← The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told
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- [00:07]
Diversion Audio
Diversion Audio.
- [00:11]
Mary Kay McBrayer
A Note this episode contains mature content and descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners. Please take care in listening. You've no doubt heard of morphine, and you probably know that today it's used to treat moderate or severe pain. Morphine is an opiate which makes it very addictive, so physicians tend to prescribe it only in very dire or end of life situations. It's been a lot of help to a lot of people. You've probably also heard of opiate overdoses. Today we're most familiar with heroin overdoses. Morphine overdoses look similar. Symptoms include slowed breathing, drowsiness, nausea, constipation, vomiting, seizures and pinpoint pupils. What you likely haven't heard of is atropine. It inhibits the nervous system. Today we use atropine to treat certain types of pesticide poisonings and slow heart rates. It also has other uses like pupil dilation. In fact, pupil dilation is a big side effect of atropine. So are fast, shallow breathing, muscle stiffness, diarrhea and chest pain. Like morphine, atropine was readily available in the 1890s when this episode's story takes place. Both drugs were sold over the counter at the time, no prescription necessary. A nurse would notice something interesting about these two drugs. Their side effects are in opposition. For example, morphine shrinks the pupils while atropine dilates the them. If you were taking both, it would be hard to identify either in your system based on that side effect. A nurse would also know how to dose each medicine and at what point overdose could occur. It would just take a little experimenting to find out how much of each drug could take a patient up to the edge of death without pushing them over. But the thing about boundaries is you never really know where they are until you cross them. Welcome to the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. I'm a writer of true crime, which means I live inside the research wormhole. I'm constantly reading about crime, but I'm not necessarily interested in the kind of gory details that make headlines. I'm more interested in the people behind crime stories and what we can learn about society by looking at their experiences. That's what I get into here every week when I dig into crimes where a woman is not just a victim. She might be the detective, the lawyer, the witness, the coroner, the criminal, or a combination of those roles. As you probably already know, women can do anything. If you've been listening for a little while, you know that I sometimes say if you want evidence of my true crime obsession? You can read my book, America's First Female Serial Killer, Jane Toppan in the Making of a Monster. And I still want you to do that. But today I'm so excited to tell you I'm covering her story here. This will be a condensed version of what's in my book, but don't go thinking I can even try to fit a book's worth of research into one episode. I'm going to need a little more time than that. So this is the first of a three part miniseries about a precocious little orphan, one who was abused and ignored for so long that her acting out behaviors eventually escalated to scandalous multiple murders of people who betrayed her, of people who loved her, and of strangers. I'll tell you all about it after the break.
- [05:26]
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- [06:30]
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- [06:59]
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- [07:40]
Mary Kay McBrayer
I know you know this rigmarole. You're at a work event, a wedding, a one year old's birthday party, and someone finds out about your interest in true crime. And then they look at you like you did the crime. Sometimes they outright ask, how can you be interested in that? Gosh, I couldn't possibly how do you sleep at night? And I probably don't have to tell you friend. Sometimes I don't. I didn't, not really when I learned about Jane Toppin. But it wasn't Jane that kept me awake at night. Not at first. I was still trying to reconcile the thought of a child I felt that I knew with the monster that they became from firsthand experience. After college, I did a 10 month term of service at a residential treatment facility for emotionally disturbed kids. That's a mouthful. I know. And that's their terminology. What it actually looked like was upsetting. I was assigned to tutor and mentor a unit of 10 to 12 high cognitive teenage boys. Most of them had explosive rage disorders and severe issues with authority. I mean, if every adult in your life had disappointed you or actively harmed you when you were that age, there's a high probability that you'd be experiencing these things too. Most of my boys were wards of the state. Some of them had kids of their own. Most of them already had criminal records. This was their sort of last stop before a juvenile detention center. The really saddest, most heartbreaking thing of all though, was when the kids did learn, they did use their coping skills and they got discharged and they had nowhere to go. Before you get mad at me for violating HIPAA regulations, everything I'm about to tell you about two of the boys at this facility is now public knowledge. You can read more about them through the links in the show notes for this episode. So back to the story. I came to learn the hard way that if I didn't hear about the boys after they were discharged, that was good. I mean, I would ask after them and the direct care people