Women Serial Killers of the 20th Century (10 page)

Nannie was the immediate suspect and promptly arrested.
The police were astounded by her reaction to being arrested: she giggled and she continued to giggle throughout her police interrogations. In between her giggles, Nannie admitted to murdering four husbands, her sister, her mother, her grandson, and Arlie’s mother.

It was not long before the media nicknamed her "The Giggling Granny" and "The Jolly Widow
”.

Groups of psychiatrists were called in to examine her
; their conclusion was that she was mentally sane. Her trial was set for June 2nd, 1955, in the Criminal Court of Tulsa, Oklahoma. On May 17
th
, she pleaded guilty to the murder of Samuel Doss, the only murder that had taken place in Oklahoma. Judge Elmer Adams, after a brief hearing, sentenced her to life imprisonment.

The case made
great media copy as the public were baffled and intrigued as to how this overweight, short sighted, graying, motherly looking figure could have killed so many for so long. Nannie loved the media attention and would pose smiling and giggling for photographs and gave lengthy interviews, when allowed, as if a movie star.

Nannie
died in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary of leukemia on June 2, 1965.

MARY ELIZABETH WILSON

The Merry Widow of Windy Nook

Mary Elizabeth Wilson was born
in Hebburn, South Tyneside, England in 1893. As a teenager, she got a job in service with the Knowles family. She cultivated a friendship with the son, John Knowles, and married him in 1912.

Mary and John moved to a house in Windy Nook, Gateshead.
At some point in the marriage, Mary began an affair with a John Russell who eventually moved in to the house with them as a lodger. In 1955, John Knowles, after forty-three years of marriage, died. Five months after her husband’s death, Mary married her lover John Russell. In early 1957, John died. The local doctor attributed both husbands’ deaths to natural causes. In both cases, Mary inherited everything.

In June
of 1957 at the age of sixty-four, Mary married wealthy Oliver Leonard, an estate agent, in a registry office in Jarrow. Twelve days after the marriage, Oliver became ill and died the following day. The local doctor pronounced heart failure as the cause. Mary again inherited everything.

Mary then married
husband number four, Ernest Wilson, another wealthy man. At the wedding reception, Mary joked to her friends that the left over cakes could be saved and used at the funeral. Just a few days after the wedding, Ernest became sick and died. The doctor attributed the death to "Cardiac Failure”. During Ernest’s funeral, Mary joked to the undertaker that with the amount of trade she had given to him she should have a discount. Her morbid humor and general cheerful demeanor gave rise to gossip and the nickname the ‘Merry Widow of Windy Nook’.

The local constabulary became suspicious, as Mary seemed to be chalking up a lot of dead husbands. The police ordered the exhumations of the bodies of Oliver and Ernest. The pathologist concluded that phosphorous poisoning, a
toxic condition caused by ingesting white or yellow phosphorus, occasionally found in rat poisons and certain fertilizers,
had killed both men.

Mary was arrested and charged with two murders.
Her defense was that both Oliver and Ernest took sexual stimulation pills that contained phosphorous. The jury was not convinced and found Mary guilty of murder. The judge sentenced her to death. Because of her age, her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in London’s Holloway women’s prison. She died there four years later at the age of seventy.

The bodies of her earlier two husbands
, John Knowles and John Russell, were also exhumed, and the pathologist reached the same conclusion: that of phosphorous poisoning. However, it was considered pointless to have a second trial.

A plot full of poison
.

Rhonda Bell Martin was born in 1907 in Alabama. Not much is known about her early life beyond the fact that her father deserted the family when she was 12-years-old. Her first marriage was when she was just fifteen and ended in divorce when she was nineteen. At twenty-one-years-old, she married a man by the name of George Garrett. Together, he and Rhonda had five children. He died when Rhonda poisoned him. She gained a small amount on an insurance policy, which barely covered the funeral expenses. Rhonda married for the third time to Talmadge J. Gipson, but the marriage lasted only a few months.

Rhonda, without divorcing husband number three, met and married her fourth
husband
,
Claude Martin. Claude had a son Bud, and after Claude’s death in 1951, Bud became Rhonda’s lover and eventually her fifth husband.

When Bud became ill, doctors discovered arsenic in his body and suspected he was being poisoned. They called in the police. Bud survived but remained a paraplegic for the rest of his life. When the police began to investigate, they looked at all the other deaths surrounding Rhonda. They exhumed Claude Martin’s corpse and discovered in his body large amounts of arsenic.

