okay, I love prunes.

Also, this reminds me of the fantastic John Candy vehicle Delirious, where he was a romance novelist who got thrust into his own story. Oh, yes. But perhaps the most incredible part of the Nanny Doss story is just how easily she got away with murder again and again for over three decades. Good at it. Good at it. I'm the best.

You are the best. Come for me. I'm the go. You might be. This is despite the fact that most of the people closest to her were absolutely convinced that she had, in fact, killed their children, siblings, and fathers again and again and again. It's an incredible set of circumstances where this truly innocent looking woman, and it's

true. If you look at her, look at her face. She's guileless. She has that like wide open expression, big smile, like the exactly, if you picture like kindly grandmother, it is exactly this woman. And leading up to the kindly grandmother form, she actually had a shapely figure. She was obsessed with glamour magazines, so she knew how to like doll herself up. She was always uncharacteristically like done up in front of people.

She's kind of like she dazzled people. And then your whole family, everyone else around her, it's like, you will never fucking believe me, but Nanny is a straight cold fucking murderer. Everybody loves me, you want to put some backgammon? I actually have had so many prunes since I've met you. Oh, yeah. It seems like you're only feeding me prunes. Yeah.

I like them. I like how they eat them. She does look like a janitor who just happens to also be the hospital executioner. Or like, she looks like a prison executioner, but then like, you know, yeah, she's like... She looks like Juana Man 3. There's a little bit of Juana Man 3, but honestly, it is, she's still, she's very charming, but no one would, no one believe, everyone suspects she'll torture you, but you'll also feed you jelly.

Yeah. Yeah. That's her exactly. That's called marriage. Yeah. Now our source today, giggling granny Nanny Doss by Ryan Greene, admittedly ain't the most reliable. And it's obvious that the author took a fair amount of liberties when it came to the particulars

of the story, because he doesn't volunteer where he got a lot of the stories or the details he presents as fact. And overall, Nanny Doss presents a damn good story. And while we'll of course strive to be as factual as possible, the speculative parts of the story will, I think, become fairly obvious as we go through the narrative. I also read a fairly extensive book called Black Widow by Steven White that was all like, it does cooperate quite a bit of this, but it does lean into the romance quite a bit. It leans into like, you know, her sexual escapades.

She got banged out a lot. Good for her. Good for her. Same thing with Bill Gunness. No, necessarily why, but you would think that she wouldn't be killing all these people if she was sexually satisfied. But you know, sometimes it's not just about that. I guess not.

It's not about that at all. All right. It's not with the female serial killer. It's never about sex, at least as far as I can tell, there's always some sort of like it's a much more complicated motive. That's more dangerous. I mean, when I... Technically, B.T.K. kept himself from killing for 10 years by by binding his head and putting

women's panties on. Like he did keep it, all of his horrible impulses at bay for a short period of time, because it was on the whole, it was a whole other power game inside of his own head, but it was about him or whatever. It's like a weird... But Nanny Doss also, like, I mean, hell, she was, she would keep her shit under control for 15, 16 years at a time, and then that switch would just flip, and then all of a sudden it's fucking time for the dirt, put the man down.

Get up! Every day, he goes to the factory for 18 hours. It comes home. It's a long shift. I want him to wrap me a poem. I'm sitting in a goddamn chair. I want him to eat my pie without fucking... And I mean both pies.

I don't want a kind of complaint. I don't want to do it every day, on a regular, forever. So you're going to eat the banana cream pie and then also the blueberry pie you've made. Eileen Warnos, when she blew the small dicks man from Fog Hat, that was quite sexual. That's different. She did not blow him away. She did not kill him. That's true.

No, and it was because of Fog Hat. That's what saved him. I know. Warnos was born in November of 1905 in Blue Mountain, Alabama, the illegitimate child of a woman named Lou, made name unknown, and a soldier from a nearby army base. Lou had been ostracized from her family following Nanny's birth, so she worked odd jobs around Blue Mountain to sport herself and her daughter, and eventually she met and married a poor dirt farmer named James Hazel.

Here's my question. Why start as a dirt farmer? You don't... If everyone technically starts as a dirt farmer, it's just you have to go above dirt farmer. It's just that a lot of people stay at dirt farmer. But why are we farming just dirt? What I don't understand is that if you're a dirt farmer, seems like you just got fired

by the planet Earth, and now you don't have a job anymore because a farm to me says it's got things growing out of the dirt. If you just have dirt, you have a graveyard. Well, if you have dirt, as we saw in Stephenville, Texas, there's a lot of dirt farms there. Yes. Think about storms. What do you need? Sandbags.

What do you think sand is? Dirt. Therefore, aren't dirt farmers the ultimate heroes? Is that what that is? What are you talking about? What that is on Stephenville? No, that's just because there's a drought in Texas and they can't fucking plant anything. It seems like the whole infrastructure, something's going wrong in Texas.

Fantastic. No, I know it. It ain't just Texas, my friend. It's the entire fucking country. All in all, it was one of the strangest odd jobs was. She had to juggle while standing on one foot and she had plates on her head. That's a classic coastal humor right there and it's so nice that even after all these years and the brain surgery, Kissel is just as fast as he ever has been.

Well, that's a fact. The James and Lou were somewhat of a practical match because while single mother Lou certainly wasn't the most exciting of marriage prospects in the early 20th century Alabama, James wasn't a catch either. No. In spite of being dour and miserable, James would turn mean at the slightest sign of stress. Yeah, damn it. These leaves are turning brown.

I don't know. I need more dirt. Just the change of season. It happens every year. Yeah. Now they're yellow. Yeah. They're red.

It's fall. Stay green. Stay green. It's just the change of seasons. Well, James saw his new wife and his new stepdaughter as well as all subsequent children as little more than free labor for his worthless three acre dirt farm. Isn't what families are for? It was.

Back then. Now, after Lou and... Well, it's not... That's the thing. It's more about you use children for that, but you also must love those children. Why do I... I don't love my snow plow. Yeah, man.

I actively hate my vacuum. Oh, every time I look at it, I'm like, I gotta use you because I just made a mess. After Lou and James got married, they had four more children, a boy and three girls, and every birth was carefully timed so the pregnancies wouldn't keep Lou from working the fields during harvest. That's what a father needs to do. He needs to watch his cum and he builds to a level where he's like, he knows one thing against the sun level and he's just like, all right, is she done with the beets yet?

Because these beets ain't gonna beat themselves. I don't even know what they do. I think they're a bush. There's something like that. They're purple. They're the root vegetables. The root vegetables. But you definitely...

Yeah, that's so fucked that I imagine that they're like, you have to wait till the moment she's done. She's like, and the last of the potatoes are harvested. She's like, all right, I'm fucking horny. Well, absolutely. After a good harvest, I think that would be quite arousing. No, he saw the whole thing as it's an arithmetic model. He calculated how many children he needed to balance out their labor input versus their

cost and he came upon five. Yeah. You know, it's always really sexy before sex when they bring out the Excel spreadsheet and then talk about what do we need. He gets to that point too, even more so with one of her husbands. So passion is not exactly the word to describe this relationship. Well, technically, Lou did it maybe experience about 30 seconds of marital bliss when that soldier put that baby inside her.

And this is what you seem to discover a lot of stories about women in the early late 1800s, early 1900s, especially like this, is like they did maybe have like an evening of pleasure. Right. They just turned into a lifetime of drudgery. Right. Yeah. Right. Was it worth it?

No. Was it worth it? No. It sounded like a youth pastor talking to a pregnant girl. Was it worth it? Yeah, it was. You fucking asshole. What if we change the name abortions to deflations?

Listen, because deflating a balloon is still legal. Yeah. We just start calling babies little balloons. All right. And the Nanny Doss hated her stepfather from her earliest memory, partly because he was a terrible person, but mostly because he forced her to raise her siblings starting when Nanny was five years old. Oh my God.

That's too early. Five. Come on. And that was when she wasn't clearing debris from the dirt fields. It's a hard life. Yeah. It doesn't sound fun. Yeah.

When Nanny was allowed to leave the farm and go to school only in the wintertime. Yeah, she walked through the rain and literally it's that story of like, they had to walk like the two to three miles to the school house that was just an abandoned fucking barn in the middle of a field where a woman was like, would slap you if you used your left hand and shit. Let me give you some fun fetishes. Well, when she finally went to school, she and the rest of the Hazel family were all picked on for what author Ryan Green called their quote unquote, odd mannerisms.

Although green doesn't get specific as to what those mannerisms were. What do you think they may have been, Marcus? I don't know. Blinking a lot. Hawking loogies on the floor. Not really thinking about what anyone else wanted when it came to smells. Yeah. And it's a lot of the Molly Shannon.

What's it with the superstar thing when you're sticking your hands up in your armpits to smell him a lot. I remember there was this one kid that we grew up with who was very sweet, right? He was really sweet, but he obviously was like the crowd of elementary school kids decided that he didn't belong, you know, he'd wear his Boy Scout uniform every day and he was really sweet. And then what he would do is he'd stick his two fingers into both nostrils and it's like permanently running nose and he would scoop from his nose like into his mouth.

We all had a kid like that. I had a kid in that. What was that? Do you want to go on? Oh, no, he committed suicide when he was 17 years old. Very sad story. It's brutal. It's horrible.

I figured you were going to say something like that. I knew a kid in middle school who when getting nervous, he would pull out a Ziploc bag. I've told you this before. It was full of his mother's hair and he would rub it all over his body. There's always one of those kids. Yeah, man. But then he makes you feel kind of normal. That's Jack.

Exactly. From Twitter. But from what little schooling Nanny had, she found that reading gave her a much needed escape from the drudgery of her daily life and it wasn't long before she discovered her preferred genre, which actually took quite a bit of effort because at the time there was not a lot of emphasis on little girls getting any form of education and she latched on to reading. She somehow taught herself how to read.

That's great. And then it really did open up her whole world to a world of homicide. Okay. And when she was seven years old, her mother gave her an issue of true romance magazine to keep her quiet on a long train ride. And Nanny felt like she'd found a portable heaven in romance literature that she could use as an escape with every free moment. But on that same train ride, Nanny, like many serial killers, received an injury that was

at least partly responsible for the ease in which she would commit her most heinous acts without conscience for the rest of her life. Just as Nanny was reading, everything suddenly went black and when she awoke, she was suffering a debilitating headache. As it turned out, a storm had knocked down a tree which blocked the train tracks. And when the conductor saw it and slammed on the brakes, Nanny flew forward and bashed her head on the metal bar in front of her. This is delirious.

Yeah. It really is. I was thinking more Rick Moranis and that scene in Spaceballs. Okay. It seems to really be used quite a bit. It's a trope. Yes. Spaceballs.