would tell me where they were, what grade, stuff like that. But if the news came to me while I wasn't looking for it, it was never ever good news. One of the boys I heard about was shot and Killed after I left. His name was Darion. He was so fun to be around. The kind of kid where you could just tell if any one little thing in his life had been different. He'd have been unstoppable, like an athlete or a business person. He was smart and charismatic and he could work a room. My friend told me the person who shot him thought that they were shooting his dad, but I don't know if that's true. He was 17. Another of the boys, Michael was low cognitive, so he really shouldn't have been on our unit by definition. But because his medications were so effective, though, and his behaviors were so under control now, they had moved him out of his former unit and onto our less locked down unit. He had been at the facility off and on since he was 5. That place was the most he knew of a home. Two years after I finished my term, my best friend called me and told me not to turn on the news. So obviously I turned on the news and Michael was in police custody. Miraculously, no one had been hurt after he charged in elementary school with an automatic weapon. I didn't even need to read the article to know what had happened. Michael had aged out of the system, had no support and had no way to get his medicine. Or he just forgot to take it. And we had failed him. When I say we, I don't mean we at the facility. I mean we as a culture, as a society. So when I tell you the story I'm about to tell you about Jane Toppan, I really saw Michael Hill. They're both monsters. And it is not easy for me to say that about Michael. We had to do a feelings check in before and after every module event. When I was serving there. The other teenage boys would say stuff like, my name is Brandon and I feel straight, or my name is Shane and I feel good. And Michael always said, my name is Michael and I feel happy. He said, yes, ma'am. He called me Ms. McBrayer. And he was always asking if he could help, but there's. There's just no getting around it. He did something evil. I just really don't think it had to be that way. So let's talk about Jane Toppin, the nurse who would evade suspicion of the murders she committed for over a decade. Or rather, let's talk about Honora, because that's what her parents named her. She was born to Peter and Bridget Kelly, and she was the youngest of either two or four children, depending on where you get your information. Their situation was dire. When Honora was Just a toddler. Her mother died of tuberculosis. That left Peter Kelly a tailor to provide for his kids on his own. Now, Peter Kelly was an Irish immigrant in Massachusetts. And this was in the 1870s, a time when businesses posted signs in their windows with the acronym Nina meaning no Irish need Apply. They couldn't even be bothered to spell their discrimination all the way out. So Peter did his best for a while, but with a history of substance abuse and unspecified mental illness, he felt himself failing his family. So he took two daughters, Delia and Honora, to the Boston Female Asylum. The Boston Female Asylum was actually not an asylum like we think of them today. It was more of an orphanage. And for the time, it was a very progressive one. Child Protective Services wasn't a thing. So this was as good as it got for unfortunate children. I'm staunchly against the term underprivileged, so we're calling it what it is, unfortunate. Essentially, this was a temporary home for orphans. And if the kids weren't orphans, then parents who couldn't provide for them in any capacity, quote, surrender them. That required that they never, ever come back to see their daughters. It had to be a clean break, and it had to be forever. And if you think that sounds somewhat unreasonable and sort of cruel, don't worry, it gets worse. Yes, the Boston Female Asylum wanted to do right by the children. I really believe that they did want that. But like I said, it ain't no cps. So while the girls lived there, they learned practical skills. Cleaning, cooking, mending, sewing. Only the things absolutely necessary for working class women. Then when the girls turned 11, they could be indentured out. You heard me, right. After their education was complete, a local family could indenture a child to work in their home until they turned 18. But wait, there's more. When the child became an adult at 18, depending on the contract, which they had no part in, never had to sign or approve shit, they would receive from their indentured family $50 and or a new set of clothes. And then, well, a lot of families invited the women to stay on as unpaid help or pay them a little to stay on in the same capacity. But other families were like, well, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. And then the girl would have to make her own way in the world with or without a reference, depending on how the family felt. The reason behind the complete severance between girls and any living family members as required by the Boston Female Asylum, I suspect it was to further decrease the likelihood of any upward mobility a servant was much less likely to step out of their current situation and into something new and unsure if she had no support system outside her employers. So with full knowledge of that arrangement, Peter Kelly still felt like he had to sign over his daughters. I mean, how miserable would you have to be to surrender your daughters to that kind of foster care? He was very miserable. In fact, not long after that, people started to say that he sewed his own eyelids shut.
