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Jolly Jane Toppan, the Killer Nurse Obsessed With Death

Jolly Jane Toppan killed at least 31 people between 1880 and 1901, but the doctors who hired her thought she was one of their best nurses.

Jane Toppan

Today, psychiatrists say she was one of the most unusual serial killers in history. Like many serial killers, she had an unstable childhood. Unlike most female serial killers, she did it for the sexual thrill.

As her victims lay dying, she got a powerful erotic charge from holding and caressing them.

Jane Toppan couldn’t resist that excitement, and admitted she aspired “to have killed more people — helpless people — than any other man or woman who ever lived.”

Jane Toppan

She was born Honora Kelley around 1857 in Boston, the youngest of four girls in a poor Irish immigrant family. Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was a year old.

Her father, Peter Kelley, a tailor, lost his mind and was said to have sewn his eyelids shut.

Kelley — known as ‘Kelley the Crack’ — tried to raise the girls, but he was suspected of abusing them.

In 1863, Kelley took 8-year-old Delia and 6-year-old Honora to an orphanage called the Boston Female Asylum in the city’s South End. The orphanage placed girls in respectable families when they turned 10.

Boston Female Asylum

Delia supposedly became a prostitute and an alcoholic. Another sister, Nellie, ended up in an insane asylum.

Honora became an indentured servant to Mrs. Ann C. Toppan of Lowell, Mass. The Toppans passed her off as an Italian girl whose parents died at sea, because of the stigma associated with the Irish. They also renamed her “Jane Toppan,” which sounded less Irish. She died well in school and had many friends, but got unattractively fat.

Jane also displayed the earmarks of a sociopath, telling outrageous lies: her father sailed around the world, her sister married an English nobleman, her brother was decorated at Gettysburg by Abraham Lincoln.

Nursing

At 18, Jane Toppan graduated from Lowell High School. The Toppans freed Jane from her indenture and gave her $50, but she stayed in the household as a servant.

Young Jane Toppan

When Ann Toppan died, Elizabeth took over the house, and continued to treat Jane as a servant, though with more kindness than her mother.

Elizabeth married a church deacon, Oramel Brigham, who moved into the Toppan house. But something — some strain or dispute — caused Jane to move out of the house she’d lived in for 20 years.

At 33, Jane Toppan started her training as a nurse at Cambridge Hospital in 1887. There she earned her nickname, ‘Jolly Jane,’ for her friendly outgoing personality. She liked to gossip, though, and celebrated the dismissal of students she didn’t like. She lied that the Tsar of Russia had offered her a nursing job, and she probably stole small things. Many of her fellow students grew to detest her.

The hospital administration grew concerned over her obsession with autopsies, but didn’t know she experimented with morphine and atropine on her elderly patients.

Boston City Hospital female ward around 1890

One patient, Amelia Phinney had an operation in 1887. Afterward, she said, Jane Toppan gave her a dose of bitter medicine, causing her to lose consciousness. Jane climbed into her bed and kissed her all over her face, but something startled her and she stopped.

The next morning Phinney decided it had all been a dream. Fourteen years later, Jane Toppan was arrested, and Phinney realized she’d had no dream.

Two Faces of Jane Toppan

Jane Toppan got a job at Massachusetts General Hospital, but lost it because she recklessly gave out opiates. Nevertheless, doctors recommended her as a private nurse to their wealthy clients.

Massachusetts General Hospital. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Outside of her job she guzzled beer, told dirty jokes, gossiped madly and enjoyed turning her friends against each other. But to the doctors and their patients she seemed a highly skilled professional, compassionate and cheerful.

Nurse Jane Toppan was earning $25 a week when women earned an average of $5 a week. She was also getting a sexual thrill, she later admitted, from climbing into bed with her patients as she murdered them.

Killing Spree

She befriended her elderly landlord and his wife, but killed them one by one. She later explained they had gotten ‘feeble and fussy’ and ‘old and cranky.’ Her colleagues in nursing school remembered her saying there was no use keeping old people alive.

In 1889, 70-year-old Mary McLear fell ill on a visit to Cambridge. Her doctor sent Jane Toppan, ‘one of my best nurses,’ to care for her. Jane poisoned Mary McLear.

