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  “Charmed ’Em, Poisoned ’Em”

  Though Nannie’s flirtatious demeanor corroborated her story somewhat—lonely hearts club member looking for love in all the wrong places—the police weren’t convinced she was telling the whole truth. There were too many other mysterious deaths linked to her name, including those of her mother, father, two sisters, two of her children, and a step-grandson. But when they tried to get her to admit to killing her relatives, Nannie’s attitude changed abruptly. “You can dig up all the graves in the country,” she snapped, “and you won’t find any more on me.”

  Although Nannie acted deeply offended by the insinuations, the evidence was pretty damning. She’d been hanging around both her sisters and her beloved mother right before they died. Then, the day after her mother’s funeral, Nannie had pranced off to marry Richard Morton—not exactly the picture of bereaved daughterhood. And the brother of Frank Harrelson (husband number two) called the police to report a chilling anecdote from a decade earlier: he and Harrelson had been walking past a cemetery when Harrelson pointed out the little grave that belonged to his grandson, muttered that the boy had been poisoned, and then said, simply, “I’ll be next.”

  None of this fit with the image Nannie had so carefully crafted: that of a breezy, good-humored grandmother who flirted with police, smiled at the press, and cracked jokes about the whole silly situation. Okay, so maybe she’d killed a husband or two, but it was all tinged with a bit of Arsenic and Old Lace-esque humor (a movie that came out when Nannie was thirty-eight, by the way), and anyway, her husbands were cheats, liars, abusers, and prudes. In light of that fact, her murders were, well, practical. Just the sort of get-’er-done move you’d expect from a sensible housewife.

  But other sources vehemently denied that Morton or Lanning had ever cheated on her. In fact, the salacious story of Lanning’s supposed orgy was contradicted by none other than Charlie Braggs, Nannie’s first husband. In a peculiar twist, one of Nannie and Braggs’s surviving daughters had ended up marrying Lanning’s nephew, and the party that the police interrupted was actually just an innocent family visit. “All that happened was that the police heard there were strangers in the house, which is out in the country by itself, and went out to see who it was,” said Charlie Braggs. “Nannie wrote us a terrible letter after that, but there was no more calm, steady man in the world than Harley Lanning.”

  Sam Doss’s brother also began poking holes in Nannie’s story. He had been suspicious of her from the start: “No woman is going to travel a thousand miles or so to marry some plain working man just because she wants him.” He watched Nannie torture the puritanical Sam Doss by smoking openly and wearing scandalous outfits, and he disagreed with the popular perception of Nannie as “simple, candid, open, cheerful.” That wasn’t the Nannie he knew. “She was a smart one,” he said. “She was shrewd, very shrewd. And I seem to remember that she sometimes would tell you one thing and the next time just the opposite.”

  Despite her detractors, Nannie was enjoying a newfound celebrity. She hammed it up for the press, and they rewarded her with splashy headlines:

  CALM, AFFABLE GRANDMOTHER TELLS OF POISONING FOUR OF FIVE SPOUSES

  TULSA GRANDMA CHARMED ’EM, POISONED ’EM

  NANNIE DOSS ONCE CARRIED A PISTOL; WAS WELL LIKED

  Moments before she appeared on TV to be interviewed, the cameraman suggested she remove her glasses and smile for the camera, quipping, “You might get another husband if you look nice.” Nannie replied, “Ain’t that the dying truth,” and then cracked up at her own pun. She was Oklahoma’s biggest news story of 1954, and she knew it.

  Nannie was certainly not the first or last serial killer to achieve and even enjoy celebrity, but she was a celebrity at an interesting time in America. Think of everything cliché you know about the 1950s: housewives spent their days vacuuming with martinis in hand and a look of existential horror in their eyes, and every home was outfitted with a TV set. Nannie’s celebrity fit perfectly into this social landscape. She was the twisted parody of the housewife, a woman seemingly obsessed with marriage and, uh, cooking, but a woman who used her feminine charms to catch and kill men instead of catching and keeping them. She wore cat-eye glasses and lipstick; her hair was curled; she was photographed in a double string of pearls. She appeared on TV, giving interviews and flirting with cameramen, creating an intimacy between audience and murderer that would have been unthinkable in the case of previous lady killers, and enabling her reputation to spread farther and farther.

