Ask who was America’s first female serial killer and two names come back most often: Lavinia Fisher, hanged in Charleston in 1820, and Jane Toppan, the Massachusetts nurse who confessed to thirty-one killings in 1902. Both answers fail on the record. Fisher was never charged with murder. Toppan confessed, but a jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity. Better answers exist, and they belong to women most lists leave out.
The question needs a test before it can have an answer. The FBI’s working definition, adopted at a 2005 symposium in San Antonio, calls serial murder the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender in separate events. A historian also has to ask what kind of proof counts: a legend, an accusation, an indictment, a confession, or a conviction. This page takes the candidates in order of date and sorts what each record shows into those categories. Where a story is legend, it says so.
In the early 1800s the road north out of Charleston, South Carolina, was lined with boarding houses named for their distance from the city: the Four Mile House, the Five Mile House, the Six Mile House. Wagon traders from upstate South Carolina and North Carolina used the road to bring goods to market, and they used it again going home with cash in their pockets. John and Lavinia Fisher, both in their late twenties, ran the Six Mile House, in what is now North Charleston, near where the old Navy hospital later stood.
By early 1819 a gang was attacking travelers on that road, and the inns along it, the Six Mile House among them, were said to be its bases. On February 18, 1819, a party of local men went out to the house to investigate. There were fights on the property, and several people were arrested, the Fishers among them. A mob burned the Six Mile House afterward, with the Fishers’ belongings inside, and the Five Mile House as well.
The Fishers were first indicted for assault with intent to murder and for common assault, for attacks on two men at the house on the day of the arrests. The charge was then changed to highway robbery, which was a capital crime in South Carolina at the time, and was finally framed around an attack on a trader who had stopped to water his horse. They were convicted in May 1819. Another man arrested at the house, William Heyward, was tried separately, convicted and later hanged. The author Bruce Orr, a former homicide investigator whose 2010 book Six Miles to Charleston was written from the documents, argues that the Fishers’ joint trial, held apart from the rest of the gang, is one reason later writers came to treat the couple as if they had acted alone.
They waited in the Old City Jail, built in 1802 over a paupers’ burial ground and meant for 130 prisoners; it often held more than 300, with no running water. Lavinia was first held in isolation and later moved upstairs at her own request. On September 13, 1819, John and another prisoner tried to escape through a window on a rope of knotted blankets. The rope slipped and John fell; Lavinia could not get out, and John would not leave without her. The two men were found the next day hiding under an overturned boat on the wharf. The couple’s lawyer pressed for a rehearing, which was not heard until January 1820, when a new trial was refused and the sentence of death was confirmed. The execution, first set for February 4, was postponed by the governor to February 18 to give them time to make their peace. They were hanged that day before a large crowd, a year to the day after their arrest, at a gallows near the present corner of Line and Meeting streets. John climbed the scaffold willingly. Lavinia, who seems to have expected a pardon to the last, resisted, and constables dragged her to the platform; she denounced the governor and insisted on her innocence. According to a newspaper account, she died quickly and he did not. John was about twenty-nine and Lavinia about twenty-eight. They were buried in a paupers’ field, reportedly on ground now occupied by the Medical University of South Carolina.
No murder was ever attributed to them. “There’s absolutely no evidence that [the Fishers] killed anybody ever,” says Nic Butler, the historian at the Charleston County Public Library, who describes the later story as embroidered with fiction. The famous version, with tea laced with oleander, a bed that tipped guests through a trapdoor into a pit, and a cellar full of skeletons, does not appear in the trial record. Orr calls the cellar and poisoned-tea stories “fabrication and fiction,” and points out that the smell of a cellar full of bodies would have been hard to conceal. Historians have traced much of the legend to later writing: an 1830 book by a Scottish-born writer, Peter Neilson, who claimed to have seen the execution and wrote of “a great number of skeletons,” and a fictionalized essay of 1897, reprinted in South Carolina newspapers, that added the trapdoor and a spiked pit. Later retellings pushed the count to twenty or thirty victims.
The bodies, in fact, numbered two. While the Fishers were in jail, the remains of a white man and a Black woman were found buried near the house. According to Orr, the man lay in a freshly dug grave and may have been shot during the raid; whether he was a gang member or a victim is unknown. The young woman had been buried about two years earlier. Nobody was charged with either death. As the Charleston historian Mark R. Jones has put it, the count was “a grand total of two, not fifteen.”