- [18:50]
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- [19:51]
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- [20:24]
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- [20:57]
Mary Kay McBrayer
There's not a lot to be found about Honora Kelly during her early childhood. Most of it is anecdotal. Still, those sources all report similar things. She was a really hard worker, she was a fast learner, and she could tell a hell of a story. So even though she was only 8 years old, 3 years younger than the standard age for a child to be indentured out of the Boston Female Asylum, the staff signed her over. I don't know why they thought that was all right. To be honest, eight is a lot different than 10 or 11. Because even though the Boston Female Asylum was a sanctuary for girls with no home, it was still an orphanage. The fact was, if the wards didn't land an indenture when they turned 18, they really were out on their ass. And who could tell when the next opportunity would come? You might have surmised that a lot of this part of the story is my best guess. Let me reiterate that I don't want to misrepresent anything here. I don't know the hard facts of this part of Enora's life and I looked for them hard. So what I'm telling you now is my best guess. But it's an educated guess. It's based on the most likely instance that I've deduced from the facts that I could find. So like I said, She's 8 years old. Eight is a lot different than 11. And the woman who indentured Honora Kelly seemed to know that by all accounts, Anne Toppin was an evil bitch. I mean, a pretty common kind of evil. At that time, though she would have probably been seen as normal then. She was middle class, but she wanted to seem wealthier. She seemed to live by a phrase that circulated at that time in New England. Either you have a maid or you are a maid. And when an entitled lady couldn't afford a live in maid of all work, she could always turn to child labor. So that's what happened. Ann Toppan indentured Honora Kelly from the Boston Female Asylum. Because this was an image thing to begin with, Ann set her expectations immediately. Honora was to call her Auntie. And naturally she had to change Honora's name. She couldn't have her friends scared that an Irish person was in her house. There was a lot of anti Irish discrimination at the time. As I mentioned, Irish people were stereotyped as drunk, dishonest and dangerous. So Auntie thought the appropriate thing to do was to change her new servant's name from Honora Kelly to Jane Toppan. She told her so immediately. She Also told Jane that she had a daughter. It was Jane's job to take care of Auntie and her daughter and the house. By the way, you think keeping house is hard work now add to it doing laundry by hand, building fires, and cooking every single thing from scratch on a wood burning stove. Granted, Jane might not have been expected to do all of that right away as a little girl, but ultimately her workload would have expanded to include a lot of that. Jane was just happy to have her own room, even if it was in the attic. Remember, this is the 1870s, no climate control. I live in Atlanta, but if you walked into my attic right now, for instance, the intensity of the heat would melt your eyelashes together. In New England, it would have been more livable. But the attic apartment was the one that was the hottest in the summer and the coldest in the winter since there was barely any insulation. So that's where this eight year old lived. There did seem to be a bright spot for little Jane at Auntie's house. At first, Auntie's daughter, Elizabeth. Elizabeth was more than 20 years older than Jane. It seems like she was already married to the church deacon, Oramel Brigham, by the time Jane moved in, even though she still lived with her mother. It's possible that she and her husband actually both lived there since Auntie was a widow, although there's no real documentation of that part. Regardless, we do know that when she moved in, Jane looked up to Elizabeth and she took it to heart when Elizabeth tried to befriend her. This could have been a really positive relationship for Jane, but Auntie wasn't going to let that happen. She didn't like the mixing of classes. So even though Elizabeth treated Jane like a foster sister, and even though she tried to defend Jane, if Auntie thought she stepped out of line, it didn't work. Jane was constantly in trouble. Despite being very eager to please and very hardworking, Auntie's spite poisoned the well. By her teens, Jane did not see Elizabeth as even a friend, let alone a sister. I'm not sure how conscious Jane was of the jealousy or bitterness that she harbored against Elizabeth, but I imagine it felt a lot like when someone you work for thinks you're a great friend, if you've been the employee in that situation, then you know you're not a great friend, you're a great employee. You know, like your boss might confide in you about some personal hardship for an hour and a half and then make you stay late to make up all the work you missed while she was blabbering on that kind of one sided relationship, that kind of I'm her best friend, but she's not my best friend relationship. Jane did have a lot of friends though. Everyone loved to be around her. She was fun. She was entertaining. One of those friends was James Stewart Murphy, which isn't relevant yet, but just Dog Ear that name for later. Part of what earned Jane those friends and got her in trouble the most was her mouth. She wasn't disrespectful. She liked to tell stories. She'd have a whole picnic in rapt attention with some tale she was weaving on the spot. Everyone loved Jane's company and liked being around her. But as soon as they got home, Auntie would beat her for telling lies. Plus, Jane was Irish, so Auntie hated her for that reason too. Auntie even told her guests and friends that Jane was probably Greek or Italian. That's really all we know