Lady Killers Page 3

  Erzsébet hated Thurzó most of all, and as she tried to convince her relatives to release her, she continually lashed out at the palatine for imprisoning her. At one point, Thurzó lost his temper and screamed, “You, Erzsébet, are like a wild animal. You are in the last months of your life. You do not deserve to breathe the air on earth or see the light of the Lord. You shall disappear from this world and shall never reappear in it again. As the shadows envelop you, may you find time to repent your bestial life.”

  But was Erzsébet such a beast?

  In the centuries since her imprisonment, several scholars and biographers have insisted that Erzsébet was innocent and/or that the trial of the accomplices was a show trial that shouldn’t have resulted in Erzsébet’s rather under-the-table conviction. They argue that the whole thing was a setup, masterminded by Thurzó and the king, designed to imprison a political rival, to incapacitate a powerful widow, and to seize all those delicious Nádasdy-Báthory lands. They say Erzsébet’s lack of trial was unfair, and that the confessions of her accomplices, achieved through torture, cannot be taken as fact.

  But many of the cries about Erzsébet’s innocence don’t take into account certain cultural and historical factors, like the agreement between Thurzó and the Báthory children to avoid trial, or the fact that torture was a common part of inquisitional trials like this one and would not have been considered strange or suspicious in this case. (These were violent times all around, as is made pretty obvious by the fact that Ilona Jó and Dorka had their fingers torn off as part of their official sentence.) The argument that the king wanted to seize Erzsébet’s wealth and cancel his debt to the Nádasdy-Báthorys doesn’t hold water either, because when Nádasdy died his six-year-old son would have become the owner of the estates in name and, when the boy turned fourteen, in practice. By the time Erzsébet was arrested, she no longer owned those vast swathes of Báthory-Nádasdy land, and the king would have had to imprison the whole family in order to claim their fortune and cancel his debt. Plus, under the rules of the Tripartitum, Thurzó was not allowed to gain any material wealth from prosecuting Erzsébet, so he couldn’t have been framing her just to get rich.

  Another sticking point for those who believe in Erzsébet’s innocence is the fact that Thurzó began investigating Erzsébet when there was no hard evidence against her, only rumors of her violence, and she was never informed of the inquest that was starting. But all this was perfectly legal under the Tripartitum. Thurzó was simply enacting something called a common inquest, intended to determine whether or not a crime had been committed. It was a standard way to gather evidence against nobles before informing them that they were about to be dragged into court—or imprisoned in their own dungeons, as the case may be.

  All this is not to say Erzsébet was absolutely the flesh-eating, blood-bathing ogre the court believed her to be. Much of the testimony against her was hearsay, and confessions achieved through torture will always be rather suspect. There was obviously a lot of misinformation swirling around the whole affair, like the part about the 650 dead girls. There are many more theories about why the king would have wanted to frame her—she was Protestant, he was Catholic; she was a powerful woman, he didn’t like that—too many to get into here. Maybe someday someone will uncover a ledger of victims written in her spidery handwriting. Until then, we’ll always be a little bit in the dark.

  With Erzsébet imprisoned, all legal documentation about the trials was sealed. The countess was put under house arrest in her own castle. Parliament decreed that her name would no longer be spoken in society. And the towns around Csejthe grew quiet for the next hundred years.

  Murderess

  Despite the court’s best efforts to act as though Erzsébet Báthory had never existed, her story spread and spread, especially once the trial transcripts were rediscovered in the 1720s. Today, the Blood Countess is a hugely popular figure in the world of horror, gore, and sexy vampires, featured in everything from a Venom single (notable lyric: “Counteeeess BAAAATHORY”) to poetry, novels, and films. Historian Raymond McNally has even argued it was Erzsébet who inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Run a search on Google Images for “Erzsébet Báthory” and you’ll see just how sexualized her legend has become: you’ll find everything from manga of the countess sporting bloody nipple clamps to fan art featuring a nude Erzsébet reclining seductively in a bathtub full of—well, you know.

