Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Jolly Jane

  In the nineteenth century, going to nursing school was akin to becoming a nun in terms of lifestyle, commitment, and discipline. This is not unusual considering that traditionally church monasteries functioned as the first organized hospitals in the medieval era with nuns serving as nurses and monks as physicians. Florence Nightingale had introduced a new standard of professional disciplined nursing in the 1850s, which demanded strict conformity, obedience, and sacrificial devotion to duty.

  In the 1880s nurses in America typically trained for two years in grueling conditions: They worked seven days a week for fifty weeks a year—no Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving holidays. Several student nurses would share a small room, sleeping on narrow cots. They would be awakened at 5:30 a.m. and given time to make their beds, dress, and prepare their own breakfasts. They typically worked twelve-to-fourteen-hour shifts with seventy-five-minute breaks for lunch and supper, which were provided for them. The food was so bad that they frequently had to purchase their own provisions. Each nurse would have approximately fifty patients to take care of: prepare food for and feed, bathe, dress, clean their wounds, change their bandages, wash their clothing and bed linen. Student nurses were also expected to take care of their wards by cleaning, dusting, washing the floors and windows, and stoking the stove.

  Discipline administrated by head nurses was strict—the smallest infraction such as lateness, failing to clean properly, leaving the ward without permission, or even complaining about the food could be punishable by dismissal or penalizing comments in the student’s record. The nurses would sign a contract by which they were bound to serve a period of two years. In exchange they received room and board, a bib apron and nurse’s cap, and a salary of seven dollars a week, from which they had to pay for clothes, textbooks, and other expenses.132 Once a week they were required to attend lectures in the evening on medical theory. At the end of two years the students would be examined on their medical and nursing knowledge by a board of physicians and, if they passed, were issued a diploma certifying them as professional nurses.

  Jane Toppan’s fellow nursing students remembered her as a gregarious and cheerful person but with a hidden threatening side to her. Jane Toppan tended to spread gossip and rumors about student nurses she did not like and implicated several students in infractions they did not commit but which resulted in their dismissal. Several of her acquaintances would later testify to the glee with which Jane celebrated the innocent students’ dismissals from nursing school. If we accept anthropologists’ assertions that gossip and slander are early signs of female aggression, then Jane Toppan fits the bill.

  Along with the gossip, Jane also spun exaggerated, aggrandizing lies about herself, claiming, for example, that the Tsar of Russia had offered her a nursing position with his family.

  Although it was never proven, she apparently committed acts of petty theft against fellow students and from hospital supplies, but evaded detection every time. Many of the students and supervisors came to detest Jane, but senior staff and patients were completely enamored with her happy disposition and daily good cheer. She was nicknamed “Jolly Jane.”

  Jane Toppan appreciated the admiration that some patients gave her. She liked those patients so much that when there was the possibility that they had sufficiently recovered from their illnesses to be released, Jane would doctor their medical charts to indicate worsening conditions or she would administer small overdoses of medicine causing alarming symptoms that would result in the patients being held longer in the hospital. But for those patients Jane did not like, another fate awaited.

  Jane’s Addiction

  After her arrest, investigators found numerous textbooks, many of them showing extra wear on pages dealing with poisons and dangerous drugs—particularly morphine, an opiate used for pain relief, but which in a massive dose can cause death. According to her confession later, Toppan became addicted to the thrill of watching patients die from morphine overdose. She would stand over their beds, looking into their dying eyes and watching their pupils contract, listening to the breath shorten and then cease. She said that these murders became “a habit of her life” and caused her “delirious enjoyment.”