A month later she killed a close friend with strychnine so she could take her job as dining hall matron at St. John’s Theological School in Cambridge. She got the job, but it didn’t last. The administration couldn’t ignore complaints of her incompetence and missing money.

Marriage Plot

Elizabeth Toppan Brigham, Jane’s foster sister, often invited her to come visit and stay in the house she grew up in. Jane sometimes took her up on the invitation.

Jolly Jane was vacationing in Buzzard’s Bay in the summer of 1899 when she targeted Elizabeth Brigham. Elizabeth complained of depression, and Jane invited her down to the Cape.

One day she took Elizabeth to the beach for a picnic of cold corned beef, taffy and mineral water laced with strychnine.

“I held her in my arms and watched with delight as she gasped her life out,” Jane later said.

Jane Toppan then insinuated herself into the household of Elizabeth’s widower, Oramel Brigham, because she wanted to marry him.

With three days she killed Brigham’s housekeeper, 77-year-old Edna Bannister. She took over from Edna and tried to impress Oramel Brigham with her housekeeping skills. Brigham made it clear he didn’t want her as a housekeeper or as a wife.

Jane Toppan decided to win his love by poisoning him and then nursing him back to health. That didn’t work either, so she threatened to claim he’d gotten her pregnant. An enraged Oramel Brigham ordered Jolly Jane Toppan out of the house.

She tried to commit suicide with an overdose of morphine, but failed and went to the hospital. Upon her release, she visited an old friend, Sarah Nichols, who lived with her brother in Amherst, N.H.

Suspicious Minds

By 1901, a Massachusetts state detective was following Jane Toppan. He suspected her of killing the entire family of Alden Davis .

Jane had rented a cottage in Bourne from the Davis family, but she hadn’t kept up with the rent. Alden Davis’ wife Mattie came to Cambridge to collect, but Jane killed her with a cocktail of morphine and atropine. Then she moved in with the elderly Alden Davis to take care of him.

Jane Toppan took care of Alden Davis all right. She killed him and then two of his married daughters, Minnie Gibbs and Geraldine Gordon.

Minnie Gibbs’ father-in-law suspected the sudden deaths of an entire healthy family had to do with foul play. He consulted a toxicologist and got a judge to order Minnie’s body exhumed. Investigation revealed she died of morphine and atropine poisoning.

Taunton State Hospital, 1987 (since demolished)

Police arrested Jane Toppan in Amherst on Oct. 29, 1901.

Jolly Jane Toppan went to trial for murder in the summer of 1902. She confessed to her lawyer she killed at least 31 people, perhaps as many as 100.

She claimed she started her killing spree because a boyfriend dumped her when she was 16. A Lowell office worker gave her a promise ring, but moved to Holyoke, Mass., and fell in love with someone else.

“If I had been a married woman, I probably would not have killed all of those people,” she said. “I would have had my husband, my children and my home to take up my mind.”

An eight-hour trial took place in Barnstable County Courthouse. A jury deliberated for 27 minutes and found Jane Toppan not guilty by reason of insanity. She spent the rest of her life at Taunton State Hospital, dying on Aug. 17, 1938.

Some attendants remembered her calling them into her room and smiling. “Get some morphine, dearie,” she said, “and we’ll go out in the ward. You and I will have a lot of fun seeing them die.”

This story last updated in 2022. If you enjoyed it, you may also want to read ‘Married to a Murderer, H.W. Mudgett’ here. Images: Boston City Hospital female ward courtesy Boston City Archives via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0. Boston City Hospital surgical ward via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0.

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Connecticut Mystery: The Unsolved Murder of Jerusha Brewster

Amos and Jerusha Brewster of Norwich, Conn., married in 1761, and would both die famously: he in a battle that helped turn the American Revolution toward victory and she in a murder that remains unsolved to this day.

For Amos, life ended in 1777 on the battlefield at Fort Mifflin in Philadelphia.

The British army sought to finish off the Americans. British general William Howe was ensconced in Philadelphia while George Washington and his army retreated toward Valley Forge.