It ruined Star Wars for me because I watched it first and then I watched Star Wars and I was like, this is not as good as Spaceballs. Yes. Spaceballs is a better film than Star Wars. It is. Yeah, it is. The resulting concussion was so bad that it caused permanent brain damage and for the rest of her life, Nanny would suffer from sudden debilitating headaches that sometimes

lasted for days. More importantly for the purposes of our story though, Nanny also became prone to severe depressions, long dark moods and uncontrollable rages. That was the real thing. It was the black cloud that they said would cover Nanny and that she would often be found in these like besides screaming her head off, but she'd also be found. I mean, obviously she was put to work in the field pretty quickly afterwards, but crying in the field.

Like it's kind of crying in the club. Sure. It's sad to do. It's kind of sad. But he never did really. Yeah. He never once cried in the club. I've cried in the club or two.

I have. I have. But it might be good when it comes to watering the one potato. You've got too much salt content. Make a damn tea is cleaner than this. Oh, you can't have too much salt in a potato. Well, of course, as Henry said, Nanny was put right back to work as soon as her family returned from the trip and suffered from constant blockouts, constant headaches and true to form

James refused to let Lou take Nanny to a doctor. I mean, yeah, because, you know, he doesn't want to listen to what the doctor is going to do. The doctors are making the frogs gay. Yeah. Going to help and maybe help his daughter a little bit suffering from the migraines. No, no. It's going to turn into a frog and then we're a gay frog.

In addition to his callousness, James Hazel was also highly violent and would beat Nanny when she disobeyed. But after the accident, Nanny discovered that she no longer feared violence because she was already in constant pain anyway. Yeah, dude, like that movie soldier. This is a superpower, isn't it? Yep. In a way.

Consequently, the shit rolled downhill and after the accident, Nanny quickly developed a taste for beating her younger siblings when they disobeyed, where before she hadn't been violent towards them at all. Yeah. She started really lording herself. She could basically be like, if I'm going to be mommy, I'm going to start acting like a goddamn mom. Well, mommies can also be very sweet.

Your mommies deliberately put out the punishment, sometimes it gives you the tear. Yeah. Do you have any more prunes? Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I got these extra ones. They're extra slippery for you. I love that.

No, it was a full and complete personality change. You know, before she's sweet, somewhat timid, into reading, afterwards she's a fucking violent rage monster. But when Nanny wasn't in the throes of rage, she dreamed of love using the idealized, simplified stories she read in magazines like True Romance as a template for the life she came to believe that she was owed for all the shit she had to endure. It was amazing. I have read this one story and it was about the German Count.

He comes in and he's a German Count and you're a little milkmaid tied up to a barrel of milk, right? Tied to it. His count comes in and he says stuff like, oh, we have ways of making you come. I go like, oh, that's amazing, oh, wow, maybe next thing you know is Count railing me against his barrel of milk, right? I love this book. Right.

You didn't care about his political affiliation at all, did you? By that point, he was so deep inside of me, he might as well have been me. I was like, I was fucking myself, he was so deep up in my guts, but his imagination, of course, I'm five. You're five years old. Oh, you're five. Well, that's kind of a little lured imagination there for a five-year-old, but okay. Well, James Hazel, on the other hand, wouldn't allow Nanny to go to any social functions,

dances or fairs where Nanny's dreams might be realized, and he wouldn't let Nanny wear anything flattering out of fear that she'd be molested. Because it'd be her fault. Well, that's not true whatsoever, so obviously there's some parental issues here, but that's very sad. She was denied love, falling in love over the deep fried butter that you can get at the Iowa State Fair as you both look at the same deep fried butter and then you say, ooh, yeah, that looks really good, and then you guys eat the butter together and then kiss with

your little butter lips. That's what you need to find. You finally find an app that brings you together with somebody over a pile of fried butter. But the thing about molestation is that it's fantastic. Let's get in, though. Let's get in. What is there, Jeffrey? What is there, Jeffrey?

What molestation is? Sir, we're pulling you over for a traffic stop, sir. I don't even know why you started with that sentence. We actually have to investigate now. That's highly important to the story. Yes. 90% of molestation cases are perpetrated by people that the children know, especially family members.

And that was certainly the case for Nanny Doss. And disturbingly, in early 20th century Alabama, it seemed like molestation was not something that could or even should be prevented, but rather something that had to be channeled in a certain direction. The way my mom even, even just her generation, talks about molestation is like the way getting molested was like such a part of life that they're like, yeah, well, you just don't need to go. You can't be anywhere near Roger.

You know what I mean? That's how they would just pick somebody in the family and be like, well, you don't want to be, you can't be left alone with cousin Adam for all that long. Yeah. It's very, very bad. The case in point was that when James Hazel discovered that his uncle and cousins had molested his birthdaughters at a number of family reunions, James responded by beating them within an inch of their lives saying that his daughters were off limits.

Nanny on the other hand, was fair game for incestuous molestation as far as James Hazel was concerned. And when he caught family members molesting Nanny on two separate occasions, once by a cousin and once by an uncle, he punished Nanny both times for being too flirtatious. Yeah. He blamed it all on her. And then Nanny's going to get some revenge. It sounds like.

Oh, yes. But Nanny, her dark moods at this point were solidified and they were really already coming like this young age. And she actually like weirdly, it kind of saved her psychologically, but also created a monster where like the dark mood, because she then she realized they were like, you men are the problem. Right. Right.

So this is the point of the story where as with most of these serial killers, you are like, okay, it's very unfortunate, rough childhood, much like Richard Ramirez, you know, but it doesn't mean you should go on and kill. But well, that ain't easy. No. Yeah. Up to a sympathy, up to a point, of course. But again, Nanny took solace in romantic fantasy and began sneaking away to read the

lonely hearts and missed connections columns in the local newspaper, thinking that if she could only sneak out a letter or two, she could escape Hazel Farms. She had a plan. Yeah. And finally though, at the age of 15, Nanny convinced her stepfather that if she were to get an entry level factory job in town, she could earn money for the family to act as a buffer between harvest. And when James saw the logic in Nanny's plan, she got a job at the linen treadmill in Blue

Mountain. Yeah. Her father, her adopted father was like, everything had to be a pitch and had to be very logical. Like he wasn't going to let her just because she wanted freedom or whatever. Like he didn't want to give her, allow her to have her own space. But she had to, like literally be like, no, this is going to be super advantageous for the family. For the business.

Because I will go, I will make money, we'll bring it in, we can, because we ain't growing shit. I didn't even notice that we have not really gone past the dirt farmer part of the equation. That's what we grow. We grow the dirt. The dirt's already there. You just need to shovel to acquire dirt. You should have seen it before.

What was it before, just ethereal matter, just atoms floating in a gray miasma? Less dirt. No, no, no. It was less dirt. Before it was grass. Now it's dirt. So we made it worse. So we killed the grass that's alive to bring up the dirt, which has always been there.

Or rocks. There was also rocks. It was a lot of rocks. They were all there. And now it's dirt. You wouldn't even have to plant the rocks. Why don't you just go to the fridge and get some prunes? We're not Christian archeologists.

Okay. We don't have to make shit up in the dirt. You know your life is horrible when you seek freedom at a factory that you have to sew linings together. Where you're just standing there like, finally, freedom. Get back to work. Get back to work. Good job.

Good job. Good job. Good job. This is so much better than the dirt farm. So much covered in soot. Now Nanny might not have been a beauty queen, but she certainly had a cuteness about her, especially for rural Alabama. And she immediately caught the attention of the single men of Blue Mountain, despite

being, as Ryan Green put it, a shaky prospect for marriage. Yeah. At that time in place, Alabama in the early 20th century, a wife was still expected to bring a dowry or property to a marriage, and Hazel Farm was worthless land worked by a worthless man. But that didn't put Nanny off her game. And she took up smoking to have an excuse to hang around outside of the factory and chat up young men.

You all like fucking nicotine, huh? Yeah. Me too. Love with these. What I love about these menthols, because these are the original menthols, of course, because they have shard of actual, like, some kind of chemical in here. I believe this is active asbestos. Yes, it is.

Oh, but that cool Carolina asbestos. Man, you are so hot. I can see the lung cancer growing and your teeth rotting as we talk. Thank you. Yeah. Wow, what a 10. See how brown my tongue is? Yeah, I do.

Wow, it's so hot. Hot. Consequently, during one of those smoke breaks, Nanny came across a tall and handsome 17-year-old boy named Charlie Braggs, who for some reason fell head over heels for Nanny and within four months they were married. What it seems about truly happened with Nanny is that she educated herself on how to appear as like literally how to appear as a fun, flirtatious woman from her romance novels and her various like magazines about celebrities and all this kind of stuff, like she actually

fashioned herself as one of these things and I think that's really was the difference is that she was, what they all said that she was vivacious and so that it tells that she was really funny and she used to hold court where people used to come and like listen to her talk and she tell stories and stuff like that and then I think at the very, very bottom of it, I think she sucked dick and then at the time period, it's just those little X-Factors. It's a thing that you don't do. It's a significant situation and I think people really enjoy that.

I don't know, I really actually have this question, side stories LPOTL, the gmail.com. How prevalent was sucking dick throughout history? I mean, I can't imagine it was any less prevalent when people, we do it, we don't, that's just foul. I don't know. It goes in and out of favor. It ebbs and flows, I would imagine. Because like in Greek times, they have sex with between the boys and the legs.

Yeah. Yeah, in Rome and the late, in like the early, like 500 BC, people suck a dick everywhere. And eat asshole shit, right? Yeah. Everywhere. Now Nanny's teenage romantic ideals were outweighed by her hatred of her stepfather. So she didn't really care who her husband was just so long as it got her off Hazel Farm.

She was, however, pretty sure that Charlie Bragg's quiet and uncomplicated would be easy to manipulate. But starting from the very first day of their marriage, Nanny found that the romance she'd at least hope for was not in her future. First of all, her first time having sex, which she imagined would be a grand event, was described as a, quote, crushing anti-climax, although I would venture to say that was speculation. A safe bet, but speculation nonetheless. I mean, okay.

I mean, she wanted to get railed by a commandant in a milk field. Yeah, you got Charlie Braggs rolling in there and you know, it does, they'll be like, you know, roll over. Here we go. Here we go. All right. Well, hopefully that takes that sleep, you know, like he's very, they all been working in a factory all day.

This is speculation at best. I believe that factory workers, they know how to hunt because they work hard nowadays. Nowadays. Nowadays. I don't know if necessarily back in the day, I didn't know. I think at the time, I think they thought the clitoris was a small elf back in the day. And they were afraid to activate it because it would cause nuisance and chaos in your

home. All right. Well, perhaps worse than the bad sex though, was that when Nanny had walked through the door of her new home earlier that night, she found Mother Braggs, her mother-in-law waiting for her and her new husband, surprised that Charlie would invite his mother to stay over on their wedding night. Nanny asked when Mother Braggs was planning to leave. So, this is really nice actually.

