The woman who will become known as one of the world’s worst black widows is sitting
on her porch on a blustery day at the start of Fall.
She places a glass of lemonade down on the newspaper and runs her index finger over the
lonely hearts column.
Her finger suddenly stops and she smiles.
“This is the one,” she thinks, her thoughts animated with pictures of her and this other
lonely heart living out the romance she’s always dreamed of.
Except she will murder this man in cold blood.
She will kill him, and people close to him.
She will commit unspeakable horrors throughout her deranged life, and she will do it with
a great big grin on her face.
Welcome to the world of the giggling granny, a woman who turned being widowed into a profession.
She was born with the name Nancy Hazel on November 4, 1905, in a small town in rural
Alabama.
There she and her four siblings did not have a happy childhood, with school and friendships
being out of the question because the stern, hardworking father made them labor on his
farm.
Then when she was seven years old something happened to Nancy that may explain why in
later life she became a very serious serial killer.
She hit her head while riding a train and for years after experienced debilitating depression
as well as the occasional blackout.
It could have been the injury that caused her to do such horrific things, but young
Nancy had more than just head trauma to deal with as a kid.
Her father, a man of few words with a frightening hair-trigger temper, wasn’t just strict,
he was puritanical.
All the young girl wanted was a life like the other girls had, going out on dates and
one day having that first kiss down by the river.
It never happened, because the father didn’t allow her or her sisters near any boys.
In fact, he told them that they weren’t even allowed to wear dresses or skirts.
They had to dress like boys or at least dress in a way that looked entirely unattractive.
He told them he was doing them a favor, saving them from the lustful little scoundrels that
would knock them up and ruin their lives.
But that didn’t stop her from dreaming.
When her father and mother were out of the house, Nancy would go into her mother’s
closet and pull out the stacks of romance magazines.
She read for a while and then looked in the air as if seeing herself all dolled-up and
out with some savior who’d rescued her from her life of loveless gloom.
Then she’d get the newspaper and read the lonely hearts column.
Little did she know that one day she’d be picking her victims from one.
She met her knight in shining armor when she was just 16.
His name was Charley Braggs and he worked in the linen factory with her.
They dated for around four months and then decided it was time to get hitched.
Nancy’s father was actually content with the decision.
Not one to embrace casual dating, he told Nancy that if she wanted to be with the guy
then marriage was the only way.
The couple had four kids over a period of just four years.
She smoked heavily, he drank heavily.
She was sure he was cheating on her, but then during drunken fights, he accused her of doing
the same.
Nancy’s vision of romance was shattered, so, what did she do about that?
Well, the answer is she did what she’d end up doing lots of times: killing.
When she was just 22 and had been married for six years, two of the children mysteriously
died.
They were healthy, lovely kids, and then just like that, they were gone.
It was believed they died of accidental food poisoning, but the real reason you could say
was their mother wanted a quieter household.
The serial killer was out of the gates.
As for the husband, she scared the hell out of him.
That’s why he left her.
He actually took one of the kids with him, but later returned and gave the kid to her.
We’ll come back to him later and the crazy things he had to say about Nancy.
Now she was lonely again with two kids on her hands.
There was a solution to her misery, and that was the newspaper and the lonely hearts column.
There she read a wonderful little ad by a guy named Robert Franklin Harrelson.
As often happens in life, the perfect prince charming was anything but.
He had a criminal record for assault and drank his way to the tune of a whisky bottle every
day of the week.
Still, she and her two kids stayed with him for many years, despite the regular beatings
and the continual verbal abuses.
Then, when Nancy was 37, her daughter Melvina had a child of her own.
His name was Robert Lee Haynes.
Now Nancy was a grandmother, but it seems she wasn’t exactly made up about that.
We know this because of what happened to Melvina’s second child.
She was still in the hospital, absolutely exhausted after experiencing a grueling labor
and still half-zonked from all the ether that doctors had given her.
In this haze, she opened her eyes and she could swear that she saw her mother in the
corner of the hospital room holding her newborn.
