Women Serial Killers of the 20th Century (9 page)

Crime Doesn’t Pay?

Marie Joséphine Philippine Besnard
, née Davaillaud, was born on August 15th, 1896 in Loudun, France, close to the Loire valley. Her father, Pierre Eugène, and mother, Marie-Louise, adored Marie, having lost two sons before she was born. Her father was a wealthy but frugal farmer. Marie was brought up as a Catholic and received her education at a convent school. Her classmates remembered her as being immoral, spiteful, and mean and for being wild with boys. Marie was also remembered for lying and stealing.

Marie married Auguste Antigny, her cousin two years her senior, in 1920. Her mother was the sister of Auguste’s father, and they had known each other all their lives. Her parents had not allowed her to date him until she was eighteen, and they were not given consent to marry until she was twenty-four. Auguste was diagnosed with tuberculosis shortly before the wedding
. Tuberculosis, in the 1920’s, was an incurable, untreatable disease, but Marie said she was in love and wanted to marry him. The marriage lasted until his death on July 21st, 1927 when Marie was thirty. The cause of death was officially noted as tuberculosis. When Auguste died in Marie’s arms, she was reported to have sobbed uncontrollably.

In 1929, Marie married Léon Besnard, the owner of a rope shop in Loudon. Léon, although only just making an adequate living, belonged to an extremely wealthy family. Léon and Marie lived a modest life but dreamed of better times when they might inherit wealth. Two wealthy great aunts of Léon’s died in 1938 and 1940 and left their estates to León’s parents. Marie and Leon invited the parents, who were aging, to come and live with them. Shortly after moving in with Marie and Leon, Léon’s father died after consuming poisoned mushrooms. Léon’s mother, Marie-Louise Besnard
at the age of 68, died three months later from pneumonia. Léon and his sister, Lucie, age forty-five, inherited the parents' estate. Lucie, not many months after her mother's death, apparently killed herself on March 27, 1941, and Léon then inherited the entire estate.

Around this time, on May 14, 1940, Marie and Léon’s bank account increased yet more after Pierre Eugène, Marie's father, passed away from what was suspected to be a cerebral hemorrhage. However, all this wealth appeared not to be enough for Marie and Léon for they then invited an affluent childless couple, the Rivets, to be houseguests. Touissaint and Blanche Rivets soon became attached to the Besnards, especially Marie, thankful for her hospitality. Monsieur Rivet passed away from pneumonia on July 14th, 1940, and Blanche Rivet followed the following year. Blanche became ill with nausea and convulsions and died on December 27th, 1941. Touissaint and Blanche had made Marie their sole beneficiary. The Davaillaud’s family,
the Besnard’s family, and friends were dropping like flies.

Although Marie and Léon Besnard had experienced an unusual number of deaths amongst their family and friends in such a short time frame, few people in the town suspected anything. It was simply considered bad luck. This began to change when an elderly, wealthy cousin of Marie’s, Pauline Bodineau
at the age of 88, who was living with Marie and Léon, died on July 1st, 1945. Marie claimed Pauline had mistakenly eaten a dish of lye (caustic soda) thinking it was a desert. Talk and suspicion in Loudon began. On July 9th, 1945, another elderly, wealthy cousin of Marie’s, Virginie Lalleron at the age of 83, who was also living in the house died in an identical manner to Pauline. Now the town’s suspicions became highly aroused. Marie was the only beneficiary of both of the cousins. Despite the suspicions of friends and neighbors as ‘something being not quite right’, nothing was done, and no criminal inquiry took place.

Marie-Louise, Marie's mother
, died on January 16
th
of 1946 and left her entire estate to Marie. Marie and Léon were now exceedingly wealthy. They owned an inn, a cafe, six houses, as well as several stud farms.

Then Marie discovered that her husband was conducting an affair with Louise Pintou, the local
Postmaster. In retaliation, she began an affair with a German man, a handsome ex-prisoner of war. However, Marie was not going to let Léon get off that lightly with his infidelity and she saw as his betrayal.

Léon confided in Louise Pintou that he thought Marie would attempt to poison him. He asked Louise to insist on an autopsy if he died
. Louise promised she would. Léon Besnard died at home on October 25th of 1947, apparently of kidney failure.

Louise Pintou kept her word and sent a letter to the local public prosecutor telling him of Léon’s fears and suspicions. She also discussed the matter with her customers at the town’s post office. Marie
was in control of all the money, which was a great deal, and felt powerful. When she heard the town chatter, she went door-to-door threatening the gossips with their lives. Louise Pintou had her house broken into, and every present Léon had given to Louise was destroyed or stolen. Two close friends of Louise’s, who had also contacted the public prosecutor, were forced to leave the town in fear of their lives after arsonists had burned down their homes.

