If you think your grandma’s weird, wait until you meet Nannie Doss.

Known by a handful of delightfully horrifying nicknames...The Giggling Granny, The Lonely Hearts Killer, The Jolly Black Widow, Lady Blue Beard...Nannie Doss looked like the kind of grandmother who’d bake you cookies and tell you to eat seconds. Instead, she was slipping arsenic into sweet potato pie and serving it with a smile.

Between 1920 and 1954, Nannie poisoned, smothered, and schemed her way through eleven victims, including four husbands, her own sister and grandson, all in the name of love. She spent her life searching for romance and the “perfect man,” leaving a trail of bodies and broken hearts in her wake.

In this episode, we’re diving deep into her dark fairytale: a childhood of abuse and isolation, a head injury that might’ve rewired her empathy, and a deadly addiction to love stories that promised happy endings. We’ll look at how the 1950s ideal of the sweet homemaker gave her the perfect cover, and how a society blinded by gender stereotypes allowed one smiling widow to keep killing for decades.

It’s a story about love, lies, and lethal pie.

This episode is a refreshing/re-recording of one of the first stories I ever covered on Serial Napper.

Sources:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/nannie-doss-giggling-granny

https://people.com/nannie-doss-giggling-granny-serial-killer-8761190

https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/nannie-doss/

https://murderpedia.org/female.D/d/doss-nannie.htm

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