Bipolar Blunders: Part 2

Welcome back, beautiful Chimers, to Diary of a Bipolar Pixie. I’ve been in a writing kick lately and that means that while this will probably be scheduled to post on April 19th, I’m writing in March. I’ve had a lot going on in the past week, and writing seems to take my mind off of things. I’ll probably write it all down in a diary post for a later week, that way I know it’ll have content that maybe you find boring but that’s fine.

For now, I’m going to have a random conversation about a random topic I’ve been thinking about recently. Serial killers! I guess it’s not really that random considering I’ve been watching a lot of Reels TV, and Reels has had a lot of documentaries about different serial killers, such as John Wayne Gacy and Richard Ramirez. After several hours of watching these shows, I realized there weren’t too many shows about female serial killers, who’s kill counts tend to be much higher than their male counterparts. So what does a mildly obsessive individual do? Follow along to see.

Most of the information I’ve found comes from Murderpedia and Thoughtco for this section.

Nannie Doss

Nannie Doss was born Nancy Hazel on November 4, 1905. According to many reports, Nancy was molested multiple times by multiple men before she reached her teen years, which gave her a poor understanding of what love really was. She also used to read her mother’s romance novels and the single-and-looking column in the local newspapers, and dreamed of the perfect marriage, while living poorly with her constantly fighting parents. She also struggled in school. Some blamed the issues on the fact that Nancy’s father made her and her siblings work excruciating hours on the family farm. Some blamed the accident Nancy had when she was 7 on a train, which resulted in a head injury. There are also those who say Nancy had different focuses on her mind and she didn’t care about school.

At sixteen-years-old, Nancy got married for the first time to Charles Braggs. The two worked together in a factory and dated for only four months before they got engaged, and quickly married. The marriage was not the romantic adventure Nancy always dreamed about, though. Charles’s mother was massive part of his life, and took control of Nancy very quickly, telling her what she could and couldn’t do, who she could and couldn’t have over, and even went so far as to move in with the couple permanently.

In a four year span, Nancy and Charles had four daughters, which put extra stress on the then twenty-year-old woman. Nancy started drinking and smoking much more frequently, which only worsened the already strained relationship of the couple. There were rumors that both individuals also had affairs on the side, as Charles would leave for several days at a time unannounced, and Nancy was said to have men over while he was gone.

Then, tragedy struck not long after their youngest daughter was born. Charles left for work, saying goodbye to his four healthy daughters, only to return home to two very sick girls. Nancy said they started convulsing after breakfast and that there was nothing the doctors could do. Their two middle daughters died, leaving Charles heartbroken, but Nancy seemed to be more worried about the insurance pay out.

Charles stayed with Nancy until just after his mother’s death in early 1927, then he packed up his eldest daughter and himself and moved without saying another word to Nancy, leaving his newborn in her care. Nancy had to get a job to support herself and her child. A little over a year later, Charles returned to drop off the daughter he left with so that he could be with his new girlfriend. The two officially divorced in 1928, and Nancy moved back home to live with her mother. And before you ask, no I don’t know what happened to her father. I’m doing a lot of digging into her life, but the articles I’ve found haven’t mentioned her father after she was married the first time. I’m thinking he died of mostly natural causes because he’s also not listed in her victim count.

After moving in with her mother, Nancy resumed her old hobbies of reading novels and her favorite section of the newspaper. While reading this section, she found an ad from a single man, Frank Harrelson, looking for his future wife. Nancy reached out to him and the two started a romantic relationship through letters. About two years after her divorce with Charles, she and Frank got married and the couple and Nancy’s two daughters moved to Jacksonville, Alabama. However, Nancy soon discovered that her new husband was an abusive alcoholic with a criminal record. Surprisingly, the two were married for sixteen years despite that.

Within those sixteen years of marriage, Nancy’s oldest daughter married soldier, who died while away at war a few years later, and had a daughter, who didn’t even have a name. Nancy acted as midwife while her daughter was in labor and she expressed that the child was stillborn. Both of Nancy’s daughter said they thought they saw Nancy holding a hair pin over the baby’s head. Nancy’s oldest daughter, however, couldn’t be certain that she actually saw her mother stick the pin in her newborn daughter’s head, given that she was severally exhausted and delirious from just giving birth. Doctors couldn’t explain how the baby died.