  Out of the 306 testimonies collected by Thurzó, sex is mentioned once, maybe twice. The trial was not an investigation into sexual deviance; it was an investigation into rumors of torture and death. But in the centuries since, plenty of sex-drenched tales have popped up, like the rumor about her peasant lover and subsequent pregnancy, or whispers that she slept around when Nádasdy was off fighting Ottomans. One persistent tale concerns her aunt Klara, reputedly a bisexual and a sadist. As the story goes, during Nádasdy’s long absences, Erzsébet liked to visit Klara’s castle, where Klara would teach her niece all about witchcraft, torture, and making love to a woman. Another rumor says that Erzsébet and Anna Darvolya were lovers.

  Her story has a sick glamour, sure. Who isn’t drawn to the idea of a vampiric countess with long black hair and a penchant for ripping apart lithe nudes? She makes a seductive antagonist, worthy of the serpentine sound of murderess. But these stories of lovers and sadism are simply ways of making her monstrousness appealing. They’re a distraction, a bizarre attempt to mitigate her crimes: “She beat up girls . . . because it was a fetish for her!” “She was a psychopath . . . but also a lesbian!”

  Really, Erzsébet may simply have been the most frightening and least pretty thing of all: a heartless killer. The fan art that features a voluptuous Erzsébet with blood-splattered cleavage isn’t scary—what’s scary is that portrait of Erzsébet from 1585. What’s scary is staring down the otherworldly blankness in those big, four-hundred-year-old eyes.

  Countess Erzsébet Báthory died on August 22, 1614, after complaining that her hands were cold. The last thing she did was lay down in her bed and sing, beautifully. She was buried in holy ground, but her body was later removed, after residents complained, and taken to the Báthory crypt. That crypt was opened in 1995. No trace of Erzsébet was found.

  THE GIGGLING GRANDMA

  Nannie Doss

  Nannie Doss was her own PR agent. She overpowered the news in the mid-1950s by flirting on camera, cracking morbid jokes, and framing her horrible crimes as nothing more than a fluke on the path to finding Mr. Right. After all, she was just a silly, love-struck grandma who would never intentionally harm a fly, much less murder four husbands in cold blood. Everything she did was done in the name of love. And love could justify anything. Right?

  One of the many virtuous, refined, and, yes, straight-up housewifely skills the forty-nine-year-old Nannie possessed was her ability to bake a mean cake. She could whip up the type of cake that would make a lonely farmer marry her on the spot. One day, she sent a buttery homemade confection all the way from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Goldsboro, North Carolina, intending to woo a sixty-year-old dairy farmer named John Keel. The man was smitten with her humorous letters and her obvious skill in the kitchen and hoped that Nannie would soon head east to be his bride. Nannie was stuck in Tulsa for the time being, caring for a “sick, aged aunt,” but Keel felt sure they’d be together shortly.

  But before Keel could get his hands on a ring, he learned something horrifying about his lady love: she had just been arrested. There was no aged aunt. There had never been an aged aunt. The person she had been “caring” for was her husband, and now he was dead.

  “I’m sure mighty proud, mighty proud that she didn’t come to my part of the country,” Keel said later.

  Thinking Crooked

  The Nannie that Keel thought he knew was born Nancy Hazle in 1906. Her family owned a farm in Calhoun County, Alabama, and her parents were strict: Nannie had to work in the fields from a very young age, and she was by no means allowed to run around with boys.
Today, rumors abound that her father was abusive and that Nannie rebelled by sleeping around as much as she could. We don’t know this for a fact, but we do know that he was controlling and that she liked boys—a lot. In fact, the austerity of her boyfriend-less upbringing was something Nannie would rebel against for the rest of her life.

  Long before she thought of boys, though, she suffered a terrible accident. When Nannie was seven, she was riding along in a train when the whole thing crunched to a sudden stop and she split her head wide open against the metal bar of the seat in front of her. She felt the repercussions of this injury forever: awful headaches and a sense that sometimes she was “thinking crooked.”