Blinking her eyes, with her vision blurred, she watched in horror as her mom took out
a hatpin and shoved it into the baby’s soft head, right into the brain.
Melvina passed out again from exhaustion, and when she came to she thought that what
she’d witnessed had been some kind of nightmare.
She called out to her husband.
With his head down he entered the room.
He had bad news.
Their baby had died.
It was a mystery to the doctors.
Still, it seems that Melvina didn’t blame her mom.
Maybe she really did think that she’d had a nightmare, perhaps a premonition of a natural
death.
After that happened, though, she and her husband just drifted apart.
But Nancy was by no means done with killing.
Melvina met another guy.
World War II was raging and this man was a soldier.
For Melvina, it was a match made in heaven, but for Nancy, it was a disastrous coupling.
Nancy was now not just fighting with her abusive husband, but she was battling with her own
daughter.
One day the two of them had a fight, and guess what…someone died.
On July 7, 1945, Melvina’s second daughter passed away.
It was thought to be from asphyxiation from unknown causes, but when you hear that Nancy
later picked up a five hundred bucks life insurance policy on the kid, well, it was
likely another murder.
1945 was coming to an end and one day the American public became jubilant.
That was the day it was announced that Japan had surrendered to the Allied Powers.
Great big parties were thrown from one side of the US to the other.
Nancy’s husband, not one to miss out on an excuse to get out of his mind on booze,
joined in the fun.
When he got home from the party he tried to force her into bed.
The last thing he said to her was, “If you don't listen to me, woman, I ain't gonna be
here next week.”
The next day she was in the garden tending to some roses, when what did she find but
her husband’s secret stash of corn whisky.
Without so much as blinking an eye she calmly walked back into the house.
She opened a cupboard and put her hand up to the top shelf.
That’s where the rat poison was kept.
She then returned to the whisky bottle.
Her violent husband didn’t survive the night.
Now she was 40, perhaps getting on in years to start another family.
But with hope in her black heart, she again took to going through the lonely columns of
newspapers.
It wasn’t long until she met another guy, but as luck would have it, he turned out to
be another man fond of whisky and spending nights in the beds of other women.
His name was Arlie Lanning.
The two got married, but yet again it was an unhappy marriage.
Inside the house, the two argued, but outside their relationship looked like a dream to
the other townsfolk.
So, when this guy died mysteriously, they came out in support of Nancy.
With tears in her eyes, the well-liked churchgoing Nancy told them, “He just sat down one morning
to drink a cup of coffee and eat a bowl of prunes I especially prepared for him.”
When standing over the coffin, she wept and said, “He looked in fine shape.
Then...well...two days later...dead.
I nursed him, believe me, I nursed him, but I failed…
Poor, poor Arlie.
You know what he said to me before he breathed his last?
'Nannie,' he said, 'Nannie, it must have been the coffee.'”
When her house burned to the ground, they wished her well again, although she was made
up after collecting on the insurance.
With cash in her pocket, she decided it was time to go and find one of her sisters.
She did just that, but her poor sister was so sick she spent most of her days in bed.
She died just after Nancy moved in with her.
Now she was in her mid-forties and single again, but instead of going through the lonely
hearts columns she decided to join a dating service called the “Diamond Circle Club.”
It was through that service that she met a man called Richard L. Morton.
He was immediately taken in by her charms and the fact she always had a smile on her
face.
It was 1952 and the couple got hitched in Emporia, Kansas.
This time her husband didn’t have a problem with whisky, but he did enjoy forming short-term
relationships with other women.
Nonetheless, the couple seemed to live a pretty normal life.
That’s what it looked like when Nancy’s mom went to live with the newlyweds.
She needed looking after, after falling and breaking her hip.
A few months later the mother was six feet under after unknowingly drinking one of Nancy’s
poison cocktails.
Just three months later and her husband was in the ground too.
During this time one of Nancy’s other sisters also died in mysterious circumstances after
getting too close to her.