Even the details of the hanging have grown in the telling. The story says Lavinia went to the gallows in her wedding dress and called out, “If any of you have a message for the devil, tell me now, for I will be seeing him shortly.” The line is endlessly repeated and has never been verified; another version has her offering to carry a message to hell. Butler believes she probably wore the plain white smock issued to condemned prisoners, and Jones agrees that the Fishers went in loose white robes. Eyewitness accounts contradict the story that she leapt from the platform to cheat the hangman. Orr has suggested that the couple may have been victims of politicians who wanted their land, at a time when the state was hoping to attract a federal naval base to the area; that, too, is a theory rather than a finding.
Legend: a poisoner and trapdoor killer with dozens of victims. Record: a woman convicted of highway robbery and hanged for it. Lavinia Fisher may have been a robber’s accomplice. On the evidence, she was not a murderer at all.
A less famous candidate from the same decade comes closer to a murder case. Martha “Patty” Cannon lived on the border between Delaware and Maryland, where a gang led by her and her son-in-law, Joseph Johnson, kidnapped free Black people and sold them into slavery in the Deep South. Congress had banned the importation of enslaved Africans in 1808, and the demand for enslaved labor in the expanding cotton states made kidnapping profitable. A Delaware state historical marker, dedicated to the gang’s victims, says it is believed to have abducted “hundreds of persons of color,” moving them as far south as Alabama and Mississippi and slipping between the jurisdictions of three counties along the state line.
Little is known of her early life. The Maryland State Archives suggests she was born around 1746, which would have made her about eighty in 1829, though a Wilmington newspaper that year put her between sixty and seventy. Her husband, Jesse Cannon of Sussex County, Delaware, had died by 1826. In March of that year she bought a property called Wilson’s Plain from Joseph Johnson, who had married her daughter, for $1,000; the crossroads there was later called Johnson’s Crossroads and, from 1882, Reliance.
In April 1829 a tenant farmer was ploughing a usually flooded field on a former Cannon and Johnson property in Sussex County when his horse sank into a grave. Underneath was a blue painted chest holding a man’s bones. Local people believed they were the remains of a Georgia slave trader, remembered as Bell or Miller, whose horse had been seen at Cannon’s; Cannon had said he sailed south with a cargo of enslaved people. Further searches found two oak boxes of human bones, among them at least one adult and at least two children, and the body of a young child of mixed race reportedly buried in a garden.
Much of the account of the killings came from Cyrus James, a young Black man from Maryland and a member of the gang, who was reportedly raised by Cannon and was probably held in slavery by her. He was arrested in Delaware on April 3, 1829, and examined before a justice of the peace at Seaford. He said that Cannon and the two Johnson brothers had shot the trader at supper, and he described the burials. He said he had seen Cannon beat a child to death with a piece of wood, and that she had killed the mixed-race child because she suspected its father was white. One of the dead was said to be a person the gang believed was free and who had a family; the children, the reports said, were killed to prevent discovery. James’s testimony was given by a young man with every reason to fear the people he was describing and the officials questioning him, and it may have been coerced.
According to the Maryland State Archives’ summary of the newspaper reports, Cannon was jailed at Georgetown, and the Delaware Register reported on May 16, 1829, that three murder indictments had been returned against her and one against Joseph and Ebenezer Johnson together. Joseph Johnson was never found and may have gone to Alabama. Cannon never stood trial. She died in the Georgetown jail on May 11, 1829. The marker says the circumstances are disputed but that she is believed to have taken her own life. The story was reprinted in newspapers from Mississippi to Vermont and in London.
With no trial, the murders were never proved in court, and the number of her victims, like her age, is unknown. Record: kidnapper and trafficker, indicted three times for murder, dead before trial. On the evidence that survives, she is a strong suspect in more than one killing; she was never convicted of any.
A conviction and a confession together first appear in this list with a woman from upstate New York. Elizabeth Van Valkenburgh was born in Bennington, Vermont, in July 1799, lost both parents by about the age of five, and grew up in Cambridge, New York, with little schooling. She married at nineteen and had four children with her first husband, whom she does not name in her confession. In March 1834 she married John Van Valkenburgh, and they had two more children. By her account he drank heavily and was rough with the children when he did.
