Jane Toppan was a private nurse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, trusted by doctors and by the families who asked for her. In the summer of 1901 she was staying with the Davis family of Lowell at their cottage in Cataumet, a village in the town of Bourne on Cape Cod. Within weeks the mother, both married daughters and the father were dead. In October 1901 she was arrested in New Hampshire, and in December a Barnstable County grand jury indicted her for three of the deaths.
She was never convicted of anything. On June 23, 1902, she was tried at Barnstable for the death of one daughter, Mary D. Gibbs. The evidence of the homicide went uncontested, the medical experts for both sides agreed that she was insane, and the jury returned a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. She was committed to the Taunton Insane Hospital for life and died there in August 1938. Around the time of the trial she was reported to have confessed to 31 killings. Those confessions were never tested in court.
She was born Honora A. Kelley in Boston, the daughter of Peter Kelley and Bridget Finn, according to the Lowell Historical Society, which has worked from census returns and the records of the Boston Female Asylum. Her birth year is uncertain. Some documents give March 31, 1854; the asylum and census records point closer to 1857, and the physician Charles Follen Folsom, who knew her and wrote a long study of her case, gave 1857. Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was very young. She had older sisters, Ellen, known as Nellie, and Delia.
Her father was a tailor. Stories about him, including the nickname "Kelley the Crack" and a tale that he tried to sew his own eyelids shut, are described by the Lowell Historical Society as rumors. What the asylum records show is that in February 1863 Peter Kelley asked the Boston Female Asylum, a home for destitute girls on Washington Street, to take Honora and her slightly older sister, Delia Josephine. The asylum's managers judged that his habits made him unfit to care for them. Folsom wrote that the elder of the two girls was two years older than Honora.
Of the rest of the family, Folsom recorded that one sister became insane and that another drifted into a life the asylum's ladies would have called immoral. A third sister later kept a small shop in Boston and tried to bring the relatives together again. The Lowell Historical Society notes that little else is documented about the father or the sisters.
Honora spent about 20 months in the asylum. In November 1864 its committee approved binding her to Mrs. Ann C. Toppan of Lowell. Folsom put her age then at seven. Under the indenture she could be sent back to the asylum at any time before she turned 18, the age at which she became free. She was never legally adopted, but she took the family's name and was known in Lowell as Jennie Toppan. She appears under that name in the Lowell census returns of 1865, 1870 and 1880.
The Toppans lived in the Centralville section of Lowell. Folsom, who gathered recollections from people who had known her as a girl, described a household that was kind but firm and active in church life. At home she was told that being Irish was not her fault, but that she was not to behave like one. Outside, she passed as an Italian child whose parents had died of ship fever on the crossing to America. No one corrected the story. Years later, Folsom wrote, she laughed until she could not stop when she told it.
She was slow with her schoolbooks at first and took four years to finish a three-year high school course, but she graduated with credit. Her teachers found her steady and hardworking. She was popular, active in a Congregational church and its Sunday school, and friends with some of the best-regarded girls in her class, many of whom stayed her friends as adults. They remembered her as good-humored, playful, generous, loyal, sometimes quick-tempered, and a gifted storyteller who could carry a picnic by herself. The Lowell Historical Society records that she was engaged to a young man from Lowell who moved west and broke it off; Folsom also mentions a broken engagement.
When she turned 18 she reported to the asylum as her indenture required. The Lowell Historical Society says Mrs. Toppan gave her 50 dollars that day and encouraged her to make her own way. Folsom wrote that the family asked her to stay, and she remained for eleven more years. Her place in the house was never clear. Folsom said she was never quite a servant and never an equal. When the family's income fell and friction grew between the two younger women of the household, her position became impossible. At 29 she left with no job, no trade and no inheritance. Mrs. Toppan did not mention her in her will. Folsom wrote that Mrs. Toppan's daughter, whom he calls Mrs. M., and her husband, Mr. M., both said openly that Jane deserved a share of the estate, and the house stayed open to her. The Lowell Historical Society records that Toppan's foster sister was Elizabeth Toppan, who married Oramel A. Brigham, a deacon of the First Trinitarian Congregational Church in Lowell and a depot master for the Boston and Maine Railroad.