  Perhaps the version of femininity that Nannie presented to the world seemed, in a dark way, more appealing—and certainly more accessible—to her female peers than the versions they were receiving from other sources. After all, when the rest of America’s housewives changed the channel away from the coverage of Nannie’s case, they would have been presented with goddesses like Marilyn Monroe, glimmering in tight white dresses and marrying baseball stars, so perfect as to feel utterly foreign.

  “Darling, How We Miss Thee”

  Nannie’s court-appointed lawyers refused to make a plea for her, insisting she was mentally incompetent, so she was given a default plea of not guilty. Nannie herself continued to flirt with everyone in power. On her way to the courthouse, she told the prosecuting attorney that she’d been cold in her jail cell, and to prove it, she placed one of her freezing hands on the back of his neck. When the police woke her from an evening nap to interrogate her, she laughed, “I don’t know why you guys get me up at this hour to talk to me. I’ve been talking to you for a week.” Her lawyers finally had to tell Nannie to stop chatting to the police altogether, for fear that she’d let something slip about all those dead family members.

  Meanwhile, bodies were being dug up all over the country. Arsenic was found in every one of Nannie’s dead husbands, and the murder charges racked up against her accordingly. None of these findings were a surprise, since Nannie had already admitted to these particular murders, but there was one shocking reveal: despite Nannie’s insistence to the contrary, an autopsy revealed that her mother’s body was also loaded with arsenic.

  Why was Nannie so loath to admit she’d killed her mother? She’d been practically giddy about the murders of her disappointing husbands, as if she were entitled to take their lives. Considering how enthusiastically she agreed to the autopsy of Sam Doss, it almost seems as though she wanted her husband killings to come to light. And yet she couldn’t bear the suggestion that she harmed her mother. She had constructed a narrative that she only killed those deserving of death, and killing innocent family members didn’t fit with this story. I’d get down on my knees and crawl anywhere for my mother, she insisted, and the papers printed it, word for word.

  Though the image she manufactured was one of harmless, lovelorn femininity—an image reliant on both sexist and ageist assumptions about who could be dangerous, and when—Nannie, the alleged mother killer, actually had a horrific dark side. This might seem obvious, since she murdered, what, eleven people, including a child? But strangely—or perhaps predictably—she didn’t really scare people. For the American public, Nannie was forever an affable grandmother, the punch line to a joke.

  Many serial killers—Ted Bundy comes to mind—make waves not just for their crimes but for their ability to pass as normal, nonviolent, even charming. (Direct from Bundy: “I was a normal person. I had good friends. I led a normal life, except for this one small but very potent and destructive segment that I kept very secret and close to myself.”) When they’re not committing their monstrous crimes, they walk among us, looking perfectly innocent and, in Nannie’s case, plump, cute, and grandmotherly. Isn’t that part of what’s so horrifying about serial killers? The idea that Bundy could have been your next-door neighbor, that Nannie could have fixed you a cup of coffee?

  Now, Ted Bundy, who was among other things a rapist and a necrophiliac, seems objectively “scarier” than Nannie, who giggled and poisoned prunes. But serial killers aren’t scary because th
ey’re male; they’re scary because they destroy order. Or rather, they reveal that what we perceived as order and normalcy (the all-American boy, the giggling grandma, the housewife vacuuming vacuously) has been a violent lie all along. In the 1950s, Nannie Doss looked far more like the average housewife than Marilyn Monroe did. She embodied the order of things: mothering, marrying, cleaning the kitchen floor. And yet she brought death in her wake.

  By December 5, the press learned that this “gentle grandmother” had another morbid hobby: she loved to compose tombstone epitaphs. Her step-grandson’s tomb read: “Darling how we miss thee.” Lanning’s said, simply: “We will meet again.”

  “The Cleverest Criminal I Ever Interviewed”

  At Nannie’s preliminary hearing on December 15, the judge decided to turn her over to the state asylum so doctors could determine whether she was insane or not. “Arsenic Nannie” wasn’t upset about the compulsory ninety-day stay. In fact, she was relieved. It seemed, to her, like a little luxury.

  “Now maybe I will get some rest and won’t have to answer so many silly questions,” she laughed. She had high hopes for her asylum vacation, telling a jail matron, “Maybe those docs at the hospital will teach me to think straight.”