About a year later, a few months after her husband was deployed, Nancy and her family welcomed a new addition to the home. Nancy’s oldest daughter had a son, Robert, but a few months after Robert was born, Nancy and her daughter had a huge fight. The daughter decided to go spend time with Charles to cool off. Given her son was only a few months old, she chose to leave him with Nancy. Robert died mysteriously during that time, the cause of death labeled as asphyxia due to unknown causes. The family claimed a $500 life insurance policy shortly after.

Then, the sixteen year marriage came to an abrupt end the day after Japan surrendered in World War II. The entirety of America celebrated the ending of the war, and Frank celebrated as only a true alcoholic can. He drank far more than even he could handle, and ended his night by raping his wife. The next morning, Nancy was cleaning the house when she found one of his liquor bottles. She snapped and poured rat poison into the bottle before presenting it to her husband. He died that night in agony.

I’m not sure if she was questioned or even under any suspicion for Frank’s death, because the next I hear of her, she’s on her way to Lexington, North Carolina, where she meets husband #3, Arlie Lanning, and they were married within 3 days. He was as much of an abusive alcoholic as Nancy’s previous husband, and met a mysterious end that Nancy claimed was a heart attack. Shortly after, the couples home, which had been left to Arlie’s sister and not Nancy, went up in flames, which allowed Nancy to collect the insurance money, thanks to some loophole I don’t know of. She then left town after her mother-in-law died unexpectedly in her sleep. Nancy stayed with her sister, who was bedridden before Nancy moved in, but died shortly after.

Nancy went on to find a fourth husband, who may have not been an alcoholic, but was just as abusive as the two previous men to enter Nancy’s life. While married to him, Nancy visited her mother for a short time, and returned home only after her mother’s funeral. After she returned home, her fourth husband followed in the footsteps of the other men, dying under mysterious circumstances.

Drumroll please, because we’ve officially reached the point where I can no longer report this information in a calm and direct manner…. This woman got married a fifth time! I mean, I would have started questioning her after the third mysterious death in her life, but we’re onto ten mysterious deaths that I can count! I don’t know what these people were thinking!

Anyway, Nancy met her fifth husband, Samuel Doss, while living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Samuel was the exact opposite of Nancy’s previous husbands, since he was a strict Christian man who refrained from alcohol and detested romance novels. I’m sure Nancy didn’t kill him because of that, I’m sure at that point in her life she was so accustomed to killing for the insurance money that she didn’t know how to function in what could have been a healthy relationship for her.

Nancy was itching for that money. I don’t even know what she thought she needed to spend it on. (Thank you Murderpedia for only stating the super facts and not any of the backstory.) Nancy was in a rush, and it cost her dearly. Samuel became very ill very fast, so he went to the hospital for treatment. Doctors labeled it digestive tract infection, treated him, and sent him home. By the end of the night, he was dead.

Because of his previous visit to the hospital, doctors immediately flagged his death as suspicious and conducted a full blown investigation. It was then that they discovered the extremely high levels of arsenic in his system. The doctors called the police, and the police interrogated Nancy at length, until the woman admitted to killing eleven people. I’ve listed them all, I’m sure you can figure them all out.

Nancy went to trial, pleaded guilty, and spent the rest of her life in prison. I think a mix of her age and her name created the “Nannie” nickname for her. She died of leukemia in the prison hospital in 1965, after eleven years of lock up.

My conclusion about this woman is that she had some severe mental problems to justify killing all of those people. The children, specifically, should have had no part in her rage, and should have been safe from her, and with her. I’ve been abused, I’ve had those thoughts of loathing and rage, but I’ve never gone through with those thoughts. However, she was in a different time, in a darker place than I was. I will never condone harming another person for any reason. I’m honestly just so upset about those poor kids, who never even got to experience life.

Elizabeth Bathory

We’re going to talk about one more female serial killer for this post and save the rest for later. I didn’t really think this was going to end up being such a long in depth look into their lives when this started, but these women are incredibly fascinating to me.

Our next contender on the list of women who kill is Elizabeth Bathory. Before we go on with her story, I would like to say that I have absolutely no organization to how I talk about these women, I looked them up and wrote down their names as I found them, and am researching them in the order I had them written down.

Now, onto the woman who would later be called “The Blood Countess.”

Elizabeth Bathory was born to a powerful Hungarian family in 1560, who boasted the inclusion of members of the royal family, some judges, and even a few religious figures. But her family tree had some darkened branches stretching off of it. Her uncle, for example, was a devout Satanist, who taught his niece all about the will of this hellish entity. She also had an aunt who was an extreme sadist, and introduced the young girl to her greatest pleasure in life, the torture of those she deemed as lesser beings.

