SERIAL KILLER: "The Giggling Granny" Nannie Doss Pt. 1

For over two decades, Nancy 'Nannie' Doss of Blue Mountain, Alabama, moved from husband to husband... and left a trail of unexplained deaths in her wake. Charming and churchgoing, she was never suspected, even as children, siblings, a parent, and multiple spouses died in her presence. This episode traces her early life, her cycle of violent marriages, and the killings that investigators would eventually piece together. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Serial Killers & Murderous Minds to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped together on Monday ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com http://crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Serial Killers & Murderous Minds is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. 🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Murder True Crime Stories, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts! Follow me on Social Instagram: @Crimehouse https://www.instagram.com/crimehouse/TikTok: @Crimehouse https://www.tiktok.com/@crimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudios https://www.facebook.com/crimehousestudiosYouTube: @crimehousestudios https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Vanessa Richardson?

  Hi, everyone. Before today's episode, there's another show I want to tell you about. It's called What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Plus Connor's infectious energy that'll make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on earth. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  This is Crime House.

• 0:41Vanessa Richardson?

  Most of us grow up imagining what our future might look like. Maybe we picture falling in love, getting married, having a family, and building a life that feels happy and secure. But adulthood rarely turns out exactly the way we imagined. Relationships sometimes disappoint us. Families struggle. Life gets messy. Still, we usually manage to pick up the pieces and keep going. When it came to Nanny Doss, things worked a little differently. Whenever the life around her failed to match the one she'd imagined, people close to her had a disturbing habit of dying. Through it all, Nanny maintained the same cheerful smile while continuing her search for something better.

• 1:26Vanessa Richardson?

  But behind the smile was a secret she managed to keep for decades because most of those deaths in her circle weren't accidents at all. For more than 20 years, Nanny killed the people closest to her and got away with it.

• 1:54Vanessa Richardson?

  The human mind is powerful. It shapes how we think, feel, love, and hate. But sometimes it drives people to commit the unthinkable. This is Serial Killers and Murderous Minds, a Crime House original. I'm Vanessa Richardson.

• 2:09Tristin Engels?

  And I'm forensic psychologist Dr. Tristin Engels. Every Monday and Thursday, we uncover the darkest minds in history, analyzing what makes a killer.

• 2:19Vanessa Richardson?

  Crime House exists because of listeners like you. Want even more? Join Crime House Plus and get both parts of every story dropped on the same Monday completely ad-free. No waiting three days for part two, plus Crime House bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com. Or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds page. Before we get started, be advised that this episode contains descriptions of domestic abuse, sexual assault, and the murder of adults and children. So please, listen with care. Today, we're diving into the disturbing story of Nanny Doss, a woman whose life followed the same cycle over and over again.

• 3:03Vanessa Richardson?

  She entered relationships, hoping for some version of a life she'd imagined, became unhappy, and then found a horrifying way out. And over more than two decades, Nanny turned the people closest to her into her victims.

• 3:18Tristin Engels?

  As Vanessa goes through the story, I'll be talking about things like how childhood trauma can shape someone's later relationships, and what we can and can't reasonably connect to future violence. How postpartum stress, repeated pregnancies, and major life stressors can affect someone psychologically. And how someone can repeatedly recreate the same unhealthy cycles in their life while simultaneously using violence as a way of trying to escape them.

• 3:46Vanessa Richardson?

  And as always, we'll be asking the question, what makes a killer?

• 3:54Speaker 03

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• 4:54Vanessa Richardson?

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• 5:37Vanessa Richardson?

  By partnering directly with ethical manufacturers and cutting out traditional middlemen, Quince offers luxury products at prices 50% to 80% less than high-end competitors. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Serial Killers and Murderous Minds. It's the best way to support the show.

• 6:11Vanessa Richardson?

  Before she ever took the lives of the people closest to her, Nanny Doss was just a little girl who wanted to be loved. Nancy Hazel, the woman the world would come to know as Nanny Doss, was born in Blue Mountain, Alabama, in November of 1905, one of five children in a working-class family. Her father, James, worked as a railroader and farmer. Her mother, Louisa, cared for the home. Money was limited, so Nanny's childhood didn't leave much room for play, leisure, or the kind of carefree experiences most children hope for. Instead, Nanny and her siblings were expected to work from an early age. James would keep them home from school for long stretches so they could help on the family farm. At an age when most children

• 6:55Vanessa Richardson?

  were still spending their days on swing sets, Nanny already knew how to cut wood and plow a field. James was also strict in ways that went far beyond chores. He controlled what Nanny wore and who she could spend time with. Makeup and dress clothes were forbidden. So were ballgames and visits with friends. But James couldn't control everything. According to Nanny, when she was around seven years old, her family took a train trip to visit relatives in southern Alabama. It was the first time she'd ever been away from the farm. At one point, the train stopped short and threw Nanny forward, slamming her head into the metal frame of the seat in front of her. She was shaken up and bruised, but no one took her to a doctor.

