Nannie Doss

Nannie Doss (born Nancy Hazel; November 4, 1905 – June 2, 1965) was an American serial killer responsible for the deaths of 11 people between some time in the 1920s and 1954.

Doss was also referred to as the Giggling Granny, the Lonely Hearts Killer, the Black Widow, and Lady Blue Beard.

Nannie was born on November 4, 1905 in Blue Mountain, Alabama, now part of Anniston.

She was born to Louisa "Lou" (née Holder) and James F. Hazel.

Nannie was one of five children; she had one brother and three sisters.

Both Nannie and her mother hated James, who was a controlling and abusive father and husband.

James would force his children to work on the family farm, refusing to let the children go to school, resulting in Nannie's poor academic performance.

At age 7, while the family was taking a train to visit relatives in southern Alabama, Nannie hit her head on a metal bar on the seat in front of her when the train suddenly stopped.

For years after, she suffered severe headaches, blackouts and depression.

Doss blamed these and her mental instability on that accident.

During childhood, her favorite hobby was reading her mother's romance magazines and dreaming of her own romantic future.

Furthermore, her favorite part was the lonely hearts column.

Nannie's father forbade the Hazel sisters from wearing makeup and attractive clothing as he believed it would prevent them from being molested by men.

He also forbade them to go to dances and other social events.

Nannie was first married at age 16 to Charley Braggs, her co-worker at a linen factory.

With her father's approval they married after four months of dating.

Braggs was the only son of a single mother who insisted on continuing to live with him after he married.

Nannie later wrote: "I married, as my father wished, in 1921 to a boy I only knowed about four or five months who had no family, only a mother who was unwed and who had taken over my life completely when we were married. She never seen anything wrong with what she done, but she would take spells. She would not let my own mother stay all night..."

Braggs' mother took up a lot of his attention and limited Nannie's activities.

The marriage produced four daughters from 1923 to 1927.

The stressed-out Nannie started drinking, and her casual smoking habit became a heavy addiction.

Both unhappy partners correctly suspected each other of infidelity, and Braggs often disappeared for days on end.

In 1927, the couple lost their two middle girls to suspected food poisoning.

Soon after, Braggs took firstborn daughter Melvina and fled, leaving newborn Florine behind.

Braggs' mother died not much later and Nannie took a job in a cotton mill to support Florine and herself.

Braggs brought Melvina back in the summer of 1928, accompanied by a divorcée with her own child.

Braggs and Nannie soon divorced, with Nannie taking her two girls back to her mother's home.

Braggs always maintained he left her because he was frightened of her.

Her second husband was Robert Franklin Harrelson.

They met and married in 1929.

They lived in Jacksonville with Melvina and Florine.

After a few months, she discovered that he was an alcoholic and had a criminal record for assault.

Despite this, the marriage lasted 16 years.

Melvina gave birth to Robert Lee Haynes in 1943.

Another baby followed two years later but died soon afterward.

Exhausted from labor and groggy from ether, Melvina thought she saw her visiting mother stick a hatpin into the baby's head.

When she asked her husband and sister for clarification, they said Nannie had told them the baby was dead—and they noticed that she was holding a pin.

The doctors, however, could not give a positive explanation.

Doss finally confessed to the murders in October 1954, after her fifth husband had died in a small hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

In all, it was revealed that she had killed four husbands, two children, one of her sisters, her mother, two grandsons, and a mother-in-law.