I'm so glad you're here, but it seems like, you know, like, why are you here? Like, you were supposed to, I just got plugged for the first time. No, I always just like to have my mother around when I'm about to have sex with my wife for the first time. And that's when Charlie said, oh no, she's not just spending the night, she lives here with us forever. At this point, like, you know, because it's Nanny Doss, look at this old woman because it's exactly as she matched you with, like, a big bag, scowl on her face, just sitting

there and being like, wait, let's break this. Right, like throw Mama from the train. Yes. Well, yeah, I actually completely understand Nanny and we'll get into the murders and I'm sure I'll change my tune, but at this point, I get it, she has been, this is infuriating. It's a rough start. But then the thing is, she's immediately like straight up, she's like, all right, it's the wife's job to stop making breakfast.

Oh my God. So that time you start doing your wife's job. What if I just fucking kill you, mother-in-law? What if I kill you? Okay. Now, predictably, considering Nanny Doss's luck so far, Mother Braggs was a tyrant, disparaging and cruel. And anytime Nanny tried telling her husband that his mother was a horrendous person to

deal with, Charlie, the definition of a mama's boy, would act physically wounded. Oh, my mother, my mother, he's just grown a sort of like a Stockholm syndrome-like acceptance of the fact that his mother is an active tumor sucking off of his life force. Yeah, it's like a Frank Hennan-Lotter movie. At this point, I am the bad devil on Nanny's shoulder, just like, do any gas pumps work in this country? And then be like, what if she wasn't around? That'd be kind of nice, right?

Well, furthermore, Mother Braggs prevented Charlie and Nanny from having any sort of romantic life together by faking illnesses to hold Charlie's attention. Oh, my God. And Nanny was once again stuck in a house ruled by a creature of manipulative control. Charlie! Oh, my God. Charlie! What, Mom?

A pigeon bit my toe. Oh, I know. I know you were supposed to go on a date tonight, but a pigeon bit my toe, so you're gonna need to stay home and get me safe from pigeons. Yeah, I'll go kill the pigeon, make sure it gets the message, and then I'll rub your toe with my mouth. I hope you have a good Nanny, huh, Nanny. That's horrible.

Meanwhile, like, Nanny, though, but that's a problem that's like, she doesn't understand who she's fucking. It seems like they are pushing Nanny to a limit, and I'm sure she's gonna go a little overboard. But the worst conflict between Nanny and Mother Braggs concerned Nanny's romance magazines. Mother Braggs would destroy any piece of romance literature that she found in the house, because she considered reading romance stories equal to infidelity. Your pussy needs to be dry all day.

I just know when I make shows that I want to be faithful to my dear, dear late husband, and I put a bunch of paper towels up there. Oh, fantastic. I'm sure I keep it as dry as possible. Absolutely. But of course, you do have to urinate. I just go right in. I make a little nest.

Yeah. The water boy, Kathy Bates character, very much, it's the devil. It's the devil. It's the devil. No, she thought that reading true romance magazine was the same thing. You're breaking a commandment, like you are committing infidelity. What about being a cut queen, because that sounds like she is. She wants to watch her son have sex with his wife.

Wow. Perhaps. That's just your favorite. That's your favorite genre right now. As long as they're stuck in a laundry machine or something like that. I don't know what's been going on. All I know is all these slip and false, we need safer sets. I really speak to the problems of private insurance.

It really does. But crushed and depressed, Nanny became a two pack a day smoker and a moderate drinker to deal with the sad reality of her existence, which of course only worsened Mother Bragg's opinion of her daughter-in-law, which only made the relationship worse. Because the mother-in-law couldn't handle cigarette smoke. So that was the only way to get her out of the house is that she'd just sit inside and smoke all fucking day just to make her leave. That is pure domestic warfare.

It really is. It doesn't sound like a fun home life. And as it was, things weren't all that great with Charlie either. Nanny became a baby factory just like her mother. And between 1923 and 1927, Nanny gave birth to four children. Her first was Melvina, her last was Florine. I just think Melvina and Florine are just sound like just two women you'd never want to see coming.

No, you definitely don't. I never want to find out, like if I found out my insurance adjuster is Melvina, we're fucked. I mean, I don't know. Just a scrunch face, mean old Melvina. It sounds kind of like she would be a Frenchie if she was a dog. Yeah, sure. I don't know.

It's a good name for a dog. Yeah, you can call her Mel or you can call her Vina, just don't call her late for dinner. But that's on you then because you actually control when dinner is served because you're the human. I always just leave a bowl out and I say, it's a buffet style. It's not good. I didn't say it that way. Well, at first, Nanny and Charlie had sex whenever Charlie wanted.

Nanny eventually shuttered at his touch and would only have sex with him if the timing was right for her to get pregnant again. And she even slept in the children's room to avoid him. But Nanny wasn't withholding sex from Charlie because she found sex to be icky. Rather, all of her sexual energies were being spent in the gin mills around Blue Mountain, Alabama. And she went and got it. If she wasn't getting it, she went and got it.

And because there was that thing, there was that about her, which must be the true lack of impulse control, like that idea that that's what fucking happened in the, when she got hit in the head because what's weird is that this is male behavior, not female behavior at the time, quote-unquote. I don't know, buddy. How many times has this husband just disappeared? These women just disappeared. I'm talking about in this time period, men would just disappear.

And then you just have to deal with it. Right. Well, when Nanny was able to convince either Charlie or mother Braggs to babysit her kids, Nanny could be found roaming bars topless, letting herself be fondled in public and sleeping with whatever drunk would take her home. Come on, who wants to make me a full house? This is fantastic. I'm such a being.

Because the best part is that you take me from me a full house, we take you all the way to the rural flush. I love you, Nanny. You're just so great. You're no, in no way would you kill a bunch of people. Just let me fuck you. Just let me fuck you dumb. You dumb polly.

Fantastic. That's all you are as a dick to me. You remember that. All right. Mama Nanny can't do. I think I fell in love with you, Nanny. That's your first mistake. Dicked.

Well, Charlie, meanwhile, didn't care much because he was having affairs with every woman who'd let him at the linen thread mill where he and Nanny met, sometimes for days at a time. In Nanny's part, she kept notes in her diary of every woman Charlie slept with to use as evidence of infidelity if he ever tried divorcing her. And after years of this, Nanny's fantasies of a different life, a better life, a more romantic life, they began to overwhelm her and fill her every waking thought. Just like the sexual power fantasies of some male serial killers start to overwhelm them

in their 20s. Isn't she already accomplishing that? She's getting banged all over town. She got the kids, which I guess she wanted because that was... You're confusing it. Her thing is not sexual at all. No, it has nothing to do with sex. Nothing at all. Romance has something to do with sex.

It's not even just romance. She wants a life of luxury. She wants to be taken care of. She wants to be pampered. She wants to live like when she sees these things, like she wants them to come and scoop her off her feet. But I don't remember when Belle smoked two packs a day and banged everyone at the gin mill.

Because Belle didn't have to live with the beast's mother-in-law. Can you imagine? Okay. All right. With that warthog. Truly, like what we said, I keep bringing up just because that documentary series really was so fascinating and looking into the fantasy function of a serial killer, the idea of BTK, where he had to straight up confess, at one point, my fantasies became more real than

my life. Right. And that I was walking in fantasy every single day. And that's where the either the head injury or mental illness kind of comes into factor because it's not just daydreaming anymore. You are in a fantasy world and you will start to try to make it match up as much as possible. Yeah. And I think with the sexual stuff with her, especially going top with some bars, being

fondled in public, sex with multiple men, I think that actually has more to do with the molestation than it does with any sort of like serial killing or any kind of psychopathy or anything like that. That's a whole different can of worms. Because in one way, she was de-sexualized, right? Like she was made to wear sack dresses and not allowed to dress in any way, shape, or form that were like beautiful or feminine. Right.

But at the same time, she was hyper-sexualized because she'd been actively sexually molested. She was like nine years old. But Nanny, like many serial killers in their 20s, made her decision to cross the line, passed sympathy into the realm of destruction. She was a 21-year-old mother of four, but was soon to be a mother of two. Whoa. Look at that. What happened?

This is why I would be a good boyfriend for Nanny. What happened? For kids. But man, what happened? What happened? We're gone, huh? That's crazy. I assume they're fine.

Whatever. They must have went to the war or something. They went to the war. Yeah, they went to the war. Fly from your clay. A roast as dark as the night, perfect for fueling the cryptid research and mad ravings required for your podcasting. Don't mind the red eyes.

He's just trying to warn you of the bridge. The bridge. Finally, from the caffeine-addled brains of Spring Hill Jack Coffee and last podcast on the left, we bring you Mothman's red-eye blend. Yes, delicious Panama beans. Go to lastpodcastmerch.com to order yours today. Now, Nanny adored her firstborn child, Melvina, but the rest of her family, including Charlie and Mother Braggs, started to look all too much like a burden far out of step with Nanny's

fantasy life. Yeah, you can only get one extra kid on a horse. Yeah, four kids at 21. And I'm gonna get banged in a horse from here on out. Absolutely, they can be very arousing these horses. Well, Nanny figured that if she only had one kid, maybe two, then her life would turn around. And for her, the decision was nothing more than a practical problem that had absolutely nothing to do with human emotion, because real human emotion was not possible for a

person like Nanny Doss. Just the appearance of emotion and the appearance of that's the other thing where the psychopathic kind of comes into, because nothing can satisfy you. And then she went to her Firefox account and googled, how do I murder my child? But the police didn't look there. They didn't look? No, they didn't. Because in time, she was just asking a fox in a field.

About Xanax, how much Xanax do I have to give back? Hey, Mr. Fox, how much Xanax do I got to give these babies? You're gonna want to give them a whole bar. You want to smash it up and put it in their little baby food too, as well. Yeah, I'd take the advice of the fox. He's killed at least three or four antelopes since I've known him. So when Charlie returned home one afternoon after one of his three-day-long affairs, he discovered that his two middle children were very suddenly stone dead.

Wow. See, a couple of days before, Nanny had given Melvina toast for breakfast, while her youngest, Florine, had been breastfed, but for the middle two. I just wanted to... I'm sorry. You can go on. I'm sorry. I was just gonna be...

It was like when you said breastfed, I was like, nice. But then I'm like, it's a baby. I just never... It's a baby. It's a baby. It's not like that weird woman on the new season, a 90-day fiance, who's still breastfeeding her fucking child long after she should. She keeps every fucking scene.

She just keeps flopping out her fucking tit and putting her kid on. She's like, he's hungry. You can't sleep in the bed with me because I gotta breastfeed him. And the wife and the husband is like, why are you still breastfeeding this child after so long? I don't want to share breast with my child. This is very odd. This is odd behavior.