• 7:38Vanessa Richardson?

  Nanny later claimed the injury left her with headaches, blackouts, depression, and changes in her behavior. For the rest of her life, she would point back to that moment as the thing that changed her, the reason for the darkness that came later.

• 7:53Tristin Engels?

  Head injuries can cause problems with impulse control, emotional regulation, judgment, and even, in rare instances, personality changes in people. And one of the most famous cases of this, incidentally, also involves railroads. It's the case of Phineas Gage in 1848. Phineas was a 28-year-old railroad construction foreman who was working one day when an explosion blasted an iron rod completely through his left cheek and out of the top of his skull. And it destroyed a large amount of his frontal lobe, which handles emotional control and decision-making. His memory, his speech, and his physical strength remained intact, but he reportedly had a drastic change in personality. And he became aggressive, impatient, more profane,

• 8:38Tristin Engels?

  and he struggled with some aspects of executive functioning. His family stated that they did not recognize him anymore after this accident. Children, however, are remarkably neuroplastic, meaning after a head injury like Nanny's, which is obviously far less severe than Phineas, at her age, a developing brain can adapt much better because it's able to reorganize and form new neural pathways and connections. They have a more unique capacity for recovery than adults do. And that's not to say that head injuries can't cause poor behavioral control or depression in children. It can. But millions of people have head traumas of varying degrees and types and never go on to murder anyone.

• 9:21Tristin Engels?

  Phineas Gage never harmed anyone. In fact, it's been reported that his severe behavioral changes actually stabilized over time. So to suggest that this one head injury, without loss of consciousness that we know of or any medical intervention, is the cause of any future offending behavior would likely be an externalization of blame. But if she is suggesting that this incident was memorable insofar as she was shaken up and she never wanted to feel fear like that again, then that would be reasonable and something to explore.

• 9:57Vanessa Richardson?

  At seven years old, do you think a child would even understand that changes in their emotions or behavior might be connected to an injury?

• 10:04Tristin Engels?

  At seven, she may have noticed that she felt different or behaved differently. Certainly, headaches are easily associated with that. Psychologically, much less so. But I wouldn't expect a child that age to independently understand that. It's more likely that she came to this conclusion retrospectively and needed some kind of rationalization. But I'm sure we'll find out about that in episode two.

• 10:29Vanessa Richardson?

  Well, whatever changes Nanny believed the accident had caused in her, her home life remained just as rigid as before. When Nanny or any of her siblings stepped out of line, her father beat them. As Nanny grew into her teenage years, she started longing for everything James had spent years denying her, especially romance. With no real chance to date, she found another outlet. As a teenager, she became fascinated with romance magazines and something called lonely hearts advertisements, short newspaper ads written by people looking for a spouse or companion. Nanny imagined what it would be like to answer one of those ads, or maybe place one herself, and finally find the kind of loving, caring relationship she had dreamt about.

• 11:14Vanessa Richardson?

  At that point in her life, it was all only a fantasy. That changed in 1921, when Nanny was 16. That year, she went to work at the Linen Thread Company in nearby Anniston, a mill that turned out things like twine and fishing nets. There, she met a charming coworker named Charlie Braggs. The two began dating almost immediately. Within just a few months, Charlie asked Nanny's parents for permission to marry her, and James said yes. So it might seem surprising that Nanny's controlling father let things move so fast, but at the time, especially in rural, working-class communities, girls were expected to marry young. Nanny later said she did as "my father wished", and within months, they were married.

• 11:59Vanessa Richardson?

  Nanny felt like she finally had what she'd spent years imagining, a loving relationship of her own. She moved into the home Charlie shared with his mother, and almost immediately, the two women clashed. Nanny had spent years waiting to escape her father's control, only to land in a house run by someone just like him. Nanny later described her mother-in-law as controlling, claiming she wouldn't allow Nanny's own mother, Louisa, to visit and would sometimes pretend to be sick whenever Nanny and Charlie made plans to go out.

