There's more to local murder history (female edition) than Lizzie Borden

You couldn't grow up in Massachusetts without knowing about Fall River's own Lizzie Borden. 

You know, Lizzie Borden, as in:

Lizzie Broden took an axe,
Gave her mother 40 whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father 41. 

And then there was the Chad Mitchell Trio tune. The Chad Mitchell Trio was a commercial folkie group popular in the 1960s. They weren't purists like Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Pete Seeger, Tom Rush, and Bob Dylan. They were more akin to the Kingston Trio. But I liked them just fine, especially in my snobby pre-purist days. (As I did the Kingston Trio.) I had something of a crush on Chad Mitchell, the lead guy and a cutie (IMHO). Anyway, they had a song about Lizzie Borden that had this as the chorus:

Cause you can't chop your poppa up in Massachusetts
Not even if it's planned as a surprise (A surprise)
No, you can't chop your poppa up in Massachusetts
You know how neighbors love to criticize

What you don't grow up knowing is that a) it was Lizzie's stepmother; and b) she was acquitted of their murder. For Lizzie, the jury is still quasi out, but most of history comes in with a verdict of she did it. And got away with it because she was a woman from a well-to-do WASP family, when killers were thought to be men from poor immigranty communities. (Sound familiar?)

Anyway, statistically, even if Lizzie was guilty as sin, more men than women are murderers by a long shot. Or a short shot. Or a stabbing. Or a strangulation. Etc.

And that goes for serial killers as well.

But there are female serial killers. Sure, there are lot fewer of them. And they also differ from male serial killers in that females tend to kill people they know, often the elderly, often by poisoning, often for financial gain. But they are out there. (Source: New-Medical)

One female serial killer I'd never heard of - until I saw a Blue Sky mention from Boston's West End Museum - was Jane Toppan who, largely in her capacity as a nurse, poisoned at least 31 people during a spree that took place between 1895 and 1901. What she lacked mostly was a financial motive. 

Toppan, who admitted to have committed the murders to satisfy a sexual fetish, was quoted as saying that her ambition was "to have killed more people—helpless people—than any other man or woman who ever lived." (Source for this and all other info on Toppan (including her picture): Wikipedia)

Yikes! "Sexual fetish." (She supposedly would fondle her victims while they were dying.) And wanting to kill more than anyone else? Sounds more like a guy thing, but whatever. She was quite the psycho, with quite the history. 

Jane Toppan - nickname Jolly Jane; ho-ho - wasn't born Jane Toppan. Rather, she was born in Boston in 1854 as Honora Kelley, daughter of Irish immigrants who, given the timing, likely fled the famine to make their life in Amerikay. 

Kelley's mother died of TB when Honora was young, and her father was apparently an alcoholic and batshit crazy. (His nickname wasn't jolly anything. It was Kelley the Crack, for crackpot.)

In later years, Kelley was said to have sewn his own eyelids closed while working as a tailor.

That sure sounds sane.

Anyway, at a young age, Honora and one of her sisters were sent to an orphanage. After a couple of years, Honora (now age 8) became an indentured servant in the Toppan home in Lowell. She took on their last name, and started calling herself Jane Toppan. 

It looks like Jane Toppan had an opportunity for decency and normalcy. (One of her sisters became a prostitute, the other was - not surprisingly - committed to an insane asylum.) She had the chance to become a nurse, training at Cambridge Hospital.

Unlike her early years, where she was described as brilliant and terrible, at the hospital she was well-liked, bright, and friendly, earning her the nickname "Jolly Jane". Once she became close with the patients, she picked her favorite ones, who were normally elderly and very sick. During her residency, Toppan used her patients as guinea pigs in experiments with morphine and atropine; she altered their prescribed dosages to see what it did to their nervous systems. However, she spent considerable time alone with patients, making up fake charts, medicating them to drift in and out of consciousness, and even getting into bed with them. 

How Dr. Mengele of her. Kinda sorta.

From Cambridge Hospital, she moved on to Mass General. "My" hospital. Shudder, shudder. But they apparently sussed something out, and after a couple of years she was fired. After returning to Cambridge, she "was soon dismissed for administering opiates recklessly." 

On to private duty nursing, where her killing spree really took off. She killed not only the people she was taking care of, but their family members as well. Eventually, the authorities figured out that Jane Toppan wasn't exactly Clara Barton or Florence Nightengale. 

Kelley/Toppan ended up spending the rest of what turned out to be a long life - she died in 1938, age 81 - in an insane asylum.

Toppan is often considered an "angel of mercy", a type of serial killer who takes on a caretaker role and attacks the vulnerable and dependent, though she also murdered for seemingly more personal reasons...She later described her motivation as a paralysis of thought and reason, a strong urge to poison.

That strong urge got her to, among other whack acts, poison "herself to evoke the sympathy of men who courted her." I'd say those fellows caught a lucky break when they broke up.

This is just such a weird and interesting story. You never know what you're gonna learn when something pops up on your timeline. Guess there's more to local murder history (female edition) than Lizzie Borden.