After a year with a friend's family and some months with a relative of that friend, she was placed as a nurse at the Cambridge Hospital, with strong references. Folsom judged the evidence conclusive that while there she stole 65 dollars belonging to the hospital, and he dated that theft to 1887, the first wrongdoing of hers he could trace. No one suspected her for more than three years.
On the strength of her Cambridge testimonials she entered the training school for nurses at the Massachusetts General Hospital. The superintendent hesitated, Folsom wrote, because she knew the girl's origins and doubted that someone from that background was equal to the work, but the recommendations won her a trial. Toppan passed her probation well. Patients liked her, her charts and beds were in order, and she was trusted to stand in for a head nurse. Most of the other nurses disliked her. She criticized their work and sometimes lied about them. Near the end of her course she was found to have falsified her records. Her diploma had already been signed when she left her ward without permission; when she learned she was to be reported, she left the hospital before she could be dismissed. She was afterward suspected in a run of small thefts in the school. The Lowell Historical Society and the West End Museum also say she left without completing her training.
Folsom knew her during these years as a patient. In 1888 and 1889, he wrote, she was under his care for severe headaches, spent nearly a week in a private hospital, and came to his office for an eye examination at a time when brain tumors were much on doctors' minds. He examined her repeatedly and found her capable, comfortable, lively and intelligent. He came to suspect that she later treated her headaches with opiates and acquired a morphine habit, but he could not establish whether she used the drug now and then or all the time.
Boston Magazine, in a 2015 account of her arrest, says that a patient at the Cambridge Hospital who survived one of her experiments later described Toppan climbing into her bed and kissing and stroking her, until someone came into the room. The Lowell Historical Society says that hospital co-workers complained of her gossip and of missing money, aprons and uniforms, and that she was reported to have given patients excessive doses of morphine and atropine and to have asked questions about poisons and antidotes.
After a year of private nursing in Lowell and Cambridge, during which, Folsom wrote, she stole a diamond ring from a private patient, she returned to the Cambridge Hospital. She stayed more than a year and rose to head nurse, and Folsom heard her described there as the best nurse in the hospital. Her standing with the trustees let her ignore the matron, who dismissed her; she argued her case to the board's chairman and was reinstated, then openly defied the matron. She took 22 dollars from one person and 20 dollars from the house officer, and at least twice she falsified temperature records. She was finally let go because, officially, the trustees no longer had confidence in her. Folsom places her departure from the Cambridge Hospital in 1892.
From 1892 well into 1900 she had a reputation as the best private nurse in Cambridge. A visiting surgeon told Folsom she was the best nurse he had known in severe operations because she anticipated what he needed. Doctors sent her their most difficult invalids. Some physicians avoided her because of her hospital record, but they did not refuse patients who asked for her, and she was sometimes engaged before the attending doctor. Soon after the death of the woman he calls Mrs. M. in 1899, Folsom wrote, she applied for a responsible post and named six referees: three leading physicians and three prominent Cambridge families. All six praised her without reservation, and she was chosen unanimously, though she did not take the job.
Folsom traced six thefts in the first six years of her career, of sums from about 20 to 100 dollars plus the diamond ring, all before she was known to have poisoned anyone. One woman she stole 100 dollars from said she would never testify against her because her family owed Toppan so much. She lied readily and well, Folsom wrote, and her lies were consistent, so it took years for anyone to see the pattern. She also borrowed. By 1901, Folsom wrote, she owed well over 2,000 dollars, though she had nine years of steady, well-paid work, few expenses and no dependents. Where the money went no one could say. She told one friend she had invested in railroad and electric stocks; asked about it later, she laughed and said no one could claim she had spent it on clothes. After her arrest she said she had nothing to pay a lawyer with, and her creditors found no assets.
For three years she rented a room in a private house in Cambridge and boarded there between cases. Folsom calls the couple Mr. and Mrs. E. Mrs. E. had heard about the old hospital theft, and Toppan talked her out of it. Mr. E., a shrewd New Englander, remarked in her hearing that he kept an inventory of his silver and counted it now and then. In early 1901, with Mrs. E. recovering from pneumonia and Mr. E. in bed with what his doctor called ptomaine poisoning, Toppan told Mrs. E. that the household's servant had been drunk for three days. She showed her the woman's limp arms and dull manner and had her driven away in a carriage. The servant had an excellent record everywhere she had worked, and questioning after Toppan's arrest led to the belief that she had been given a narcotic. Toppan took over the household and hired the replacement.