• 12:31Tristin Engels?

  Nanny likely didn't recognize this about Charlie's mother at first because she didn't really have an opportunity to. She was consumed with her own controlling environment, and marriage represented freedom from that environment. And meeting Charlie was an opportunity for the escape that she had been fantasizing about for years. So she was probably very motivated to make that relationship work. And that means filtering out any information that may complicate that relationship, and that includes alarming signs from his mother. But also, whatever interaction Nanny had with Charlie's mother before the marriage was likely very different. You don't necessarily know how controlling somebody's going to be, or at least the extent of it, when they don't have authority over you yet. But once she starts living with her,

• 13:16Tristin Engels?

  she is subjected to her rules and expectations, and that's when she's likely realized she's not gaining any autonomy after all. And Nanny's own history with that, living with her father, may have made that more recognizable and maybe even less tolerable than it would have otherwise been. And this could have felt like an enormous letdown for Nanny.

• 13:38Vanessa Richardson?

  Still, Nanny was a newly married teenager, and for the time being, she followed her husband's lead and put up with the arrangement. Two years later, in 1923, Nanny gave birth to their first daughter, Melvina. She was still a teenager. Three more girls followed in quick succession. For most of the next four years, Nanny was either pregnant, recovering from childbirth, or caring for a newborn while raising other very small children. That would have been a lot for anyone, but Nanny was barely out of her teens, figuring out motherhood inside a crowded house that her mother-in-law still ran, and inside a marriage that was already coming apart. Exactly what caused the relationship to unravel isn't clear.

• 14:21Vanessa Richardson?

  Reportedly, Charlie started disappearing for days at a time. Nanny started drinking, and sources suggest both of them were unfaithful. Then, in early 1927, around the time their fourth daughter, Florine, was born, the family suffered a devastating loss. One morning, Nanny and Charlie's two middle daughters ate breakfast. By lunchtime, both were dead. Nanny told doctors the girls had gotten sick right after they ate, and their deaths were written off as food poisoning. At least, that was the accepted explanation at the time. But shortly after the girls died, Charlie got a warning. It came in the form of an anonymous note, and its message was simple:

• 15:04Vanessa Richardson?

  "Don't eat anything Nanny cooks for you." The note didn't say why, but coming so soon after his daughters' deaths, it planted a terrifying possibility in Charlie's mind. Did Nanny have something to do with it?

• 15:18Tristin Engels?

  Nanny is still so young when she becomes a mother of four children, and she has four children in four years. Not only is she caring for four very young children, her marriage is seemingly deteriorating, and she's living under the authority of her mother-in-law. And that is quite a bit of physical and emotional stress in and of itself. So her system is likely overloaded. But I want to be very clear when I say that's not an excuse for what comes next with Nanny. There are overwhelmed parents in nearly every household, and they do not kill their children, let alone even fathom the idea. And I highlight these things to give us context for Nanny's psychological state here, especially at her age, not to excuse it.

• 16:01Tristin Engels?

  Now, for a parent to intentionally kill their own child, assuming that's what happened, something has to override the instinct they have against harming their child. And there are very different psychological ways through which that can happen. And the most commonly understood is severe mental illness, like postpartum psychosis, for example. That can profoundly distort a mother's perception of reality. And in some cases, a parent can convince themselves that death is somehow protecting their children from something worse. And in other cases, not necessarily related to postpartum psychosis or postpartum in general, but psychologically speaking, their child becomes associated with a partner, a grievance,

• 16:45Tristin Engels?

  or something the parent wants to escape. And sometimes, the motive can be much more instrumental. Their child or children are experienced as an obstacle to something the parent wants. We talked about that with our episodes on Chris Watts. So if Nanny did kill her two girls, and someone sure thinks she did, and how she did it even, then what I want to know is what changed for her after this? What did this resolve for her? Because I think the answer to that is going to really reveal a lot.

• 17:17Vanessa Richardson?

  When a parent later frames a child's death as somehow sparing them, how do you begin to tell a genuine delusion from, say, a rationalization?

• 17:26Tristin Engels?

