“The Giggling Granny”

I’m so excited for this post because I have not yet researched a female serial killer. Not surprisingly, 90% of murders are committed by men, so there is a plethora of male serial killers out there, but the females are usually the intriguing ones. Since women are usual much more emotional and empathetic, it is highly unusual for women to be capable of being serial killers. However, I am going to be outlining one of those exceptions, Nannie Doss. Doss is responsible for the murder of several of her husbands and also a lot of her family members between 1920 and 1948.

The Psychological Profile

Nannie Doss was born in 1905 into a family of farmers in Alabama. She had an abusive father and a mother who did not do anything about the abuse. Then at the age of seven, she suffered a traumatic head injury on a train, which changed her life. Despite having grown up on reading romances and dreaming of falling in love, she was married at the age of sixteen to a man she had only known for four months. They had four children and lived with her mother-in-law, but she was just as abusive as her father had been.

The Crimes

During her first marriage, two of her children died suddenly with no explanation. During her second marriage, Doss is suspected of having killed her newborn granddaughter by stabbing her brain with her hairpin. Then, her two year old grandson died by asphyxiation while in her care. Then her second husband, who was abusive towards her for sixteen years, was murdered when she poisoned his moonshine. After she remarried to her third husband, her mother fell ill and then died suddenly while under her daughter’s care. Her sister also suddenly died after being around her sister with no explanation. Right after this all occurred, Doss discovered that her husband had been cheating on her while she was caring for her mother. He also suddenly died of mysterious causes. Her final victim was the last man that she “loved.” He simply told her not to watch educational television programs or read educational magazines. She laced some cake and coffee with poison and served it to her fifth husband.

Her Capture

When it came to her final victim, the doctor who looked into the death realized there may be some foul play involved on Nannie’s part. After he performed an autopsy on the body, he found the lethal doses of arsenic in his system. They realized after exhuming her other past husbands that they all had doses of arsenic and rat poison in their systems. Police suspect that she is responsible for nearly 12 deaths throughout the coarse of her life. Her reason for murdering her husbands was because she was in pursuit of the perfect husband. This delusion to solve this by murder was likely linked to the head trauma she experienced as a child. She died in prison in 1964.