Jolly Jane Toppan, A Real psycho

“Jolly” Jane Toppan was a serial killer in Massachusetts in the late 1800s. Toppan contended her life purpose was to “have killed more people – helpless people – than any other man or woman who ever lived.”

Jane was born to the name Nora and grew up in Boston’s Female Asylum, where undesirable female children were frequently abandoned. Nora and her sister, Delia, were raised in the BFA with over a hundred other kids. Nora was facilitated as an indentured servant to the widow, Ann Toppan, who altered Nora’s name to Jane. Her sister, Delia, was not as fortunate and was sent to the roads for prostitution when she was of age.

Jane was cleared of her responsibilities when she was eighteen and given $50. She decided to work for the family as a servant until Ann passed and Ann’s daughter wedded and left home. Jane then attended Cambridge Hospital in Boston to educate to be a nurse.

Toppan worked as a student nurse and got along nicely with her patients; she even falsified their medical records to keep them in the hospital for lengthier stays to get to know them. She had powerful feelings toward aged patients, feeling they were unnecessary and not worth keeping alive. She murdered at least a dozen people while working as a student nurse – she dosed her elderly patients with opium to see how they would respond to the drug, upping the dose to see them suffer and finally die. She started poisoning with other drugs, on occurrence she would stage an illness with poison and nurse them back to a “miraculous recovery.”

She worked as a personal nurse for families around Boston for years without detection; murdering aged family members and stealing their belongings. She even murdered her landlords, fellow doctors and nurses, and friends as she got exhausted with their company. She wasn’t captured until she used a metallic-based poison on a casualty, which eventually provoked an investigation.

In court in 1902, Toppan was found not guilty. She then told her attorney that she murdered more than one hundred people and occasionally got into bed with her sufferers as they shivered from the poison. She was instantly scheduled for another prosecution and penalized to life in an asylum.

When she initially came to the asylum she declined to eat, afraid that her food may be poisoned – which the newspapers gloated as ironic revenge. She kept up in the asylum until she perished in 1938 at the age of eighty-one. There was a media reanimation of the story after her demise, contending her to be America’s first serial killer.

There is a book about Jane Toppan and her killings, named Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer by Harold Schechter.

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