  It's a very good question, and I'm going to do my best to explain this, but to be fair, it's so much more nuanced than a simple answer. But I would first want to know if this belief existed before their child or children were killed, or if it emerged as an explanation after the fact. Obviously, if there is no evidence that it existed before, and convincingly so, then it's a rationalization, more likely. With a genuine delusion, I'm looking for evidence that the person's perception of reality itself was distorted. What exactly did they believe the child needed to be saved from? Why did they believe it? How firmly did they believe it? Did they refuse to believe alternative options?

• 18:08Tristin Engels?

  Did they feel fixed in that belief regardless of conflicting information? Was that belief part of a larger psychotic process? I'd also want to know if there were hallucinations, other delusions, disorganized thinking, or significant changes in functioning. Because with a rationalization, a person generally remains grounded in reality, but they develop an explanation that makes their behavior easier to justify, whether it's to themselves or to everybody else, or both. And there are strategic ways to question and tease out whether that's the case, too. But the behavior itself, leading up to and especially after, is what really tells us the most. Did they conceal it? Did they lie? Are they trying to avoid being caught? Did they benefit in any way from their death?

• 18:52Tristin Engels?

  Again, a lot goes into it, more than I can describe here, but those are really the broad strokes of it.

• 18:59Vanessa Richardson?

  Well, whoever wrote that note never came forward, but Charlie took it seriously enough to fear that he could be next. So he took Melvina, their oldest, and left. He didn't take the baby. Florine, only a few months old, stayed behind with Nanny and with Charlie's mother. But Charlie also left with a question he couldn't shake: Had his daughters really died of food poisoning? Or had something much darker happened inside that house?

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• 20:42Vanessa Richardson?

  By the end of 1927, two of Nanny's daughters were dead. Her husband had walked out with a third, and an anonymous note had put a terrible question in Charlie's head whether his wife had killed their children on purpose. He had no proof, though. And in 1928, Charlie came back with Melvina and with a new woman he wanted to marry. He asked Nanny for a divorce, and she agreed. Before the year was out, it was final, and Nanny took custody of both surviving daughters. She moved the girls back in with her parents and took a job at a local cotton mill to support them. But the old longing hadn't gone anywhere. Before long, Nanny was back in the pages of the same romance magazines and lonely hearts

• 21:27Vanessa Richardson?

  ads that had comforted her as a teenager. In 1929, Nanny answered an ad placed by a 23-year-old truck driver from nearby Jacksonville named Robert Frank Harrelson. The two of them started writing to each other. Frank sent poetry, and Nanny wrote back with romantic letters and a photograph of herself. By the time they met in person, things moved fast, and they soon became husband and wife. But the reality of married life set in quickly, and once again, it looked nothing like Nanny's fantasy. She described Frank as a heavy drinker with a violent temper and said he physically abused her and, at times, raped her.

• 22:09Tristin Engels?

  Once again, the fantasy promises something completely different from the reality. But that's true of most fantasies. There's an element of control in answering romance ads and writing letters back and forth because there's distance to that. Nanny gets to decide what parts of herself she presents. She gets to imagine the person on the other end, based largely on what they choose to present to her. And everything that she doesn't know about them gets filled in with this fantasy that she lives in. There's not going to be conflict. There's no bills, no compromises, or stressors of any kind of cohabitating. There's nothing yet to test the relationship. And then they get married, and all of that control disappears.

• 22:51Tristin Engels?

  The fantasy she was living in disappears, and she realizes that this is a real person sharing her home with violent behaviors that she likely didn't even factor as a possibility to begin with, because you don't when you're living in a fantasy. In a fantasy, everything's perfect. That's never realistic. So now she finds herself back in the same kind of environment she's been trying to escape. And that can elevate fear, anger, resentment, even hypervigilance. And unresolved anger can turn outward, especially in someone who may already be capable of using violence to solve problems.

• 23:28Vanessa Richardson?

  If abuse becomes a part of everyday life in a marriage, can it start to change what that person sees as an acceptable way of handling conflict?

• 23:36Tristin Engels?

  It can. Most often, people who are constantly exposed to violence in their relationships can grow to expect it or become accustomed to the escalations that happen. And they become hyper-aware of it. So after a while, violence isn't something that would be shocking anymore to them like it would be to someone watching it, but rather, it's something that just happens when people get angry with each other. And during Nanny's time, violence by husbands against their wives was much more socially tolerated, and women had far fewer protections from it. There was also this idea that the man was the head of the household and had authority within it. So it was, in a lot of ways, socially acceptable.

• 24:17Tristin Engels?

