My ambition is to have killed more people, helpless
people, than any other man or woman who ever
lived. That quote just, it stops you cold, doesn't
it? It really does. It's not just the ambition
to kill, it's the qualifier, she adds, helpless
people. Exactly. It completely removes any idea
of a challenge or a fight. It's pure predation.
This isn't, you know, a general on a battlefield.
It's not a gangster taking out a rival. No. This
was a woman named Jane Toppin. And what makes
that, quote, infinitely darker, just so much
worse, is her job. She's a nurse. The ultimate
betrayal. I mean, you go to a nurse when you
are at your absolute weakest. You're literally
putting your life in their hands. Right. You're
trusting them completely. And this woman, everyone
knew her as Jolly Jane. She was, by all accounts,
bright, friendly, well -liked. If you were sick
in Massachusetts in the late 1800s, she was the
person you wanted by your bedside. Lovely, competent,
and underneath it all. A monster who is quietly
trying to become one of the most prolific serial
killers in American history. And maybe she was.
I mean, given the timeline and the gaps in the
records, she might have been one of the most
successful if you define success by just how
long she got away with it. So that's our mission
for this deep dive. We're going to unpack the
life of Jane Toppin. But we're not just going
to run through a list of victims. Honestly, the
list is terrifyingly long. And at a certain point,
it just becomes. Yeah, it becomes a statistic.
Exactly. We want to get at the how and the why.
We want to look at the psychology, the systemic
failures that let her operate for so long. And
we've pulled a lot of material for this. We have
biographical details, court records, asylum intake
logs from the time, and some really incredible
newspaper accounts. Yeah, the newspaper stuff
is fascinating. We're looking at the Indianapolis
Journal, the Lowell Sun, and, of course, the
Hearst papers like the New York Journal. And
those papers give you the real -time reaction.
You see a world just struggling to understand
how a nurse, a sister of mercy, as they called
them. A sister of mercy. Yeah. It could be this.
This predator. They didn't even have the term
serial killer back then. They were trying to
map a new kind of evil. So we're going to trace
her story from this just... Dickensian horror
of a childhood in Boston, through the hospitals
in Cambridge where she learned her dark trade,
and then finally into her private practice where
the whole thing just imploded. It's a story of
manipulation, of madness, and a terrifying ability
to hide in plain sight. But to understand Jane
Toppin, the killer, you really have to go back.
You have to start before she was Jane Toppin.
You have to start with Honora Kelly. That's where
it all begins. Okay, so Honora Kelly. Born March
31st, 1854 in Boston. And before we even get
into her family life, which is a whole other
thing, we need to talk about Boston in the 1850s.
Yeah, you absolutely have to set the stage. This
is post -famine. The city is flooded with Irish
immigrants and the social climate is, well, it's
incredibly hostile. No Irish need apply. That
wasn't just a slogan on a sign. It was economic
reality. Poverty was rampant. Living conditions
were awful, squalid. So she's born into this
marginalized, struggling community. And then
her home life. Struggling doesn't even come close.
No, it was a catastrophe. Her mother, Bridget,
died of tuberculosis when Honora was really young.
TB was just, it was the scourge of the tenements.
So that leaves Honora and her sisters alone.
With their father, Peter Kelly. And the sources
on Peter Kelly are, well, he was known in the
neighborhood as eccentric. Which feels like a
massive understatement. A huge one. He was known
as Kelly the crack, as in crackpot. He was an
abusive alcoholic, but his behavior went so far
beyond that. There's one detail that just. It
encapsulates the chaos of that home. I know exactly
the one you're talking about. It's the kind of
thing that once you hear it, it just sticks in
your brain. He was a tailor. Right. And the story,
which seems to be corroborated by the historical
records, is that in some kind of fit, a psychotic
break maybe, he took his needle and thread and
sewed his own eyelids closed. Let's just pause
on that. I mean, just picture it. A man in a
tenement with a tailor's needle, mutilating himself,
and his young children are right there. Think
about what that teaches a six -year -old. It
teaches you that the human body is a moment.
It's just material. It's fabric. It can be altered.
It can be controlled. It can be mutilated. It
totally desacralizes the body. If your own father
can do that to himself, what are the rules? What
are the boundaries for what can be done to other
people? There are no boundaries. It establishes
this baseline of extreme violent instability.