A Hero’s Death

British naval ships proceeded up the Delaware River with needed supplies. A force of 200 to 400 Americans stationed at Fort Mifflin, including Amos Brewster, had orders to prevent them from reaching Philadelphia.

For nearly six weeks, this small contingent of men succeeded in stopping the British Navy from completing its mission. Bombarded daily, the American soldiers rebuilt their fort each night. Then on November 15, a force of six British ships armed with more than 200 cannon approached the fort, which had only 10 guns.

Jerusha Brewster lived in Canterbury, Connecticut with her daughter and son-in-law.poison

At one point, more than 1,000 cannon shots an hour poured down upon the fort. That night the Americans, with no remaining ammunition, had to torch the fort and evacuate. Their contribution to history: delaying the British advance while Washington dug in at Valley Forge.

Amos, however, died in the action.

The Brewster genealogy proudly notes: Amos Brewster served in the Revolutionary War and died of wounds received at Fort Mifflin, he being one of the heroic three hundred who defended the fort so valiantly when besieged by the British. The old New England valor was in Amos and he fell with his face toward the foe.

Jerusha Brewster

Jerusha Brewster, now a widow and living at the couple’s Canterbury, Conn., home, raised the couple’s four children alone. And by 1800 she was living with her daughter and son-in-law, Lovisa and James Morse.

Jerusha Brewster had a difficult relationship with her son-in-law. Early in 1802, Jerusha left home for several weeks, and upon returning in April her fortunes took a turn for the worse.

Newspaper accounts say that the morning after she returned home, Jerusha made pancakes for her daughter and three grandchildren:

“She had been absent from the family for more than a fortnight; she left a bowl of flour in her cupboard; and the morning after her return she made some pancakes of the flour,” reported the newspaper. “While she was preparing her breakfast, two of her grandchildren came into her room, to whom she gave cake. Soon after, her daughter, Mrs. Morse, who always treated her mother well, came in with her child of nine months old; she ate two, giving the child a piece, and went out.”

According to the newspaper, Jerusha Brewster then began her breakfast. She had nearly finished when the children and the mother were taken with puking.

“The daughter, Mrs. Morse, sent word to her mother not to eat any more of the cakes; she came into her daughter’s room, and in about five minutes was taken with the most violent and racking vomiting.

“The physician was called and by proper antidotes arrested the fatal progress of the poison in Mrs. Morse and her children, but had no efficacy upon the old lady.”

Poison

A jury at the inquest subsequently gave a verdict of ‘poison, and by design.’

“The body was opened and a considerable quantity of arsenic taken out,” reported the newspaper. “The cakes that remained were examined, and pieces of poison were found in them. “

Suspicion immediately fell on her son-in-law James, for it was well known that James and Jerusha Brewster had lived together ‘quite unhappily.’ James had also served in the Revolutionary War; and some sources say he served as a teen under General Washington.

With no proof against James in the murder, the authorities could do nothing more than question him and let him go. He and Lovisa would move to Centerville in western New York, where they passed away, she in 1841 and he in 1845.

At the funeral of Jerusha Brewster, the minister, Rev. Waterman, chose to deliver a sermon aimed at her killer. He spoke on the Biblical passage from Corinthians: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be paid back according to what he has done while in the body, whether good or evil.”

This story about Jerusha Brewster was updated in 2022.

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Jennie Cramer – New Haven’s “Beautiful Victim” of 1881

Jennie Cramer and her mother Christina had an awful fight on Thursday, August 4, 1881. Jennie and her friend Blanche Douglass had been dating two of the Malleys – members of one of New Haven’s wealthiest families – and they hadn’t come home the night before.

Cover of the book about the murder of Jennie Cramer, The Beautiful Victim of Elm City

If she didn’t stop her scandalous behavior, Christina threatened, Jennie, 21, would have to find her own place to live. Jennie insisted she did nothing wrong, that she only spent the night at the hotel where Blanche was staying because Blanche was ill and she could find no one to accompany her home.

In truth, the two girls had stayed at the Malley mansion. Jennie thought it would sound better to say they had stayed in Blanche’s rooms. But Jennie probably did believe the rest of it – that Blanche was sick. The best evidence suggests that Jennie never knew exactly what was going on with the Malleys and Blanche.

