In 1903, at the age of sixteen, Louise married a traveling salesman, Henry Bosle. When he discovered Louise sleeping with another man in their marital bed, he committed suicide. Following Henry’s death, Louise, at the age of twenty, moved to Boston and began working as a high-class prostitute. She supplemented her income by stealing from her clients. When her thieving was discovered, she scampered off to Texas and settled in Waco. Here, she met a flamboyant character Joe Appel, a wealthy oilman who decorated his gaudy shirts with diamond buttons and wore diamond studded rings and diamond belt buckles.
A week after meeting Joe, his body was found with a gunshot wound to his head and his diamonds gone. Louise came under suspicion and was hauled in front of a grand jury. Under questioning, Louise admitted that she had shot Joe but convinced the jury, with her charm, looks, and courteous manners that she had simply defended herself from rape.
In 1913, Louise met and married Harry Faurote, a hotel clerk. Like her first husband, he committed suicide after finding her with another man. Louise’s third husband was Richard Peete, the owner of an automobile agency. They married in Denver in 1915 and had a daughter together. Louise soon tired of domestic life, so she left her husband and daughter and moved to Los Angeles. Here she met another oil baron, Jacob C. Denton, a widower. Louise moved into his house. Louise, despite already being married, was hoping for marriage; however, Jacob wasn’t. On May 30th 1920, Jacob disappeared. To neighbors and friends inquiring after him, Louise would say he was away on business or that he was in the hospital after having to have his arm amputated. Jacob’s lawyer felt decidedly uneasy and told Louise he needed to contact Jacob urgently. Louise retreated to her husband and daughter in Denver.
Jacob’s lawyer voiced his suspicions to the police and a search of Jacob’s house was conducted.
Jacob’s murdered corpse was found buried in the cellar of the house. He had been shot in the back with his feet and hands tied. The district attorney and Jacob’s lawyer both felt that Louise was responsible. The problem they faced was how to get Louise back to California. As it turned out, it was simple.
Two detectives travelled to Denver and broke the news to her that Jacob Denton's corpse had been discovered. They asked her to come with them back to Los Angeles, flattering her into believing that her help would rapidly lead them to the killer. They at no time let on that they believed Louise was the murderer. Unsuspecting, Louise boarded the train with the detectives and once back in Los Angeles was arrested for the murder of Jacob Denton.
Louise was found guilty of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced her to life in prison at San Quentin, California. Louise served eighteen years before being paroled. While she was in prison, her husband Richard committed suicide.
San Quentin Women’s Prison Quarters
Each year that Louise was in prison, she made an application for parole and each year her request was rejected. Louise was a model prisoner and never any trouble. In early 1939, she applied again. A member of the parole board spoke to a journalist, Caroline Walker, who had covered Louise’s trial in depth and mentioned that they were thinking of paroling Louise.
Caroline Walker reputedly warned the board member that Louise was “far too dangerous for freedom. That Louise had spent her entire life lying, stealing, and committing violence and that if she was freed, it would be a tragedy for someone”.
On April 11th 1939, Louise Peete stepped out of prison after serving eighteen years for murder. To the waiting reporters she declared; "Now I owe the world nothing”.
As a parolee, strict tabs were kept on Louise, and whoever was employing her had to send in monthly reports to Louise’s parole officer.
When Louise was released from prison, she secured herself work as a housekeeper to Jessie Marcy. Not long after taking up her post, Jessie died. Louise then went to work for Emily Dwight Latham, a woman who had been influential in obtaining Louise’s parole. Emily died shortly after Louis began working for her. Both Jessie’s and Emily’s deaths were attributed to natural causes.
Louise then became a housekeeper in the home of Arthur and Margaret Logan. They lived in Pacific Palisades, an affluent area of Los Angeles. Margaret’s husband Arthur was mentally ailing, and Margaret, a busy real-estate broker, needed help. Margaret was fully aware of Louise’s background and believed in her innocence. Margaret Logan was one among many who liked and trusted Louise. Margaret found her charming, sweet, and believable. While working for the Logan’s, Louise met and married elderly bank manager, Lee Borden Judson, in May of 1944. He was her fourth husband.
