Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Lydia was a relatively attractive woman. Her photograph from the period shows a thin, delicately featured woman with a full mouth and slightly melancholic eyes who looks younger than her 40 years. In addition to her good looks, if she was a psychopath she might also have had the typical psychopath’s charismatic personality that mesmerized the physician who employed her, the gentleman who hired her to take care of his mother, and now the widowed farmer who wanted to marry her.

  Lydia later confessed that she agreed to marry Hurlburt if he promised, “all that he was worth should be mine.” The old man signed a will leaving his entire estate to Lydia. Witnesses later recalled that for more than a year they saw Lydia greeting her husband at the door with kisses, cooking his meals, mending his clothes, and even shaving him when his hands began to tremble too much.

  One Sunday morning in 1868 as Hurlburt was preparing to go to church, he felt suddenly dizzy and fell ill. As the day went on, he became progressively weaker. Noting his absence, neighbors dropped by the next day and brought along some freshly dug clams, from which Lydia diligently prepared a chowder laced with arsenic. Throughout that Monday, Hurlburt twisted with abdominal pains and vomiting. On Tuesday, at his insistence, a physician was called, who later recalled that he could immediately see that Hurlburt was at death’s door. The physician was touched by how much care Lydia lavished on her dying husband, wiping his brow and attempting to keep his strength up with broth and medicines she carefully prepared herself. Hurlburt died an agonizing death the next day, which the physician certified as “cholera morbus.”

  The 46-year-old widow inherited $20,000 in property and $10,000 in cash, a substantial amount in those days. She had no financial cares left in her life and no husband or children to cramp her space or cause her concern. Just as Lydia had recalled when her last child died, she now “felt good…I had nothing to fret or trouble me.”

  Within a year Lydia took up with another widower, Horatio N. Sherman, an outgoing, heavy-drinking factory mechanic whose wife had just recently died leaving him with four children, one of whom was a sickly infant child, and a mother-in-law living in his house. It is hard to explain Lydia’s motives. Horatio was actually in debt, and Lydia ended up paying the $300 he owed—he was no cash cow. Perhaps by now Lydia was addicted to a surge of power she felt every time she put a victim to death.

  Lydia and Horatio Sherman married in September 1870. Two months later, Lydia put arsenic in Horatio’s infant son’s milk and after a bout of terrible stomach pains the already sickly infant died the same night. The next month, Horatio’s 14-year-old daughter, Ada, well known in the town as a pretty and sweet child, became ill during the Christmas holidays. Lydia did her best to nurse Ada back to health, diligently making sure she drank the tea she prepared for her every day. Ada was a strong and healthy girl and for five days suffered from constant vomiting, bloody diarrhea, and excruciatingly painful abdominal spasms until she succumbed on New Year’s Eve.

  By April 1871, the couple was said to have taken separate bedrooms. Despondent over the death of his infant son and his young daughter, Horatio went on a drinking binge in New Haven. Lydia sent his 17-year-old son to find him and bring him home, which he did. The next day, Horatio went back to work at the factory. When he returned home, Lydia was waiting for him with a delicious cup of hot chocolate. It took Horatio four days to succumb to an agonizing death on May 12, despite the efforts of his physician Dr. Beardsley.

  Beardsley was an experienced physician who had treated several cases of accidental arsenic poisoning and who immediately recognized the symptoms. While treating Horatio, Beardsley had asked if he had taken any medicines other than the ones he prescribed. Horatio respond with his last known words, “Only what my wife has given me.”

  Beardsley secured permission to autopsy Horatio’s body and sent specimens to a toxicology expert at Yale. Enough arsenic was found in Horatio’s liver to kill several men. A warrant was immediately issued for Lydia Sherman’s arrest, but she had already left town, returning to New Brunswick. In the meantime, the bodies of Horatio’s two children and Lydia’s second husband, Hurlburt, were exhumed and arsenic was also found in their bodies. Soon, police also learned of the seven deaths linked to Lydia in New York.

