WHO IS AMERICA’S FIRST FEMALE SERIAL KILLER?

Article BY LORI BELL

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Legend has held that the first widely recognized first female serial killer in the United States is Lavinia Fisher. She was born in 1793, but, the location of her birth, her maiden name, or any information about her childhood, is unknown.

Lavinia grew up to marry a man named John Fisher and the couple lived near Charleston, South Carolina for most of their lives. The pair made their living operating a hotel called the Six Mile Wayfarer House, which they managed in the early 1800s.

Lavinia was a very beautiful and charming woman, adding to her popularity in the community and to the business of the hotel. It would later be learned that she utilized those characteristics to help her husband rob and kill many male travelers.

Mysteriously, men who were visiting Charleston began to disappear. And as more men went missing, the rumor mill began to do its work. Many reports were made to the local sheriff’s department about guests disappearing. Due to lack of evidence, and the popularity of the couple with many locals, these complaints came to nothing.

Lavinia Fisher would invite lone travelers into the Six Mile Wayfarer House to dinner and ask them questions about their occupations, trying to determine if they had money. She would send them up to their rooms with a cup of poisoned tea. Once the men drank their tea and went to bed, her husband would go to the room to make sure they were dead by stabbing them.

Another version of the legend was that the tea would only put the men to sleep for a few hours. Then, when they were almost asleep, Lavinia would pull a lever and the bed would collapse and drop the victim into a pit. Some believed that there were spikes waiting at the bottom of the pit.

Much of what actually occurred in the alleged murders at the hands of John and Lavinia Fisher has become widely exaggerated through time, so factual details are hard to find. The locals soon gathered up a group of vigilantes who went to the Fishers neighborhood in February, 1819 to stop the purported ‘gang activities’ that were occurring there.

Though it’s unknown what they may have said or done, they were obviously satisfied with their task and returned to Charleston, leaving one man by the name of David Ross to stand watch in the area. Early the next day, Ross was attacked by two men and dragged before a group of men along with Lavinia Fisher. He looked to her for help , but instead, she choked him and smashed his head through a window. Somehow, Ross was able to escape and alerted authorities.

Immediately following this incident , another man named John Peeples was traveling from Georgia to Charleston and stopped at The Six Mile House to see if they had a room. Lavinia replied that there was unfortunately no room, but he was welcome come inside, rest and have some tea.

Her company was so pleasant that he ignored Lavinia’s husband’s odd glances at him and chatted with her, answering her every question. She excused herself for a moment and returned with news that a room had suddenly become available. She poured him some tea, but John happened to hate tea, and not wanting to seem rude, he poured it out when she wasn’t looking.

She interrogated him for hours. Lavinia finally showed him to his room. He began to wonder why she had asked so many questions. Suddenly, he felt uncomfortable with all the information that he had provided and worried if he might become a target for robbery.

John decided to sleep in the wooden chair by the door. In the middle of the night, he awoke to the sound of the bed disappearing into a deep hole in the floor and discovered the Fishers’ plan. He quickly jumped out the window, got on his horse and alerted the authorities in Charleston.

Based on these accounts, the assailants were finally identified by name, something that law enforcement had previously lacked. Police were immediately dispatched to the location and during the ensuing investigation, Lavinia and John were located, along with two other gang members.

The Six Mile Wayfarer House was thoroughly searched and the grounds dug up. Filled with hidden passages, the Sherriff reportedly found items that could be traced to dozens of travelers, a tea laced with an herb that could put someone to sleep for hours, a mechanism that could be triggered to open the floorboards beneath the bed, and in the basement there were a couple of bodies dug up, but nothing to tie them to the Fishers for sure.

John Fisher surrendered the group in an effort to protect his wife and shield her from possible gunfire. Later, during interrogation, he again attempted to protect Lavinia by giving the identities of all involved in the gang.

Nearly a full year elapsed between the time of their arrest and their execution. The Fishers pleaded not guilty but were ordered to be held in jail till their trial. Their co-conspirators were released on bail. At their trial the jury rejected their please of innocence and found them guilty of highway robbery, a capital offense.

The Fishers occupied themselves with plans to escape, as they were housed together at the Charleston, South Carolina Jail in a 6x8 cell not heavily guarded. They began making a rope from jail linens, which was used to drop down to the ground.

