On August 31, 1901, the Boston Globe reported that an entire family from Lowell had died over one summer. Mattie Davis, sixty-two, the wife of Alden P. Davis, had died in early July while visiting Cambridge, of what was taken for complications of diabetes; the date is given as July 3 in some accounts and July 4 in others. Her daughter Genevieve Gordon came home from Chicago for the funeral, fell ill at the family's summer house in Cataumet, on Cape Cod, and died later that month, reportedly of heart failure, on July 21 or July 30 depending on the account. Alden Davis, sixty-four, died of a stroke in early August, on the 4th by one reckoning and the 8th by another. On August 13 the last of them, his married daughter Mary Gibbs, forty, known in the family as Minnie, died after a short illness while her husband was away at sea. The causes given were diabetes, heart failure, a stroke and exhaustion.
The same woman had nursed all four. Jane Toppan was forty-four, a private nurse from Cambridge who had been the Davises' family nurse for years. After Mattie's funeral, Alden Davis had asked her to stay on and look after his daughters. People who knew her called her Jolly Jane. She was good company, a gossip and a teller of stories, and families across the Boston suburbs trusted her with their sick.
Mary Gibbs's father-in-law, Captain Paul Gibbs, did not accept that four healthy people could die of four different natural causes in six weeks, and he asked for an investigation. The bodies of Mary Gibbs and Genevieve Gordon were exhumed and examined in a barn near the cemetery, and the specimens went to Edward S. Wood of the Harvard Medical School. He found poison. Investigators eventually settled on a combination of morphine and atropine. State detectives already had their eye on Toppan; the Davis deaths were only the latest in a string among people in her care. They learned that she owed the family about five hundred dollars in back rent, that a guest in the house had heard her pressing Mary Gibbs to forgive the debt, and that a druggist in Falmouth had sold her morphine before the deaths. She had also twice tried to kill herself that summer. On October 29, 1901, she was arrested in Amherst, New Hampshire, for the murder of Mary Gibbs.
The two drugs explain a good deal about how she had gone undetected. Morphine narrows the pupils and atropine widens them, and a dose of both muddies the signs a doctor at the bedside would look for. She had learned that in the hospitals. She had been born Honora Kelley in Boston to Irish immigrant parents, Peter and Bridget Kelley. The year is usually given as 1854, with March 31 as the day, although some accounts put her birth around 1857. Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was small; her father, a tailor remembered in the neighborhood as Kelley the Crack, drank, was mentally ill, and was said to have been found in his shop trying to sew his own eyelids shut. In 1860 he surrendered his two youngest daughters, Delia, eight, and Honora, six, to the Boston Female Asylum, an orphanage for poor girls, whose records describe them as rescued from a very miserable home. He never saw them again. Delia was later said to have become a prostitute, and an older sister, Nellie, was committed to an insane asylum. In November 1862 Honora went to Lowell as an indentured servant in the household of Ann C. Toppan. She went to school and grew close to their daughter, Elizabeth, but she was never adopted, and Mrs. Toppan, by the account that has come down, disliked the Irish and pressed the girl to bury where she came from. She took the name Jane Toppan and told people she was Italian. She stayed in the house until she was twenty-eight.
In 1883 she began training as a nurse at Cambridge Hospital, where she was liked by staff and patients and earned the nickname Jolly Jane, and in 1889 she was recommended to Massachusetts General. Doctors thought well of her skills and repeatedly criticized her for changing patients' doses on her own. She later described what she was doing there as experiments: she gave patients morphine and atropine, watched them sink and come back, and falsified their charts. She said she got into bed with some of them as they died. Massachusetts General dismissed her in 1890, before she graduated, for leaving her ward without permission. She became head nurse at Cambridge Hospital for a short time, after the woman in the post, a friend, died suddenly, and was fired for mistreating staff. Then she went into private nursing, and prospered at it despite complaints of petty theft. There was no ward, no chart anyone checked, and nobody to wonder how many of a nurse's patients died.
The deaths she later described that can be tied to names and dates began in earnest in 1895. Israel Dunham, eighty-three, her landlord and patient in Cambridge, died on May 26, 1895, and his widow, Lovely Dunham, eighty-seven, on September 19, 1897. Elizabeth Toppan Brigham, the foster sister she had grown up with, died on August 29, 1899, after a visit from her; one account says the poison that time was strychnine. Mary McNear, a patient, died on December 29, 1899. Florence Calkins, forty-five, Elizabeth's housekeeper, died on January 15, 1900, and William Ingraham, a patient, on January 27. Sarah Connors, forty-eight, called Myra, a patient and friend, died on February 11, 1900. Edna Bannister, seventy-seven, Elizabeth's sister-in-law, died on June 19, 1901, two weeks before Mattie Davis. By the list most often reproduced, that makes twelve deaths that can be named, against the thirty-one she confessed to. She also used poison for smaller ends: she was said to have dosed a housekeeper just enough to make her seem drunk so that she could take the woman's place in a household, and to have poisoned herself to win sympathy from men who courted her.
She was held in the Barnstable County Jail for months, cheerful by every account. By the spring of 1902 her behavior was strange enough that doctors examined her, and on April 5 they declared her insane, citing what they called an absence of moral responsibility, a failing memory and a habit of untruthfulness. Both sides now expected an insanity verdict. In June she confessed, and the confession went far beyond the Davises. She named thirty-one people she said she had killed, the first of them at Massachusetts General. Among them was Elizabeth Toppan Brigham, the girl she had grown up with in Lowell, who died in 1899 after a visit with her; the head nurse at Cambridge Hospital whose job she had taken; and whole families. "It is my ambition," she was reported to have said, "to have killed more people, more helpless people, than any man or woman who ever lived." Asked whether she felt remorse, she said: "I have thought it all over, and I cannot detect the slightest bit of sorrow over what I have done."
She was tried for Mary Gibbs's murder alone, at the Barnstable County courthouse, in June 1902. The alienist Henry Stedman testified that she was incurably insane. "The alienist lies!" she said. "I am not crazy!" She insisted that a woman who knew what she was doing and knew it was wrong could not be insane. The jury took less than half an hour. On June 23 she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed for life. While she waited for the verdict, the Globe reported, she "chatted, laughed and was exceedingly jolly," and she left the building smiling. Soon afterward the New York Journal printed what it said was her confession to her lawyer, in which she put the number above thirty-one and said she had wanted a sane verdict so that she might one day be released.
She spent the next thirty-six years at the State Lunatic Hospital at Taunton. The diagnosis on her record was moral insanity. For a while she was comfortable there. Then she began to say the staff were abusing her and that there was a plot to poison her, and in 1904 she refused food until her weight fell from about 160 pounds to 80. She recovered, and in later years she told people the real number might have reached a hundred but that she had forgotten many of the details. She died at Taunton on August 17, 1938, aged eighty-four if the 1854 birth date is right. Under questioning she had said that she took a sexual thrill from bringing patients close to death, letting them come back and then watching them die, and that she lay with them and held them as they did; she later described what drove her as a paralysis of thought and reason and a strong urge to poison. The Davis family, four people in six weeks, were the only deaths she was ever charged with, and a jury heard only one of them.