  On June 7, 1871, detectives followed Lydia on a shopping trip from New Brunswick to New York. That evening, when she returned to New Brunswick, she was arrested as she stepped off the commuter train at the station. She was tried in New Haven, Connecticut, in April 1872, in a highly publicized eight-day trial. Nicknamed the “American Borgia” and “Queen Poisoner” Lydia became the subject of numerous books and songs and poems. The American public was fascinated with this serial murderess.

  So inexplicable and insane were Lydia Sherman’s murders that the authorities could not see their way to charging her with capital murder and instead she was tried for the murder in second-degree of Horatio Sherman. Her murders to relieve herself of the burden of her spouses and children are reminiscent of Susan Smith, the 23-year-old woman who in 1994 in South Carolina let her car roll into a lake with her two children strapped in the backseat. The defense attempted to argue that she had “accidentally” murdered Horatio—or that perhaps he had committed suicide after the death of his children and that there was no conclusive evidence Lydia poisoned anyone.

  But in the end a jury convicted Lydia on circumstantial evidence. She was sentenced to life imprisonment. She had only served five years when she became ill and died in prison in May 1878 at the age of 54.

  Sarah Jane Robinson

  No sooner had Lydia Sherman died than Sarah Jane Robinson made her appearance. While the murders committed by Sherman were inexplicable in their motive, Sarah Robinson was on a hedonistic murder-for-profit campaign. Sarah was born in Ireland around 1837. When her parents died within months of each other in 1850 the 14-year-old Sarah took her 9-year-old younger sister, Annie, and sailed to America to join their older brother in the Boston area. Once in the U.S. the sisters, although remaining close, lived separate lives. Annie McCormick married, but unfortunately her husband was killed in an industrial accident. Several years later, in 1879, she married for a second time, an unskilled laborer named Prince Arthur Freeman. They lived in crushing poverty, Prince making a few dollars a week at a metal foundry while Annie worked as a seamstress. Shortly after their second child was born, Annie contracted pneumonia in February 1885 and needed bedside care.

  Sarah volunteered for the task and settled in the Freeman residence, dismissing the nurse hired by Prince’s mother to care for Annie. Sarah, although a seamstress by trade like her sister, claimed to have also had nursing experience. Sarah appeared to be a caring, outgoing, energetic, friendly, and diligent, churchgoing woman, but there was trouble lurking in the shadows. Sarah was married to laborer Moses Robinson and had eight children, three of whom had died. Although she had a reputation as a trustworthy seamstress with private and corporate clients, she was always behind in her rent and bills. She attempted to raise money by renting furniture and then mortgaging it several times over to different companies, but ended up being caught.

  It was 1881 when Sarah is thought to have committed her first murder. When her family’s landlord, 70-year-old Oliver Sleeper, fell ill, Sarah offered to nurse him. He died of “heart disease” despite Sarah’s constant bedside care. Sarah charged his estate fifty dollars for her services but instead received a remission on her rent, which she sold on discount for cash to other tenants. Sleeper was known to have $3,000 cash on hand, but it was never found. It’s unknown whether Sarah got her hands on that money.

  The next year Sarah husband, Moses, suddenly died. Moses had been insured for $2,000 with the Order of Pilgrim Fathers insurance association. But when Sarah attempted to collect on the insurance it was discovered that an agent had stolen the premium payments Moses had made. The company refused to pay out and Sarah sued. The lawsuit was pending when she was arrested for murder several years later.

  By the time Sarah arr
ived at the Freeman’s tenement apartment, her sister’s health had significantly improved. But Sarah, who claimed to have psychic powers, insisted that she had dreamt that Annie was going to get only sicker and die. And sure enough, the first night that Sarah nursed Annie, she suddenly developed wrenching stomach pains and started vomiting. As hard as Sarah tried to nurse Annie, making sure Annie took down every medicinal drink she prepared for her, Annie eventually died on February 27, 1885.

  The caring and generous Sarah revealed to the family that Annie’s last wish was that her husband, Prince, and their two children—1-year-old Elizabeth and 6-year-old Thomas—move in with her. Stunned at the sudden death of his wife and overwhelmed by the warmth of his sister-in-law, Prince and the two children moved into Sarah’s home in April.