And then in 1860, Peter Kelly just... checks
out. He takes Anora, who's six, and her sister
Delia, who's eight, and he walks them down to
the Boston Female Asylum. Which was an orphanage,
not a mental institution. And the intake records
are just so heartbreakingly bureaucratic. They
just say the girls were, quote, rescued from
a very miserable home. And the abandonment is
total. Complete. He signs the papers, surrenders
his rights, walks out, and never sees them again.
He just erases them from his life. And we should...
Probably talk about the other siblings here because
it brings up that whole nature versus nurturer
question. Was there some kind of madness gene
in this family? Well, it's a tragic story for
all of them. The older sister, Nellie, she wasn't
put in the orphanage, but she ended up being
committed to an insane asylum later in life.
And Delia, the one who went into the asylum with
Honora, she reportedly fell into prostitution
to survive after she aged out. So it's just a
string of tragedies. But Honora's path is different.
On the surface, it almost looks like she got
a lucky break. It looks that way. Two years later,
1862, she's placed out. She becomes an indentured
servant for a woman named Anne C. Toppin in Lowell,
Massachusetts. And this is the pivot point. This
is where Honora Kelly effectively dies and Jane
Toppin is born. She takes the name Toppin. She
eventually starts going by Jane. She's shedding
that Kelly identity, the poverty, the madness,
the father with the sewn eyes. But there's a
huge catch. She was never adopted. Never. That
distinction is everything. She was a servant.
She lived in the house. She used their name.
She called Mrs. Toppin mother. But legally, socially,
she was the help. And the Toppins had their own
biological daughter, Elizabeth. Right. So Jane
and Elizabeth grow up together, side by side.
And by all accounts, they got along. They were
like foster sisters. But you have to imagine
the constant daily psychological friction of
that. Absolutely. You're at the same dinner table.
You might be wearing her hand -me -down clothes.
But you always know. And everyone else knows.
She's the daughter, the heir. And you're the
charity case. It's proximity without belonging.
She's close enough to see the life she wants,
the status, the security, the love, but she's
fundamentally locked out of it. And that kind
of status anxiety can breed a very specific,
very cold kind of resentment. It fuels this idea
that you've been cheated, that you're owed something.
And it can lead you to see other people not as
people, but as obstacles. Or tools. And yet,
for a while, she plays the part. She keeps it
all under wraps. So let's fast forward a bit.
It's 1883. Jane's in her late 20s now. She leaves
the Toppen house and decides to become a nurse.
She starts training at Cambridge Hospital. And
this is where that persona, Jolly Jane, really
gets perfected. It's a total reinvention, isn't
it? Completely. Her childhood teachers described
her as brilliant and terrible, a liar, a troublemaker.
But at the hospital, she's bright, friendly,
and well -liked. She constructs this perfect
mask of the bubbly, caring, competent nurse.
It sounds so harmless. It's the name of the nurse
you'd want if you were sick. But while she's
building this reputation with the staff, she's
starting her experiments with the patients. This
is where the profile really starts to take shape.
And it's specific. She didn't just target anyone.
She would bond with them, especially the elderly
and the very, very sick. She chose her favorites.
Favorite in Jane Toppin's world is a very dangerous
thing to be. A very dangerous thing because it
meant you were selected to be one of her guinea
pigs. She started using. for these bizarre pharmacological
experiments. She wasn't just killing them outright,
not yet. She was testing things. Let's get into
the specifics of that because the how is so important
here. She was fascinated by a very particular
combination of drugs. Morphine and atropine.
Okay, so for those of us who aren't doctors,
break that down. Why that combination? What does
it do? It's basically a physiological tug of
war. Morphine is an opioid, a depressant. It
slows everything down, your heart rate, your
breathing. It constricts your pupils. It basically
puts your body to sleep. Okay. Atropine does
the exact opposite. It's a stimulant. It blocks
the nerve that slows the heart so your heart
rate speeds up. It dilates your pupils. It wakes
everything up. So you have one drug telling the
body to shut down and another one screaming at
it to rake up. Precisely. She was creating a
chemical war inside her patients. She'd give
them a dose of morphine and watch them drift
toward death. And then she'd hit them with a
shot of atropine and yank them back. My God.