And the parents are saying like, I don't know, Emily does what she wants. She does whatever she wants, and everyone's just baffled at this moment, baffled. That's not good, man. You should not be able to fire up a Nintendo Switch and breastfeed. Why can't it be one or the other? All right. So toast and breast milk. Toast for one, breast milk for the other.

But for the middle two, Nanny had mixed in poison with their porridge, and by the time the doctor showed up thinking it was extreme food poisoning, both kids had expired. Not thinking for a second that a woman would murder her own children, the entire town gathered around Nanny and praised Nanny for her bravery in the face of such a tragedy. Because Charlie, when he came home, right, he finally rolled up. He comes to the scene where the entire house is cut there, the entire neighborhoods at his house, the doctor's there, the cop is there, whatever, because you know, every town has like one police officer or some bullshit, they walk in and Nanny is just like crying

and going like, I can't believe what happened, it's unbelievable tragedy. And meanwhile, like Charlie catches her eyes and it's like she gives a little like wink. Right. See what happened. Yeah. See what's happened. Yeah. He said after he finally looked into his wife's eyes after the guilt wore off, he said he

saw no sadness, saw no anger. All he saw was a dark void. Or at least that's, you know, Ryan Greene speculation and Charlie said it was so terrifying that he fled from his home in the middle of the night with Melvina, just Melvina completely abandoning both his youngest child and his mother to a child murderer. Something went on because he came in and it was because it's really interesting because he really he was on a fucking bender doing whatever he rolled in to find two of his four kids dead.

And something must have happened for him to be like, he fucking did it because he left in the middle of the night because again, he would not have taken at least a child if he wasn't afraid. You know what I mean? He would have just left on his own if he was just going to go on another fucking bender. Sure. Exactly. But as far as mother Braggs went, she didn't last too much longer after Charlie left.

The illness she'd endured from the beginning of nanny's marriage to Charlie took a very sudden turn into chronic and crippling stomach pain, which eventually killed mother Braggs in the summer of 1927. So she's got three victims real fast. I don't, is this inappropriate to say, but mother Braggs, I mean, get out of the house. Mother Braggs. She put herself in harm's way and she sounds like she was very overbearing. Yes, when then, but the thing was, is that when Charlie left, the fight kind of left

her too. So she'd become even more of kind of like a lump. Like she was just like in the house and very despondent and upset. But that's when nanny knew she's vulnerable. And what I'm going to do is because again, what you're going to see is what she did, what a lot of women killers do is that they get even closer to their victim. So they come in and they become the caretaker and then they control your entire life. And then they slowly poison you, but they did, she fucking got mama Braggs in a fucking

week. Oh my goodness. Oh yeah. But I mean, you know, she wasn't great. No, she wasn't. No, but you shouldn't just murder someone because they're awful. I say you to leave them outside. Yeah.

Honestly, somebody like that, you could just let mother Earth take care of it. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, a year later in 1928, Charlie reappeared with a new woman, a new child and Melvina after finally hearing news of his mother's death. Because how do you say this? Be like, I'm kind of married in another state.

And I got to go, but the thing is, is that that's also my inheritance is that farm. So I got to go get that thing. I have to go get that. Okay. Nanny was then forced out of her home and after Charlie divorced her for his new family, he left Melvina behind with a woman again that he firmly believed had murdered two of his children. Okay, no one like Melvina.

All right, let's go on here later. Nobody like Melvina. What did Melvina ever do? She's great with shells, shells and cheese. Melvina, shells and cheese, we've never had it. Very good. But yeah, no one liked her. Well, we don't know that.

It seems like the entire Bragg's family, just it was just, it was a big mess. Let's just say it was a big, a big, big mess. Right. Yeah. And they didn't necessarily, it didn't seem like Nanny Doss was like just the one evil person amongst an entire family of good people, like they all made, the decisions that they all made were definitely emotionless. Everyone was very hard-edged and callous to each other.

Yeah. Nanny is just fighting for her right to party. You know, but she, she, she did party. The thing is that she already was party. Okay. Yeah. Well, with nowhere else to go, Nanny returned to the Hazel family farm and went back to work at the Threadmill.

But instead of choosing a man there, she tried her luck with the lonely hearts columns in the newspaper and began writing letters. Dating apps have always been dangerous. Absolutely. Sending photos and baked goods along with her love notes. Cause her bakery was fucking bar none. She also, she wasn't afraid to get lewd with these fishing expeditions. Yeah.

She'd say stuff about her ankles. She'd say stuff. And honestly, you want to come treat me like cows cause I'm all jammed full of milk. Oh yeah. You suck. You've got to handle these udders. I'll cattle prod you. Sure.

Well, mostly she focused on men who wooed her with poetry because that's what she come to expect after reading so much romance literature. Yeah. Finally, she settled on a 22 year old from Jacksonville, Alabama named Frank Harrelson who fell for Nanny after she mailed him a picture and a slice of spice cake. Yeah. Spice cake. Love spice cake.

It was, man, man. Yeah, dear Nanny being roses of red, violets of blue, your ankles are swollen, and I love you. You just gave up with that. Nice. Well Frank swept her off her feet with flowers, chocolate and poetry and within two months they were married. You can most hear the grunt, when he did that.

Oh yeah. This is romance, get away. We gotta work in this game, boys. We gotta go to three stores. moving to a two-bedroom log cabin in Cedertown, Georgia, Nanny felt like the dreams of romance that she had literally killed for were finally coming true. But as it would time and again, reality won out.

Why can't I be romanced? What? She was really, she doesn't get it because every single time she got this time. Why can't she be romanced? I mean, other than, she has three people that she's killed now. I get it.

This is for all y'all out there. All y'all who ain't married yet, okay? Marriage is a partnership. Like you have to, it takes work, but yeah, it should be fun, yes. Yes. But there's gonna be moments, there's gonna be ups and downs.

There's gonna be high points of eroticism and excitement. And there's gonna be low points of we're like, is this your sock? Is this my sock? Sure. And then sometimes the house burns it alive. And everyone's in the house when the house is burning, everyone's dead.

I love this Zabrowski marriage counseling. Well, I mean, not to bring 90-day fiance into it again, but I will. I mean, this is what you learned, this is how we know. I know. Hey man, and it works the exact same way, because you've got these people that are writing letters to each other,

they're just sending Facebook messages to each other. They don't know each other at all. They only get to know each other through these romantic, you know, missives. And then once they finally meet, after two months, they have to fucking deal with each other. And they realize like, oh my God, you're awful.

Oh my God, I'm awful. I'm awful. Because these are not the types of people who make good decisions about their lives. Oh, because they're marrying someone after knowing them for like a few days or a month. Like they just, they have really bad decision-making skills at every point.

They already did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it just compounds when they get together, because then it's like an exponential factor of two people who already make bad decisions without they're making bad decisions together. Yes. That's why you guys are all complicit

in the demise of American culture, overall culture as a global stand, because you guys watch such trash. Wow. Oh, trash. Wow. Oh, trash. How many episodes in a row did you watch that show

where they make swords? How many hours? Fords and fire. We learned the Fords and fire, eh? Yeah, yeah, we learned. And I know so much about swords now. Yeah. I know about the stuff that they used to make them.

You have to be able to hack through a fish. Yeah. And you know how much I've learned about the K1 visa process quite a bit, my friend? I'm learning about government. I'm learning about government. It will kill. It will kill.

But after the wedding, Frank shut down the emotion in romance and he turned to drinking. And once prohibition ended, he switched from moonshine to whiskey, but still poured his liquor of choice into a clay jug and buried it in the garden out of habit. That's how I like it. I like it. I feel dirty.

I like it. I feel dirty. Honestly, I'm kind of mad that the liquor can't kill me anymore. Yeah, that is too bad, isn't it? Your sickle hole is regular. Nanny's life then became a routine of staying home alone with her children

until her husband needed to be bailed out for drunken disorderlies. And Nanny soon discovered that Frank had turned to lonely hearts ads because he developed a local reputation as a mean drunk back home. Yeah. Oh, my. Soon he had to send out for love.

She can't get, she just can't find a good one. I don't know. It's just going to have to really kill these guys until she can figure it out. Now, at one point, Nanny tried matching her husband's drinking. But after they went on a three-day bender and simply forgot about Nanny's daughter, Florine, on days two and three, Nanny decided

that wasn't the life for her. Eventually, the drunken beatings began. And Nanny endured the marriage for another 16 years while she raised Melvina and Florine to marrying age. Well, that was the thing is that she had this in gold. And also remember this too, guys, and all of us. Your spouses can wait 20 years before killing you. Because they've had the plan.

They've had the plan. The entire time, they knew they were going to kill you. It's like the Chinese government. They think in eras. They think in a long period of time. Think it ahead there. They know what's inside your mind. Yeah, also just make sure that you have a healthy relationship

going. Yeah. Do your best there. Keep that going. Yeah. Try your best. We don't come home super hammered and just start fighting. Yeah, it would be nice if we just had a nice time.

Yeah. Well, by 1942, Melvina had married a guy named Mosey and had a kid. And Florine moved in with her older sister to help with child care. Well, that was the thing. Florine still never really. No one cared about Florine.

No one liked Melvina, but nobody cared about Florine. What's worse? Melvina, she got all the attention and became like a, I'm going to give me your speech. Because she got all the actual care and attention. Florine was just like, I guess I'm going to go help out Melvina. And that's her whole life.

And you're not projecting. You're not projecting or anything. I'm just saying it's her whole fucking life. And she literally had to go, I guess it's time for me to go be Melvina's butler. And then she had to have Melvina be like, it's my booze. Nice. Look at my new, I got a new booty.

A little Cinderella stepsisters going on here. All right. But when Melvina got pregnant again immediately after giving birth, a long dormant switch flicked back on in Nanny's brain. Oh no. Because Nanny, when she became obsessed with Melvina's kid, right?

She became obsessed with the grand kid. So she was like, I'm the one who knows how to do. Nanny knows how to do. I'm going to teach her myself. And so she went and like, she just basically took over complete care of the grand kid. But all of a sudden, but the whole time she was just like, now the thing is, you don't want to get immediately

all plugged up again because you can ruin everything. You should just have one Melvina. You need a Melvina. That's all you need. We don't need a Florena. She knows from experience. Yeah. Yeah, she did.

She remembered how having two kids in such quick succession with Charlie had affected her in such a negative way to the point where she murdered two children. Sure. But she didn't really consider that her daughter just might be fine with it. She doesn't know. Yeah.

Nevertheless, Nanny, and this is indeed, again, a lot of speculation. She might have done something purely evil to alleviate her daughter's stress. Evil. Now, moments after the second child was born, after a long and difficult labor, the child was handed to Nanny to hold.

