She murdered 31 and snuggled victims as they died for sexual kicks - the 'jolly' killer you've never heard of
Jane Toppan had become a crutch to the prominent Davis family as they were struck by tragedy after tragedy.
It was summer and the wealthy railroad dynasty had welcomed their longtime friend and adored ‘jolly’ nurse into their idyllic Cape Cod home.
But, one by one, the family members suddenly dropped dead.
In just over a month, four had died - succumbing to a seemingly unrelated myriad of illnesses.
Family matriarch Mary ‘Mattie’ Davis was first, with her death explained away by her diabetes.
Days later, her daughter Genevieve Gordon was dead from apparent heart failure.
After losing his wife and one of his daughters, Alden Davis - who made the family fortune running the railroad from Boston to Cape Cod - suffered an apparently fatal stroke.
His other daughter Mary Gibbs would be dead within days - seemingly of a broken heart.
But to Gibbs’ father-in-law, the sudden wipeout of the entire Davis family was oddly suspicious.
Something sinister was going on.
Toppan, the popular Boston nurse and Davis family friend who had cared for each of the four victims, was harboring a macabre secret.
'Jolly' Jane Toppan was one of America's first and most prolific female serial killers, murdering at least 31 victims
As a nurse, Toppan (pictured) killed patients and anyone else who got in her way with lethal doses of morphine
For years, Toppan was known by the affectionate nickname ‘Jolly’ Jane due to her warm and jovial bedside manner.
But, in reality, she was an ‘Angel of Death’ - killing patients and anyone else who got in her way with lethal doses of morphine.
Some were injected with a fatal dose of the drug while others were poisoned with Toppan’s special laced bottles of Hunyadi mineral water.
In a sick twist, Toppan reveled in toying with her victims' lives by bringing them to and from the brink of death with alternating doses of morphine and atropine.
As her helpless victims lay dying, the ‘jolly’ nurse would curl up in bed with them - getting a twisted sexual thrill while they gave their last breaths.
By the time ‘Jolly’ Jane Toppan was exposed as one of America’s first female serial killers, she had claimed the lives of at least 31 victims, according to her own remorseless confession letter.
But many fear the number could truly top 100.
‘She really was probably the first woman serial killer,’ Diane Ranney, the former assistant director of the Jonathan Bourne Public Library in Massachusetts who has researched the Toppan case for decades, tells DailyMail.com.
‘[But] it seems odd to me that the fame really never reached her.’
Jane Toppan's shocking confession letter was released in the New York Journal in 1902
Despite her sadistic murder spree, Toppan is a serial killer that few have heard of.
Even in the Cape Cod town of Bourne - where many of the murders took place - Ranney says the chilling past is a little known tale among the community.
‘People don't know about it… for some reason, it's one of those well-hidden secrets,’ she says.
Born Honora Kelly in Boston’s south end in 1854 to Irish immigrant parents, Toppan’s start in life was turbulent to say the least.
Her mom died when she was only a small child, leaving her and her sister to be raised by her alcoholic father.
Some victims were poisoned with laced bottles of Hunyadi mineral water
In a bizarre twist, her dad - in the throes of mental health issues - sewed his own eyelids shut and abandoned his two daughters at the Boston Female Asylum.
Honora was later taken in as an indentured servant by the wealthy Toppan family and her name changed to Jane Toppan.
‘I'm probably the only person who's been researching her who feels sorry for her,’ Ranney says.
‘Everyone else calls her a monster, which in a way she was, but the more I looked into things, the more I thought, she's a very interesting person.’
Through her years of research, Ranney says it’s ‘a question of why she was like she was’.
It’s a question Toppan gave a curious answer for after she was caught.
In her young adulthood, Toppan was jilted at the altar by her fiancé.
She went on to blame her lover - and being unmarried - for sending her down her dark and deadly path.
‘If I had been a married woman I probably would not have killed all these people,’ she infamously claimed.
Rejected by her lover, Toppan decided to train at Cambridge Hospital to be a nurse - a vocation that would give her the knowledge of drugs and position of trust that she would later exploit.
