She Was a Beloved Nurse — Until Her Poisonings Made Headlines Nationwide By Christina Coulter

In the late 1800s, Massachusetts nurse Jane Toppan was known for her easy laugh and tireless care — but behind the smile, the woman colleagues called “Jolly Jane” was poisoning patients by the dozen.

By the time she was arrested in 1901, Toppan had admitted to killing 31 people, though authorities formally charged her with just 12, according to Boston Magazine. Many were elderly or ill patients entrusted to her; others were people in her orbit — a foster sister, landlords, and members of a Cape Cod family who hired her as a private nurse.

Born Honora Kelley in Boston in 1854, she was surrendered as a child to the Boston Female Asylum after her mother died and her father could no longer care for the children. She was placed as an indentured servant with the Toppan family of Lowell and took their surname, per the Lowell Historical Society and the West End Museum.

By the 1880s, Toppan was training as a nurse and, colleagues said, living up to the nickname “Jolly Jane” for her sociable, upbeat manner. Behind that veneer, investigators later alleged, she was experimenting with morphine and atropine, bringing patients to the brink and back again.

Boston Magazine reported that during her training she was ultimately dismissed for administering opiates without a doctor’s order and leaving her shift early. She soon moved into private-duty nursing, where she had free run of patients’ homes — and limited supervision.

Her methods were intimate and methodical. She favored morphine and atropine, adjusting doses to slow breathing and cloud consciousness. According to The Indianapolis Journal in June 1902, she was described as one who would “gleefully fondle the patient, stare into the eyes as if it were to see the inner workings of the soul, do all possible to intensify the agony of the patients, and then when the end came she would become herself again.”

She also admitted that some killings brought sexual gratification and that she liked to be alone with her victims as they died, according to Boston Magazine.

Victims accumulated over the 1890s. In the mid-1890s, her former landlords Israel and Lovey Dunham died after sudden illnesses; Toppan later acknowledged poisoning them, according to Boston Magazine. In 1899, her foster sister Elizabeth Toppan Brigham died after a visit with Jane on the coast; Toppan would later confess to that poisoning as well, per the Lowell Historical Society.

The most publicized deaths came in 1901, when Toppan nursed Alden Davis at the family’s summer home in Cataumet on Cape Cod. Within weeks, Davis and two of his daughters — Mary “Minnie” Gibbs and Genevieve Gordon — were dead, per Boston Magazine. Relatives, rattled by the rapid cluster of losses, pressed for an autopsy; toxicology found morphine in one daughter’s system, prompting exhumations and a wider inquiry.

Toppan was arrested in October 1901. In custody and during subsequent examinations, she spoke chillingly about her motives.

“It is my ambition to have killed more people — more helpless people — than any man or woman who ever lived,” she said, according to Boston Magazine.

Asked whether she felt any guilt, she answered: “I have thought it all over, and I cannot detect the slightest bit of sorrow over what I have done,” per the West End Museum’s account of period coverage.

Her 1902 trial in Barnstable turned on sanity. Alienists — the era’s psychiatrists — testified that she was insane; prosecutors argued she knew exactly what she was doing. Toppan herself insisted she was sane, telling examiners she understood right from wrong, according to Boston Magazine.

The jury ultimately found her not guilty by reason of insanity, and she was committed to the Taunton Insane Hospital.

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She spent the rest of her life there. Contemporary write-ups and later museum histories note she never expressed remorse. Per the West End Museum, she dropped from 160 pounds to 80 in 1904 after suspecting, with bitter irony, that nurses were poisoning her.

Toppan died in 1938 at age 81, still a ward of the state.