But when the doctor came to check on the baby soon afterward, he found that it had very suddenly died with no clear cause of death. I mean, it was crazy. This baby jumped up. It smashed its own head against the wall for about, I mean, five, six times. Wow.

I didn't want to rule. I didn't want to fight his liberties. I never heard of it. Because I agree with everybody should have their own liberty. Sure. And the right to take your life. Yeah, that child should be allowed to do that as a choice. OK.

Sure, yeah. Well, it was assumed that the baby had merely been starved of oxygen for too long during the difficult birth and hadn't recovered. But when Melvina returned home, she told her sister Florene about a nightmare she'd had while recovering. She said that she'd dreamed that her mother Nanny had taken

a hat pin and pushed it ever so slowly into the soft spot of the baby's head while she held it after birth. Yeah, I know. That's not a medical thing to do. That's not good. It didn't just wait. I thought it would pop.

Yeah, it didn't pop though. This probably didn't happen. This is probably a motion-coloring memory. No, she probably just shoved it. She just covered it. She just shoved it in its nose and its mouth with it. Maybe.

But it was a long and difficult birth, baby. Especially back then, this is 1942. There's not the best infant mortality rate in fucking Alabama even now. But Florene replied that she remembered seeing their mother toying with a hat pin after the baby was declared dead, wearing a, quote, careful expression of grief.

See this? You can't see this because this is obviously an audio medium. But Jackie and I were having this conversation about how we both have never naturally frowned. And look at a frown. You can't see it. Look at us frown. You look like a fish, right?

Right. Have you ever frowned once? I could just see nanny dots just in the going, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm. Very sad, yeah. I'm sure someone would have noticed all the fucking blood if nanny had stabbed a hat pin into a baby's skull. It might not have a whole lot of blood, actually,

now that I think about it. I don't know. My maybe a bunch of fluid would come out. I'm not really sure how that works. You can put your finger over it and then, like, honestly, put a little hat on the baby. Yeah, yeah. But I think it is telling that her daughters,

at the very least, discussed the possibility. It's quite just because she's already killed three people. Maybe put a little sticker on it like Casey Anthony did there. Very bad. But despite suspicions that their mother had killed her baby, Melvina abandoned her first son, Robert, to nanny when her marriage to Mosey fell apart, which only filled nanny with more resentment and rage.

Because now she's got another fucking kid to take care of. Well, anyone named Mosey is always going to walk away from you. We had a thing, but I mean, it's slow. But yeah, they were always walking away. Now, during those 16 years married to Frank, nanny was often in what she called a dark mood. And she found that those dark energies

were best put not into murder, but baking. Yeah. But honestly, I know my mom was like that, too. So when she was upset, cleaning became her weapon. And so the vacuum, she used to bang the vacuum against the bedroom doll passive aggressively. And she used to clean and hoff and clean. And so I actually feel like that the baking

would become even more psychologically damaging. Because as soon as that flour came out, you're like, oh, fuck, oh, god, oh, no. I mean, it could be worse. You know, at least you're going to eat a bunch of food. Yeah, she could shit in her hand and throw it on the fucking wall. That would be bad.

It would be bad. You got cookies. It's a poopy turkey. However, those dark moods came with dark thoughts and baked goods eventually became nanny's most reliable murder weapon. So fucking sweet. It's so metal, dude.

It's just so exactly what you think it would be. Death by my mother. Well, specifically, the victim of her first baking-themed murder was her grandson, Robert. Oh, yeah. Almost on a whim, it seems. Nanny added arsenic to a batch of cookies she was baking. And then she spent the next few hours almost force feeding

her grandson the tainted batch. You want another cookie? Why don't you have another cookie? Have another one. That's what has happened to me my whole childhood. I didn't know, but it turns out I'd love arsenic. Absolutely, you've adapted very well to it. The boy became sluggish, went to sleep, and never woke up,

making him, at the very least, the third child to die on Nanny's watch. And never mind if she even murdered him or not. Three children have died under her care. She's the worst babysitter of all time. It's ironic her name is Nanny. Definitely dies with cookies in his tummy, though. So you go to bed, and you've got your little chocolate chips

on your hand. If they had done an autopsy, that would have been called evidence. Then it wasn't. And they didn't do it. Again, no suspicion came Nanny's way. And she theatrically flung herself into the mud during the child's funeral.

Oh, my God, her grief has turned her into a swine. Reportedly, though, Frank then looked at Melvena and Florine and said, quote, I reckon I'm next. So we're all just expecting to get murdered by Nanny now? Is that what he's going to come with, the loudest to happen? It's just this depression of the time period, too. I just like just a drunk with one of those, like, you know,

like how your hats get all, like they have the flat burn hats, but they're all, like, stretched out, like, fucked up and just be like, well, when do I get my poisoning? Absolutely. Maybe they should be a little nicer to Nanny, not that it's their fault. No, but I think Nanny is extraordinarily difficult

to be nice to. Oh, yeah. Oh, she does this bake all day. Yes, some of it has poison. But what about the pancakes that didn't? Well, it's also the worst thing in the world, because everybody else loves her. Right?

Everybody else thinks Nanny is the most lovely, because she puts up this whole front to everybody, where she's fun and glamorous and, like, literally always done to the nines with her hair done, makeup done. And then he's just, he's like, well, you know, at least maybe I could see him one last time. I need to see her today, so then maybe they not can go. Death by booby, that's how you want to go, Henry.

I can't wait. Now, about a month later, World War II came to an end, which meant joy and celebration all across the country. Frank's celebration, however, took a criminal and morally reprehensible turn. And on the night of Japan's surrender, Frank raped Nanny in a drunken rage after she refused sex. And for this, Nanny decided that Frank had to die.

He might have to die. He might have to. But there was an interesting breakdown of the time period, too, and how Frank was, like, on that border between being able to go to World War II and not, and they were all doing the lottery, like the draft lottery, and the town, because there was such a big rush to get as many soldiers into the field of operation

to get them all, that it sucked up all the available workforce. So there had to be a discussion amongst people, amongst these certain areas of the world, being like, well, some of us have to stay behind to do some of this work. Well, isn't this also where a lot of the gales went to the factory and started working?

A lot of it, some of it. Yeah, it was both, really. Alabama and World War II was a gigantic manufacturing hub. A lot of the ships, especially ships, a lot of the ships that we built, both for England and for ourselves, a lot of it came to Alabama. There's a great, in the Kinburns documentary, The War, there's a great section on what Alabama was like

during this time and how World War II completely changed it. But Frank was one of those guys in manufacturing. That's how he got to stays like, oh, we need these manufacturing people here, and that's why he stayed. But you were supposed to put up a front of, I can't wait to get in there and fight those jerrys. Like, you were supposed to act like you wanted to go and be like, I want to volunteer,

and these guys were all volunteering to go. But Frank, to be Frank, was kind of a pussy, right? And he didn't want to go. He didn't want to go. I mean, it's irrational, perhaps. Yeah, but everybody around him heavily judged. Anybody who didn't act, they didn't walk in. So it was this, the whole town was also torn apart.

And Frank was one of these guys who just would cover himself in booze just to, I guess, stand it or whatever. But he was a bad dude. Yeah. Now, Frank quite sensibly never ate meals at home. And he kept his liquor hidden so Nanny wouldn't throw it away. But while Nanny worked in her garden while she formulated a plan to poison her husband,

she coincidentally happened upon Frank's buried moonshine job. Whoa. Immediately, she poured out an inch of liquor, replaced it with an inch of rat poison, and reburied the jug. She's like the Riddler from the Batman. Yeah. By the next morning, Frank was laying in the front yard,

dead as a doornail. And Nanny emptied out the jug and washed it thoroughly before calling the police. I mean, if you're going to kill someone, she killed him with what he loved. Yeah. Yeah, he got it. So man.

As far as victims go, like, Frank, finally, we get to do that thing where, you know, we can say, like, yeah, the victim was a real fucking piece of shit. Fuck that guy. I mean, this is what they did with Eileen Warnows in Monster, which was far too sympathetic. This is the most sympathetic murderer. But then again, she's killing children.

It's just I'm saying there's a lot to unpack. It's complicated. It's complicated. The funny thing, if she hadn't killed children, like every single one of her husbands was a piece of fucking garbage. They were all garbage. They're all garbage.

Awful. But she didn't kill a lot of children. And some other relatives decide that we'll get to it a bit. OK. Live from your grave. Hey, what's up, everyone? How you doing? Ben Kissel here with Henry Zabrowski.

Yeah, it's me, man. Yeah, bro. Henry Zabrowski is smoking some of that sweet last podcast on the left, babe. Go out there and purchase yourself some. I hope you enjoy it. We have Sativa. We have Indica.

And we have a hybrid. And I have to tell you, from my personal experience, they are wonderful. Super tasty, live resin. You really get the delicious, weedy taste, which is what I like. And three different experiences. You go to your local vape store and get it.

Absolutely. Thank you all so much for supporting the show. We absolutely love you. Can't wait to see you on the road and get that vape. Put it in your brain and have a good time. And if you want to set your favorite weed store, give them a call and ask for them by name. Last podcast on the left, it's weed.

Hail yourselves, everyone. Hail Satan. Now, reportedly, neither Melvina nor Florine dared go near Nanny at the funeral, which was now the third one involving a family member dying suddenly and mysteriously. And she's just going, ee, ee, ee, ee, ee, ee. Like she's crying all alone.

And like, you know, like absolutely dry tears. Right. But much to Nanny's surprise, Frank actually had a big life insurance policy. And since no foul play was suspected, Nanny suddenly had money for the first time in her life. But you see. Your dream came true.

But again, it had nothing to do with the insurance policy. She didn't even fucking know. It just showed up. And then it was like, this light bulb went off for her. She was like, oh. This is like when we first launched Patreon. We did seven years for free. And then people are like, you can get paid for it.

You're like, wait, what? What? She bought 10 acres outside of Jacksonville, Alabama, built a cottage, and filled it with romance novels and magazines. Locals worked the land. And with a small pension and the insurance money, Nanny was finally independent.

I'm every woman. I'm not every woman. Thanks for hitting me. Most women don't kill multiple people. But the problem with independence is that it wasn't compatible with the romantic life Nanny had always wanted. So she returned to the Lonely Hearts columns.

And with the money she earned from killing her last husband, she expanded her search to the entire country to find the next. For two years, Nanny took trains to cities all over America to vet potential suitors. And eventually, she settled on a man named Arleigh Lanning from Lexington, North Carolina, who wrote letters with all the flair of a romance novel.

Wow. Well, when he and Nanny finally met, Arleigh, like all the rest, was absolutely smitten upon meeting her, immediately impressed with her impeccable clothing, her perfect makeup, and her, quote, carefully quaffed curls. You're very tired. Yes, very quaffed.

