Nannie Doss was born in 1905 in Alabama. She was one of five children, all of whom avoided their father, whose wrath “ruled the family with an iron fist”. James, their father, would pull his children out of school for them to tend to the farm. This resulted in Nannie’s poor academic performance, and dropping out of school after completing grade six. Nannie suffered severe headaches, blackouts, and depression after a train accident at the age of 7, where she hit her head on a metal bar as the train came to a sudden stop. She blamed her future mental instability on the accident as well.

James was convinced that his daughters would be molested if they were attractive, so he forbade his daughters from wearing makeup and nice clothing or attending any social events and dances. On her prom night, Nannie was working in a linen factory. To escape her father’s controlling environment, Nannie’s favourite hobby was to read her mother’s romance magazines, especially the “lonely hearts” column, and dream of her own future romances. It was not until Doss got her first job in 1921 that she had any social interaction with the opposite sex.
At the age of 16, Nannie married a co-worker from the linen factory, Charley Braggs, only months after they started dating. Braggs took care of his unwed mother, who insisted on continuing to live with him after their marriage.
If she had hoped that marrying Braggs would be an escape of the oppressive environment she grew up in, she was sorely misled. Not only did Braggs turn out to be an abusive, drunk and adulterous husband, but her mother-in-law turned out to be extremely controlling and manipulative. Nonetheless, they had four children together which she raised nearly on her own.

Doss’ life became an unbearable prison of raising children, taking care of her mother-in-law, and putting up with her husband. To cope, she began drinking, smoking, and having her own adulterous adventures.
In 1927, the couple lost their two middle girls to suspected food poisoning. Braggs, however, remembered the girls being perfectly healthy when he left for work, and found them dead on the kitchen floor when returning that evening. Suspecting his wife, Braggs took firstborn daughter Melvina and fled, leaving newborn Florine behind. Braggs’ mother died not much later and Nannie took a job in a cotton mill to support Florine and herself. Braggs brought Melvina back in 1928, and soon after divorced Nannie. Charley Braggs became the only husband that Nannie didn’t poison to death – “the one that got away”.
Alone again, Doss returned to her childhood passions of reading romance magazines, but this time she began corresponding with some of the men who advertised in the lonely hearts column. That’s where she met her second husband, Robert Harrelson. They met and married in 1929. After a few months, she discovered that he was an alcoholic and had a criminal record for assault. Despite this, the marriage lasted 16 years.

After an evening of particularly heavy drinking to celebrate Japan surrendering to the Allied powers in 1945, he raped Nannie. The next day, she poured rat poison into his corn whiskey jar, then watched as he died a painful death.

Figuring it had worked once, Doss returned to the classified ads for her next husband. Three days later, she married Arlie Lanning. Like Harrelson, Lanning was an alcoholic and a womanizer. However, in this marriage it was Nannie who often disappeared—and for months on end. But when she was home, she played the doting housewife, and when he died of what was said to be heart failure, the townspeople supported her at his funeral. At the time it was believed that he died of a heart attack brought on by the flu. He showed all the symptoms: fever, vomiting, stomach pains. With his history of drinking, doctors believed his body simply succumbed to it and an autopsy wasn’t performed.