During her time with Margaret, Louise told her that she was to receive a large amount of money from real estate investments she had in Denver, and she would like to invest it in Margaret’s business. In believing her, Margaret Logan heavily invested in property speculation and lent Louise money. Louise, apart from lying to Margaret, also began practicing Margaret’s signature.
On May 29th of 1944, Margaret realized that the story of the real estate was false and also discovered Louise had forged her signature on a check. Margaret confronted her. Louise, realizing she might be sent back to prison, took a gun and shot Margaret in the back. The shot did not kill her and so Louise finished her off by bashing her on the head. Louise then dug a hole in the garden, under the shade of an avocado tree, and buried her.
Louise told the feeble-minded Arthur that Margaret was in the hospital and forbidden to receive any visitors. Louise then informed one of Arthur’s doctors that Arthur had gone crazy one night and had smashed his wife in the face and bitten her viciously on the neck and nose. She stressed to the doctors that Arthur was impossible for two women to handle. She said that Margaret was so traumatized by the events that she had gone away for a while to recover. The same story was relayed to friends and neighbors. On June 5th, by court order, Arthur was forcibly taken to the State Hospital for the insane in Patton. He died within six months on December 6. Arthur died a lonely man, bitterly thinking his wife had betrayed him and callously locked him away.
Louise and the innocent Lee Judson took up residence in the Logan’s house.
Not long after Arthur Logan’s death, an astute parole officer noticed discrepancies in the signatures on Louise’s parole reports. She pointed it out to her boss, and it became obvious to all concerned that Louise herself was signing the reports; that, alone, was a violation in her parole conditions. The matter was handed over to Fred Howser, the District Attorney; he remembered the previous case against Louise Peete and re-read her files. A discreet investigation began.
Upon talking to neighbors and friends of the Logans, it was revealed that neither Arthur nor Margaret had been seen for several months. Fred Howser chillingly realized that he was, in all probability, investigating another murder case.
On the cold and foggy evening of December 20th, 1944, the police raided the Logan house where Louise and Lee were living. The house and garden were thoroughly searched and under the shade of an avocado tree, they unearthed the murdered body of Margaret Logan.
Louise and Lee were both arrested on suspicion of murder. On January 12th, 1945, the charges against Lee Judson were dropped. The following day, he went to the top of a thirteen-floor office building in Los Angeles and leapt to his death; another victim of Louise.
Louise Peete 1947
Louise came to trial before Judge Harold B. Landreth and a jury of eleven women and one man. Her defense admitted that she had buried Margaret Logan’s body. However, she denied killing Margaret claiming that Arthur, in an insane state, had battered and shot Margaret Logan to death. Louise explained her actions to the court by saying, that because of her previous record she felt that her only solution was to bury the body herself and have Arthur removed to an insane asylum, for his own protection and for that of others.
On May 28th 1945, the jury took just three hours to reach their verdict of murder in the first degree. There was no recommendation for mercy.
On June 1, 1945, Judge Harold Landreth sentenced Louise to death in San
Quentin’s gas chamber.
Louise appealed, but all the appeals failed. Until the end, she maintained her innocence saying, “I have never killed or even harmed a human being. . “.
On April 11th of 1947, Louise Peete, at the age of sixty-six, was executed in San Quentin's gas chamber. As she said goodbye to the prison matron and her fellow prisoners, Louise is reported to have said, “Don't be troubled, my dears. Death is merely an eventuality in all our lives”. To the reporters attending her execution, she declared, “The governor is a gentleman - and no gentleman could send a lady to her death”.
Gentleman or not, the Governor did.
San Quentin Gas Chamber
San Quentin's warden, Clinton Duffy, later said of Louisa Peete that she projected,
“an air of innocent sweetness which masked a heart of ice”.
Louise is buried at the Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles. Louise’s daughter Betty travelled to LA in April of 1947 to visit her mother one last time.
According to Betty’s children, their mother believed in Louise’s innocence until the day she died in Oregon at the age of 76.
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 both 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 la
st 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 30th in her sleep.
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