John made it out but the rope broke, leaving Lavinia trapped in the cell. Not willing to go without his wife, he returned to the jail and the two were kept under much tighter security. The Constitutional Court rejected their appeals and both were sentenced to be hanged.

Lavinia had concocted a plan in her in mind to make sure she was not executed. At the time in South Carolina you could not execute a woman who was married. When Lavinia mentioned this at her trial the judge told her that they would kill her husband first, so that she would become widowed.

On the gallows in front of the Old City Jail before John’s execution, he asked the minister to read a letter he had composed. Before a crowd of some 2,000 people, the letter insisted on his innocence and asked for mercy for those who had done him wrong in the judicial process. He then began to verbally plead his case before the gathered crowd and asked for their forgiveness before he was hanged.

Lavinia Fisher made another plan and decided to be executed in a wedding dress. She was a woman of legendary beauty and hoped that with a priest present, she could seduce a man into marrying her. When this failed to happen and Lavinia realized she was running out of time, before the executioner could tighten the noise, she said to the crowd, “If any of you has a message for the devil, give it to me – I’ll deliver it.”, or “If any of you has a message for the devil, Tell me now – for I will be seeing him in a moment.”

Then she jumped off of the gallows and committed suicide herself much rather than having someone execute her. Legend says she was actually swinging on the noose, screaming and kicking, and still alive for 15 minutes until she finally died. Not quite reaching the ground, she dangled into the crowd. Later, onlookers would say they had never seen such a wicked stare or chilling sneer as that which was on 27-year-old Lavinia’s face.

Though many sources say that the Fishers were buried in the Unitarian Church Graveyard located between King and Archdale Streets in Charleston , this is unlikely and may have been promoted by tour guides.

There was a Potter’s Field Cemetery next to the jail at the time, where most criminals were buried if their bodies weren’t claimed by family members. Additionally, church records have been searched, indicating no evidence that they were buried there.

Sometimes the legend is more fun to tell, and this one has lived on for a while in Charleston lore. So, while Fisher is claimed to be the first female serial killer in the United States, that distinction likely belongs to Jane Toppan, who confessed to 31 murders in 1901, and who was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Jane Toppan was a 26-year-old nurse from Boston, Massachusetts who gave lethal injections of morphine to 31 hospital patients, and was suspected of having killed an additional 70 patients over the course of a two-decade career.

They call nurses, “Angels of Mercy” – and to all appearances, Jane Toppan fit the bill. Besides her obvious competence, she seemed to be a sensitive, sympathetic woman who had worked for some of Boston’s best families.

Born Honora Kelley in Boston in 1854, Toppan lost her mother in infancy to Tuberculosis. Her father, a tailor, went insane and was confined to an asylum after he was found in his shop, trying to stitch his own eyelids together.

His four daughters lived briefly with their paternal grandmother before they were relegated to a local orphanage. Though never formally adopted by the Toppans, Honora took on the surname of her benefactors and eventually became known as Jane.

In 1885, Toppan began training to be a nurse at Cambridge Hospital. During her residency, she used her patients as guinea pigs in experiments with morphine and atropine. She would alter their prescribed dosages to see what it did to their nervous systems.

Toppan would administer a drug mixture to patients she chose as her victims, lie in bed with them, and hold them close to her as they died. She was recommended for the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital in 1889. She claimed several more victims there before being fired the following year.

Toppan began her poisoning spree in 1895 by killing her landlords. In 1899, she killed her foster sister, Elizabeth, with a dose of strychnine. In 1901, she moved in with Alden Davis and his family to take care of him after the death of his wife, whom Toppan herself had murdered.

Within weeks she killed Davis and two of his daughters. The surviving family members of the Davis family ordered a toxicology exam on Alden’s youngest daughter. The report found that she had been poisoned, and local authorities put a police tail on Toppan.

On October 29, 1901, she was arrested for murder. On June 23, 1902, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed for life in the Tauton Insane Hospital. She remained in Tauton for the rest of her life.

Jane Toppan is quoted as saying that her ambition was “to have killed more people – helpless people – than any other man or woman who ever lived . . . “ .

Which one of these two women has earned the title of the “First Female “ serial killer, is up to you to decide. Either way both of them have earned their place among many infamous killers. Looks can be deceiving as well as work ethic. Trust no one no matter how charismatic they may be, or you could be the next one who is “killed with kindness.”