  The Hazles were perpetually poor, and by the time Nannie was fifteen—a gap-toothed, rosy-cheeked cutie—she had dropped out of school to work on the farm full-time. That same year, she got married. It wasn’t exactly a Romeo and Juliet type of situation; the man, Charlie Braggs, was someone her strict father had already approved of for her. But Braggs himself was thrilled with the match at first. Nannie presented herself to him as a “church woman,” and Braggs found her “a pretty girl, good build and lots of fun.”

  Nannie, however, found it difficult to stay put. “She was quick tempered,” said Braggs. “Her whole family is like that. Sometimes she would get mad for a reason and sometimes it seemed not. She’d pout and then go off for days or weeks, often with other men.” He found out she was “no more Christian than if she had never heard the Bible preached.”

  They had five children, but three of them died young, and Braggs harbored a few unspeakable suspicions about that fact. He’d noticed that two of the babies had showed symptoms of severe stomach troubles just before they died, and had “turned black so quick.” His misgivings left a horrible taste in his mouth. But what could he do? Motherhood was a woman’s world, and a mystery to him.

  Something else went wrong during their marriage: Nannie’s father left her mother. Nannie despised him for it, and refused to let him see his grandkids. Perhaps in her mind, her father had failed to hold up his end of the bargain, which was to fully inhabit the role of husband. The breakup only increased her adoration of her mom, though. “I’d get down on my knees and crawl anywhere for my mother,” she said, years later. This love would eventually come under severe questioning, but Nannie was always adamant about this one thing: she loved her mother, and she would never hurt someone who she loved so purely.

  Motherhood didn’t suit Nannie herself, though, and neither did marriage—at least, not the imperfect marriage she had with Braggs. After eight years of fighting and suspicion, Braggs grew tired of chasing Nannie around Alabama and filed for divorce. Sensing that Nannie was either unfit or unwilling to take care of their two remaining girls, he kept their oldest daughter and sent the other to live with Nannie’s dad.

  Years later, Nannie told a reporter that she didn’t hate men, despite what her actions implied, because some men were good. She certainly enjoyed male company. She was always pursuing men: writing to them, flirting with them, marrying them. And the men she met were good—at least, that’s what their friends, neighbors, and family members said. Nannie told a different story. In her version of events, she was forever the innocent princess, disappointed again and again by a long line of unsatisfactory suitors.

  Lonely Hearts

  On the night of Friday, November 26, 1954, the police of Tulsa, Oklahoma, were surprised to see a plump, jovial, quintessentially grandmotherly figure brought into the police station on suspicion of murdering her fifth husband. The woman, Nannie Doss, was coquettish and hilarious, and the police were taken aback by her cheerful disposition. “She talks a lot,” said detective Harry Stege, “but not about the case.” She laughingly brushed off questions about arsenic and autopsies and unhappy marriages. She smoked a cigarette. Her eyes sparkled.

  It took twenty-four hours of on-and-off interrogation before Nannie admitted that okay, fine, yes, she had poisoned her husband Sam Doss by spiking his coffee with rat poison. Around midnight, she signed a formal statement admitting that she was a murderer.

  Meanwhile, reports were trickling into the police station of more dead husbands, a dead step-grandson, and other long-held suspicions people had about the “smiling, talkative widow.” After a weekend of continued interrogation, Nannie giggled at the police officers and told them she was finally ready to clear her conscience. Sam Doss wasn’t her only victim, she declared. She’d had five husbands, and she’d killed four of them.

  After Charlie Braggs divorced her, Nannie had married an older man named Frank Harrelson from Jacksonville, Alabama, who had children from a previous marriage. According to Nannie, Harrelson was a mean, abusive drunk. She tolerated his weekend benders for fifteen years, until the day he came home plastered and snarled, “If you don’t come to bed with me now, I ain’t going to be here next week.”

  “I decided I’ll teach him,” said Nannie. “And I did.” Harrelson was in the habit of drinking cheap “rotgut” whiskey from an old fruit jar hidden in a flour bin, so Nannie found the jar and stirred in a healthy portion of liquid arsenic. The next time Harrelson ducked out for a secretive nip of the hard stuff, he died.