The Lowell Historical Society publishes a table of deaths among people Toppan nursed or lived with, giving each person's age, the date of death and the cause entered on the death certificate. It draws the table from the Lowell Sun of November 4, 1901. For the years before 1901 the table lists, in this order:
Israel Dunham of Cambridge, 83, died May 26, 1895. Certified cause: strangulated hernia.
Lovely P. Dunham of Cambridge, 87, died September 19, 1897. Certified cause: old age.
Elizabeth Toppan Brigham of Lowell, 70, her foster sister, died August 19, 1899, after two days' illness, with Toppan in the house. Certified cause: heart failure.
Mary McNear of Cambridge, 70, a widow; the table gives her death as December 28, 1900. Certified cause: apoplexy.
Florence M. Calkins of Lowell, 45, housekeeper for Oramel Brigham, died January 15, 1900. Certified cause: heart failure.
William H. Ingraham of Watertown, 70, died January 27, 1900. Certified cause: heart failure.
Sarah E. Connors of Cambridge, 48, matron at St. John's Theological School, died February 11, 1900. Certified cause: complication of diseases.
None of these deaths was ever charged. They are attributed to her by the table and by her later confessions as reported. The Lowell Historical Society says the foster sister died while Toppan was on vacation with her, and that Toppan received a share under her will. Boston Magazine reports that Toppan later said the killing of her foster sister was the only one she committed out of ill will.
Folsom, who disguised the people in his account with initials, described several deaths from these years. One was the death of a woman he calls Mrs. M., whom he describes as the only child of the couple who had raised Toppan. In the summer of 1899 Mrs. M. was staying for rest at a seaside cottage where Toppan was also living. She went to bed well on a Saturday night. On Sunday morning Toppan said she was too sick to come down to breakfast, and later that day telegraphed her husband, Mr. M., that she was dangerously ill. He arrived on the first train Monday. She died early on Tuesday, August 29, and the doctor certified apoplexy. Her will left Toppan 200 dollars; Toppan had told people the legacy would be much larger and seems to have believed it. About 50 dollars was missing from the dead woman's pocketbook. Toppan told Mr. M. that his wife had wanted her to have her gold watch and chain, and he handed them over. Toppan pawned them, and the tickets turned up among her belongings after her arrest. Folsom treats this death as a murder and robbery.
Folsom wrote that Toppan spent four summers at that cottage with the family of a close friend, often buying and cooking the food, and that one summer she ran the mess for the biological laboratory at Woods Hole. In all that time, with every opportunity, she poisoned no one else there, as far as he could learn. He also describes three small fires at the shore, at least the first of them in a house Toppan had falsely told Mr. M. she had bought, and he believed she set all three, perhaps to settle a debt she could not pay or to cast blame on a maid she disliked.
In February 1900, Folsom wrote, she poisoned a friend he calls Mrs. R. to take over her post running the refectory of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, where she fed some eighty people a day. Toppan served a good table but had no business training, and she lost the position after about eight months. Folsom said she went home and cried like a child.
He also wrote that on an earlier occasion she had killed a friend in the last stage of a fatal illness with one large dose of morphine, to end unbearable suffering, and that she told some friends that people made hopelessly wretched by age or disease would be better off helped quickly and easily to their deaths.
The Davises were a Lowell family with a summer home at Cataumet. Alden P. Davis, according to the Lowell Historical Society, had worked on the Ladd and Whitney monument in front of Lowell City Hall. The Lowell Historical Society says the deaths began when Mrs. Alden P. Davis went to Cambridge to collect rent Toppan owed her. She was hurt on a stairway but insisted on going, and she died within two days of Toppan's nursing. Toppan took the body to Cataumet and stayed to look after the family. Within weeks both married daughters, Genevieve Davis Gordon and Mary Davis Gibbs, and Mr. Davis were dead. There were three small fires in the house, which did little damage.