Rhonda was arrested in March
of 1956. Under questioning, she admitted to murdering three of her five dead children, her mother, and two ex-husbands. They were all buried next to each other in the same cemetery. The police then exhumed all the bodies, and newspapers nationwide followed the case with ever-increasing sensationalist headlines such as, “About the chain-smoking Montgomery waitress” and “The plot full of poison.”

At her trial, the prosecution alleged that the murders were committed to collect insurance payouts. The payouts that Rhonda received, however, were only minimal and barely covered death and burial costs. In the case of Claude Martin,
they suggested that she wanted him out of the way so she could pursue his son Roland, or Bud, as Rhonda called him. Rhonda pleaded insanity. A psychiatrist for the defense testified that in his opinion Rhonda suffered from schizophrenia and was not responsible for her actions. The prosecution psychiatrists, on the other hand, said they could find nothing wrong with her.

The jury found
Rhonda guilty of the murder of Claude Martin at the age of fifty-one. The judge sentenced her to death in Alabama’s electric chair. Her lawyers appealed, but all appeals were denied.

On October 11
th, 1957, Rhonda enjoyed a last meal of mashed potatoes and a hamburger, followed by cinnamon rolls and coffee. Rhonda then walked to the death chamber dressed in a black and white dress and black shoes. On each hand was a wedding ring: one for her deceased husband Claude Martin, and one for her paraplegic husband Roland Martin, who she still professed to love.

As the clock struck midnight, Rhonda was strapped down into the chair.
The authorities asked Rhonda if she had anything she wished to say. In answer, her head shook silently, and the switch was turned on. A few minutes later, as her body jerked with the jolt of the electricity racing through it, the authorities pronounced she was dead.

                         
Rhonda Bell Martin

A Charming Lady

Anjette Donovan was born on the 23rd of August in 1925 in Macon, Georgia. Her parents, Jetta and William Donovan, operated and owned a produce company. Anjette had two older brothers and grew up into an exceedingly pretty girl, with a particularly charming personality that captivated people and enabled her to manipulate people at her will.

In 1947 when Anjette was twenty-two, she married Ben Lyles Jr. at the Mulberry Street Methodist Church. Ben, who had recently left the army, was the owner of Lyle
’s Restaurant in downtown Macon; a restaurant that had been opened by his now deceased father.

Ben and Anjette moved into the Biltmore apartments on Poplar Street. They were within walking distance of her parent’s house on Lamar Street
: a large, rambling, old house with a large front porch and tree-shaded garden and also within walking distance of Lyle’s Restaurant. They had two daughters together: Marcia, born in 1948, and Carla, born in 1951.

At the beginning of 1951, Ben began drinking heavily and staying out late gambling.  Anjette began having to work at the restaurant as Ben slipped deeper and deeper into alcoholism. Anjette enjoyed running the restaurant and was extremely successful at dealing with and attracting clients. As Ben’s health began to decline and without consulting his wife, he sold the restaurant in June of 1951. Anjette was furious and never forgave him. Ben’s health continued to deteriorate, and the doctor’s warned him to stop drinking.

In December, Ben began suffering from nosebleeds. On January 23rd, he was admitted to Macon hospital moaning in pain and bleeding profusely from his mouth and nose. His legs and arms were swollen, and he was vomiting frequently, puzzling the physicians at Macon Hospital. He died on the 25th of January in 1952. On his death certificate, the cause of death was attributed to encephalitis. Ben was buried next to his father in Cochran, a small town about forty miles to the southeast of Macon. Ben’s mother Julia was inconsolable, and Anjette showed no emotion.

Ben had a G. I. life insurance policy from which Anjette received $9,300 and two other policies from which she received $3,000. Much of this money went towards the funeral and other
to debts Ben had built up.

Anjette moved with her two small children back in with her parents. She secured herself work as a bookkeeper at another local restaurant, The Bell House
, and learned all she could about running a restaurant. She worked hard and saved every penny that she possibly could.

In April
of 1955, Anjette had saved enough money to buy back the restaurant she believed Ben had stolen from her and re-launched it as ‘Anjette's’. The restaurant quickly became one of the most popular in town, serving classic Southern dishes. It was frequented by attorneys, judges, civic leaders, and businessmen who were attracted not just by the food but also by the attractive, buxom, brown eyed, young widow with soft, dark hair, sparkling eyes, and a flirtatious, charismatic personality. Frequently, Anjette would be rumored to be having liaisons with various men in the community.