  But with Nanny, I think her experiences likely reinforce something slightly different. If violence is repeatedly modeled as something people are allowed to use when they have power and it's socially accepted, then violence is an available way of exercising power for her too. And then she can justify it.

• 24:37Vanessa Richardson?

  Despite everything, Nanny stayed. The marriage was turbulent, but life moved forward. Melvina and Florine grew up and started families of their own, and Nanny became a grandmother. Then, in 1945, 18 years after her own daughters died, death touched Nanny's family again. That year, Melvina gave birth to her second child, a seemingly healthy baby girl. Melvina was still groggy from the ether she'd been given during delivery when Nanny picked up the newborn. At some point while the baby was in Nanny's arms, she died. Nanny said the baby was already dead when she picked her up, but Melvina remembered it differently.

• 25:19Vanessa Richardson?

  Drifting in and out of consciousness, she believed she'd seen her mother push a hat pin—that's a long, thin decorative pin women wore to hold their hats in place—into the top of the baby's head. Melvina wasn't sure what she'd seen, so she asked her husband and her sister Florine, who'd both been in the room. They told her Nanny had just announced that the baby was dead and that they'd noticed a pin in her hand. From that point on, Melvina seriously questioned whether her mother had killed her daughter. No one could prove it. Doctors never established a clear cause of death for the newborn, and no one could think of a reason Nanny would want to kill her own grandchild. But there was an unsettling parallel.

• 26:03Vanessa Richardson?

  Nanny had once been a very young mother herself, overwhelmed by multiple pregnancies, small children, and an unhappy marriage. Now she was watching Melvina become a mother for the second time in two years. There's no way to know what was going through Nanny's mind that day, whether the sight of her daughter in that hospital bed stirred something up, or whether it was something else entirely.

• 26:26Tristin Engels?

  Given her history, if she truly did kill her own granddaughter, it's absolutely reasonable to wonder if there was some kind of projection happening with Melvina. Watching her own daughter become a mother could have activated memories or feelings associated with that period of her own life. But this was not Melvina's first child. And also, at the same time, the deaths of Nanny's two daughters didn't happen until after Nanny had four children in four years. So if this is a projection, I still would want more information to support it. Like, is Melvina in a strained marriage also? Is she already feeling overwhelmed? Is Nanny seeing something in her daughter's circumstances that genuinely reminds her of her own?

• 27:09Tristin Engels?

  Or is Nanny feeling as though this new baby is somehow going to become an obstacle to her as the grandmother? Does she anticipate becoming responsible for her grandchildren in some way and connect that to what she felt in her own life when she was raising her own four children? Except now she's older. She's still unhappily married herself, and maybe she's even less tolerant of feeling trapped by responsibilities that she doesn't want. So her children have all grown up. They've all started lives of their own. So she's finally experiencing what life without dependence is like again. And the idea of having more dependence may be something that also is driving this.

• 27:54Tristin Engels?

  We don't fully know just yet. But she may think she's rescuing Melvina from something also, or she may be rescuing herself from something. But again, I come back to the same question. What does murdering her own granddaughter actually solve for her?

• 28:13Vanessa Richardson?

  Whether Nanny had anything to do with her granddaughter's death could never be proven, but death was following her now in ways that were getting harder to write off as coincidence. And just a few months later, it happened again. In July of 1945, 39-year-old Nanny was watching Melvina's two-year-old son, Robert. By then, Melvina's life had been turned upside down. She'd lost her newborn only months earlier, and in the aftermath, her marriage had fallen apart. She'd started seeing a soldier, a man Nanny didn't approve of, and the two women fought about it. But even with her suspicions about her mother, Melvina was a young, single mom with one child left, and she needed help.

• 28:56Vanessa Richardson?

  At times, that meant relying on Nanny. And that month, after a bad fight with her, Melvina went to stay with her father and left Robert with her mother. On July 7, 1945, Robert died in Nanny's care. Nanny said she'd simply found her grandson unresponsive. His death was attributed to asphyxia from what cause doctors couldn't say. When word reached Melvina, she was devastated, and underneath the grief was rage. She'd trusted her mother with the one child she had left, and now he too had died in Nanny's care. Put together with what she believed she'd seen in that hospital room months earlier, it was too much to ignore.

• 29:41Vanessa Richardson?

  But there was nothing she could prove. Forensic medicine in the 1940s had real limits, and if a two-year-old had been deliberately smothered without leaving obvious injuries, establishing that would have been almost impossible.

• 29:54Tristin Engels?