  Eventually, she began to experiment with combinations of drugs, such as morphine with atropine, which had opposite effects from morphine. Overdoses of atropine would cause the pupils to dilate, the heart rate to increase, and spasms to shake the patient. Often there was delirium and seizures with the patient hallucinating and losing all muscular control. Toppan would first inject morphine and as the patient sank into a coma she would then revive her victim with doses of atropine, which would then cause death. She was sadistically transfixed by her patients’ deaths. She would inject alternating doses of morphine and atropine just to watch their opposing effects on the victims’ pupil sizes. Like a deranged, mad scientist, she toyed with different combinations of lethal doses of the two drugs, which misled the physicians, who failed to note any kind of recognizable pattern in the symptoms of the dying patients. All this, she confessed, gave her a “voluptuous delight”—a Victorian way of saying “sexual pleasure.”

  There was only one known survivor of Toppan’s murders, who was able to describe what transpired. Thirty-six-year-old Amelia Phinney was hospitalized with a uterine ulcer and was tossing in her bed in pain, unable to sleep. Then Jane Toppan came in, raised her head and put a glass to her lips. She told Phinney to drink the liquid because it “would make her feel better.” Phinney recalled feeling her mouth and throat go unusually dry, her body grow numb, and her eyelids feel heavy as she began to slip into unconsciousness. Then a strange thing happened: She felt the blankets pulled back, the bed creak, and the mattress sag as Toppan got into the bed with her. Toppan cuddled with her, stroking her hair and kissing her face. She remembered Toppan then getting up on her knees next to her and peering into her eyes, no doubt observing the state of her pupils. Phinney was convinced she was dreaming, but when Toppan lifted up the glass again to her lips and told her to drink some more, Phinney mustered up all her strength and turned away. The last thing she remembers is Toppan suddenly jumping off the bed and dashing out of the room. Somebody must have been approaching.

  Phinney awoke the next morning in an extremely groggy state, but her recollections of the night were so weird that she was not sure whether she had hallucinated them or not. Moreover, they were embarrassing. Phinney did not report her experience until years later when Toppan was arrested.

  Although “Jolly Jane” charmed senior staff and particularly physicians—who had sporadic contact with her—her immediate supervisors and fellow students developed an intense dislike for her. Her constant tall tales and her gossiping about others alienated people around her. She was also suspected of thieving hospital supplies and patients’ belongings, but nothing could be proven. Nor could anything be proven about the unusually high rate of death among patients in Jane’s care. It would have been inconceivable that a student nurse was deliberately murdering them.

  Despite this, or precisely because of it, Toppan transferred in 1888 to the Massachusetts General Hospital nursing school. She arrived with a handful of glowing recommendations from Cambridge Hospital physicians. Very soon, however, she alienated her immediate supervisors at Massachusetts General. In the summer of 1890, shortly after having successfully passed her exams, Toppan was reported to have left a ward without permission and was immediately dismissed without a diploma being issued.

  Toppan secured employment as a head nurse at another Cambridge hospital using a forged diploma, but she was dismissed a few months later after the forgery was discovered when she was again suspected of stealing patients’ property and doctoring patient records.

  Toppan then decided to go out on her own as a private nurse. She still had excellent recommendations from physicians and over the next ten years she received so many testimonials and referrals from physicians that she became known as Cambridge’s most successful private nurse. She had a
host of clients from New England’s prominent families and physicians clamoring for her services for their wealthy patients. As a private nurse, she earned twenty-five dollars a week, a fortune compared to the five dollars a week that women on average earned in the U.S. in that era. Despite this success, minor complaints from patients continued to dog Toppan: She borrowed money without repaying it, she fibbed, and she was suspected of small thefts from the patients’ homes she visited. These faults, however, were overlooked because of the cheerful and exuberant manner in which Jane Toppan nursed her patients. Jane had developed a dual personality: With clients she was demure, never drank, and was pleasantly well-behaved, but to the friends she socialized with she showed another side, telling obscene jokes, drinking beer, and displaying a seething vindictiveness against those she thought might have crossed her. She took great delight in causing grief for no reason by telling tales, gossiping, and turning people against each other.