  True to form, Nannie thoroughly enjoyed herself at the asylum, where she celebrated her fiftieth birthday. She was getting plenty of attention due to her continued celebrity status, and she made sure to primp every time the staff psychiatrists came around to examine her. One of the doctors raved about her behavior to the press, noting that she still suffered from headaches—a holdover from her childhood accident—but that otherwise, her health was perfect. In fact, she was nearly perfect. “If you had small children,” he said, “you’d be delighted to have her as a babysitter.”

  His supervisors disagreed. On March 14, a group of medical examiners declared Nannie “mentally defective with a marked impairment of judgment and will power” and recommended she be recommitted to the asylum. But the prosecution pressed on, demanding she at least be tried for murder, so Nannie was tossed back into jail while her attorneys entered a plea of “not guilty by reason of insanity.” A sanity hearing was set for April, with everyone rolling their eyes about it as the dueling sides gathered their experts. “The hearing shapes up as a battle of contradictory testimony by psychiatrists,” snarked a little paper from South Carolina.

  Nannie disliked the confining setup of jail and wanted to go back to her tiny slice of asylum paradise, where everyone knew her name. “You can’t see people [in jail], and I like people,” she complained. Perhaps what she meant was that in jail, people couldn’t see her. Still, she managed to charm another man or two from behind bars. One “elderly suitor” went so far as to mail her a marriage proposal—but Nannie tore his letter up. “I’ve had enough husbands,” she told the press, who were, as usual, hanging on her every wisecrack.

  Her sanity hearing turned out to be a jumble of he-said/she-said analysis, with Nannie’s sanity or lack thereof batted back and forth like a badminton shuttlecock. “Mrs. Doss is mentally defective and is now insane in the legal sense. She also has been crazy for a long time,” thundered a doctor for the defense. The prosecutor hissed that he had five psychiatrists on hand who were all ready and willing to declare her sane, and then quoted from a doctor’s report: “She is a shrewd, clever, sharp, calculating, selfish, self-aggrandizing female whose aggressive behavior under frustration releases her hostility toward men, particularly her husbands.” A superintendent from the state asylum noted that Nannie would giggle “extensively at nothing” for ages and then fall into long, dark depressions. If that wasn’t insanity, what was? The prosecution’s experts scoffed. Nannie was a sociopath, one of them said, and a “shrewd, calculating female who feigned insanity to escape the electric chair . . . the cleverest criminal I ever interviewed.” At that final statement, Nannie laughed out loud.

  After three days of this, it took the jury a mere fifteen minutes to decide that Nannie Doss was sane. The killer herself heartily concurred. “I’m as sane as anybody,” she chuckled. “I guess I ought to know better than anybody if I’m crazy. I’ve never felt more sane in my whole life.” She chewed gum while the verdict was declared, and grinned at the photographer as he took her portrait.

  Nannie’s official trial was set for early June, and so everyone was shocked when, on May 17, she suddenly pled guilty. She was hoping for a lighter sentence and thought maybe an unexpected plea of guilty would earn her some clemency. It’s also possible she misunderstood the implications of pleading guilty. She wanted to be sent back to the asylum—where she’d felt so free and so popular—and perhaps she didn’t realize it was too late for that. She’d been officially declared sane, and with this plea of guilty, she was now officially a murderer.

  Her sentencing took place on June 2, where the prosecution urged the judge to consider the death penalty. Nannie sat between her attorneys, chewed more gum, and “wore an attractive blue party dress.” The hearing was brief, but the sentence was long: life in prison. It would have been the electric chair, but the judge couldn’t bear the thought of killing a woman. “This court has never heard of a woman being put to death for any crime in Oklahoma,” he said. “It may happen some day . . . and the people of this state would very reluctantly see such come to pass.”

  After the sentencing, Nannie remarked, “I have no hard feelings.”

  Out of the Headlines

  Nannie entered prison on June 4 and dropped out of the news until a reporter interviewed her in September. “I thought everybody had forgotten me,” said Nannie. “I thought I was just out of the headlines.” She mentioned she’d lost eight pounds in jail because she did the laundry “the hard way,” but complained that her headaches were getting worse.