The local prosecutor was by now receiving so many complaints about Marie, he passed the case
on to an investigating magistrate. Léon’s body was ordered to be exhumed. It was exhumed on the 11th of May in 1949. The pathologist reported that Léon’s body showed that significant amounts of arsenic had been ingested.

Marie was arrested for the suspected murder of Léon and held in the local jail while the investigation continued.  Here Marie, incarcerated as she was, attempted damage control. However, three informers reported Marie to the police saying that Marie had tried to hire them to “get rid” of Louise Pintou and her friends, the Massip brothers.

The investigative magistrate ordered twelve more bodies to be exhumed: these were Pierre Eugène Davaillaud, Marie-Louise Davaillaud, Léon’s parents, Auguste Antigny, Lucie Bestard, Toussaint Rivet, Blanche Rivet, Pauline Bodineau, Virginie Lalleron, and Léon’s two great aunts.

Auguste Antigny
’s body contained 6 mg arsenic.

Léon Besnard's body contained 19.45 mg of arsenic.

Marie-Louise Besnard’s, née Gouin’s (68-years-old), body contained 60mg of arsenic.

Lucie Bodin
’s, née Besnard’s, body contained 30 mg of arsenic.

Pierre Eugène Davaillaud’s body contained 36 mg of arsenic.

Monsieur Toussaint Rivet’s body contained 18 mg of arsenic.

Madame Blanche Rivet’s body contained 30 mg of arsenic.

Pauline Bodineau’s body contained 48 mg of arsenic.

Virginie Lalleron
‘s body contained 20 mg of arsenic.

Léon’s great aunt
’s body (86-years-old) contained 35 mg of arsenic.

Léon’s great aunt
’s body (92-years-old) contained traces of arsenic.

Marie-Louise Davaillaud’s
body contained 48 mg of arsenic

Marie was charged with thirteen counts of murder. Her trial began in February
of 1952. Marie, being an extremely wealthy woman, hired the best legal team of French lawyers money could buy. Marie’s team of lawyers demanded new tests to confirm that all of the victims had been slain with arsenic, which was central to the prosecution’s case. The prosecution had difficulty in defending the results of their exhumation examinations against the battery of highly paid experts the defense team produced. Even though witnesses testified of her attempts to threaten and murder witnesses and female acquaintances testified that Marie had said, “Arsenic was a better alternative to divorce”, the trial ended in a mistrial. The judges ordered new tests to be performed. Marie remained in prison in "preventative detention" until the next trial.

A second trial was held in March
of 1954. This time around, Marie was only charged with six murders, as the physical evidence of five of the bodies had deteriorated to such an extent that no reliable tests could be performed on them. This case also led to a mistrial, as none of the forensic experts could agree on their findings. This time, Marie was released on bail.

The third trial took place seven years later on November 20, 1961. At this trial, the prosecution again charged Marie with thirteen murders. In this trial, Marie’s brilliant defense team had
learned that the cemetery grounds where the bodies had been buried were fertilized with a product containing arsenic. This evidence meant that the prosecutor and his team would have to prove that the arsenic in the corpses had not been introduced after burial, an impossible task at that time.

Marie Besnard, despite arsenic
having been found in thirteen bodies whose deaths enhanced her wealth, her attempts to threaten and murder witnesses, and female acquaintances relating during the trial that Marie had said, “Arsenic was a better alternative to divorce”, was acquitted on December 12, 1961.

Marie Besnard died in 1980 and is unlikely to have uttered the words
, “crime doesn’t pay”.

NANNIE DOSS

The Giggling Granny

Nannie Doss was born Nancy Hazle
on Nov. 4, 1905, in Blue Mountain, Alabama, to poor farming parents James Hazle and his wife Lou. She soon became known as Nannie after her birth.  Nannie was the eldest of five siblings; she had three sisters and one brother. James Hazle, her father, was a farmer and a control freak; the children and their mother lived in fear of him.

Life was hard and
by the age of five, Nannie had learned to cut wood, plough the fields, dig the farm free of weeds, scrub pots and pans, and clean the house. School was, despite the two-mile walk, almost a treat from the drudgery of the farm, but her schooling was far from regular because if her father needed her help on the farm that was his first priority. Consequently, Nannie never learned to read or write particularly well, and her education stopped entirely after the sixth grade.

An event, that Nannie later claimed had an enormous impact on her life, happened when she was seven. On her first ever trip away from the farm, and her first train ride to visit family in the south of Alabama, the train suddenly braked. Nannie, propelled out of her seat, smashed her head against a metal bar. In an interview many years later with
Life magazine,
she claimed that from that point on she suffered from blackouts, severe headaches, and depression.

While her father was an abusive dictator, Nannies’ mother Lou was a gentle, caring woman. To escape the hardship of her life, Lou subscribed to various romantic story magazines and as Nannie slipped into her teenage years she would devour her mother’s magazines. Nannie would sit and daydream of the day when she would be swept off her feet by a tall, dark, handsome stranger and whisked away into the sunset.