  Victims

  It is unclear how many patients Toppan murdered during her period as a student nurse and later as a private nurse. In the end, Toppan confessed in detail to the murder of thirty-one victims between 1880 and 1901. In her later stage of killing she focused her attentions on individuals other than her patients. After befriending her elderly landlord couple, 77-year-old Israel Dunham and his wife, Lovey, Jane murdered them one by one: first the husband in 1895 and then, two years later, his widow. According to Jane, they had become “feeble and fussy” and “old and cranky.” Several witnesses from nursing school and from her period as a private nurse would recall Toppan commenting “there was no use in keeping old people alive.”

  In December 1889, 70-year-old Mary McLear, while visiting her granddaughter in Cambridge over the Christmas holidays, fell ill. The attending physician sent for “one of his best nurses”—Jane Toppan—to care for the elderly woman. McLear died on December 29 after four days in the care of “Jolly Jane.” After the funeral, relatives noticed that some of McLear’s best clothing had gone missing and voiced suspicions to the doctor who immediately assured them that nurse Toppan was one of “the finest women and best nurses he knew.” The issue was dropped.

  Jane Toppan was in demand and well paid. Financial gain could not have been a pressing motive in these murders. The stealing must have been the final exercise of her power over her victims or perhaps a satisfaction of her need for trophies, a characteristic of some serial murders.

  A Cold Dish of Vengeance

  Eventually, Jane Toppan turned her murderous attention on her older stepsister Elizabeth and her deacon husband, Oramel Brigham. Every once in a while “Jolly Jane” would take Elizabeth up on her offer to visit and stay at the house she was raised in. The tensions of years ago had long been forgotten and soothed by Jane’s good-natured cheer. She was sincerely welcomed at the house.

  But in the summer of 1899 Elizabeth found herself suddenly unable to shake off a persistent winter melancholy. Jane came to the rescue. She invited her sister for some picnicking on the beach and fresh air at a cottage she was renting on Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts. Giving her fifty dollars for expenses, Oramel saw his wife off on August 25, entrusting her into Jane’s care. Two days later, he received an urgent telegram from Jane informing him that Elizabeth had fallen seriously ill. By the time Oramel arrived on the train, Elizabeth was in a deep coma. According to an attending physician, she had had a stroke. She died the next day on August 28.

  Broken-hearted, Oramel was packing Elizabeth’s things when he noticed that her handbag had only five dollars in it. Forty-five dollars were missing and when he asked Jane about it, she said she knew nothing about it. As Oramel was leaving, Jane told him that Elizabeth, in her last dying days, had wanted Jane to have her gold watch and chain as a reminder of her. Touched by his wife’s tender concern for her younger stepsister, Oramel immediately gave Jane the watch. In later years he was equally touched by Jane’s reluctance to carry the watch—she had such fond respect for a precious artifact in Elizabeth’s memory. He had no way of knowing that Jane had immediately pawned it. A few years after her arrest, police would find the pawnshop ticket dated shortly after her stepsister’s death.

  In her confession several years later, Jane admitted to inviting Elizabeth to the cottage specifically to “have my revenge on her.” Toppan explained that for decades she had hated her sister; she was the first of her victims that she “actually hated and poisoned with a vindictive purpose.” She took years to lull and cheer Elizabeth into a trap. She confessed that she had deliberately prolonged Elizabeth’s death to torture her and that she had climbed into Elizabeth’s bed and cuddled and groped her as she died: “I held her in my arms and watched with delight as she gasped her life out.”

  Jane’s Downfall

  By June 1901, after five summers at the cottage, Jane owed a total of $500 in unpaid summer rentals to the Davis family, the parents and two adult daughters who owned the cottage and who had befriended “Jolly Jane.” From June to August she methodically murdered the four members of the family—wiping out the family entirely.

  Jane then packed her things and headed to her childhood home where 60-year-old Oramel Brigham lived. Jane was set in her mind to marry Oramel. She later would confess: “Everything seemed favorable for my marrying Mr. Brigham. I had put the three women to death who had stood in the way.”