I love that when you. That's the only thing that's tired on me. Yeah? She was my budget. Whoa. Come on. Loosen up a little bit. Loosen up a little bit.

And within days, they agreed to be married. And Nanny relocated to North Carolina for her third go round on the marriage carousel. And this time, I'm not killing all the horses and the unicorns out there. You're not going to? Do you promise? Pinky's way around?

OK. You know the stats on a third marriage? Crush it up. 70% end in divorce. Ha, you got it. Well, all right. Honestly, after one, you never do it again. Never get married again.

But you understand. Now, at first, it really did seem like things were going to work out this time for Nanny. Life was romantic and domestic, filled with pleasant dinners at home, dancing, and trips to the theater, trips to the movies. Arlee was even a better class alcoholic. He drank wine, not moonshine.

Classy. Very nice. Classy. OK. But after only a month, the wine took over. And Arlee started sleeping around. Ari, you're married to a murderer. It's just how this goes.

You have to tiptoe through the tulips a little bit here. This is what happens when you find somebody at this time period this way, I think, too. But also remember, Nanny, it's not like she's just in one small town in Alabama and going through all the eligible bachelors. Like her first husband, yeah, that's Alabama, but that's a different town in Alabama.

Her second husband, that's over in Georgia. This one, it's in North Carolina. She's in completely different states. No one's talking to each other. She can tell whatever story she wants to tell. Oh, yeah. And the thing is about Arlee sleeping around, Nanny did the same fucking thing.

She would leave for up to a week at a time after leaving short, vague notes that said things like, quote, going on a trip. Be back soon. Oh, my god. No, she is the ultimate. It's such good passive aggression. It's so good.

He would disappear. So the first time he disappeared. Because this thing, the last guy did the same thing, right? They just disappeared. These dudes would just go on benders and not come back. It sounds fucking great. I don't even know that you know that was an option as an husband.

It's not just benders. It's going out and fucking other women for days and a time. Technically, it's not an option as a husband. No, everybody is mad. You destroy everything. But still, I didn't know you could just choose to do it, and that's what they would do. And so when Arlee did it for the first time,

she's like, fucking. He's not going to find me when he goes back. So literally, she was like, she'd go on her trip. And they're like, OK, you're going to go fuck? I'm going to go fuck. Yeah, I mean, you know. And I'm just going to come back whenever I want to, too. An orgasm for an orgasm.

They should have just done gangbangs. It's difficult because of the curls. You got one from, I would say, she's trying to keep the curls together up top. You can't be fucking getting Chinese finger trap. You're trying to keep your hair together? Sure you can. That involves the bugle and the vagina.

Yeah, there's a lot that goes into it. Things get quite messy. Sure, they can. I guess that's true, Ben. They can, they don't have to. I guess they just can. Recognizing that Nanny's behavior was a reflection of his own, Arley went on the wagon.

Temporarily. Always. The damage, however, was done. And their marriage settled into a years-long cycle of Arley's binging followed by Nanny's dark moods and a whole lot of sex with strangers from the lonely heart's columns in between. But Christmas of 1952, for some reason,

was different for Nanny. Again, that switch flipped. It's Christmas. Yeah, it's stressful. It is. Well, it was, that's the thing, it wasn't about stress. Nanny had murdered her way through her first couple of families.

So she didn't get a lot of Christmas cards from her daughters. And this Christmas, the urge to start over for a fourth time began to swell once more. Because it started with that thought, it did start with the thought of like, No one remembers me at Christmas time. That's very sad.

I cares about Nanny, even though I kill, I kill and I kill. They don't know it for sure. They don't have evidence. They don't have any evidence. We don't have any fucking evidence. I just said send a Christmas card. So they should be thinking about it

because when it comes down to it, what do you need? Evidence. I mean, to be concerned, to be a crime. To be honest with you, I think you have to become very close to your mother if you know that she kills everyone who gets distant because just you gotta stay in her good graces.

Or you stay very, very, very, very far away. Nanny has a long reach. You stay very far away. Because the reason why Nanny kills, Nanny kills when she thinks that you're a burden. She kills when she thinks that you're getting a little bit too attached. And that's the trick to the narcissistic personality mode

or whatever it is, the version of it, which is that's the thing is that she does want your attention up to a point. Right. And then she finds you needy and you also have to get away from her. Now you have to die. So there is no, either way you're gonna be dead.

Right. If you get too close to Nanny. They get too close to Nanny. Send the cards, send the card. Well, after spending months in a deep depression, worse than any Arleigh had seen before, Nanny suddenly snapped back to her well-quaffed self. I'm so sorry.

I'm so sorry. You can tell I made my curls stiff again. Yeah. And she apologized to her husband for her behavior with her specialty, stewed prune pie. Oh yeah, give me that prune. It is just this concept of,

it's like I'm fine with prunes, right? Like I'm neutral on prunes. They're good for the body, they're good for the bow. But a whole plate of stewed prune pie, which must look like literal just shit. Right. Like it's just loose, brown. Well, if you have a nice crust on it or something.

It's fine. It's just, I'm not into it. I feel like it's a little bit, dates, I don't mind. I think dates are technically the fancy term for prunes. Right. Well, I think they're the prunes that were out in the sun for a while.

But the thing about the prune is that what she had discovered is that it was the perfect cloak to arsenic. Because it's sweet and bitter. It's highly sweet, highly bitter. And after eating a slice of prune pie, Arlie went to sleep and didn't wake up. The doctor subsequently declared death by heart failure

while Arlie's family consoled Nanny, not knowing that this was the second husband she'd personally put in the ground. And I'll tell you what, I'd dig the hole too if I could. Right. Just because that's fun as hell. Watching them go down there fucking permanently.

Absolutely, death by prune. No one likes that. But after Arlie's estate got settled and it was discovered that Arlie's will gave his house to Arlie's sister, Nanny. Oh, idiot. Yeah. Nanny discovered a house insurance policy

and stated that if the house was destroyed, Nanny would get the payout. Nanny's fucking co-incidence. And she kind of liked Arlie's sister too. Like if she said that she was like, it's unfortunate how this works out that I'm involved. Like it doesn't kind of feel like that.

Cause it's like, I'm here. So I'm going to do what Nanny does. And then it does whatever the fuck Nanny won't. I see that. So unfortunately you're going to be just kind of swept up that. Fantastic. Yeah.

About a month after Arlie died, before the deed was transferred to Arlie's sister and after all of Nanny's belongings were shipped back to Alabama, Arlie's house mysteriously burned the fucking ground. I think it happens. It does happen. Where is the fire department?

Oh, the phone. I should, I should use the phone. Right. It's in the house. Where is the phone? It's in the burning house. Oh, that's good. I'm going to have to walk to the fire department.

Yeah. It'll take you a while. Oh, my ankle is real hinky today. Yep. Oh, it's going to take some time. It'll take just about enough time for a house to burn down. How dare you accuse me of arson? I actually didn't.

I didn't. So. Evidence. Okay. In a Nanny did stick around North Carolina for a few months to take care of Arlie's mother who'd been suffering from a long illness. But as it went,

the illness took a sudden turn for the worse after Nanny took over care and started Arlie's mother on a diet of stewed prunes. Okay. I'm just going to say this. Let's bring COVID into it. Death results. Please, great.

That's what this has been missing. Turbo four cancer. You're dying, right? And then you get COVID and then you die. And I say, maybe it was COVID's fault, right? Yeah, sure, sure, sure. The mom was going to die. And Nanny, yeah.

She helped. But she helped, she didn't have to pay for anything. Was this death by Nanny or death by long-term illness? This was death by Nanny. Also, why aren't we blaming the fucking prunes a little bit? I have never defended anyone so much in my life. But I know she's a murderer. It was because you want to marry her.

I don't want to marry her. You just want to be dispatched in that way. There's a part of me that is envious of the time period, when another state was really getting away. A different country. You can get away. Within months, Arleigh's mother passed away. And Nanny moved back to Alabama after the funeral,

several thousand dollars richer than when she left. After that, though, Nanny, oddly enough, temporarily switched from Black Widow to Angel of Death. Of course, Angel of Death being another common trope amongst female serial killers. It's the idea that they are a God that is bestowing the gift of death to terminally ill people, or people that they believe should not

be suffering any longer. I think Angel of Death is far, far for Nanny. I do think that murder just became habitual. You think so? It became habitual. And it really has become a practical way for her to make things simpler for her life. Indeed, habitual.

A habitual. Emphasis there on kind of the middle term. She is Israel keys. She is everything that people wanted Israel keys to be. She really is like. She's an extremely dangerous human being. And everybody around her eventually dies. Right.

Well, following her move back to Alabama, Nanny's family wrote letters begging her to visit her sister, Dovey, who'd fallen ill from a wasting disease. You know, Dovey's like, don't invite Nanny here. I still, I feel like I'm getting better. I feel like I could turn this around. Really, Dovey? I mean, that's kind of what I'm thinking, man,

is that they know that people die around Nanny. That when Nanny comes around, people go into the fucking ground. So like, why don't we just, you know, why don't we write a letter to Nanny and give that Nanny? I heard you say you want to invite Nanny. I'm still alive. You're an iron ranger.

That's what they're doing. Yeah, Nanny agreed. And after a week of care, she decided that Dovey had to go. Dovey, you know what's coming, right? I just feel like, oh, look, I can get my legs moving again. Yeah. After Dovey complained of constipation. Where did I hear?

Oh, I think I know the cure for that. Let's put up the prune signal. Yeah, Nanny mashed up a nice paste of stewed prunes. And after a week of Nanny's prune diet, Dovey died too. At her funeral, Nanny learned through family that her stepfather, James, had died at some point in the last few years as well. So Nanny invited her mother, Lou, to come live with her.

Now Nanny immediately came to realize that this decision was a mistake. But she was well aware that the locals wouldn't look kindly upon her for abandoning her mother. So Mother Lou ended up on a prune diet for long. Prunes hit the menu, man. Wow. As soon as prunes hit the menu, everybody's going to have it, man.

That is dangerous. And Nanny got all the appropriate praise for taking care of her sick and dying mother. Of course, Mother Lou died eventually. Now, it's interesting about Nanny, because I feel like that's where any sort of psychological arm chair psychologist talk about her is that she was obsessed with what other people thought.

Yes. She had no inner life. Everything was inconveniences and fantasy to her. So the inconveniences to her fantasies, what she believed her life was supposed to be, and this unattainable way, the thing that she was searching for that was just never going to fucking happen.

But she'd still believe that she needed to kill and kill and kill and kill to get that life, but also at the same time, she loved the societal points of look at what I've done in this moment of grief. I take care of these people. I do this. What are you eating first? One of Nanny's pruned pies, a sausage made by that psycho

in Canada who ground them all up in there, or one of Hanson's out of Alaska. What are you going to eat if they serve you all food? Well, Robert Hanson's baked goods were the least affected by anything, and I would eat his stuff. Yeah, he definitely ate his baked goods forever. It wasn't a part of his thing.