  I cannot imagine what Melvina must have been experiencing in this moment and throughout all of this, because, I mean, she gives birth to her daughter. Supposed to be a very exciting moment. She watches a healthy crying baby get handed to her mother, someone she loves, someone she trusts, only to suddenly die. She knows what she saw, but no one else saw it. She can't prove anything. She has to either trust what she saw and question her own mother without any evidence to back it up, or she decides to question herself and trust her mother. That is a horrible position to be in. And she chose to trust her mother, which I think many people would have done in that situation.

• 30:38Tristin Engels?

  That's your biggest attachment figure, and it's the one you turn to after a loss of that magnitude, too. Then she entrusts her again, only to lose her son. But once again, there's no proof. To say that she is experiencing a combination of profound guilt and anger or rage, like you said, and understandably so, but also betrayal and self-doubt, all of which I think would be an understatement. This has to have been very destabilizing for Melvina psychologically.

• 31:07Vanessa Richardson?

  This kind of goes with what you were just saying, but do you think Melvina could have blamed herself for leaving Robert with Nanny, even though she had no concrete evidence that he was actually in danger there?

• 31:17Tristin Engels?

  Absolutely. I mean, after a loss, and certainly a traumatic loss like this, compounded, people often find themselves in the bargaining stage of grief. I call it the woulda, coulda, shoulda's. Melvina may have been particularly vulnerable to that because, you know, she had previously suspected her mother and then made the decision to trust her over herself or her own judgment or what she knows to have seen. So in Melvina's case, this had to have been a particularly difficult stage to work through, if at all. But what she knows after Robert's death isn't necessarily what she knew when she made the decision to have Nanny watch him. She had suspicion, but she didn't have any certainty. Her daughter died in Nanny's arms in a hospital room in front of everyone.

• 32:01Tristin Engels?

  No one else saw what she thinks she saw. No one suspected her, not even medical staff. And I can see how easy it would be to talk yourself out of that suspicion, especially if medically and forensically, there was no certainty that Nanny did anything.

• 32:18Vanessa Richardson?

  Once again, a child had died in Nanny's care. But without physical evidence or a clear cause of death, Melvina's fears remained just that: fears. There was still nothing anyone could prove. But there was one detail about Robert's death that pointed to a possible motive. Nanny had taken out a $500 life insurance policy on her grandson. That's about $9,000 in today's money. Two months after Robert died, she collected the payout. It still wasn't proof, but it was one more reason to question what had really happened to that little boy. And shortly after Nanny got her hands on the money, she made another major decision,

• 33:01Vanessa Richardson?

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• 33:46Vanessa Richardson?

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• 34:28Vanessa Richardson?

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• 35:12Vanessa Richardson?

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• 35:39Speaker 07

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• 36:11Vanessa Richardson?

  By the fall of 1945, Nanny had buried an extraordinary number of people. Two of her daughters had died years earlier, and now, within a few months of each other, both of her grandchildren were gone, too. And not long after she collected the insurance money on Robert, she decided she'd had enough of her husband of 16 years. In September of 1945, just weeks after the end of World War II, Frank came home drunk one night after celebrating with friends who'd returned from the war. According to Nanny, he demanded sex. She refused, and he raped her. By the next day, Nanny had made a decision. She wanted out of the marriage for good, and instead of leaving Frank or going through

• 36:54Vanessa Richardson?

  a divorce, she chose something quicker. Nanny poured rat poison into one of the jars of corn whiskey her husband kept hidden around the house. Frank drank it. He became violently ill, and on September 15, 1945, he died. Doctors assumed it was food poisoning or some other sudden illness. No one suspected his wife. Nanny played the grieving widow, but not for long. Almost immediately, she returned to the same place she'd gone looking for romance before: the lonely hearts ads.

• 37:31Tristin Engels?

  This just strengthens my theory that all of this behavior is in pursuit of her own fantasy. She raised her two girls after allegedly potentially killing two others. She gave her marriage with Charlie a fair shot. To Nanny, she did her part. When her girls started families of their own, I think the obligations of being a grandmother may have started looking a little too similar to the obligations of being a mother again. And that may have started to feel like an obstacle or trap, preventing her from getting the life she wanted. And next thing you know, she kills Frank, too. She performs being a grieving widow, then immediately starts in with the romance ads without any hesitation or remorse.

• 38:16Tristin Engels?