of Jane's childhood. Jane got out of the frying pan to jump in the fire, basically. But there is one consistent rumor that no one has been able to really corroborate. Some sources say it is absolutely true. And some say it's just a lie Jane told later. It's really specific to be a lie. Jane fell in love with an office worker at a local textile factory. His name was Tom Higgins. An apparently nice Irish boy. I imagine this was a fun slap in the face to Auntie. So bonus. And Tom proposed to Jane and she had one foot out the door and then he fucking ghosted her. This is a tale as old as time, but it never gets less infuriating. Like my man. Why don't you just be honest? Some people say the reason Tom ditched her is because he'd gotten some other girl pregnant and had to marry her and move one town over. So no one was scandalized by their existence. These Victorians, y'all so constantly scandalized. You know, they're the reason why table skirts exist. Yeah, the legs of tables were too sexy. It's also why we call poultry light and dark meat instead of breast and thigh. Because watch out for this seductive chicken. Okay? Anyway, I can only imagine that must have been devastating for Jane. Imagine how helpless that would have made her feel. Abandoned again with no explanation at all. I hate that. I hate the effect it probably had on Jane. So with that potential option just eliminated. Jane stayed on at the Toppan house after she turned 18. She got her contractual $50 for over a decade of labor. And it seems like she started earning a small wage in addition to room and board. But none of it would have been enough to strike out on her own. Not if she had to leave without a reference, which, knowing Auntie, would probably have been the case. And then Auntie died. At this point in history, there was a whole glamorous ritual around funerals. This is the era of widow's weeds and black bordered calling cards when the body would sit up in the parlor of the home for visitation. It's actually the reason we rebranded the parlor the Living Room, so people wouldn't associate it with only death. So the only mother that Jane had ever really known died. Elizabeth was a mess. So Jane likely had to handle or carry out a lot of the preparations for the funeral. Coordinating, breaking the news, that kind of stuff. Plus the etiquette for this time was intense. Like I said, very particular. Some funerals even hired professional mourners. Jane did all of this in addition to her own grieving, because even if Auntie was a mean spirited old hag, she was still Jane's mother figure. And then everyone gathered in the parlor for the reading of the will while Jane served them. I should mention here that even though Auntie made Jane change her first and last name, she never adopted her. She didn't even mention Jane in her will. And that did not sit well with Jane. Common practice or not. It pissed her off even more when Elizabeth told her that Jane was welcome to stay on at the Toppan House for as long as she wanted, as the help, of course, doing the same thing she'd been doing since she was a child, toiling away for the same unappreciative family. So finally spinster Jane said, I'm out. Actually, she did stay on for a while, but then she rallied and she got her ducks in a row and she actually said something like if no one else is going to help me, I'm going to help myself. But the way Jane decided to help herself was pretty unorthodox.
- [33:44]
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- [34:48]
Diversion Audio
Discuss and celebrate savings. I know it's usually a master detective or a super sleuth who loves true crime as much as we do, but today it's better. It's cheap Caribbean's 25th anniversary sale. That means 25 good reasons to put up your away Message now until February 3rd. You can unlock up to $250 off all inclusive vacation packages site wide. You're definitely going to need a portable charger for all these vacation pics. Visit CheapCaribbean.com for up to $250 off. Offer ends February 3rd.
- [35:18]
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- [35:52]
Mary Kay McBrayer
It was now 1885 and two significant things had happened. One, Jane decided she would become a nurse and she was admitted to Cambridge Hospital, the most prestigious nursing school in existence at the time. And two, Jane gained 60 pounds. And I mean that in a good way. Remember, these are the Victorians. Beauty standards have historically revolved around whichever body type is less attainable. So back then, when people worked hard outside and ate little, it wasn't desirable to be tan and thin. That just showed you were poor. Instead, being pale and fat was considered hot because it showed you could hang around inside all day out of the sun and you weren't missing meals. And I'm not a sociologist with a focus in historical beauty by any means, but the beauty trends we have now also reflect wealth. Think about it. What I see now is the ideal our clear, natural skin and hair and toned, lean bodies. So tracing backward, what do we have to do to get that? Because don't even trip. Natural is not natural. Keira Knightley running errands is not Mary Kay running errands. So here's the recipe or at least some ingredients to this unattainable, as ever natural beauty trend we're seeing these days. Be able bodied, or at least able and healthy enough to exercise regularly, eat balanced meals at normal times from Whole Foods, go to the dermatologist to make sure our skin is perfect enough not to be masked by makeup and get the fat sucked out of our stomachs and injected into our lips. And who among us has the time and resources to get there? Well, I know who. It's not anyone working a desk job who has no or bad insurance and has to eat inexpensive processed foods. Really, you can do it for almost any beauty standard and the outcome is similar. What's beautiful is what's expensive. Anyway, to put this in perspective, Jane