Segregation and racism in 1950’s Georgia was part of life. Black and white people
would sometimes be required to attend separate schools, eat separately, and use separate public toilets, train carriages, buses, park benches, and water fountains. In Anjette’s restaurant, she had three black cooks and several waitresses who were all white. There were different washrooms for the white and black employees at Anjette's, and the cooks were never to enter the public areas of the restaurant. However, despite these social restrictions, Anjette became close friends with one of the cooks, Rosemary Reynolds. Although they never socialized in public together, they would spend hours in the kitchen gossiping and laughing. From Rosemary, Anjette learned much about African-American life, customs, and traditions.

In the spring of 1955, Anjette began dating 26
-year-old Joe Neal Gabbert, a six foot tall pilot for the company Capitol Airways. On the 24th of June in 1955, they surprised friends and relatives by getting married in Carlsbad, New Mexico. On their return to Macon, Joe moved into Anjette’s house. In October, Joe was admitted to the hospital for a minor wrist operation. The day following the surgery, Joe developed a raging temperature and an intensely painful rash developed all over his body. The doctors were unable to explain it and moved him to the Veterans Hospital in Dublin, Georgia. He died in agony on the 2nd of December in 1955.

With the money Anjette received from Joe’s life insurance, Anjette purchased a house and a new, flashy
, white Cadillac. Within a couple of months, Anjette started dating another pilot, Bob Franks, much to the condemnation of members of the Macon community. Although Anjette was particularly fond of Bob Franks, she was not the only woman he was seeing.

Through her friendship with her cook Rosemary, she
learned of ‘hoodoo’, a traditional folk magic practiced by some African-Americans. The aim of ‘hoodoo’ is to allow people to improve their daily lives by accessing supernatural forces. It was also used to improve relationships, luck, wealth, health, and other problems one encounters. As in other folk traditions, much use is made of herbs, roots, minerals, candles, oils, and incense.

Anjette was superstitious and burned different colored candles
: white for peace, green for luck and money, red for love, and burned a black candle in an attempt to break up a friendship Bob Franks was conducting with another woman. The restaurant staff would often find Anjette burning candles and talking to the flames.

Despite the death of her first husband Ben, Anjette remained close to her mother-in-law Julia Lyles. Julia was lonely and moved in with Anjette and her granddaughters and would help Anjette at the restaurant and look after the children. In August of 1957, Julia became ill with vomiting and severe edema. On August 28th, 1957, Julia was admitted to
the hospital. Anjette visited her daily, taking Julia her favorite foods from the restaurant and earning respect from hospital staff for her dedication to and caring of her ex-mother-in-law. The doctors were unable to diagnose Julia’s illness, and she became progressively worse. She died on the 29th of September, 1957. Anjette had her buried next to her husband and son. Anjette produced Julia’s will, which left most of her estate to Anjette and her daughters.

On Sunday, March 2nd, 1958, Anjette’s nine-year-old daughter, Marcia
, became ill with a high temperature and vomiting. Marcia was taken to the hospital on March 5th and occupied the same room as her father Ben Lyles, step-father Joe Gabbert, and her grandmother Julia Lyles had previously occupied before their deaths. Doctors were mystified by Marcia’s illness. Her mother would visit her daily, bringing homemade lemonade from the restaurant. The staff from the restaurant and school friends also visited. Anjette became convinced that Marcia was going to die, no matter how many doctors or friends reassured her that she was young and getting the best help possible. For a while, Marcia did improve but then her condition weakened again.

In early March, the local coroner, Lester Chapman, received an anonymous phone call that told him that Marcia Lyles was going to die. It did not take long for the coroner to learn that Anjette Lyles
’ daughter was in the hospital. He made a phone call to Marcia’s doctor who told him that Marcia was making a slow recovery. Lester Chapman then put the anonymous phone call down to mischief making.

A week later, Nora Bagley, Julia Lyle’s sister who lived in Cochran, Georgia, received an anonymous letter which read, “Please come at once. She’s getting the same dose as the others. Please come at once
”. Nora didn’t understand what it meant. A few days later, a second anonymous letter arrived on Nora’s doorstep and this time mentioned Marcia by name. Nora consulted with a few other relatives, and they decided to travel to see the sheriff in Macon. The meeting between the sheriff, the coroner, Lester Chapman, Nora Bagley, and others concluded that the letters and phone call were just from someone trying to stir up trouble.