She was coggling them on and off like a light
switch. She wanted to see how close to the line
she could take them. She was mapping the nervous
system by torturing people to death. She'd spend
hours alone in their rooms, falsifying the medical
charts so no one would see the wild swings in
their vitals. And then there's the intimacy part
of it. Yeah. The sources say she wouldn't just
sit by the bed. No. She would get into bed with
them. Just... Try to process that image. You're
a patient, you're drugged, you're fading in and
out of consciousness, and your nurse is climbing
into your bed and holding you as you die. It
breaks every boundary imaginable. Professional,
social, physical. It speaks to this profound
need for absolute control and this really perverse
desire for closeness with... death itself. She
wanted to feel the life leave them. She wanted
to be the only person in their world at that
final moment. It's predatory in a way that's
hard to even comprehend. And somehow, despite
all this, despite patients crashing on her watch,
she manages to fail upward. That's shocking.
In 1889, she gets recommended for a position
at Massachusetts General Hospital. Mass General,
a top tier prestigious institution. But she doesn't
last there. She's fired the next year. She claimed
later she killed people there, but there was
no proof at the time. So she goes back to Cambridge
Hospital for a bit. And gets dismissed from there,
too. This time, the official reason is administering
opiates recklessly. Okay, we have to talk about
that. Administering opiates recklessly. Today,
that would be a career -ending event. You'd lose
your license, there'd be an investigation, a
huge paper trail. How does she just walk away
from two major hospitals with that on her record?
Because it's 1890. There's no central nursing
board. There's no digital database. There are
no background checks. Right. Hospitals were just
these independent islands. If a nurse was a problem,
the hospital just wanted to get rid of her quietly
to avoid a scandal. So they'd fire her. She'd
walk out the door. And in the next town over,
she's basically a clean slate. It's the pass
the trash phenomenon, but with lethal consequences.
And honestly, getting fired was probably the
best thing that could have happened for her,
quote unquote, ambition. Because she moves into
private nursing. The perfect setup. No supervising
doctors, no head nurse checking the charts at
the end of a shift. It's just her, alone in a
house with a vulnerable person. It was the ideal
hunting ground. She was charming. She was available.
She was Jolly Jane. Families loved her because
she seemed so devoted. Of course they did. She'd
stay up all night with the patient. They just
didn't know why she was staying up all night.
And she flourished. Even with these constant
complaints of petty theft that seemed to follow
her everywhere, she built a successful career.
But then, around 1895, something shifts. The
goal changes from, you know, curiosity and experimentation
to just destruction. The sources all point to
1895 as the year her spree began in earnest.
She stops just toying with people and starts
killing with clear intent. And her first major
targets were her landlords. Israel and Lovely
Dunham, an elderly couple. And their age is key.
Israel was 83. Lovely was 87. When an 83 -year
-old man dies, nobody asks questions. Nobody
demands an autopsy. Jane knew that. She used
their age as a shield. So she was there for both
of their deaths, playing the role of the... grieving
devoted nurse. She was. Israel died in May of
95. Lovely followed him in September of 97 and
Jane just keeps going. But then in 1899 she does
something that I think reveals the true depth
of her psychopathy. It goes beyond the angel
of mercy theory. She kills her foster sister
Elizabeth Brigham. This is the murder that complicates
everything. Elizabeth wasn't a patient. She wasn't
a landlord. She was her childhood companion.
They were by all accounts friends. So. Why? What
was the motive? Jane went to visit her on Cape
Cod, a little vacation. They had lunch, went
for a walk on the beach, and then Jane gave her
a dose of strychnine. And let's talk about strychnines
for a second. That's a departure from her usual
morphine and atropine cocktail. It is a brutal,
brutal way to die. It's a convulsant. It causes
every muscle in your body to contract violently
and at once. The victim is fully conscious. Their
back arches. They can't breathe because their
diaphragm seizes up. It's absolute torture. So
this wasn't a gentle drifting away. This was
rage. This was cruelty. It suggests a very different
emotional state. And the motive. The most common
theory is just pure distilled jealousy. Elizabeth
had the life Jane always felt she deserved. She
was a true top end. She had the status, the security.
So killing her was the ultimate act of leveling
the playing field. If Jane couldn't have that
life, then neither could Elizabeth. Or... Maybe
the urge to kill had just become so overwhelming
that things like friendship or family didn't
even register as concepts anymore. Which fits
with what she said later about that paralysis
of thought. Exactly. After Elizabeth, it's like
the dam just breaks. The body count skyrockets.