The Lowell Historical Society table gives Mrs. Alden P. Davis's age as 62 and her death as July 4, 1901, with chronic diabetes as the certified cause. It gives Genevieve Gordon, of Chicago, as dying on July 31, Alden P. Davis, 65, on August 8, and Mary Gibbs, 40, on August 13, and it notes no death certificate for those three. The Barnstable indictments give the dates as July 30 for Genevieve D. Gordon, August 8 for Alden P. Davis and August 12 for Mary D. Gibbs, all at Bourne.
Folsom told the story of that summer in close detail but, as everywhere in his study, under initials. He calls the mother Mrs. S. and her husband Mr. S., and says he had known them for about twenty years. He described her as kind, hardworking, upright and devoted to her children. One of her daughters had married an old schoolmate of Toppan's, the children called Toppan Aunt Jane, and the family's large house had once been run as a small hotel.
For five summers, he wrote, Toppan had rented Mrs. S.'s cottage at the shore and had not paid for it in full. Folsom put the debt at no more than 450 and no less than 250 dollars. On June 27, 1901, Mrs. S. left the shore to try once more to collect it. She fell badly hurrying to the train but kept going. In Cambridge, Toppan took her to dine at the house where she boarded, the home of Mr. and Mrs. E., and Folsom wrote that she gave her the first dose of poison there. Mrs. S. became drowsy and could not travel home.
For about a week she was better and worse by turns. Toppan resisted calling a doctor and wanted to keep her in a spare room; when the family insisted on proper care, she was moved to a nearby house where Toppan had once lived. Toppan sent first for a physician of her own choosing, who was away, and then accepted anyone except two doctors who had said they distrusted her. The doctor who came was told that Mrs. S. had diabetes and had eaten the wrong food. A urine test showed sugar; Folsom noted the suggestion that the sample had been tampered with. A second nurse was called in, and Mrs. S.'s daughter, Mrs. N., came to stay. For eight days, Folsom wrote, Toppan gave atropia and morphia in amounts and combinations meant to imitate diabetic coma, without rousing the suspicion of the family, the second nurse or an experienced physician who saw the patient every day. Mrs. S. died on the eighth day, July 4.
Toppan took the dead woman's gold watch, later recovered, and her pocketbook. Asked what had become of the money, she said it had been looked after and put in a safe or bank. A day or two after she brought the body home, she dropped Mrs. S.'s handbag and it fell open, showing a roll of bills.
One man in Cambridge already had his doubts. He had held back 100 dollars of Toppan's wages on Mrs. S.'s behalf and had recently learned that Toppan had stolen money. Folsom wrote that on the Sunday morning after the death he learned a death certificate had been signed and a burial permit issued. He called the medical examiner back from the seashore. After checking the facts at the city health office and talking with the attending physician, both doctors were satisfied there was no reason to suspect murder.
At the shore, after the funeral, Mr. S.'s daughter from Chicago stayed with him, and his other married daughter, Mrs. B., who lived nearby, closed her house and moved in with her two small children. Toppan ran the table. Folsom described her as cheerful, capable and comforting, with a pleasant voice, a quick sense of humor and a love of practical jokes. During these weeks a grandson's small savings went missing from a child's bank whose key Toppan knew about.
Mrs. N. was grieving and anxious about her father, who had suffered several attacks of melancholia, and her husband was away. Folsom wrote that her husband's family believed Toppan wanted her out of the way above all because she was pressing for the overdue rent owed to her mother, and that Toppan probably stole most of 50 dollars her husband had recently sent. Toppan told Mrs. N.'s sister, and sent word to the sister's husband, that Mrs. N. was so despondent she had talked of suicide. Mrs. N. fell ill one evening and died at five o'clock the next morning, July 31. Toppan let the family believe she had taken Paris green, a supply of which was kept in the shed. The doctor certified heart disease.
Mr. S., whom Folsom described as nearly 70 and enfeebled by melancholia, seemed as well as usual when he went to bed. Early on the morning of Friday, August 9, Toppan found him dead in his bed. The doctor certified apoplexy. Nearly 300 dollars and some notes of debt had been in his pocketbook. All that was left was 9 dollars and 68 cents. The family believed, without being sure, that Toppan's own note was taken with the rest.