  That speaks to her ability to compartmentalize. But pursuing that fantasy, again, was the priority, and she is intensely focused on doing exactly that, which I think is very revealing, because idealization can work this way. You don't have to be attached to an individual in the relationship. You can be attached and idealizing an imagined version of the relationship you want and what you believe it's going to provide you. And again, that's not the same as reality. When there's a mismatch, Nanny changes the person, or she removes the parts, like what or who is holding her back. But the one thing she doesn't seem to get rid of is the fantasy itself.

• 38:57Tristin Engels?

  And rather than recognizing that the idealized life or relationship or romance that she's chasing doesn't realistically exist, she puts the failure on others, on

• 39:08Tristin Engels?

  Husbands on children or the circumstances.

• 39:12Vanessa Richardson?

  Less than two years after Frank's death, Nanny was ready to try her hand at love again. In 1947, she responded to a Lonely Hearts ad placed by a 47-year-old laborer named Arlie Lanning, who lived in Lexington, North Carolina. Arlie had grown up in Alabama, too, and by some accounts, the two had known each other as children, which gave the relationship an instant familiarity. Reportedly, they married within days of meeting again in person, and Nanny moved to Lexington to start yet another new life. At first, this marriage seemed different. People who knew Nanny described her as respectable, funny, and attentive, the kind of church-going wife who appeared completely devoted to her new husband.

• 39:56Vanessa Richardson?

  But over time, the cracks showed, just like they always did. Arlie drank heavily, something Nanny had already lived through with Frank, but this marriage brought something new: jealousy. Arlie had a reputation around Lexington as a ladies' man, and rumors circulated that he was unfaithful. Eventually, word got back to Nanny. By early 1952, more than four years into the marriage, she'd had enough of a cheating husband. So that February, she mixed rat poison into a meal she cooked for him, and based on how fast it had worked on Frank, she probably expected the same thing now. But this time, it didn't.

• 40:37Vanessa Richardson?

  Instead, Arlie got sick: dizzy, sweating, vomiting, and wasn't getting any better. For days, he lingered, and no one could say exactly what was wrong with him. That put Nanny on edge, not because she was worried about her husband, but because she was the reason he was sick. And all Nanny could do was wait and wonder if someone else was going to figure it out, too.

• 41:01Tristin Engels?

  She's probably experiencing a lot of anxiety about this, too, because, yes, fear of getting caught is probably high on the list of worries. The longer this takes, the more likely someone figures out what's really happening, and the more likely Arlie survives or recovers. But I think there's something else that's likely causing more anxiety for Nanny, and that's her inability to escape. When Nanny becomes dissatisfied with the reality she's living in, when the relationship becomes something she no longer wants, or more importantly, when she feels trapped, when the person in front of her no longer fits her fantasy, she wants an immediate escape, and her escape is murder. Arlie stopped meeting her expectations of romance, so she poisoned him. But it didn't work, so that means she can't move on.

• 41:45Tristin Engels?

  She has to keep performing as a concerned wife. So for now, she's trapped, which is a feeling she hates. And the lack of control, the lack of autonomy, I think that is a very big trigger for her, and that is just as psychologically significant, if not more, than the fear of getting caught. Because if she can allegedly murder her own newborn granddaughter in front of her family in a public setting, I don't think avoiding detection is the primary motivator for Nanny. She could have done that in the privacy of her own home with no one else around, but she chose not to.

• 42:19Vanessa Richardson?

  On February 16, 1952, Nanny got her answer. Arlie died, and no one learned her secret. He was a known heavy drinker, and a flu virus had been going around town, so his death was attributed to heart failure. No autopsy was performed. There was nothing about Nanny, the friendly, hard-working wife crying beside her husband's body, that gave anyone a reason to look closer. And that confirmed something dangerous: people could get sick and die around her, and as long as she was careful, no one asked too many questions. After all, who would suspect her? Nanny was a middle-aged grandmother with a cheerful smile.

• 43:00Vanessa Richardson?

  To everyone around her, she looked like a grieving widow, not the woman who had made herself one. But Arlie's death created a problem Nanny hadn't planned for. He had reportedly left his house to his sister instead of Nanny, and when Nanny found out, she was livid. A few months after his death, the house burned to the ground, and because the estate hadn't been settled, the insurance check went not to Arlie's sister, but to his widow. No one could ever prove Nanny set the fire, but the timing was hard to ignore. And with Arlie gone and the insurance money in hand, she went right back to her favorite pastime: finding the next husband.