Walter Malley

Walter Malley’s father, Edward, owned Malley & Co., a very successful dry goods store. The department stores it spawned would remain in business through 1982. Walter was a shy boy, musical and artistic but unambitious. He attended college but never graduated, and lived at his family’s mansion.

His cousin Jimmy was more outgoing and a harder worker than Walter. The two had met Blanche (one of several names she used) at a brothel in New York, and she was “dating” Walter.

Jimmy, meanwhile, was attracted to Jennie Cramer. Jennie’s father, a cigar maker, was far less wealthy than the Malleys. Jennie herself is generally described as beautiful, but not extraordinarily smart.

Illustration of the discovery of Jennie Cramer from The Beautiful Victim of Elm City

Nevertheless, Jennie was very protective of her reputation. She hoped her beauty would allow her to marry well. While she was open to Jimmy’s attention, she did not intend to sleep with him.

With this in mind, Blanche, Walter and Jimmy cooked up a scheme. The three would try to find a way to have Jimmy and Jennie spend the night together. Jennie never knew of the scheme, and in all likelihood never knew that Blanche was a prostitute.

Savin Rock

On Wednesday night, they put their plan into action. Walter’s father Edward was away at Saratoga. The mansion was vacant. The four spent some time drinking and eating and singing, and then Blanche began to protest that she was feeling ill. Blanche would later say she heard Jimmy and Jennie fighting in the next room that Wednesday night, as Jennie fought off his advances – apparently successfully.

After telling Jennie’s mother the altered version of the story, Blanche said she went to her dressmaker. She saw Jennie on a horse-pulled trolley headed to Savin Rock in West Haven, home of an amusement park. It was the last she ever saw of Jennie – or so she said.

Postcard of The Colonnade at Savin Rock.

Witnesses would later come forward and say they saw Jennie Cramer with two men and a woman who looked like Blanche and the Malleys at Savin Rock on Friday. With Jennie missing, her father began making the rounds looking for her.

He questioned Jimmy Malley, who said Jennie had spoken of going to New York, perhaps with Blanche. Walter made a show of taking a train toward the city, but turning back when he received a telegram at Stamford informing him Blanche was in New Haven.

No one knew where Jennie was. Until Saturday morning, when a fisherman at Savin Rock found a body – Jennie Cramer – in the surf. He pulled her to shore and ran for the police.

The first assumption was that she had drowned. But a cursory exam showed she had no water in her lungs. The next assumption was that she had killed herself because of the fight with her mother, but that, too, would soon seem far-fetched.

Arsenic and Lies

Over the next several weeks, some of the truth about Jennie Cramer began emerging. An autopsy revealed she had been raped. Further analysis found arsenic in her system. Some theorized that perhaps she had taken it herself, which some girls did to improve their complexion.

No, there was too much arsenic in her body to have been the residual effect of small doses of arsenic. Rather, she had taken a large dose and it killed her. Suicide made little sense, unless it was in despair over being attacked.

The more stones the police turned over, the worse things looked. When they discovered Blanche had told a slew of lies about herself in the initial inquiries, they arrested her and the Malleys. A grand jury declared Jimmy was the killer and that Walter and Blanche were his accomplices. They would have to stand trial.

The Edw. Malley Co. logo

While the case was proceeding, however, the Malleys did not stand idly by. Edward hired a team of lawyers and detectives. Rumors spread that he was paying off witnesses to change their stories – to become less sure they had witnessed the Malley boys with Jennie on the Thursday and Friday in question.

Blanche’s performance, even with legal coaching, was shaky. One of the Malley family, she would later say, asked how much money she would require to run away and get on the next steamer to Europe. Either confident of victory, or fearing she was being set up, Blanche refused.

The Trial

In the spring 1882, the trial kicked off. The press covered the salacious story extensively. New Haven at the time was a mini-melting pot of immigrants, with an entrepreneurial and clannish nature.

A small book was published about the case, and the Malleys tried to buy up every copy to shore up their image. There was little doubt among the public that the wealthy Jimmy Malley was guilty, but the jury found otherwise.

