Nannie Doss Biography

Nannie Doss was a serial poisoner responsible for eleven murders between the 1920s and 1954, when she finally confessed in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

After Doss’s fifth husband died in October of 1954, an autopsy found that he’d been poisoned with arsenic. More investigations revealed that in all Nannie had killed four husbands, two children, her two sisters, her mother, a grandson and a nephew.

She admitted that she had killed her husbands because they didn’t measure up: “I was searching for the perfect mate, the real romance of life.” She became infamous for appearing amused while recounting her crimes, and the papers dubbed her “The Giggling Granny” and “The Jolly Black Widow,” as well as “Arsenic Annie.” Sentenced to life in prison, she died in 1965 of cancer.