Jane Toppan
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| Jane Toppan | |
|---|---|
 Cover of Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer , by Harold Schechter. (a book about Jane Toppan) |
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| Background information | |
| Birth name: | Honora Kelley |
| Born: | 1854 Boston, Massachusetts  |
| Died: | 1938 |
| Cause of death: | Natural causes |
| Penalty: | Not guilty by reason of insanity |
| Killings | |
| Number of victims: | 31 |
| Span of killings: | 1885 through 1901 |
| Country: | USA  |
| State(s): | Massachusetts |
| Date apprehended: | October 29, 1901 |
Jane Toppan (1854 - 1938), born Honora Kelley, was an American serial killer. She confessed to 31 murders in 1901. She is quoted as saying that her ambition was "to have killed more people — helpless people — than any other man or woman who ever lived." [1]
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[edit] Early life
She was raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, in a poor family with a history of mental illness. In 1863, her father turned her and her sister over to a Boston orphanage where they would be given to other families as indentured servants. She was soon taken in by Ann Toppan, who, while never formally adopting her, gave the child her last name. Over the years, she grew to bitterly resent both her foster mother, who was abusive, and her foster sister Elizabeth, the darling of the family.[citation needed] Despite her resentment of her foster family, however, she continued to live with them long after she was officially released from service in 1874.
[edit] Murders
In 1885, Toppan began training to be a nurse at Cambridge Hospital. During her residency, she used her patients as guinea pigs in "experiments" with morphine and atropine; she would alter their prescribed dosages to see what it did to their nervous systems, and make sure they remained too sick to leave the hospital.[citation needed] It has been speculated[citation needed] that she killed at least a dozen people while employed at Cambridge. She nevertheless curried favor with a few influential doctors,[citation needed] who, in 1889, recommended her for the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital, where she claimed several more victims before being fired in 1890. She briefly returned to Cambridge, but was soon dismissed for prescribing opiates recklessly. She then began a career as a private nurse, which flourished despite complaints of petty theft.
She began her poisoning spree in earnest in 1895 by killing her landlords. In 1899, she killed her foster sister Elizabeth with a dose of strychnine.
In 1901, Toppan moved in with the elderly Alden Davis and his family to take care of him after the death of his wife (whom Toppan herself had murdered). Within weeks, she killed Davis and two of his daughters. She then moved back to her hometown and began courting her late foster sister's husband, killing his sister and poisoning him so she could prove herself by nursing him back to health. She even poisoned herself to evoke his sympathy. The ruse didn't work, however, and he cast her out of his house.
By this time, the surviving members of the Davis family ordered a toxicology exam on Alden Davis' youngest daughter. The report found that she had been poisoned, and local authorities put a police detail on Toppan. On October 26, 1901, she was arrested for murder.
By 1902, she had confessed to 11 murders, and told psychiatrists that she had an irresistible sexual urge to kill.[citation needed] On June 23, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Taunton Insane Hospital.
Soon after the trial, one of William Randolph Hearst's newspapers, the New York Journal, printed what was purported to be Toppan's confession to her lawyer that she had killed more than 31 people, and that she wanted the jury to find her insane so she could eventually have a chance at being released. Whether or not that was truly Toppan's intention is unknown, but she nevertheless remained at Taunton for the rest of her life.
Workers there claimed to remember the smile she had when they entered the room, and that she would request that they get her arsenic and go out into the ward, so they could have fun 'watching them die'.[citation needed]
[edit] Fictional portrayals
Toppan is widely believed to have been the inspiration for "the Incomparable Bessie Denker", a character in William March's novel the The Bad Seed, which Maxwell Anderson would turn into a successful play and movie, about a sociopathic child, Rhoda Penmark. Like Toppan, Denker was a serial poisoner who began killing at a young age.