  Three weeks later, tragedy struck again. Elizabeth contracted an intestinal disorder and despite the care that Sarah lavished on the little girl in her attempt to nurse her back to health, the girl died painfully. Sarah sat Prince down for a heart-to-heart talk. Death and disease were rampant among the poor of their class, Sarah explained. Prince had wisely purchased a $2,000 life insurance policy, also from the Pilgrim Fathers, but the beneficiary, Annie, had died. Would it not be wise if she were made the beneficiary, Sarah suggested. Who would care for his little boy, Thomas, should anything happen to him, Sarah argued. On May 31, Prince made Sarah the beneficiary of his $2,000 insurance policy.

  Witnesses would later testify that Sarah’s kind and caring treatment of Prince immediately vaporized to be replaced by a harsh and critical attitude. She told friends that Prince was “good-for-nothing” and that she wished it had been he who died and not her poor sister. She began to get her psychic visions again with premonitions of death for somebody in the household.

  On June 17, 1885, she told Prince that it might be a good idea that he visit his mother because it might be the last chance to see her. Prince, who believed in Sarah’s psychic powers, rushed over to his mother’s home, but to his relief found her in excellent health.

  On the morning of June 22, 1885, Sarah served Prince a bowl of oatmeal and molasses and saw him off to work. On his way to work Prince was overcome with nausea. He managed to get to work but was so wracked with abdominal pains that he was sent home. Two different physicians attended to Prince and they recognized symptoms of poisoning but assumed that he somehow was poisoned accidentally in the workplace. Nobody suspected the caring and gregarious Sarah Jane Robinson. When Prince’s sister came to nurse her brother, it appeared that he might still recover, but when his health improved so much that his sister returned home, Sarah took up nursing him again. That same night, on June 27, Prince died.

  Sarah collected the $2,000 insurance benefit from the Order of Pilgrim Fathers and set out to pay her debts, move into a larger apartment, buy new clothes and furniture, and take a trip to Wisconsin. With the last of the money she bought an insurance policy on the life of her 25-year-old daughter, Lizzie. Just in time, too, because six months later, in February 1886, Lizzie contracted some kind of stomach ailment and, despite all the nursing done by Sarah, she died an agonizing death.

  In the year since his father’s death, the now 7-year-old boy Thomas was virtually ignored by Sarah and often treated brutally. When neighbors remarked that the lad appeared to be undernourished, Sarah commented that his health was not all that good to begin with. On July 19, 1886, little Tommy fell ill with some form of gastric infection and died on July 23, curled up in pain.

  In the meantime, Sarah’s adult son, William, shortly after his sister’s death, insured his life with the Order of Pilgrim Fathers, making his mother the beneficiary. A month later he felt nauseous after eating a breakfast prepared for him by Sarah. In the evening, after drinking tea his mother served him, William began to suffer from stomach cramps.

  The next morning a physician was sent for to look at William. The doctor was affiliated with the Order of Pilgrim Fathers and was acutely aware of the strange series of deaths dogging this family whose members had bought insurance policies. The doctor secretly took a sample of William’s vomit and sent it to a Harvard toxicologist, who discovered massive amounts of arsenic. But it was too late: By the time the test results arrived, William had died. The last words witnesses heard him saying were, “The old lady dosed me.”131

  Sarah Jane Robinson was arrested for the murder of her son while authorities exhumed the bodies of six of her victims: her brother-in-law, Prince; her daughter, Lizzie; her sister, Annie; her nephew, Tommy; her husband, Moses; and her aged landlord. Tests revealed massive traces of arsenic in all the corpses.

  Sarah was charged with first-degree murder because of the obvious profit motive, but her defense attorney argued that mere financial profit could not be motive alone for so many murders. Sarah had to be suffering from “uncontrolled depravity,” the attorney insisted. She was a monster. “I do not know that the law hangs monsters,” Sarah’s lawyer argued. The jury thought otherwise and Sarah was convicted for murder and sentenced to death, but the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. She died in prison in 1906 at the age of seventy. She insisted on her innocence to the end.