Early in 1845, after he came home from an eight-day drinking spell, she put arsenic in his tea. He was sick for weeks and recovered. In March she obtained more arsenic, mixed it into brandy and gave it to him around midnight; he died within days. She fled, was brought back, hid in a neighbor’s barn, was hurt in a fall from the hayloft, and was committed to the Fulton County jail the day after his death. She was tried in Fulton County, convicted of murder and sentenced to death; in her confession she called the trial fair and thanked her counsel, judges and jury.
On January 22, 1846, two days before her execution, she signed a confession in the jail. At first she denied hurting her first husband, who had died in September 1833; in a correction dated the next day she admitted that about a year before his death she had put arsenic in rum he was drinking, and that he had been sick and recovered. She blamed drink, “RUM SELLING AND RUM DRINKING,” for everything that had happened. She was executed on January 24, 1846.
Record: convicted and executed for one killing, with a confessed attempt on another husband. By her own account, the first husband’s death was not her doing. On the test of two killings in separate events, her case does not qualify, though it shows how poisonings in a household could go unnoticed until a second death.
The first woman in this survey who was convicted of murder, executed, and who admitted two separate killings is Martha Grinder of Pittsburgh.
Martha and George Grinder married in Louisville and moved to Pittsburgh in 1859. He was a coal miner, described in the press as slow and simple; she was about fifty by the time of her arrest and was called by one paper “a woman of refinement and respectability.” She had a reputation as a generous neighbor who looked after the sick. People in her care fell ill with unusual frequency.
In February 1864, at the Grinders’ earlier home on Hand Street, a servant named Jane Buchanan, recorded in different papers as Mary, Jane or Jennie, died days after starting work in the house. Her death was put down to natural causes. That November and December two of George’s brothers died, Jeremiah on November 15 and Samuel, a Gettysburg veteran home on medical leave, on December 4, at his brother’s house.
By 1865 the Grinders had moved to Gray’s Alley in Allegheny City, now Pittsburgh’s North Side. On June 27 Martha invited a young neighbor, Mary Caroline Carothers, a newlywed, for tea. Mary fell sick that night. The next day she ate rice soup made with water Martha had boiled and fell sick again; a doctor concluded that she had been poisoned and warned the couple to stop eating Martha’s food and to move, and they did. In July James Carothers went to the funeral of one of the Grinders’ children, and the couple again ate and drank what Martha served. Mary Carothers died on August 1, 1865, after what the Pittsburgh Daily Post called “unimaginable tortures.”
James Carothers’s suspicions led to Martha Grinder’s arrest on August 26, 1865, at first on a charge of larceny. Police found packets of powders in her house, at least one of them poison, and a post-mortem found arsenic and antimony in Mary Carothers’s body. Investigators reopened the servant’s death, exhumed her, and found she had been poisoned too. The trial dealt only with the Carothers case; witnesses included James Carothers, other neighbors who had fallen ill in Martha’s care, chemists and physicians, and a former servant who had bought poison for her. On October 28, 1865, the jury convicted her of first-degree murder. She was sentenced to death on November 25.
In custody she obtained poison and twice tried to kill herself. On the day before her execution she signed a confession admitting that she had poisoned Mary Carothers and the servant girl and denying every other death. She gave no motive, though she seems to have taken money and belongings from her victims. She was hanged on January 19, 1866. The New York Times reported that she died slowly. Other deaths around her, including both of George’s brothers, her own first husband, another neighbor, Mary Carothers’s sister, and her own infant, were suspected and never proved; the Pittsburgh historian Bill Lofquist calls the true number “a matter of considerable speculation.” George Grinder lived until 1892.
Record: convicted of one murder, executed, and confessed to a second killing in a separate event more than a year earlier. On the FBI test and on the evidence of her own signed confession, Martha Grinder qualifies.
If the test is a woman convicted of murder after a long series of killings that she later admitted, the strongest answer is Lydia Sherman.