Nannie
’s and her sister’s teenage years became an extension of their miserable years as children. Their father forbade them from having friends, wearing makeup, or dressing prettily. While the other teenagers in the hamlet were out enjoying barn dances, church organized social events, or sitting in the local coffee bars, the Hazle sisters sat miserably at home.

Nannie
, in 1921 at the age of sixteen, began work in a linen factory and spent any spare money on romance stories. This is also when she first began having social interaction with boys. The boys took to her: her hair and eyes were dark, her giggle infectious, and she gave them want they wanted: sex.

A
handsome, curly-haired boy, Charley Braggs, in particular liked Nannie and they soon began dating. Charley even met the approval of Dictator James. James approved of Charley because of the way he cared for his mother; to him it showed decent old-fashioned respect for ones elders. Within four months of beginning to date, Nannie and Charley were married. For Nannie, who may have seen the marriage as an escape route from her father, now had to contend with her over-ruling, manipulative mother-in law and a husband who turned out to be an abusive, womanizing drunk.

Nannie
’s and Charley’s first child was born in 1923. This birth was quickly followed by three more.  Nannies’ dreams of love and romance seemed a long way away. Her life was as full of drudgery as her childhood had been. Nannie began drinking and smoking heavily and when Charley was out, she, too, took to going to the local bars and having her own adulterous affairs.

In 1927
, Nannie and Charley’s two middle children died from what doctors said was food poisoning. Charley was suspicious as to who had poisoned the food. He left the house and town with their oldest daughter Melvina. Nannie was left alone with her hated mother-in-law, her youngest child Florine, and the insurance money from the deaths of her two children. Shortly after Charley had left her, the dreaded mother-in-law died. A year later, in late summer 1928, Charley returned home with a new girlfriend and Melvina; he wanted a divorce. Nannie moved back to her parent’s home with her daughters Melvina and Florine.

Yet again Nannie was under the roof of her dictator father. In the evenings, Nannie and her mother would bury their heads in their romance magazines but then Nannie began going through the section entitled lonely hearts and began to answer the
advertisements. Maybe here she would find her life of romance.

She heard back from a Frank
Harrelson, a factory worker, who lived in nearby Jacksonville. The black and white photo he sent Nannie reminded her of Clark Gable. In return, Nannie baked him a cake and had it delivered to him along with an alluring photo of herself. They agreed to meet and before long, Frank proposed marriage and Nannie happily accepted. In 1929 they married, and Nannie and her two daughters left her parents’ house and moved in with Frank in Jacksonville.

The honeymoon period for Nannie did not last long. Her tall, good-looking husband turned out to be a drunk
, whose favorite occupation seemed to be engaging in bar brawls for which he had once been jailed. Despite her disappointment in her husband, she stayed and suffered his drunken abuse of her.

Melvina and Florian grew up in this dysfunctional home and b
oth eventually married. In 1943, Melvina had a son, and Nannie became a grandma. In 1945, Melvina had another child. This time her labor was long and hard, and she sent her husband Mosie Haynes to fetch Nannie to be at her side. Nannie behaved as an exemplary mother; she sat all night by her bedside mopping Melvina’s sweating brow. Finally, Melvina gave birth to a baby girl. An hour later, the baby had died. The doctors were puzzled and could not account for the baby’s death.

For the distraught Melvina, as if losing her baby was not enough
, she was troubled by what she wasn’t sure was a nightmare or real. As she had drifted in and out of sleep after giving birth, she thought she saw her mother stick a pin into the baby’s tender head. When she told her younger sister Florian and her husband Moses her ‘dream’, they exclaimed in unison that they had seen Nannie playing with a pin in her hands while she had sat at Melvina’s bedside. However, the idea of Nannie causing the death of the baby was far too shocking for any of them to consider taking it seriously.

On July 7, 1945, Nannie babysat for Melvina’s son Robert. That night
, Robert died. The family doctor cited asphyxia from undisclosed causes. Nannie collected $500 on the boy’s life insurance policy that she had recently taken out without her daughter’s knowledge. Nannie acted as the heartbroken granny sobbing and wailing as the tiny coffin was silently lowered into the grave.

In August
of 1945, the Second World War ended and on September 15, 1945, Frank went out drinking and celebrating with friends of his who had returned home. That night when he returned home, he abused and raped Nannie. She`d had enough. The following evening after supper and a dessert of prunes, thirty-eight -year-old Frank died in excruciating pain.

