Jane Toppan

What the record shows

Jane Toppan was a private nurse in Massachusetts who confessed in 1902 to poisoning 31 people between 1895 and 1901, most of them patients in her care. She was indicted for three deaths that occurred in the summer of 1901 at Cataumet, a village of Bourne on Cape Cod, and was tried at Barnstable in June 1902 on a single count, the murder of Mary "Minnie" Gibbs. A jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity, so she was never convicted of any killing. She was committed for life to the state insane hospital at Taunton, where she died in August 1938.

Toppan was born Honora Kelley in Boston, in 1854 according to the Wikipedia article and People magazine; some accounts, including the West End Museum's, give 1857. After her mother's death her father could not care for the children, and she was placed in the Boston Female Asylum. She was later sent to the Toppan family of Lowell as an indentured servant and took their surname, though she was never formally adopted. In the 1880s she trained as a nurse at Cambridge Hospital and then at Massachusetts General Hospital, which, according to the West End Museum, dismissed her in 1890 without a diploma. She went on to work as a private nurse for families in Cambridge, Boston and Lowell, where colleagues and clients knew her as "Jolly Jane."

The Wikipedia article lists twelve deaths that have been linked to her by name. The earliest were her landlords, Israel Dunham, who died in May 1895, and his wife Lovey Dunham, who died in September 1897. Her foster sister, Elizabeth Brigham, died in August 1899; Boston Magazine reported that she fell ill after an outing with Toppan at Buzzards Bay. Mary McNear, Florence Calkins, William Ingraham and Myra Connors died between December 1899 and February 1900, and Edna Bannister died in June 1901. Contemporary reporting and later accounts agree that her principal method was morphine, often combined with atropine, given in drinks or by injection. People magazine reported that she later said some of the killings gave her sexual gratification.

The deaths that led to her arrest came in 1901 in the family of Alden P. Davis of Cataumet. His wife, Mattie Davis, died on July 4, 1901; the Wikipedia article places the death at Cataumet, while IrishCentral and the West End Museum say she died in Cambridge. Toppan then stayed on as nurse at the family's summer home. A daughter, Genevieve Gordon, died on July 30, Alden Davis on August 8, and a second daughter, Mary Gibbs, on August 13. According to the West End Museum, Gibbs's father-in-law, Captain Paul Gibbs, pressed for an inquiry; exhumations and toxicology found poison, and a Falmouth chemist said he had sold Toppan morphine before the deaths. She was arrested on October 29, 1901, in Amherst, New Hampshire.

The Batesburg Advocate of South Carolina reported in July 1902 she had been indicted for the murders of Mary Gibbs, Mrs. Harry Gordon of Chicago (Genevieve Gordon) and Alden Davis, and that the state chose to try her on one count. The West End Museum says she spent about six months in the Barnstable County jail and that examining physicians declared her insane in April 1902. At the trial, alienists, as psychiatrists were then called, testified that she was insane. The Wikipedia article gives June 23, 1902, as the date of the verdict. Some later accounts, including People's, say she was charged with twelve murders; the 1902 report gives three indictments.

According to the same 1902 report, she gave her senior counsel, Judge Fred M. Bixby of Brockton, a confession naming 31 people she said she had poisoned during her career as a nurse. The Wikipedia article notes that a fuller confession later printed by the New York Journal claimed more killings, and its authenticity is uncertain. Estimates of her total, as given by Boston Magazine, IrishCentral and the Wikipedia article, range up to about 100, but no court ever examined those claims, and the confessed and suspected counts remain unverified.

At Taunton she was diagnosed with what was then called moral insanity. People and the West End Museum report that in 1904 she refused food, believing staff were trying to poison her, and lost about 80 pounds before recovering. She remained there for the rest of her life. The Wikipedia article gives her death as August 17, 1938, aged 84; the West End Museum gives August 18, and People and Boston Magazine give her age as 81, reflecting the disagreement over her birth year.