  Jane Toppan—American Female Serial Killer Superstar

  While the eight murders attributed to Sarah Robinson were clearly committed for profit, the thirty-one or more killings perpetrated by Jane Toppan between 1880–1901 were entirely inexplicable. Unlike the poor lower-class wretched females who murdered for small financial gains, Jane Toppan was a trained nurse who moved effortlessly among the middle and upper-middle classes. While we know very little about the early lives of the female serial killers so far described, we know more about Jane Toppan.

  She was born Honora A. Kelly somewhere between 1854 and 1857—sources vary on her age—and was the youngest of four sisters from a desperately poor family of Irish immigrants in Massachusetts. Her mother died when she was a year old and her father, Peter Kelly, a tailor, attempted to raise the girls. Unfortunately, the father was mentally ill and several years later he was confined to a mental institution for the rest of his life. A grandmother attempted to raise the children but soon found herself destitute and unable to keep them. The girls were turned over to the Boston Female Asylum for Destitute Girls and adopted out to different families.

  An English protestant family named Toppan, who already had two adult daughters, adopted Honora when she was 5 years old under a type of indentured adoption where if unsatisfied they could send her back to the asylum at anytime up to the age of 18. Her name was changed to Jane Toppan. With thick black hair, olive skin, a prominent nose, and big brown eyes, Jane was passed off as an Italian orphan whose parents had died at sea. To have been Irish in those days was humiliating, and Ann Toppan, Jane’s WASP stepmother, whom Jane called “Auntie,” reminded her that just because she was born Irish she did not have to behave that way. Jane developed a loathing for her family heritage.

  Ann Toppan was a strict disciplinarian and treated Jane as a household servant. Despite the fact Jane carried the Toppan name, she was never accepted on equal terms as a family member. When she turned 18, she was emancipated from her indenture and received a payment of fifty dollars from the Toppans. Although now free, she remained living at home providing housekeeping services in exchange for room and board.

  Several years later, when Jane’s stepmother died, she left an inheritance to her two daughters, but made no mention of Jane in her will. One of the daughters, Elizabeth, took over the house. Jane remained living in the house, basically performing the same household servant functions for Elizabeth that she had for her mother, but unlike their mother, Elizabeth treated Jane with kindness and respect.

  Witnesses who went to school with Jane recalled that she was a gregarious and popular girl but that she told exaggerated lies about herself—that her father had sailed around the world and lived in China, that her brother was personally decorated by Lincoln at Gettysburg, and that her sister was a renowned beauty who had married an English lor
d. In fact, one of Jane’s natural sisters would be confined in an insane asylum when she was in her twenties. Nevertheless, Jane was regarded among her peers as the “life of the party” and attended picnics, skating, and boating parties.

  What we can see in Jane’s childhood profile are the potential seeds for a psychopath: an early breaking of the bonds between mother and child, possible traumatic childhood events, mental illness in the family, lack of genuine affection and nurturing from her stepparents, a tendency to fantasize and tell lies, a sense of disempowerment and shame. While Jane maintained an outwardly open and friendly personality, internally she was locked down in a defensive posture, even though after her adoption she was not necessarily abused severely. In the territory between her outward personality and her inward psyche, fantasies were at play, possibly focused on empowerment and esteem, which she clearly lacked. The grandiose lies she told hinted at the vast gulf between her desire and her actual life.

  Jane’s stepsister Elizabeth married a church deacon, Oramel Brigham, who moved into the house. Jane continued to live in the house with the newlywed couple in exchange for her services as a maid. Jane had no inheritance, no social status, no profession or higher education, no husband or family of her own. Despite the fact the Brighams apparently treated Jane kindly, some kind of unarticulated seething hostility eventually led to relations becoming so strained that in 1885 Jane moved out of the home she had lived in for nearly twenty years. Nevertheless, Elizabeth told Jane she was welcome to visit her home anytime and that “there would always be a room waiting for her.”

  Almost nothing is known about what Jane did for the next two years. Few rewarding opportunities were available for a “respectable” single woman in those days: schoolteacher, seamstress, housemaid, or textile worker. None of these appealed to Jane, who had grandiose ideas of being destined for something better. And so it came to pass that in 1887, at the age of 33, the psychopathic Jane decided on a career in nursing. She was admitted to the Cambridge Hospital nursing school in Boston.