Between 1899 and 1900, you have Mary McNear,
a patient, William Ingram, another patient, Sarah
Connors, who was a patient and a friend. The
Sarah Connors one is interesting because Jane
wanted her job. Yes. Sarah had a good position
at a theological school and Jane coveted it.
So she just eliminated the competition. It's
ruthless. But the most calculating Machiavellian
plot has to be the one involving Florence Culkin.
Oh, this story is. It's just next level manipulation.
It shows that she could be so incredibly strategic.
It's amazing. So Florence Calkins was the housekeeper
for a wealthy family. Jane wanted that job. But
she didn't just walk in and kill Florence. No,
she did something much more subtle. She started
giving Florence small doses of poison, just enough
to make her seem drunk and incompetent. Slurring
her words, stumbling. So the family sees this.
They assume their housekeeper is a secret alcoholic
and they fire her. And it was right there to
step in and save the day. Jolly Jane. She says,
oh, you poor dears, let me help you out. She
takes the job, gets inside the house. And then
starts killing the family she's now working for.
It's just so predatory. She's using poison as
this multipurpose tool. She used it to kill,
to disable, to frame people. And the sources
say she even used it on herself. The self -poisoning.
That's a whole other layer of pathology. Oh,
yes. It's like a form of Munchausen syndrome.
Yeah. If she was dating a man and wanted attention
or sympathy, she'd ingest a little poison herself.
Just enough to make her look sick and frail.
Exactly. To trigger that protective instinct.
She weaponized sickness in every possible direction.
It shows you that she viewed bodies her own and
everyone else's as nothing more than props in
her own personal drama. Which brings us to 1901.
And the Davis family massacre, and I use that
word massacre because there's really no other
way to describe it. This is where she goes from
being a serial killer to a family annihilator.
It's the climax of her killing career, and the
speed of it is just breathtaking. This is where
the organized, careful killer starts to become
disorganized and frantic. So set the scene. How
does this all start? It starts with the death
of Maddie Davis in July of 1901. Maddie was the
wife of an elderly, respected man named Alden
Davis. Jane was caring for Maddie and murdered
her. And then in a move that is just pure horror
movie stuff, she moves in with grieving widower
Alden. Moves right into the Davis home to take
care of him. The fox is officially in the hen
house. And within weeks, that entire family is
just gone. The timeline is insane. It is. Maddie
dies on July 4th. Then one of the daughters,
Genevieve Gordon, comes to visit her grieving
father. She dies on July 30th. Less than a month
later. Then the patriarch, Alden Davis himself,
he dies on August 8th. And finally, the other
daughter, Mary, who they called Minnie Gibbs.
She dies on August 13th, just five days after
her father. So that's four members of one family
in about six weeks. Not to mention a sister -in
-law. Edna Bannister, who had died a couple of
months earlier in June while Jane was around.
She just wiped out an entire family tree in one
summer. And that's often what gets them, isn't
it? That acceleration, they get sloppy, or maybe
the high from the kill becomes so addictive that
the cooling off period just disappears. She was
killing them faster than they could hold the
funerals. And that's what finally did it. The
surviving family members, the husbands of the
dead sisters, they finally looked at this string
of bodies and said, this isn't possible. This
is not bad luck. It's statistically impossible.
So they ordered a toxicology exam on Minnie Gibbs,
the last one to die. And by 1901, toxicology
is a real science. It's not guesswork anymore.
They tested her tissues and the results came
back positive. Morphine and atropine. The smoking
gun. The Angel of Mercy mask finally slips off
and the authorities get involved. She's arrested
on October 29th, 1901. So she's arrested. She's
in custody. And this takes us to the interrogation.
Now you'd expect denial, right? I didn't do it.
They were old. It was natural causes. That's
what you'd expect. But Jane Toppin, she couldn't
wait to talk. She starts confessing. Oh, yeah.
She confesses to 31 murders. 31. And let's be
clear. The number they could actually prove in
court, the confirmed count, was 12. 12. But she's
claiming 31. And the suspected number, based
on her time in the hospitals and her private
practice, is well over 100. It's just staggering.
So, OK, we have the confession. We have the famous
ambition quote that we have to really dig into
the why. We've touched on it, but let's unpack
the psychology here because she doesn't fit neatly
into any one box. No, she doesn't. She fits the
broad angel of mercy archetype, the caregiver
who kills. But that's usually about power, about
playing God. With Jane, there was this very prominent,
very disturbing sexual component. The sources
are pretty explicit about this part of her confession.