Toppan was probably underweight before working herself to the bone for Auntie. And now that she was finally eating and drinking enough, she was probably, by the time standards, healthy. And I should probably state this outright, Jane was hot. Whatever beauty standard you're thinking about, you might not think so when you google her picture, but the only ones that come up are from when she was middle aged and they're portraits drawn after she became a criminal. So portrait artists weren't necessarily going to present her in a flattering light. But the people interviewed throughout her life said Jane was hot in the most subdued Victorian way possible. They described her as handsome and healthy and strong. When I was researching these interviews, I wanted to be like, you can just say you are attracted to her. Anyway. When Jane got on the train from Lowell to nursing school in Cambridge, Elizabeth made it a real point to say they'd keep Jane's room open for her. If I'm Jane looking at my new opportunity and someone says that to me, I'd be tempted to believe they thought I would fail, which would make me even more resolved to succeed beyond anyone's wildest dreams. And Jane pretty much did. But again, her methods were pretty unorthodox. When we think of nurses now, we think of hard work. But in the 1880s, nursing was everything it is now, plus more patients, plus buckets of custodial work, everything from scouring the floors to changing bedpans. For nursing students, we're talking 14 hour days interspersed with seminar classes and lessons from head nurses. They learned how to properly administer enemas, give baths, dress wounds and prescribe medicines after hours. They had to study for exams. And if you were wondering, hospitals were gross. Yes, they knew about germs by then, but they didn't do enough about them. There wasn't a designated cleaning Crew nurses did what they could, but they were spread way too thin to keep things squeaky clean. People did not want to go to the hospital. If you went to the hospital back then, you were as likely to die of infection as you were of whatever originally brought you in. So if you had to go to the hospital, you were terrified. And then you met your nurse who was kind and attentive and smart and really fought your corner. Jane's patients loved her. If another nurse tried to care for them, they'd balk and ask for Jane. And instead, her doctors loved her too. She was always one step ahead of them, getting them things they needed before they realized they needed them and briefing them on all the details of a patient so their day was more efficient. Pretty soon, the other nurses started getting jealous of Jolly Jane, a nickname that I can only assume really pissed her off. If you think being called jolly is a compliment, think about how you'd react if someone called you jolly. But Jane responded to the jealousy by simply outperforming her colleagues in every way. When they tried to sabotage her by snitching that she had booze in her dorm, which was forbidden, or for staying out past curfew, both things that she did do, she caught it mid stride and turned it back on them. Jane got several nurses expelled by planting alcohol in their belongings and then whistleblowing to supervisors. It's shitty, but they shouldn't have been talking shit. Jane handled it on her own, which life had taught her was the only way it was going to get handled. But it was harder for Jane to move on from the patients, at least from her favorite patients. Of course she had favorites, just like the patients had their favorite nurses. She would dote on them, get them everything they needed, attend to their every need, and then they would discharge. They'd just leave. You might be thinking, right, well, when people get well, that's what they do. They leave the hospital. But Jane didn't take it that way. She felt like they left her. No thank you, no goodbye. Just another abandonment. Another one in a long succession. And that's when Jane decided she had to take this matter into her own hands. She had to figure out some way to keep her favorite patients with her longer. So she started poking around the hospital medicine stock and she started experimenting. Join me next week on the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told for the increasingly terrifying details of Jane's experiments in the second part of our three part miniseries on Jane Toppan. My research on this story goes really deep, and a lot of my sources were primary sources I looked at while writing my book America's First Female Serial Killer, Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster. Those sources included interviews, news articles, and documents from the trial, which I'll talk about in upcoming episodes. For more of the details I don't have the space to include in this mini series, check out the full book. I'd also like to shout out Harold Schechter's book Fatal, which is another great account of Jane's story. I also get to interview Harold in the coming episodes, so you'll definitely want to come back for that. For more information about this case and others we cover on the show, visit diversionaudio.com Sign up for Diversion's newsletter and be among the first to hear about special behind the scenes features with the hosts and actors from Diversion's podcast. More shows you'll love from Diversion in our partners and other exclusive tidbits you can't get anywhere else. The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, I wrote this episode and our editorial director is Nora Patel. Our show is produced and directed by Mark Francis. Our development team is Emma demuth and Jacob Bronstein. Theme music by Tyler Cash Executive Producers Jacob Bronstein, Mark Francis and Scott Waxman.
- [46:11]
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- [46:51]
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Mary Kay McBrayer
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