  Nannie’s next spouse was Harley Lanning of Lexington, North Carolina. He was also a drinker and, on top of that, a massive flirt. Nannie couldn’t stand how popular Lanning was with the ladies, and she snapped when Lanning threw a raging party while she was out of town. The party was so wild that police had to come by and, according to Nannie, haul the partygoers “out of bed.” In a blind fury, Nannie poisoned a plate of Lanning’s food in 1952. He was dead before the weekend.

  With three husbands out of the way, Nannie was ready to change her approach. Her search for Mr. Right had failed miserably so far, since she kept getting stuck with flirts, drinkers, or men like Braggs who didn’t accept the fact that sometimes a girl just wanted to run away from home for a week or two. So she took matters into her own hands and signed up for a mail-order husband. For five dollars, she became a card-carrying member of a “lonely hearts club” called the Diamond Circle, based out of St. Louis. Each month for an entire year the fine curators of the Diamond Circle would send her a list of “lonely men,” and Nannie could contact whomever she liked.

  She struck up a correspondence with a darkly handsome Kansan named Richard Morton, and things moved quickly from there. On January 21, 1953, the operator of the Diamond Circle received a letter from Morton:

  Will you please take our names off your list—R. L. Morton Sr., Emporia, Kas., and Mrs. Nannie Lanning, Jacksonville, Ala., for we have met and are very happily married. She is a sweet and wonderful woman. I would not have met her had it not been for your club.

  It didn’t take long for things to fall apart, though. Morton worked nights at a pool hall, but during the day he liked to put on his best suit and head out on mysterious business. This disturbed Nannie. Why would he go to town all dressed up when his “sweet and wonderful” wife was right there at home? Even worse, when she was away on a trip to North Carolina, she somehow heard that Morton had purchased a set of rings during her absence. Rings could only mean one thing, she theorized: he was seeing someone else.

  “I lost my head and blew up when I found out he had been running around with another woman,” she said. She decided that if Morton could make secretive purchases, so could she—so she came back from North Carolina with a bottle of liquid poison stashed in her suitcase. Later, police would speculate that Morton had initially bought the rings as a gift for Nannie but then pawned them to follow her to North Carolina, perhaps realizing that she was furious at him. If that was the case, here was the grand, romantic gesture she’d always wanted—she just didn’t know it. Instead, she stirred poison into his coffee, convinced he was cheating on her.

  If her first four marriages had been tinged with vice—alcohol and violence and lust—her final marriage was so prosaic that it threatened to drive Nannie insane with boredom. Sam Doss was a real dud, a parsimonious h
ighway worker and part-time Free Will Baptist minister living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He wouldn’t let her buy a TV set, even though she really wanted one. He wouldn’t let her dance.

  “He got on my nerves,” said Nannie, when asked to explain why she tried to kill Doss two separate times. At first, she stewed up a huge kettle of boxed prunes and doused them with poison. (Prunes were a major hit in the 1950s. President Eisenhower declared that his favorite food in the world was a dessert comprised partially of whipped egg whites, prune pulp, and unflavored gelatin called Prune Whip.) It turned out Doss’s appetite was the only generous thing about him. “He sure did like prunes,” said Nannie. “I fixed him a whole box and he ate them all.”

  The dish sent Doss to the hospital for twenty-three days, but didn’t quite finish him off, so the day after he returned, Nannie fixed him the Richard Morton special: piping hot coffee with a dollop of rat poison. It did the trick, as she knew it would.

  Fortunately for the remainder of America’s lonely gentlemen, prunes and coffee were the last dishes Nannie ever poisoned. The attending physician refused to sign Doss’s death certificate without an autopsy to determine the cause of death. Oddly enough, Nannie loved this idea and agreed that they should definitely figure out what killed Doss because “it might kill someone else.” Her husband’s vital organs were sent to a lab in Oklahoma City, and the pathologist there returned the damning evidence: Doss had enough arsenic inside him to kill eighteen part-time Free Will Baptist ministers.

  In a photo taken after her long confession was over, Nannie Doss is leaving the courthouse with the homicide captain. She is smiling broadly and looks perfectly at home.