Free Women Serial Killers of the 20th Century by Sylvia Perrini Page B

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.

RHONDA BELL MARTIN
    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