The next Sunday, Mrs. B. was urged to speak to Toppan frankly about the missing money and notes, and she did. On Monday she seemed well, did her usual work and went out driving. During the night something went wrong, and by nine the next morning she was in a deep stupor. Toppan and the local doctor attended her all day, giving injections. A consultant was called only when she was dying. She died at four in the afternoon. The doctor certified exhaustion.
While Mrs. B. lay dying, her brother-in-law, Mr. N., took charge of her money and valuables to keep them from Toppan. Toppan, who had shared her room, took one of the children into her own bed, and after the death she walked the boy to the post office hand in hand as she often had. Through what Folsom counted as forty-eight days and four murders, she seemed entirely herself, calm and composed, with no visible guilt or remorse.
Mrs. B.'s husband, Mr. B., wanted an autopsy. Toppan told him it was useless because the body had been embalmed. He took a doctor aside and asked whether his wife's symptoms could have come from poison; the doctor went through the signs of various poisons and told him it was impossible. When the household broke up, Mr. B. thanked Toppan for her kindness to his family and gave her a ten-dollar gold piece. Toppan asked Mr. M., at her old home, by a roundabout message, to telegraph her to come to Lowell at once, and he did. On the way she stopped in Cambridge to see an old friend, the father of Mr. N., and asked him how he could account for so many deaths in the family.
Folsom wrote that Mr. M. had lent her money on two notes, of 800 and 600 dollars, against her word alone, after she told him she had bought and partly paid for a house at the shore. Folsom called the story a lie from start to finish. Staying in Mr. M.'s house in Lowell when she arrived was his sister, Mrs. J., a woman with heart trouble who had improved enough to plan a trip to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and had money with her. Folsom wrote that Toppan killed her quickly, with symptoms consistent with belladonna. While Mrs. J. lay dying, the chief of the State Detective Force called to question Toppan about the deaths at the shore. Folsom believed he hoped to lead her into blaming someone else, and that she saw through it and stayed composed.
The Lowell Historical Society table lists Edna Bannister, 77, of Vermont, the sister of Oramel Brigham, as dying in Lowell on August 27, 1901, with Toppan in the house; the certified cause was heart failure.
The Lowell Historical Society says that Toppan moved into the Brigham household, seems to have hoped to marry Brigham, and reportedly made him ill and then nursed him. He asked her to leave by the end of September 1901. She took an overdose of morphine and was treated at the Lowell General Hospital, where she made a second attempt; one of the detectives on the case had himself admitted to the hospital as a patient to watch her. Folsom also records two suicide attempts once it was known that the authorities were looking into the deaths.
How the investigation began is told in more than one way. Folsom, who interviewed many of the people involved, wrote that the first suspicion he could trace came from people who knew the circumstances of the death of the woman he calls Mrs. S., and that they went to the police. The Lowell Historical Society says that Captain Gibbs, whom it identifies as Mary Gibbs's husband, questioned the deaths, noting that Toppan was the only member of the household to come through the summer; the West End Museum names the questioner as Captain Paul Gibbs, Mary's father-in-law. Bodies were exhumed, poisons were found, and the police inquiry followed, according to the Lowell Historical Society.
Toppan went to Amherst, New Hampshire, to visit friends. She was arrested there on October 29, 1901. Boston Magazine and the Lowell Historical Society both give that date. The Lowell Historical Society notes that the story of her arrest and trial ran in newspapers as far away as Australia, New Zealand and China.
In December 1901 the grand jury of Barnstable County returned three indictments against "Jane Toppan of Cambridge": for the murder of Mary D. Gibbs at Bourne on August 12, 1901; for the murder of Alden P. Davis at Bourne on August 8, 1901; and for the murder of Genevieve D. Gordon at Bourne on July 30, 1901. She was arraigned on December 6, 1901, and pleaded not guilty to each. The court assigned Fred M. Bixby of Brockton as her senior counsel and James S. Murphy of Lowell as junior counsel, according to the Attorney General's reports. The Lowell Historical Society says Toppan had asked for Murphy, a Lowell lawyer and former state representative who had known her since childhood, and that he was out of state and learned of her arrest from the newspapers. The death of Mrs. Alden P. Davis was not among the Barnstable indictments.
The prosecution was in the hands of the Attorney General and of Lemuel LeBaron Holmes, the district attorney. When Holmes was appointed an associate justice of the Superior Court, James M. Swift, acting district attorney, helped prepare and try the case. Toppan spent about seven months in the Barnstable County jail before trial.