As was tradition in those days, Elizabeth was married off to Count Nadady at the age of fifteen and the two moved into a castle. Accounts say that Elizabeth was distant and standoffish towards her new husband, until he agreed to build her the torture chamber she dreamed of, so she could follow in footsteps of her aunt and uncle.

Elizabeth found a lot of joy in torturing young virgin girls, starting with the servants in her house. She pushed pins under her victims nails and smeared them with honey and left them to be attacked by insects. Her husband even had a hand in some of these acts of torture, but passed away in the early 1600s.

I believe Elizabeth grew extremely fearful of her own eventual demise after watching her husband pass away, because it’s said that she became even more malicious in her attacks of the young virgin girls. She bit whole chunks of flesh out of them, while alive, forced one to cook and eat her own flesh, and I’m sure much worse accounts that no one wants to list. She also had some of her older servants helping her abduct girls from surrounding villages so she could torture them. Elizabeth also believed that the blood of virgin girls would keep her young and beautiful, probably something she picked up from her Satanic uncle.

How did this vile woman get caught? Well, she wasn’t really caught so to speak. Everyone knew what Elizabeth was doing. She wasn’t murdering one random person every two years, she was reported to be kidnapping and murdering numerous virgin girls in a single month. She couldn’t even keep track herself of all the women she killed over the course of her 35 year reign of terror. She wasn’t dealt with in the beginning because she was a noblewoman who came from a very powerful family. No one wanted that problem on their plate.

Until she couldn’t get access to anymore servant or village girls. The great and terrible “Blood Countess” went after other noblewomen. That’s a severe no-no in those times, and King Matthias of Hungary finally stepped in to get involved. In 1610 (or 1611 depending on who you ask) King Matthias sent Count Gyorgy to investigate, and Elizabeth’s torture chamber and prisoners were discovered and made extremely public, to the point that no one could ignore the problem any longer.

Countess Elizabeth Bathory and and all of her wonderfully helpful servants were put on trial for their crimes. All were found guilty, and all but Elizabeth were executed. Because of her status in Hungarian society, she was spared from execution, but was held for the remaining years of her life in a cell with her only contact with outside world being a small gap in a wall for air and food. She died, with no clear indication how or why in 1614.

I truly believe that there is so much more to the woman’s story than just being a Satanic sadist. I’m obviously not an expert, or a historian, I’m just a bipolar bitch with a casual obsession for the strange and unusual, and Elizabeth was strange and unusual. I believe there must have been some sort of rape in her history. No one has that much hate for a virgin girl for no reason, and I believe she was jealous of those girls because they still held on to their innocents. I also think this happened at the hands of her Satanic uncle. I think he justified the rape in the name of Satan, and it confused and hurt her, because Christianity was the main religion of the time, and it’s more than likely that the rest of her family was made of Christians. She may have had extreme struggles with coping with what happened to her.

Which is where I think her aunt suddenly comes into play. My theory is that Elizabeth tried telling her immediate family about the incident, and they brushed it off or swept it under the rug to keep the family name from being drug through the mud. Elizabeth then turned to her aunt, who listened and understood her niece’s pain, and introduces her to a new outlet for her anger and confusion.

I then believe that the death of her husband made her really stop and think about all the harm she’d done, and she feared what her afterlife would be like, since she had such religious hardships in her youth. She turned to the Satanic teachings of her uncle, because she believed that the blood of virgins would keep her young and beautiful forever, and if she didn’t die, she wouldn’t have to worry about what her afterlife would look like.

These women were mentally disturbed and probably need a lot of psychiatric help that wasn’t available to them at the time. I truly believe that you have to have some mental health issues going on to hurt and kill people like they did.

I have a lot of other women planned out, but there is no way I can fit them all in one post, so I’m holding off until a later post. If you enjoyed reading about these women, may I suggest liking this post and subscribing to this blog so that you stay up to date on when the next crazy post comes out. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d also love it (and I mean absolutely fucking adore it) if you could donate a little bit of something to this blog. Every donation can be used to create better content for future posts. If you choose to become a paying subscriber, I will also soon be coming up with specialty content for you as my way of saying thank you for your contribution.

Until next time, fly high, Chimers!

“It’s my job as best friend to make sure he’s not a serial killer. Or an English major, not sure which one’s worse.”

― Shelly Crane, Significance

I’m sorry, that quote fucking killed me!