She was born Lydia Danbury in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1824, lost her mother as a baby, and was raised on an uncle’s farm before moving in with a brother in New Brunswick. She was devoutly Methodist and worked as a tailor at sixteen. At a Methodist gathering she met Edward Struck, a widower with children of his own, and they married and settled in New York City, where they had several children; accounts disagree on how many. Struck became a police officer in Yorkville. After he was accused of cowardice during a hotel robbery and lost his job, he sank into depression, and she poisoned him with arsenic in his oatmeal. Within weeks, according to her own later account, she had also poisoned their three youngest children, Martha Ann, six, Edward, four, and William, an infant. They could do nothing for her or for themselves, she said. Her older children died afterward: George, fourteen, who was already ill from lead in his work as a painter; Ann Eliza, twelve, who was sickly; and Lydia, eighteen, a shop clerk. A stepson, Cornelius, took his suspicions to the district attorney near the end of the Civil War. No investigation followed.
After the war she sold sewing machines in New York and in 1867 went to Stratford, Connecticut, to nurse a customer’s elderly mother. There she met Dennis Hurlburt, an elderly and well-to-do farmer, and married him on November 22, 1868. He changed his will in her favor and died about fourteen months after their wedding, after eating clam chowder she had prepared. He left her about $20,000 in real estate and $10,000 in cash.
She then became housekeeper to Horatio N. Sherman, a widowed factory mechanic in Derby with young children, and married him within months. He drank and spent her money. His infant son, Frankie, died after she put arsenic in his milk. Then his fourteen-year-old daughter, Ada, fell ill and died; Lydia had said she knew how to take care of her. After Ada’s death Sherman went on a binge, and she left a bottle of arsenic-laced brandy by his bed. Later she claimed she had meant to kill only the children.
The doctor who had attended Sherman, J. C. Beardsley, was suspicious and asked for a post-mortem, and she agreed. Organs sent to Yale were tested by Professor George Frederick Barker and found to contain large amounts of arsenic. The Sherman children and Hurlburt were exhumed, and poison was found in them too. She was arrested in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and taken to New Haven, where she was tried in 1872 for the murder of Horatio Sherman. The trial lasted eight days. She came to court in black, in a veiled straw hat, and maintained her innocence. The jury convicted her of second-degree murder. On January 11, 1873, Judge Sanford sentenced her to life at Wethersfield State Prison. A confession published under her name that year admitted the deaths of three husbands and several of her children. The papers called the case the “Horror of the Century” and her “America’s Queen Killer” and “The Modern-Day Lucretia Borgia.” In June 1877 she escaped, with help, and was recaptured within days in Providence, Rhode Island, after giving a hotel keeper’s wife two different names. She died in prison on May 16, 1878, after several weeks of illness, reportedly of cancer.
Accounts put her total at between eight and eleven deaths, beginning in the 1860s. Record: convicted of one murder, confessed to many more. The confession is a published pamphlet of the kind that sold well, and parts of it were shaped for readers; the conviction and the toxicology are firmer ground.
Jane Toppan is the name with the most victims and the clearest confession, but no conviction. She was born Honora Kelley in Boston around 1857, the youngest daughter of poor Irish immigrants. Her mother died when she was small. Her father, Peter Kelley, a tailor, became mentally ill, and in 1863 he placed her and her sister Delia in the Boston Female Asylum. She was then indentured as a servant to Ann Toppan of Lowell, who gave her a new name and presented her as an Italian orphan. She grew up alongside the family’s daughter, Elizabeth, but was never adopted, and she became known for elaborate lies about her family.
She trained as a nurse at Cambridge Hospital and at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she was known as “Jolly Jane.” Supervisors worried about her interest in autopsies, and doctors criticized her for changing patients’ medication. One patient, Amelia Phinney, later said that after an operation in the late 1880s Toppan gave her a bitter medicine and then kissed her face as she lay in bed, until something startled Toppan away; Phinney thought it was a dream until Toppan’s arrest. Massachusetts General dismissed her in 1890 without a diploma. She went on to private nursing and was well paid for it. Her poisons were morphine and atropine, and in some cases strychnine.
The people she later admitted killing included Mary McLear, a seventy-year-old woman who fell ill on a visit to Cambridge in 1889 and whose doctor sent Toppan as one of his best nurses; an elderly landlord and his wife; and, in 1899, her foster sister, Elizabeth Toppan Brigham, whom she poisoned during a seaside holiday on Buzzards Bay. Days after moving into Elizabeth’s widower’s house she killed his elderly housekeeper, Edna Bannister.