There was ample evidence that the Malleys and Blanche had lied repeatedly, but the judge instructing the jury told them there was only one question before them. Had the threesome poisoned Jennie Cramer with arsenic? On that point the jury found inadequate evidence to convict.

The shocking death of Jennie Cramer wreaked havoc on her family. Her father killed himself before the trial. Her mother, who became mentally unstable after the trial, followed suit and committed suicide in 1891.

Blanche Douglass would make headlines in the years after the trial a couple of times. Once she was accused of trying to blackmail the Malleys with incriminating letters Walter had written to her. She would later create a scandal by announcing that she and Walter had married, a story he immediately denied.

This story about Jennie Cramer was updated in 2023.

Image of Malley logo: By Self-made scan of vintage box., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24225778. Savin Rock PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10134715.

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How Maine’s Samuel Mayall Brought America its First Woolen Mill

Samuel Mayall didn’t just bring the first woolen mill to America. He gave Maine two of its first businesswomen, and a statesman who took a principled stand on slavery.

Mayall built his woolen mill in Gray, Maine, in the late 18^th century with ingenuity, hard work and a little industrial espionage.

Mayall Mill Postcard

Born in 1761, he came to New England from old England, in Yorkshire. Technology was beginning to emerge that could mechanize the centuries-old craft of processing wool into cloth. The woolen guilds were wary of the technology, fearing it would cause them to lose control of the woolen trade. They did their best to keep it to themselves.

English craft guilds dated back centuries, and dyers, fullers and weavers all had roles to play in the production of cloth. They were tightly regulated. Substandard products could get you fined, and apprentices and journeymen were not free to move from one master craftsman to another. The oppressive nature of the guilds prompted many to look for ways out.

The First Woolen Mill

Mayall, seeing the opportunity in unregulated America, smuggled some English trade secrets out of the country, bundled in cloth destined for sale to the Native Americans. Once in New England he set up shop, first in Boston with a horse-powered carding operation in 1788 or 1789. But he soon moved to Gray, where he built his mill on the Collyer Brook, which powered his wool carding and cloth dressing operation in 1791.

Mayall took in wool from farmers and brought it to his mill where he made it into cloth. The news of Mayall’s success was not well received by the English craft guilds, and they twice threatened him. Once they shipped him a hat threaded through with needles dipped in poison. The second time they mailed him a box containing pistols intended to detonate when opened. (They didn’t.)

Mayall Mills. Original mill is background, right. State of Maine photo.

Mayall Mills. Original mill in background, right. State of Maine photo.

Mayall prospered, however, serving for a time as town selectman and running his mill until 1831. After his death, two of his three daughters, Mary and Phanela, took over and ran the mill. At the same time, one of Mayall’s five sons, also named Samuel, entered politics. He served in the Maine Legislature and then represented Maine in Congress as a Democrat from 1853 to 1855.

‘Shaken off the lethargy’

Mayall broke with the Democrats over slavery, however. He switched to the Republican Party after Democratic President Franklin Pierce opened the door to expanded slavery in the Midwest. Mayall left the party in no uncertain terms delivering a fiery speech on the floor of the House:

The people of the free states are aroused. They have shaken off the lethargy which has so long rested upon them. They are prepared to grapple with this question of slavery and to wipe away the stain from the Federal Government. No magic wand will again pass over them, lulling them into quiet repose, while southern oppression shall wind its meshes about the limbs of the northern giant. Our Sampson will not be seduced to sleep on the lap of effeminate servility, while she shaves from him the locks in which his great strength lies. No sir, this federal government must be divorced from all support of the “peculiar institution.”

In 1855, the younger Samuel Mayall moved to Minnesota and later served in the Civil War. The Mayall Mills, meanwhile, under the leadership of his sisters, did a booming business supplying woolens for the Union troops, among other customers. They expanded and built a new mill to add to the output from the first. At its peak, Mayall Mills employed 20 people and produced 30,000 yards of woolen cloth in a year.

Samuel Mayall lived out his life after the war in St. Paul, Minn., where he died in 1892. His sisters sold the mill in 1879, and it closed for good around the turn of the century.

This story last updated in 2022.

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