True Crime Tuesdays on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast: The Case of the Giggling Granny

Welcome to True Crime Tuesdays on Fearsome Fiction. Today we’re going to talk about “The Giggling Granny,” a woman who baked prune cake, read romance magazines, giggled at her own arrest, and murdered at least eleven people—most of them her own family.

Her name was Nannie Doss. The press called her the Giggling Granny, the Lonely Hearts Killer, the Black Widow, and Lady Bluebeard. She was a small, cheerful, grandmotherly woman from Alabama who seemed like the last person in the world you’d suspect of anything. Which, of course, is exactly why she got away with it for so long.

Her weapon of choice was arsenic—rat poison, mostly, the kind you could pick up at any hardware store in the American South in the 1920s through the 1950s. She put it in whiskey, in coffee, in stewed prunes, in prune cake. She put it in the food of husbands, grandchildren, her own mother, her sister, her mother-in-law. She did it over and over again for nearly thirty years, and nobody suspected a thing—until the very last one. Because Nannie Doss was always smiling. And you don’t suspect the woman who’s smiling.

This is her story. Narration provided by Wondervox.