A courtroom sketch of the trial of the 'Angel of Death' Jane Toppan in the Boston Post in 1902
When Toppan started working as a nurse, she became an instant hit, earning her the nickname Jolly Jane as she would always joke with her patients.
‘She had a rather strange way of expressing her love for her patients. She took very, very good care of them… But in the end, she wound up killing them,’ Ranney says.
It is unclear exactly when the killing spree started.
During her time at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Cambridge School of Nursing, many patients mysteriously died in her care.
When she then turned to private nursing, providing her rich patients with home visits, there were also curious spates of fatalities.
But surprisingly, the deaths were always explained away by some illness or another - and no alarm was raised.
Several years would pass before anyone suspected the nurse of killing the patients she had doted on with such care.
For other victims, Toppan’s murders were far more personal.
There was her foster sister Elizabeth Brigham who she had grown up with.
Toppan also murdered her foster sister Elizabeth Brigham (pictured) who she had grown up with
Her best friend Sarah Connors whose job she wanted to take at a theology school.
Her love interest’s sister Edna Bannister who she felt was getting in the way of a romance.
And her former landlords Israel and Lovey Dunham.
Toppan’s luck only ran out when she murdered the Davis family in summer 1901 after they had dared to ask her to finally pay the $500 in overdue rent she owed.
Even Toppan went on to admit this may have finally been a step too far, declaring: ‘That was the greatest mistake of my life.’
Following pressure from Gibbs’ father-in-law, her body was exhumed and a fatal dose of morphine discovered.
Toppan’s depraved killing spree was a secret no more.
In October 1901, the 47-year-old was arrested for murder.
Ultimately, she only stood trial for the murder of Gibbs in a case that hit headlines across the US as the media and public poured over the story of a perverse female serial killer who got a sexual kick out of killing.
Victims who lived to tell the tale came forward with their shocking stories.
One patient described Toppan plying her with a mystery drink and then clambering on top of her, kissing and caressing her while she lay suffering in a hospital bed.
Jane Toppan was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was sent to the Massachusetts psychiatric hospital in Taunton (pictured) where she lived until her death in 1938
At the time, the woman passed the bizarre encounter off as a dream - only learning how close she came to being another victim when Toppan was arrested.
While suspected of 11 murders, a bombshell confession letter published in the New York Journal revealed Toppan’s actual death toll was at least 31.
In the shocking declaration, Toppan boasted that her depraved goal was ‘to have killed more people - helpless people - than any other man or woman who lived’.
She also described being driven by an ‘uncontrollable passion’ for death, writing that: ‘No voice has as much melody in it as the one crying for life; no eyes as bright as those about to become fixed and glassy; no face so beautiful as the one pulseless and cold.’
Ranney says there is no indication that Toppan deliberately chose a career in nursing to give her the opportunity to kill.
‘I don't think it started out like that. I think she may have accidentally killed someone without realizing… she may have just decided, “oh, look what I can do. Wow, that really gave me a thrill.” But I don't think she became a nurse for that reason,’ she says.
‘I think part of it was a sense that she was powerful.’
A courtroom sketch of the trial of Jane Toppan in the Boston Daily Globe on November 1, 1901
Toppan (pictured) would climb into bed with her victims and get a sexual thrill from the moment they died
More than a century on, however, questions remain as to whether it was really Toppan who penned the shocking confession letter.
Ranney isn’t so sure.
‘I've always wondered whether it really was [her],’ she says.
‘It did not strike me that it was her writing… just the way it's written. I don't think she would have been quite so blunt about things. It just seems to me that her nature was to be more secretive.’
She adds: ‘But then again, by that time, she may have decided that she was just going to confess because it brought her more notoriety.’
Toppan was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was sent to the Massachusetts psychiatric hospital in Taunton.
She lived there until her death in 1938.
Somewhat ironically, Toppan would often refuse to eat and drink at the facility - paranoid that someone was trying to poison her.