Yeah. He was just a baker. That was his cover. And he was actually very good, so I would have eaten that. Fantastic. So he won that one. Technically, Dennis Rader was very good at installing home security systems.

A little too good. Yeah. OK. It's just a job. Just a job. Fantastic. Now, after Mother Lou's death, Nanny found that she had no personal connections left.

Her parents were both dead. Her siblings and her children, what remained of her children, were deathly afraid of her. And her first husband, Charlie Braggs, was nothing more than a distant memory. She didn't even know where Charlie lived. Freedom. Freedom.

Charlie is the luckiest man. I will get you down. No matter what you do. Nanny's going to do. She must be thrilled then. Yeah, this is exactly how she wanted it. She's untethered from anyone or anything that can hold back her pursuit of a romantic life.

Finally, she's free. Yes. So she kicked it up a notch in 1953 and moved on from the Lonely Hearts column to a paid national dating service called the Diamond Circle Club. She's going from OK Cupid to fucking plenty of fish now. Oh, yeah.

She said there's a little bit of a reason, because she's like, her hair is starting to show its age. She's starting to gain a little weight. She's doing these things. She's starting to age, right? And she's starting to age, and she knows that just her picture and a piece of pie is maybe not going to bring them in anymore.

So now I need to up my game and show them all I have money. I'm well landed. Classy girl. I'll suck your dick. Wow, that's even better. From this service, Nanny snagged a man named Richard Morton from Kansas, who, like all the others, talked big about romance in his letters.

Dick Morton. Love that name. No, no, Dick Morton. And he was mad, because Dick Morton, he was unfortunately, which is, you know, she's a murderer. She's an infanticide, matricide, lower family school, all of those husbands. Patricide, all of it, yeah, yeah, and then,

but she didn't like Richard Morton, because he was short. Really? And that's the real reason. Well, did he lie about that? No, he couldn't. No one cared at the time. She didn't ask him? No.

You want to get to, you want to know that answer. Well, the other difference was that Richard was wealthy. First rich man she ever snagged, and after a month, they got married. And this time, things were different. At least at first, Richard was sober, faithful, and devoted. But Richard was also kind of boring,

and Richard was also clingy. See, this is the thing, he said, now he's staying home, and he's doing all the stuff he wants, that she wants her to do. But now, she hates it, because she's like, what, you suck though. The other guys, it was kind of funny, you know, they ran away, but now I was used to having my alone time. She literally said that, it was like,

I was used to being on my own, but now you're here all the time. What do women want? What do women want? What do women want? Well, this wasn't a part of her romantic fantasy. You know, she had this fantasy, and that's the thing, it's just the other side of it.

Her fantasy hadn't worked out again. She didn't have the excitement, she didn't have the romance. It was just some boring short lumpy dump sitting in the kitchen, waiting for her to finish a meal, and that's it. And of course, when Nanny started pulling away, Richard started courting other women. And again, in response, Nanny resumed her membership

in the Diamond Circle Club, claiming to be a widow seeking travel and excitement after suffering through a boring marriage. I love diamonds, prunes. Right. I love going on a train. I love writing letters. Do you suck dick by any chance?

You wouldn't fucking believe what I do. Let's do it. Let's get married. I think I did this new thing called sucking dick with my butt. Whoa! Yeah, I just do it. It's a double marrying, oh yeah, yeah.

At the same time, Nanny got her grubby fingers on Richard's finances and discovered that he was in quite a bit of debt. Uh-oh. The longer Richard lived, she figured the more debt he would accrue. And the less likely an insurance policy would balance out Nanny's payout.

And you know how that she got this jump on him, Kissel? How? Is that he was a late riser. And so she'd get the mail first. So she just would open all this mail. And so this is the thing I'm saying to you, Kissel, is the potential, you're searching for a suitor yourself. I know that eventually, but I'm just saying

that you might have to get up and check the mail first sometimes, because you never know what someone's planning on insinuating themselves inside of all of your financial life and then poisoning you. I hate mail. I hate mail. It gives me anxiety.

Yeah, I hate the mail too. I hate the mail. Well, either way, they can handle it. They can handle all of that. I don't care. And so after just three months of marriage, that's what boggles my mind is that she killed for boredom so much faster than she killed for abuse.

She dealt with abuse for years, decades. And with boredom, it's three months. She baked stewed prunes mixed with rat poison into an apple pie. And Richard, just like Arlie before him, went to sleep and never woke up. Do you know that that also is not really how it went too? Because she hinted, and one of these books

hinted that she would do her best. Dude, they don't just go to sleep. They don't wake up. They literally go to bed. And then you hear in the other room, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, sure. And she's going, you know, she just sits there, like not hearing anything.

It's not a peaceful night. It's like when I ate all those Super Coup Wings to win that challenge against one of our friends. It was a horrible night, horrible night. But because Richard was on the other side of middle age, and because Nanny was in Kansas far away from any of her other murders, no one suspected a thing. And after the life insurance payout,

Nanny did indeed come out $2,000 ahead. OK. Now, by this point, Nanny was about to enter her 50s. And after four failed attempts at finding her perfect romantic partner, she began to accept that maybe the romantic life just wasn't in the cards. It's just not for men, or just not there for it? Well, Nanny, have you thought about a lady?

Damn. Yes. The thing about a lady, though, is that, yeah, get one of her top hat. Get one of them long clits. Yeah, sure. That's what I'm looking for. I want one of her real long clits.

Fantastic. Yeah, the deep set of balls. OK. Great. I think we're looking for a man still. No, I mean, I don't know. What do you think gives Bill Gunness the edge of recognition versus Nanny Doss?

Do you think it's just... Violence. Yeah, the sheer violence of it. It's violence, and she strikes a more... She's scarier, too. She's scarier, yeah, it's true. I think Nanny Doss is actually scarier than Bill Gunness. I think so, too.

Because she gets in there. Yeah. She really gets in there, and she makes you think everything's chill. Bill Gunness was a monster. Literally, truly, was a fairy tale monster. Yeah. Where like, she is...

Nanny Doss is... It's that thing you never know when all of a sudden you're getting fucking broadsided with it. And she weaponized the thing that we all love. Food, basically. Yeah. And also, pies. Oh, pies.

Something as innocent as pie. Yeah. So, Nanny decided to choose a man that was at best decent. Okay. And married Samuel Doss of Tulsa, Oklahoma, just a month after she buried Richard Morton. I'm moving on. Oh, yeah.

Now, Samuel was indeed a decent man in the puritanical Christian sense, in that he didn't smoke, drink, sleep around, gamble, or even curse. At 59 years old, Samuel was the classic set-in-his-ways bachelor who went to bed and ate meals at the exact same time every single day, and even had sex at appointed times that were marked on the calendar. Oh, yeah, dude.

And you'd only have one... He's the type of thing where like, you only use a light when you're in the room. Yeah. And then you shut the light off. And you only use the light to illuminate the specific idea, the specific space that you need to be illuminating. Sure.

And then you shut it right off. You can't put the fans on until it reaches a certain temperature. And she's like, so again, she wanted this routine in a way but she didn't really want it. No, it doesn't sound like it. Yeah. It was, of course, both boring and incredibly frustrating.

It was even... It was boring on a different level than the guy before because it is... The other guy is just like, yeah, whatever, get off me. This is an actual pain in the ass that she has to deal with. So to her temporary credit, she did this time at least try to just leave instead of resorting to murder. But when Samuel started sending her letters, both shaming her

for leaving and agreeing to give her more control over their finances, Nanny decided to give it another shot. When Nanny returned to Oklahoma from Alabama, though, she brought her treasure trove of romance literature, her most cherished possessions. Now, not surprisingly, Samuel saw romance literature as both frivolous and evil, artifacts of Satan that put both of them in danger of damnation for as long as they stayed in his home.

If he just knew, you'd just let her read them. You'd just let her read them, man. I wish I could give these guys... You'd just let her do certain things. Just let her do it. Let her be herself, man. Nope. He got rid of them.

Oh, my God. That's the word. He destroyed. No, so... Because her eyes, you can just see her face. If you look at that picture of her, and you see her being like, I threw away my magazines.

Yeah. He's so fucking dead, doesn't even know it. He not only sealed his fate, he guaranteed himself a slow death. Oh, yeah. Far more painful than any other Nanny inflicted upon a husband. He just didn't know. It also must be said that Samuel's long road to death

wasn't necessarily a personal decision. It was more of a happy coincidence for Nanny. See, Samuel, boring and joyless in every aspect of his life, didn't like sweets, which dashed Nanny's usual MO of using sugar to mask the taste of arsenic. No prunes possible. And he didn't drink booze either.

The only superpower that she had, he had the kryptonite. Yes. He didn't drink and didn't eat sweets. What's he gonna do? Well, she started stirring the smallest amount of arsenic into Samuel's nightly cup of coffee at dinner. Yeah.

Slowly poisoned him. That seems a little wild, though, to have coffee at dinner. Yeah, it is. Actually, it is a little wild. He's kind of out of control. He was like, whoa, okay, whoa, buddy. And before long, Samuel had lost 15 pounds and became bedridden with horrific stomach cramps.

For the doctor's part, they were stumped, and Samuel spent 23 days in the hospital for what they thought was a mysterious gastric infection, all while Nanny showed the appropriate amount of compassion. I just wish that he'd let me cuddle him with my prunes, but he won't let me do it. Right, right. See, what Nanny hadn't counted on was that Samuel,

for the dull life he lived, was actually extraordinarily healthy and strong. Oh. Unlike the alcoholics she was used to murdering, whose bodies were already just hanging on by a thread. So, when Samuel was finally released from the hospital and sent home after recovering from long-term arsenic poisoning, she said, fuck it,

and dumped enough arsenic into his coffee to kill a horse. And Samuel died moaning in pain on the very night he returned home from the hospital. This seriously just has to end. It has to end. How can you be like this? It's depressing me. So this is where she actually got a little carried away

and a little bit lazy, dare I say. Well, but that's the thing. But Nanny definitely would have gotten away with murder had she just given him all the arsenic at once in the first place. Which truly makes me wonder just how many women around the world murdered their way through life before the age of mass communication.

I mean, that's why we tried really hard putting misogyny into everything so we can make them police themselves from the inside out. We tried to fix this problem. 24%. Yeah. 24%. Oh, maybe.

24% of women murdered their way across the world before the age of mass communication. 24%. My mother has, I think that she has this fantasy, but she's never done it. She's had this idea in her head and be like, well, I could kill everyone.