• 43:45Vanessa Richardson?

  Later that year, she married a man named Richard Morton, whom she'd met through a correspondence club for Lonely Hearts, and moved with him to Emporia, Kansas. But by then, the list of people who died around Nanny had already started to widen. For years, the people who died around her had been husbands she wanted out from under or allegedly small children left in her care, but they weren't the only ones. Back in the summer of 1950, while she was still married to Arlie, Nanny had traveled home to Alabama to help look after her younger sister, Dovie, who was bedridden, reportedly with cancer. On June 30, 1950, shortly after Nanny arrived, Dovie died. She was 41.

• 44:29Vanessa Richardson?

  At the time, no one thought twice about it. Dovie had been gravely ill, but years later, investigators would take a much harder look at her death. And then there was her mother. By the start of 1953, Louisa Hazel was 73 and recently widowed. Nanny's father had died the year before. She was living in Lexington, North Carolina, near Nanny's brother, William. Around New Year's, Nanny went to see her. By all appearances, it was nothing unusual: a daughter visiting her widowed mother. But on January 3, 1953, about 48 hours after Nanny's visit, Louisa was dead. Her death was chalked up to a heart attack.

• 45:11Tristin Engels?

  If Nanny was responsible for all of these deaths, then we have to consider what they all have in common for her. And again, I think there is a pattern with obligation, control, and escape, or feeling burdened, as if these are obstacles to dedicating her life and her time to herself and what she wants. With her sister, it appears to be an obligation to caretaking. Her elderly, recently widowed mother also appears to be an obligation to caretaking. Children and grandchildren seem to represent the same. Husbands as well, but with the added layer of disappointment to her fantasy romance, which I think also represents escape, or some kind of solution to all of this. And that may be why she becomes so resentful.

• 45:56Tristin Engels?

  So if this is true, if my theory is right, then she may feel secondary in life to all of them. And instead of them contributing to the life Nanny wants, they're somehow viewed as interfering with it instead. And with some offenders, victim selection's not about a demographic, not a specific one. It's more organized around conditions like access, opportunity, vulnerability, dependency, resentment, and in this case, what removing that particular person accomplishes. And it's now 1953. Nanny's in her late 40s. If marriage and this romantic fantasy are what's really driving her, then she may be feeling pressure to be successful obtaining that.

• 46:38Tristin Engels?

  Now, more than ever, she's not going to want to be pulled into caretaking or into obligation or anything that takes her away from putting herself first and reaching this fantasy goal.

• 46:49Vanessa Richardson?

  Do you think breaking a pattern like this could suggest that Nanny was maybe becoming more comfortable or even confident in what she was doing?

• 46:56Tristin Engels?

  It could. If she is responsible for all of these deaths, she's gotten away with every single one of them. That may have made her more confident in her methods and more confident in her ability to avoid getting caught. But remember what we talked about earlier: she may already be comfortable with violence. She's just seemingly more comfortable using violence herself to solve problems.

• 47:18Vanessa Richardson?

  This time, there was no husband to escape and no helpless child left in her care. Now, death had reached Nanny's own mother, and Louisa wouldn't be the last. Because back in Kansas, Nanny's new husband had already started staying out late, and she had already started to notice.

• 47:53Vanessa Richardson?

  Thanks so much for listening. Come back next time for the conclusion of our deep dive on serial killer, Nanny Doss.

• 48:00Tristin Engels?

  Serial Killers and Murderous Minds is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on all social media at @CrimeHouse. But don't forget to rate, review, and follow Serial Killers and Murderous Minds wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference.

• 48:22Vanessa Richardson?

  And to enhance your listening experience, join Crime House Plus and get both parts of every story dropped on the same Monday, completely ad-free. No waiting three days for part two, plus Crime House bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap "Try Free" at the top of the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds page. Serial Killers and Murderous Minds is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and forensic psychologist Dr. Tristin Engels, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds team: Max Cutler,

• 49:03Vanessa Richardson?

  Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Lori Marinelli, Natalie Pritzowski, Sarah Kamp, Alyssa Fox, Mara De La Rosa, Claire Swartzlander, and Carrie Murphy. Thank you for listening.

• 49:19Speaker 07

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• 49:51Speaker 06

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• 50:33Speaker 06

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• 50:50Vanessa Richardson?

  If you're looking for your next podcast, check out What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at WhatTheFactPod.