Back at the hospital
, Marcia’s health began to deteriorate again. A bluish, mottled discoloration spread over her body, and she experienced frequent vomiting. She also began to experience terrifying hallucinations where she would imagine there were insects crawling all over her body. She would scream at the nurses and her visitors “to get them off her,” as she thrashed around uncontrollably trying to slap them off her body. The doctors kept Marcia heavily sedated in an effort to calm her.

The mystified doctors called in an expert internist, Dr. Ireland
, for help. He spent many hours reading her chart and finally forbade Marcia’s visitors from bringing her any food or drinks except those provided by the hospital.

In the evening of April
4, 1958, Anjette, her mother, Jetta Donovan, and her sister-in-law, Alice Donovan, sat by Marcia’s bed as Marcia took her last breath. Marcia, just three months before her tenth birthday, was dead.

Anjette buried Marcia dressed in her Sunday best with a Bible and a doll
. She was buried next to relatives at the Coleman Chapel, Wadley, in eastern Georgia.

The County coroner, Lester Chapman, on hearing of Marcia’s death,
was still unsettled by the anonymous phone call and letters Nora Bagley had received. He asked the medical examiner, Dr. Léonard Campbell, to perform an autopsy on Marcia. Dr. Campbell took samples of Marcia's organs and sent them to the Atlanta State Crime Lab. Their findings reported that Marcia had died due to multiple doses of arsenic.

Rumors and gossip about Anjette murdering her daughter began to trickle throughout Macon. Many began speculating that she had murdered her mother-in-law and her two husbands, as well. Anjette, on learning of the gossip, produced a letter she claimed was written by her mother-in-law
, Julia Lyles, which read, “I am the cause of my son’s death and my own”. Anjette also visited doctors and told them that Carla and Marcia had been seen playing doctors and nurses with Terro ant poison.

The County coroner, Lester Chapman, ordered the bodies of Ben Lyles, Julia Lyles
, and Joe Gabbert to be exhumed. Autopsies performed on their bodies found that all had died from arsenic poisoning.

On the 6th
of May in 1958, Anjette, at the age of thirty-three, was arrested. She was charged with four counts of murder. The police searched her home and found several boxes of Terro ant poison, which contained arsenic. They also took into evidence various items they described as "voodoo paraphernalia". These items were various colored candles, powders, potions, herbs, roots, and written spells. The popular press from around the world paid a great deal of attention to the abundance of voodoo supplies.

Anjette’s trial began in the beginning of October
, 1958 in front of Judge Long. A jury of twelve men was selected. Journalists from Europe and America descended on the Bibb County Court. Large crowds stood outside the courthouse hoping to get a peek at Anjette, whom the newspapers described as the "glamorous, platinum-haired widow”.

The prosecution alleged that Anjette had murdered her victims out of hatred and greed and had benefited financially by $50,000. The State claimed that their evidence would show:

(1) Each of the victims had an exceptionally close relationship to the defendant.

(2) Each of them died from arsenic poisoning.

(3) The defendant was the only close, personal, attendant to all four victims.

(
4) The defendant showed little or no grief for any one of her victims, even though each was exceedingly close to her.

(
5) The defendant collected a considerable amount of money from the death of each victim.

(
6) The burials of all were similar in that each was lavishly done by the defendant.

(
7) All victims were carried to the same hospital, at which place they were attended by the defendant.

(
8) The defendant expressed a strong dislike for each of the victims either before or after his or her death.

(
9) The defendant predicted the death of all of the victims except Ben Lyles.

To prove their case, the prosecution had fifty-one witnesses. These included restaurant employees, witnesses from the hospital, and expert witnesses.  The only defense witness was Anjette.

One restaurant waitress swore that she had heard Anjette say about her daughter Marcia, “I’m going to kill the little Lyles-looking son of a bitch if it is the last thing I ever do”. The husband of the waitress said he had also heard Anjette say the same thing. Other restaurant employees stated that Anjette had said of her mother-in-law Julia, “The old devil! I hate her. I wish she was dead”.

Other employees testified to seeing Anjette place something in a glass of buttermilk which she took to Julia in the hospital. Others witnessed the same behavior with lemonade which was taken to Marcia in hospital.

A nurse testified that Anjette brought some homemade lemon juice to Marcia who became violently ill immediately after drinking it. Other nurses described how when Marcia was suffering from her terrible hallucinations, Anjette “acted as though it was hilarious. She laughed”.

The jury looked at Anjette with horror and loathing as this testimony was given.