  The first woman was, of course, her stepsister Elizabeth. The second was Oramel’s longtime housekeeper, a middle-aged widow Jane had killed the year before while on a visit when she was still welcomed by Oramel. Jane later explained, “I was jealous of her…I knew she wanted to become Mr. Brigham’s wife.”

  In the wake of the murder of the Davis family, Jane arrived at Oramel’s home on August 24, but to her dismay she found his older sister, the 77-year-old Edna Bannister staying there. Despite the fact that Edna had already made plans to leave in a few days and was not a romantic rival, she was dead within three days of Jane’s arrival. The same physician who a year earlier had certified the housekeeper’s death, certified Edna’s death as a result of heart disease. Jane now prepared herself for marriage to Oramel Brigham. She would finally become the mistress of the house she grew up in and slaved in.

  Back in Massachusetts, authorities had become suspicious about the four sudden deaths of the Davises and Jane Toppan’s proximity to them. At the end of August they decided to exhume the bodies and send samples to Harvard Medical School for analysis.

  In the meantime, Jane had encountered a problem. Despite her attempts to impress Oramel Brigham with her housekeeping skills, he made it clear to her that he had no intention of keeping her as a housekeeper or as a wife. Jane then attempted another strategy, as she said, “to win his love.” She poisoned him with a dose just enough to make him sick and then nursed him back to health. When this ploy failed to change his mind, she then threatened to ruin his reputation by claiming that he had impregnated her.

  Brigham ordered her out of his house on September 29, at which point Jane took an overdose of morphine. It took several days for her to be nursed back to health and then she was moved out of the house into a local hospital. By this time, Jane Toppan was being followed by a Massachusetts state detective who was ordered to watch her pending the results of the autopsy. Upon her release from the hospital, the detective followed Jane to Amherst, New Hampshire, where she went to stay with a middle-aged friend, Sarah Nichols, and her brother George.

  The final report on the autopsies was issued near the end of October. Traces of lethal amounts of arsenic in the exhumed bodies had been found. On October 29, 1901, state police and deputy marshals arrested Jane Toppan at the Nicholses’ house. She was charged with a single count of murder in the death of the married Davis daughter, Minnie Gibbs.

  Toppan’s arrest made big news. Nobody could believe it. A torrent of letters poured in from influential and happy former patients, who praised Jane Toppan as a fine, cheerful, respectable, compassionate, highly skilled, and effective nurse. Physicians praised h
er dedication and professionalism and expressed their trust in her care for their patients. The funeral home came to Jane’s defense, pointing out that the embalming process they used with Minnie involved massive amounts of arsenic. It looked like Jane might go free. But then the prosecution dropped a bombshell: Jane did not use arsenic. She killed with combined doses of morphine and atropine, the traces of which had been found in the victim.

  “Don’t Blame Me, Blame My Nature. I Can’t Change What Was Meant to Be, Can I?”

  Toppan’s motives were equally confounding. At first it was suggested that Jane had become a depraved morphine addict, but no evidence of that surfaced. The idea that she had killed for profit held sway for some time, but as more victims were identified it became patently clear that there was no profit to be had from some of the murders. Was she insane? In the winter of 1902, the prosecution and defense agreed that an impartial committee of “alienists”—what psychiatrists were called in those days—would interview Jane to determine whether she was insane. It is from those interviews that the full extent of Jane’s murders and her motives (or lack of ) became known.

  Jane told the committee, “When I try to picture it, I say to myself, ‘I have poisoned Minnie Gibbs, my dear friend. I have poisoned Mrs. Gordon. I have poisoned Mr. and Mrs. Davis.’ This does not convey anything to me, and when I try to sense the condition of the children and all the consequences, I cannot realize what an awful thing it is. Why don’t I feel sorry and grieve over it? I cannot make sense of it at all.”

  Jane’s description of her lack of empathy with her victims and absence of remorse for the pain she caused could come straight out of a current psychiatric diagnostics manual for psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder. Toppan herself attempted to explain her motives clearly in terms of sexual impulses, as she put it, “the desire to experience sexual excitement by killing people.”