  Nannie also told the reporter she was “tricked” into signing the statement about Doss’s poisoning. This wasn’t the first time she hinted at a conspiracy; months before, she told a reporter from the Tulsa World that she had been duped into confessing the murders of her four husbands, and that she got the idea for her confession from a magazine story. Perhaps Nannie realized her status as a celebrity murderer would not last forever, and so she no longer wanted to claim that identity for herself. She was dreaming up a better angle on her own story: innocent “lonely hearts” lady hoodwinked by the police.

  Otherwise, Nannie seemed happy enough, with no desire to go back to her old routine of marriage and housework. “I am a funny person,” she said. “If they’d turn me out right now I’d go straight to the hospital at Vinita and be content to spend the rest of my life there. That sounds sort of crazy, doesn’t it.”

  Though the asylum may have been her ultimate ideal, Nannie still adored prison. She got to do everything she didn’t get to do with Sam Doss: she saw movies, she watched TV, and she participated in the occasional dance (“strictly for the 50 women prisoners”). She loved the jail matron, Mrs. N. F. Whitaker, who was “just like a mother” to her. Nannie had a small heart attack in September and took a month of bed rest, but other than that, she was having a wonderful time. Her surviving family members didn’t visit her—but perhaps she expected that. Prison, she said, was “just like being at home.”

  But what did home even mean for Nannie Doss? She resented her father for leaving her mother and breaking up their nuclear family, but then she went on to destroy five separate portraits of the American marriage herself. She framed her husband killings as the act of someone who was disappointed in love—silly Nannie, always a little too intense in her search for Prince Charming!—but she wouldn’t claim responsibility for the deaths of her family members. Nannie seemed to have very specific ideas about the roles husbands and family should play, and she reacted furiously when people disappointed her by not fulfilling those roles. (From the prosecution, remember: her “aggressive behavior under frustration releases her hostility toward men.”) It seems likely that her issues originated from, or were exacerbated by, her early childhood head injury, since numero
us studies in recent decades have linked frontal lobe injuries to increased incidents of violent, uncontrollable social behavior. Perhaps her wounded, extreme reactions also stemmed from her earliest and greatest disappointment in another human: her father, who stifled her girlish longings for romance, who practically arranged her marriage, and who put the final nail in the coffin that held her ideals of love when he abandoned her mother.

  But none of this was explored in much depth in the press, nor in the decades following. These days, Nannie is still remembered as the hilariously murderous grandma who read romance novels in jail and was obsessed with trading in her husbands for newer models.

  This attitude continues today toward older women who kill. The disparity between the grandma archetype (smiles at us from under a halo of white hair, bakes great pies, contains a fount of cozy knowledge about the good old days) and the murderer archetype (physically strong, usually male, follows his victims down dark alleyways, crawls through bedroom windows) is just too much to reconcile. People tend to collapse back onto humor to deal with and/or to diminish it. As an editorial about Nannie Doss once chirped, “Grandma, you rat!”

  In 2015, a sixty-eight-year-old Russian woman named Tamara Samsonova was arrested on suspicion of not just serial murder but cannibalism, and she pulled a total Nannie during an interview when she blew a kiss to court reporters. Her headlines are tinged with macabre hilarity: she’s the “GRANNY RIPPER,” “GRANNY FROM HELL,” and “GRANNYBALL LECTER.” These are funny names, to be sure, but the crimes she’s accused of are as horrendous as those of Jack the Ripper himself. Yet somehow when she does it, it’s kind of a joke? (In the grand tradition of female serial killers being forever linked to the kitchen, security cameras captured footage of Samsonova carrying a pot that was thought to contain the head of her last victim.) Or consider Melissa Ann Shepard, an eighty-one-year-old alleged serial killer from Canada, who was given the Nannie press treatment in 2016. One article about her crimes began: “She looks like a sweet old lady, but . . .” while another called her a “rosy-cheeked killer.” Aw! In a way, this is a narrative we’ve been trained to laugh at; for example, the entire film Arsenic and Old Lace is predicated on the situational irony of old women who kill. But we’re talking about taking a human life here, and when it happens in the real world, it’s horrible. Canada’s “rosy-cheeked killer” drugged a man with benzodiazepine and ran over him twice with a car. Nannie killed the mother she claimed to love. These are tragedies, not comedies, at the end of the day.