Ok, so you might be wondering right now why no one questioned the fact that most people
who came into contact with this woman died.
It’s a good question, and no doubt someone should have been suspicious.
But, the fact is, no one expected a jovial, charming, and always bubbly middle-aged woman
to be a killer.
Just months after she murdered her mother and her husband, she met another man.
His name was Samuel Doss.
Now, this guy was the salt of the Earth type, so Nancy didn’t really have any reason to
shorten his life considerably.
Not only was he a minister in the Church of Nazarene but he deserved some sympathy.
Prior to meeting Nancy, he’d lost a wife and nine children in a tornado in Arkansas.
Well, in Nancy’s eyes, he was far from perfect.
This guy was a strict Christian, and he espoused a lot of conservative ideals.
He might not have cheated or even as much as looked at a bottle of hooch, but he waved
a disapproving finger at Nancy when she was enthralled while reading one of her beloved
romance novels.
He was also controlling with the couple’s finances and demanded the two were in bed
by 9.30 pm.
One day she was watching TV when he walked into the room and angrily turned it off.
He looked at her and said, “I’ve been a Christian man all my life and you’re going
to be a Christian woman.
You don’t need a radio and television.”
That was a bad move on his part.
Just three months after the couple was married, he ended up in the hospital.
He told the doctors that he felt had some kind of flu bug, but after some time the doctor
said that he had a very bad infection in his digestive tract.
He was released, but seven days later was found dead in an armchair.
Nancy wasn’t at all put out by this since she’d taken two life insurance policies
out on him.
Still, this time someone did get suspicious.
That doctor that had treated Doss couldn’t believe that the earlier sickness could have
killed him.
For that reason, he ordered an autopsy.
The result of that was clear: poisoning by arsenic, enough of it to drop an elephant.
It soon became clear that this was the reason he’d been admitted to the hospital the first
time.
Nancy later admitted that she’d first given him rat poison in a cup of coffee, but she’d
gotten the dose wrong and given him too little.
The next time she gave him a bigger dose, although it was hidden in a large bowl of
stewed prunes.
During her interrogation, she giggled all the time.
After a while, she admitted to the investigators that she’d laced sweet potato pies with
arsenic.
When she referred to her past husbands, she’d produce a large smile and call them her “sweet
potato pies.”
That’s why she got the name Giggling Granny and also the Jolly Black Widow.
When asked why she killed her last husband she replied, “He wouldn't let me watch my
favorite programs on the television, and he made me sleep without the fan on the hottest
nights.
He was a miser and...well, what's a woman to do under those conditions?”
She confessed to killing four of her five husbands but didn’t confess to the other
murders.
At times she just said some of those guys “got on her nerves”, but remained cheerful
throughout the interviews.
She told them money was never the reason why she killed, saying, “I was searching for
the perfect mate, the real romance of life.”
In fact, after she killed her last husband she was already writing love letters to another
man.
The first husband was described as the one that got away.
The media caught up with him after she was arrested and this is what he said, “When
she got mad, I wouldn’t eat anything she fixed or drink anything around the house.”
He said he only lived as long as he did because there was no life insurance policy on him.
“I was afraid of Nannie, deathly afraid,” he said.
As the trial came to an end, the judge looked down at her and said, “You understand that
all that is left is for the court to decide between a life or death sentence?”
She responded in the positive.
He gave her life in prison, saying that giving her a death sentence would “be poor precedent”
– meaning, because she was a woman.
As she left the court, reporters flocked to see her.
Laughing and smiling she told them that she wasn’t at all upset about spending the rest
of her days in prison.
In that prison, she was described as a “jokester” who got along with everyone.
When a reporter went to see her one time, she told him, “When they get shorthanded
in the kitchen here, I always offer to help out, but they never do let me.”
In 1965, after serving ten years of her sentence, she died from leukemia.
She was 59 years old.
It’s thought she murdered 11 people in total.
Now you need to watch, “Insane Story of Cannibal Clan that Terrorized Europe.”
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