In the summer of 1901 she attended the family of Alden P. Davis, from whom she rented a cottage at Cataumet, on Cape Cod, and to whom she owed about $500 in rent. Mrs. Davis died on July 3 in Cambridge. One daughter, Genevieve Gordon, who had come from Chicago for the funeral, died at Cataumet on July 21. Alden Davis died on August 4, and another daughter, Mary Gibbs, whose husband was at sea, on August 13. Mary’s father-in-law, Captain Paul Gibbs, pressed for an inquiry. State detectives were already watching Toppan over earlier deaths. The bodies were exhumed and examined in a barn near the cemetery, and the Harvard chemist Edward S. Wood tested the organs. A Falmouth pharmacist said he had sold her morphine. Toppan was arrested on October 29, 1901, in Amherst, New Hampshire, where she was staying with a friend.
She spent about six months in the Barnstable County jail. A panel of doctors who examined her in the spring of 1902 declared her insane, citing an absence of moral responsibility. She confessed to thirty-one killings, beginning, she said, at Massachusetts General, and later suggested the number might be closer to a hundred. She said she wanted “to have killed more people, helpless people, than any other man or woman who ever lived,” and that she could not “detect the slightest bit of sorrow” over what she had done. She was tried at the Barnstable County Courthouse in June 1902 for the murder of Mary D. Gibbs, before Justices Braley and Bell of the Superior Court; a typewritten transcript survives at the State Library of Massachusetts. The trial lasted about eight hours, and the jury took twenty-seven minutes to find her not guilty by reason of insanity. She was committed to the state hospital at Taunton, where she once starved herself from 160 to 80 pounds and accused the staff of plotting to poison her. She died there in August 1938, after more than thirty years.
Record: confessed to thirty-one killings, acquitted by reason of insanity, never convicted. She is the clearest case of a serial killer here, and the latest.
• February 18, 1819: John and Lavinia Fisher are arrested at the Six Mile House. • May 1819: The Fishers are convicted of highway robbery. • February 18, 1820: The Fishers are hanged in Charleston. • April 1829: Remains are found on a former Cannon and Johnson property in Sussex County, Delaware; Cyrus James is arrested April 3. • May 11, 1829: Patty Cannon dies in the Georgetown jail before trial. • March 1845: John Van Valkenburgh dies of arsenic poisoning in Fulton County, New York. • January 24, 1846: Elizabeth Van Valkenburgh is executed in Fulton County, New York. • February 1864: Jane Buchanan dies in the Grinder household in Pittsburgh. • August 1, 1865: Mary Caroline Carothers dies; Martha Grinder is arrested August 26 and convicted October 28. • January 19, 1866: Martha Grinder is hanged. • November 22, 1868: Lydia Struck marries Dennis Hurlburt. • 1871: Horatio N. Sherman dies in Derby; Lydia Sherman is arrested in New Brunswick, New Jersey (June 1871 in one account, June 1872 in another). • January 11, 1873: Lydia Sherman is sentenced to life. • May 16, 1878: Lydia Sherman dies in prison. • July 3 to August 13, 1901: Four members of the Davis family die in Jane Toppan’s care. • October 29, 1901: Toppan is arrested in Amherst, New Hampshire. • June 1902: Toppan is found not guilty by reason of insanity at Barnstable. • August 1938: Toppan dies at Taunton State Hospital.
Each candidate fails or passes a different test. Lavinia Fisher was hanged, but for robbery, and no killing was ever proved against her; the serial-killer story is legend. Patty Cannon was charged with murder three times and died before she could be tried. Elizabeth Van Valkenburgh was convicted and executed, but for one death. Jane Toppan admitted far more killings than anyone else here, but the law found her not responsible. Lydia Sherman was convicted of murder after a long run of poisonings she later admitted.
Martha Grinder is the earliest of these women who was convicted of murder and who, in her own signed confession, admitted killing two people in separate events. Her conviction came in 1865, seven years before Sherman’s. Even she is not a safe answer to the question of who came first. The answer depends on what counts as a series, on which deaths were investigated at all, and on the records of a century in which a poisoned husband or child was routinely written up as fever or dyspepsia. The fair answer is narrower: the two women named most often have no murder conviction between them, and the women whose records come closest are rarely mentioned at all.