Because of what the Attorney General's report called the unusual features of the case, her sanity was examined early. At the request of the defense, an eminent specialist in mental disease was appointed for her, and at the government's suggestion, with the defense agreeing, other experts of similar standing were appointed for the Commonwealth. The Lowell Historical Society names the three physicians as Henry R. Stedman, George Jelly and Hosea Quinby, and says they examined her in March 1902 and found her insane. Their report was unanimous: the physicians concluded that she was undoubtedly insane when the homicide charged in the indictment was committed.
The experts' report itself was never published. Folsom complained in his study that it had been treated as confidential, so that even the medical profession could not see the basis of the experts' theory. He also noted that the jury at Barnstable was given only a thin sketch of her crimes.
The Commonwealth chose to go to trial anyway, so that the question would be settled, in the words of the Attorney General's report, "both as a matter of fact and law". The trial opened at Barnstable on June 23, 1902, before Justices Braley and Bell of the Superior Court and a jury, on the indictment for the murder of Mary D. Gibbs. The typewritten transcript, titled "Commonwealth vs. Jane Toppan" and described as the trial of Jane Toppan for the murder of Mary D. Gibbs, June 1902, is held and has been digitized by the State Library of Massachusetts.
According to the Attorney General's report, evidence "uncontroverted and undenied" tending to prove the homicide was put in, together with the testimony of the medical experts for both sides. That testimony was that she suffered from a permanent and incurable form of insanity and could never be at large without danger to others. Under the court's instructions the jury returned a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. She was committed to the Taunton Insane Hospital for the rest of her natural life. The Lowell Historical Society says the trial lasted about eight hours and the jury was out about 27 minutes.
The indictments for the deaths of Alden P. Davis and Genevieve D. Gordon were not tried. The Attorney General's report for the following year listed them as still pending, and no later disposition was reported.
The number 31 comes from the period of the trial. Boston Magazine reports that during her psychiatric evaluation she confessed to 31 killings and to about a dozen more among patients from her nursing years. The Lowell Historical Society says the papers reported that she had confessed to at least 31 and possibly as many as 100, and suggests that Murphy may have passed the higher count to the press. A confession attributed to her was printed in the New York Journal; the Lowell Historical Society says it could not locate the original.
After the trial, Boston Magazine reports, she told a reporter that she had meant to be found insane so that she might one day be released. She also suggested that if she had married she might not have killed so many people. No court ever examined these statements, and the confessed total cannot be checked against named deaths beyond the twelve on the 1901 list.
Charles Follen Folsom died in August 1907 with his study of the case unfinished among his papers. It was printed privately in 1909 for circulation among professional friends, in a volume titled Studies of Criminal Responsibility and Limited Responsibility. He had treated her in 1888 and 1889, he had known one of the families involved for about twenty years, and he gathered evidence from her old friends, employers and doctors, whom he described as unusually honest and observant witnesses. Many of the details above come from him. He disguised the families with initials.
He did not accept the verdict's premise. He found in her no delusions or hallucinations and no confusion, an unusually even temper without highs or lows, and none of the physical or mental marks then associated with degeneration. Every one of her crimes, he argued, had a criminal motive, whether money, a position, the removal of someone in her way or the hiding of a theft. Her intellect, he wrote, was well developed and well balanced, and a few months after her commitment she was calm, conversed easily and could hold a discussion. He described her as a woman without feelings rather than one with bad feelings, and wrote that moral imbecility did not necessarily mean insanity. He saw no instinct for cruelty in her: where she could, she killed in a way that kept suffering low for everyone.
Folsom was not alone in doubting the diagnosis. The Lowell Historical Society notes that Oramel Brigham and a Lowell doctor, W. H. Lathrop, were among those who believed she had never been insane.
She spent the rest of her life at the hospital in Taunton. Stedman published his account of her case in 1904 under the title "A Case of Moral Insanity with Repeated Homicides and Incendiarism and Late Development of Delusions". The Lowell Historical Society says that at Taunton she came to fear she was being poisoned, often refused food and declined in health. She was never released.
