Nanny Doss: The Giggling Killer

Seeing Red A True Crime Podcast

Mark Randell & Bethan Trueman

True Crime

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2026

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on Seeing Red, we meet a woman who looked like she’d stepped straight out of a 1950s love story — but left a trail of bodies behind her. Nanny Doss was charming, chatty… and deadly. With a fixation on love and happily-ever-afters, she approached marriage the same way Bethan approaches an all you can eat buffet — aggressively and without hesitation — each one ending in a strangely convenient death. But it didn’t stop there. Her victims weren’t just the men she married — family members, too, found themselves in the path of her quiet, calculated cruelty. Using poison as her weapon of choice, she slipped death into everyday life with chilling ease, all while keeping that unsettling, ever-present smile. In this episode, we unravel the bizarre, darkly absurd story of a woman who treated murder like a means to an end… and sometimes, disturbingly, like a joke. www.patreon.com/seeingredpodcast ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/seeingredtw⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ www.seeingredpodcast.co.uk Theme music arranged and composed by Holly-Jane Shears: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.soundcloud.com/DeadDogInBlackBag⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	...you know,
0:08.0	... Hello and welcome to seeing Red, a true crime podcast, I'm Mark.
0:39.2	And I'm Bethan. Welcome back,
0:45.0	everybody. And a huge thank you to Marie Priest for her suggestion for this week's episode.
0:50.7	I really worry sometimes when people have put a suggestion through a while ago. I'm like,
0:56.7	are you still listening, Marie? Hope you're still here with us and listening to the show and you haven't left us because we didn't do your case.
0:58.7	So, um, thank you to Marie.
1:05.2	We are going to head back to October 1954 to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
1:12.8	A 49-year-old grandmother sits in a police interrogation room smiling sweet, as she describes in chilling, nonchalant detail, how she fatally laced her husband's coffee with arsenic.
1:19.0	Nanny Doss, with her greying curls and disarming grin, literally giggles as she describes
1:24.1	her brutal crime, as if she's fondly recalling a harmless prank that she
1:28.1	once played as a child.
1:30.6	Across the table, investigators exchange uneasy glances.
1:34.3	This cheerful matronly woman had just calmly confessed to killing her fifth husband,
1:38.7	and she wasn't even done talking yet.
1:41.3	In the coming hours, Nanny would, matter-of-factlyly admit to murdering 11 members of her family over nearly three decades.
1:49.5	The revelation, not to mention her chilling sense of amusement at it all, horrified the nation and earned her an infamous nickname, The Giggling Granny.
1:59.8	I've not, um, I've not encountered this before.
2:02.7	So thanks to, was it Marie?
2:05.0	Did you say that?
2:05.8	It was, yeah.
	...

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