And then they don't know. It's kind of like with like 9-11, for example. Sure. Right? It's like, was it the government conspiracy? Did they plan it or did they allow it to happen? I'm more of the latter. So your father,

she's just allowing it to happen. Allowing life to kill himself? Yeah. So she's just allowing life to slowly kill my father? She's not stopping it, is all I'm saying. Ah, squee bono indeed. But since...

Yeah, because he's definitely worth almost $1,000 at this point. Whoa! Yeah. But since Nanny's actions had introduced an element of mystery into Samuel Doss's death, the gastroenterologist who treated Samuel

found the progression, regression, and sudden fatal end of Samuel Doss's illness to be, in a word, fascinating. Fascinating. Well, because, you know, the truth is, is that every other one, all the other deaths, they weirdly had a lot of things that could cover up.

Like with Arleigh, it was either Arleigh, one of them. Well, they're all alcoholics. But there was a... The alcohol was one. And there was like a flu epidemic that also happened. That was a lot of these were blamed on. Yeah, Arleigh was like,

there was a flu epidemic that his death was just like loosely based on. And then the drunk, again, they're just considered like, well, his body just gave out ages because that's what happened all the time because he's working in the mill 16 hours and then you drink yourself with rotgut

to sleep every night. And that booze, I had one of those really old bottles of whiskey and I'm supposed to like it, but... He's like medicine. Yeah, I didn't like it. Now this guy, a Dr. Schwellbine, had treated Samuel all throughout

his 23 days in the hospital. And since no autopsy was required, because Samuel's death was put down as natural, the doctor asked Nanny if he could do one anyway. It's somewhat as a personal favor. And we've done absolutely everything to heal him. I caught slits in his foot. Yeah.

To see if I could bleed him out and send for the event. And I put mercury deep into his eyeballs. It seemed to also have no effect. I simply could not imagine what killed him. Maybe those things. And then I applied my doctor's hammer to his forehead. Right. Just to see what it would do in pound.

And I pounded his head just to see how solid the skull was. The skull was in there. Very still. The skull remained mostly intact. Oh. All right. Whatever you need to do. I don't know what could possibly kill him.

I didn't do it. Now Nanny probably would have said no to an autopsy. But Dr. Schwellbine asked Nanny in a crowded room. So, not wanting to arouse any suspicion, Nanny gave the go ahead. Yeah, I guess let's look at his fucking guts. All right. Let's do it.

Get the bone saw. Come on. Can I do it? You want to do it? Come on. Let me do it. All right. Within minutes of opening Samuel's stomach,

they found ample evidence of massive arsenic poisoning. And Nanny Doss was quickly and finally arrested. Whoa. Y'all got me. You got you. I know. What took you guys so long? What do you fucking got?

I actually don't know what it took so long. I don't know you. That's a thing. Well, that's a thing. When Nanny was brought in for questioning and asked if she killed her husband. No. She reportedly let out hysterical little yelps of laughter

to show how ridiculous she thought the concept was. That's crazy. That is crazy. So you killed your husband? Did you kill your husband then? No. It's kind of funny. Is there anything funny about his death?

Just a look on his face. Okay. Acting a little odd, man. And hence, Nanny Doss became known as the Giggling Granny. After hours of stonewalling detectives, though, a man named Ray Page stepped in and gave Nanny the hard way, easy way ultimatum. Hard way, we dig up every person who's ever died

in your vicinity and test them for arsenic. And then when we find it, you hang. Easy way, you confess and spend the rest of your life in prison. This is omnipresent. I watch a lot of police interrogation footage on YouTube. I love this show. I do, too. But a part of it is that, right?

Because you want to develop a way out for somebody. You have to develop a thing. And this idea of this, and guess what? It's fake every time. But when they ask you, they say like, listen, help us out here. We can help you. Right.

We're going to help you. We're going to get you through the system. It's not true. No, of course not. They just need to get the confession because the confession is the only way they can lock it in. It's one they can lock in a conviction. With the technology of the time,

would they have been able to find the arsenic in these cold cases? Oh, yeah, dude. Oh, yeah. It smells like almonds. You literally open it up, and it just works. Even in some deceased, decaying body? Well, they did it. He had just died.

They absolutely did it, given the choice. And that's the thing is that they gave her the hard way, easy way thing, and they're like, yeah, and we'll give you back your fucking true romance magazine, too. Yeah, I fucking did it. That's awesome. That's all she actually wants. Yeah, that's all she wanted, and she chose the easy way.

But she only confessed to killing the four husbands, even though it was pretty obvious that she'd killed many more people. The men were dug up, and they were found to be full of arsenic. But the children and the relatives were left to rest, if only because no one saw the point of digging them up, too. And once police ruffled through Nanny's correspondence, they found that she had already been courting yet another husband as she was in the process of killing Samuel.

She had no less than a dozen men already on the hook. Yeah, she would have kept going. There's no way she would have stopped. No, why would she? But as it was, Nanny Doss died in Oklahoma State Prison in 1965 at the age of 59, having continued correspondence the whole time with a litany of lonely hearts who, for some reason, still wanted a piece of the giggling granny.

Just want her, man. There's something fun about her. Nanny Doss. It is interesting. So she took her last husband who she killed. She kept his last name. Yes. I don't know why the last one.

I think it's because the last one was the... I think it's just who she stumbled on. I think it would have been anyone's last one. Yeah, it would have been whoever she married. I think she changed her name every time. Wow. Well, look at that. Talk about someone who is loyal.

That's why get someone who takes your relationship from zero to 100 in just a couple of weeks. Because in no way is that who you know. You can trust them. That means you can trust them. Absolutely. As romance, it's not a red flag. It's romance.

It's red flag because a heart is red like on a Valentine. That's correct. Great point. Also, make sure if you do have a murderer in your family, send them a card every now and again. Honestly, keep them in... To keep a light in touch. Like an Instapost.

Every once in a while, give it a like. She's going to be like, I'm still here. Right. Like you. Loving your stuff. Don't kill me. Nanny Doss, one of the most interesting killers we've ever covered. What a story.

There were some moments where you did feel a little empathy and sympathy, but then you're right. I think she would have just continued to kill a bunch of people. Oh, yeah. And it's very bad when you turn the prune on a human. I mean, I think that it's good to not trust prunes. They're disgusting. No, they're good for your mouths.

I like dried prunes. Yeah, I'm okay with them. But still, that's why you might flex. Also... Dehydrated prune. Delivery. I would go with delivery for dinner. Oh, yeah.

Or Hello Fresh. Maybe this is a good time for a Hello Fresh ad. You know what you do? You know what's really difficult to hide poison in? A crudo. Sushi. Great. Very difficult to poison it.

Oh, yeah. It's just a mercury from the sushi. You will slowly die. Yeah, but that's different. You're earning that. You want that. Exactly. Because it's a very expensive and slow way to die.

All right. So we have a couple of announcements. Number one, Spring Hill Jack Coffee. You love it. I love it. We've got a new bean. What is a new bean? A new bean.

The Mothman blend's got a new bean. It's absolutely fucking delicious. It is a little bit of a lighter roast, which I like. I think it's good for the morning time. My understanding is the lighter roast has more caffeine. It does. It gives you good jolt. It's going to get you powerful.

So honestly, go ahead and check it out. But get some of those delicious new beans. Yeah. Spring Hill Jack Coffee with that Mothman blend. It is so very tasty. You know, we fucked them up. And the other of you that have had it, no, we ain't lying. That's very tasty.

Absolutely. Love the Mothman coffee. Love the Mothman blend. Love every blend that Spring Hill Jack makes. The products that we are a part of are very good. They are fine. We try our best. They are fine.

But no, honestly, we don't normally endorse anything that we haven't already. Unless it's, you know, it's one of these things that we're forced to endorse. But you know, the rest of it, we try it. Especially if we're putting our name on it, we're trying it. We're involved in it. Absolutely. June 10th, Ben Kissel and I are going to be at a place called the Count's Den. This is in downtown Los Angeles.

I believe from 6 to 8 p.m. That's right. We're going to be there. We're going to be signing comic books. We're going to be signing Soul Plumber. There's going to be some kind of in-store New York signing as well for Marcus. But we haven't scheduled that yet. We don't know that yet.

I'm figuring that one out. Still in recovery mode over here. So I'm taking it slow. I'm going to sign your signature, Marcus. I think that would be great. Go ahead. And you just be him. And you just sit on a bunch of catchy packets.

Ben, ride a show. Because my rectum bleeds. My rectum bleeds. Folks, he's got a tomato butt. Come on, folks. The Ryman Show live, Nashville. June 18th. Can't wait.

Start at 7 p.m. Nashville time. But we want to let you know if you can make it physically there and we still want you there. We actually don't have that many tickets left for the in-person show. And I want you to be there. Yes, please. If you can and if you want to, if you're in from out of country, someplace else, you

can get there. Watch our live stream happening the same exact time. And you go to get those tickets at momenthouse.com slash L-P-O-T-L. That's it. And you go, get those tickets. It's going to be so much fun. You're going to hear a bunch of ads for it. We're just so fucking excited.

The show is not going to be a clusterfuck. Not at all. Hell no. No. Certainly not with 25 people there. No. But it's going to be fun. Totally sober-minded people.

But also remember it's going to be three hours long. When you go, it's going to be a full-ass night. Are we going to be manned? It's going to be awesome. Oh, yeah. No, no. My cousin's band, Urban Pioneers, is going to be playing. Me and Carolina are going to be doing one hell of a no-ducks and space routine that

we got worked out. We're working up right now. We can't fucking wait for it. It's going to be, it's rhyming specific. Very exciting for us. Very exciting for us. Fantastic. Truly, truly can't wait.

Fernando, Travis and I will be doing a top hat thing. All the shows will be there that you love. I'm going to recommend because the show will be long. We don't need to see any messages at 8 a.m. saying, we're pre-gaming now. Have your first beer at the start of the show. After three hours, you're going to have a nice little buzz. Yeah, you'll be hammered. And then we could actually go out.

Yeah. I always get concerned when someone sends those messages and they're like, get ready for tonight's show. It's like 10 a.m. Oh, I know. To be like, you're not going to make it to the show. You're going to fall asleep. You don't make it to the show.

We have had people literally fall forward out of their seats because they started pre-gaming too early. Have a full night out. Exactly. All right, everyone. Well, thank you so much for listening. We hope you're doing well out there. Hail yourselves.

Hail Satan's. Hail again. Magustinations, everybody. Hail me, if you would. If you've got it, spare hail. Why don't you toss me one? Why don't you toss him a hail? Also, don't eat anybody's pie.

I mean, yeah, you should. Unless you know. If they're not going to kill you. Honestly, man, fuck it. Also, prune pie. If you avoid prune pie, but if pie's going to kill you, it's going to kill you fucking anyway, one way or another. So just jump on it.

Jump on that grenade. All right. This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support our shows by supporting them. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to lastpodcastnetwork.com.