For a while after the death of Frank, not much is known of Nannie. It’s thought that she journeyed around the United States for a while before turning up in 1947
in North Carolina. She had answered a lonely-hearts advertisement placed by Arlie Lanning, a laborer. Nannie and Arlie married just two days after the meeting. It was to be another disappointment for the romance-seeking widow. Arlie, like her last husband Frank, was also a drunk, although not an abusive one; he was also a womanizer and had a poor reputation in the town. Whenever Arlie went on a drinking binge Nannie would pack her suitcases and leave, telling neighbors she was off to visit relatives; sometimes she would be gone for months.

Nannie was popular in Lexington. Her friends and neighbors saw her as a perfect wife. From her kitchen
there was always a delightful smell of baking, and the house and garden were always spick and span. She still enjoyed reading her romantic stories but now her favorite occupation was watching television and smoking her favorite cigarettes, Camel. Nannie was also a regular churchgoer and helped organize church social events. Many of her acquaintances felt sorry for Nannie for having such a drunk, womanizer for a husband, and the only reason Arlie was tolerated at social events was because of the cheerful, kind-hearted Nannie. In February of 1950, Arlie suddenly became ill with dizziness, sweating, and vomiting. He died two days later in excruciating pain. Given his lifestyle, no one was surprised, and an autopsy was not performed.

At the funeral, Nannie
epitomized the heart-broken widow explaining to her neighbors through tears that:

Arlie left his house to his sister, but it burned down before she could claim it. The television, however, was saved as while the house was burning down, Nannie was on her way to the television repair shop. Nannie moved in with Arlie’s mother.  The elderly mother passed away in her sleep while in Nannie’s care. When the check from the insurance company arrived
for the burnt house, as Arlie’s widow, Nannie was able to claim it. With the check in hand and the television on the backseat of her car, Nannie left Lexington never to return.

She made her way to her sister Dovie. Her sister was bedridden with cancer and with Nannie’s arrival, her condition soon worsened. Dovie died on June 30
th
in her sleep.

With her sister dead
, Nannie settled into her house, set about perusing her ads again, and discovered the Diamond Circle Club. This singles club cost $15 a year in membership. All members received a monthly newsletter with the newest members added monthly. Through this club, she made contact with a recently retired businessman, Richard Morton, from Emporia, Kansas. He fit Nannie’s romantic dream: he was a tall, dark, handsome, half American Indian, with piercing eyes. While he dated her, he bought her presents of jewelry and other trinkets as well as clothes. Nannie and Richard married in October of 1952, and she moved into his house in Emporia. Nannie’s romantic dream was soon shattered.

Richard Morton was not a drunkard lik
e her previous two husbands, but he was a liar. He was swimming in debt and, to make matters worse, he was also a womanizer and had a long-standing girlfriend he wasn`t going to give up. Nannie realized she had made a colossal mistake but not as deadly a mistake as Richard had. Nannie realized he had to go. Then her mother Lou showed up.

Nannie’s
father James had died, and her elderly mother invited herself to visit Nannie. Within a short time of arriving at Nannie’s and Richard’s house, Lou complained of severe stomach cramps and died in January of 1953. Three months after her mother died, Richard, also complaining of severe stomach pains, died.

And no one – doctors, family, friends
, or neighbors – asked questions.

As soon as Nannie had realized her mistake in marrying Richard, she had begun her perusal of the lonely-hearts ad columns again.
Two months before Richard’s death, she began a pen pal correspondence with fifty nine -year-old Samuel Doss from Tulsa, Oklahoma. With Richard in the ground and the insurance check in the bank, Nannie traveled to Tulsa. Samuel Doss, on meeting Nannie, fell deeply in love and immediately proposed to Nannie. To Samuel, Nannie seemed to be homely, cheerful, and an accomplished cook. They married in June of 1953.

Nannie was attracted to Samuel, as he
seemed so different from all of her previous husbands. He had a steady job as a state highway inspector. He didn’t drink or womanize. He was a straight, church going conservative man. His flaw, as Nannie discovered, was that he was seriously set in his ways. Bedtime was at 9.30 pm; he did not approve of Nanny’s romance stories, viewing them as a painful waste of money. He disapproved of her television viewing and kept tight control of the household spending. Nannie found him frustratingly tedious and irritating remarkably quickly. She persuaded Samuel to take out two life insurance policies.

In September
, after a well-cooked supper by his wife, Samuel complained of stomach pains and called in his doctor. The doctor admitted Samuel to the hospital and diagnosed him with a serious digestive infection. They kept him for twenty-three days before releasing him on October 5
th
. For his first supper home, Nannie cooked a delicious roast pork dinner followed by her specialty of stewed prune dessert. Before midnight, Samuel was dead.

Samuel’s doctor was aghast and spoke to
Dr. Schwelbein, the doctor who had examined Samuel prior to releasing him from the hospital. They concluded his death did not make any sense, and an autopsy was ordered. The pathologist performing the autopsy discovered enough arsenic in Samuel’s body to kill twelve horses.