They are. She told investigators she derived
a sexual thrill from the murders. She said she
would fondle her victims as they died. She got
a thrill from watching them get close to death,
bringing them back with the atropine, and then
letting them go again. It's that yo -yo effect
again. The ultimate power trip. And the intimacy.
The act of getting into bed with them, holding
them close as they died. She wanted to feel that
final spark go out. And there's that other quote
about wanting to see the inner workings of their
souls through their eyes. It sounds almost poetic,
but it's really just profound narcissism. It
is. The victim stops being a person. They become
a mirror, a window for her to look through. They're
just props in her private psychodrama. And when
she was asked about her motivation, she didn't
talk about rage or anger. She used a very strange
phrase. A paralysis of thought and reason. What
do you make of that? I find that fascinating.
She described it as this simple, overwhelming
urge to poison, like a compulsion she couldn't
resist. It wasn't that she was angry at Alden
Davis or Minnie Gibbs. They just happened to
be there when the urge struck. It sounds like
an impulse control disorder mixed with extreme
sadism. So the trial becomes this huge media
circus. William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal
is all over it. The headlines are just sensational.
The modern Borgia, the poison fiend. And Jane
is eating it up. She's loving the attention.
But she also has this really bizarre legal strategy.
The insanity. Defense. But she tries to use it
in reverse. Exactly. Normally, the defense team
pleads insanity to avoid the death penalty. Jane's
great fear wasn't execution. It was the asylum.
Because of her sister Nellie and her father.
The asylum was the ultimate family curse in her
mind. It was failure. Total failure. She was
terrified of being locked away forever with no
hope of release. She actually thought that if
she were found sane and convicted of murder,
she might eventually get pardoned. At least she'd
be in a prison, not a madhouse. So she gets up
in court and basically argues. I can't be insane
because I knew what I was doing was wrong. She
tried to use her own moral culpability as proof
of her sanity. It's a logic pretzel. I'm not
crazy. I'm just evil. It's a bold move. Did it
work? Not at all. The jury looked at the evidence,
the sheer scale of the killing, the wiping out
of entire families, the sexual component. And
on June 23, 1902, they came back with the verdict.
Not guilty by reason of insanity. So she gets
the one thing she feared most. She gets exactly
what she feared. committed for life to the Taunton
Insane Hospital. And she lived there for a very,
very long time. She did. She lived until August
17, 1938. She died at the age of 84. She spent
almost four decades locked away. And the accounts
from her later years are just... Sad. And strange.
She became intensely paranoid. She was convinced
the staff was trying to poison her food. Which
is just a classic case of projection, isn't it?
Of course. She knew what nurses were capable
of, so she assumed everyone was just like her.
She died a heavy, delusional old woman completely
cut off from the world she terrorized. So when
we look back on this whole story, what's the
big takeaway? I mean, beyond the obvious, you
know, don't let your nurse climb into bed with
you. I think the biggest takeaway is about the
camouflage of care. Jane Toppin understood instinctively
that society has this built in bias. We see a
nurse's uniform and we think benevolent, trustworthy.
She used that bias like a weapon. It's the ultimate
cognitive dissonance. The idea of a killer nurse
is so hard to process that people just, they
don't see it. Even when it's happening right
in front of them. And she exploited the lack
of institutional memory. The fact that she could
get fired from Mass General for being reckless
with opiates and then just walk into a private
home and kill an entire family. It's a stunning
indictment of the system at the time. It really
makes you think about the vulnerabilities of
that pre -digital age. Which brings us to a really
uncomfortable closing thought. Yeah. Jane Toppin
was caught. But she was only caught because she
got sloppy. She got greedy. She killed too many
people too fast in one place. But she operated
for nearly 20 years before that. And her stated
ambition was to kill more helpless people than
anyone who ever lived. She was stopped. But you
have to ask yourself. In an age before digital
records, before background checks, before toxicology
was standard. How many other Jolly Janes were
out there? That's the question, isn't it? How
many other caregivers in 1890 or 1920 or even
1950 sat by a bedside, gave a little too much
morphine, held a hand and just got away with
it? Their ambitions quietly fulfilled in the
privacy of a sick room with nobody ever knowing.
We will never know the true number. And that,
I think, is the most terrifying part of this
whole story. Well, on that note. i think that's
all for this deep dive thanks for listening