She died at the Taunton hospital in August 1938. Boston Magazine gives her age at death as 81. The exact day differs between accounts: the Lowell Historical Society gives August 22, the West End Museum August 18, and other published accounts August 17. The Lowell Historical Society says she was buried at Mayflower Hill Cemetery in Taunton, in the potter's field.
Proven in court: nothing. The only verdict in her case is the June 23, 1902, verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity on the indictment for the death of Mary D. Gibbs. The Attorney General's report records that the evidence of that homicide was uncontested and that both sides' experts agreed on her insanity.
Charged and never tried: the deaths of Alden P. Davis and Genevieve D. Gordon, listed as pending in 1903.
Attributed but never charged: the death of Mrs. Alden P. Davis on July 4, 1901, and the eight other deaths in the Lowell Historical Society's table drawn from the Lowell Sun of November 4, 1901, from Israel Dunham in 1895 to Edna Bannister in August 1901. Folsom described a number of deaths, under initials, as murders; none was put before a court.
Confessed: 31 killings, as reported in 1902, and possibly more by her later statements. No full list behind the number has been reported.
Dates that differ between sources: Genevieve Gordon's death (July 30 in the indictment, July 31 in the Lowell Historical Society table) and Mary Gibbs's (August 12 in the indictment, August 13 in the table). The table spells their middle initials E. (Genevieve E. Gordon, Mary E. Gibbs) where the indictments have D. Her birth year is given as 1854 or 1857, and her death day as August 17, 18 or 22, 1938.
Who first raised the alarm is also told differently: people who knew the circumstances of the death of the woman Folsom calls Mrs. S. (Folsom), or Captain Gibbs, described as Mary Gibbs's husband (Lowell Historical Society) or her father-in-law, Paul Gibbs (West End Museum).
1857 (or 1854): Honora A. Kelley is born in Boston to Peter Kelley and Bridget Finn.
February 1863: her father asks the Boston Female Asylum to take her and her sister Delia.
November 1864: bound to Mrs. Ann C. Toppan of Lowell; she becomes Jennie, later Jane, Toppan.
At 18: completes her indenture and stays with the Toppans for eleven more years.
1887: at the Cambridge Hospital; Folsom dates her first known theft to this year.
Late 1880s: trains at the Massachusetts General Hospital and leaves without her diploma.
1888 to 1889: treated by Charles F. Folsom for headaches.
To 1892: private nursing, then head nurse at the Cambridge Hospital until her discharge.
1892 to 1900: private nurse in Cambridge with a high reputation.
May 26, 1895: Israel Dunham dies.
September 19, 1897: Lovely P. Dunham dies.
August 19, 1899: Elizabeth Toppan Brigham dies (Lowell Historical Society table).
January 15 and 27, 1900: Florence M. Calkins and William H. Ingraham die.
February 11, 1900: Sarah E. Connors dies.
1900: in Folsom's account, Toppan runs the refectory of the Episcopal Theological School for about eight months.
July 4, 1901: Mrs. Alden P. Davis dies after going to Cambridge to collect rent from Toppan.
July 30 or 31, 1901: Genevieve D. Gordon dies at Cataumet.
August 8, 1901: Alden P. Davis dies at Cataumet.
August 12 or 13, 1901: Mary D. Gibbs dies at Cataumet.
August 27, 1901: Edna Bannister dies in Lowell.
September 1901: ordered out of the Brigham house; two suicide attempts.
October 29, 1901: arrested at Amherst, New Hampshire.
November 4, 1901: the Lowell Sun prints a list of deaths (as reproduced by the Lowell Historical Society).
December 1901: indicted in Barnstable County for the murders of Mary D. Gibbs, Alden P. Davis and Genevieve D. Gordon.
December 6, 1901: arraigned; pleads not guilty.
March 1902: examined by Drs. Stedman, Jelly and Quinby, who find her insane.
June 23, 1902: tried at Barnstable for the death of Mary D. Gibbs; found not guilty by reason of insanity; committed to the Taunton Insane Hospital for life.
1903: the Attorney General reports the Davis and Gordon indictments as pending.
1904: Stedman publishes his paper on the case.
August 1907: Folsom dies; his study is printed privately in 1909.
August 1938: Jane Toppan dies at the Taunton hospital.