← The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told
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- [00:07]
Diversion Audio
Diversion Audio.
- [00:12]
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 Today's episode is part two of our three part miniseries about the first American female serial killer. If you missed part one, I highly recommend that you pause me here, listen to that episode, and then come back once you're caught up. You can even listen to it on warp speed. But I promise that backstory is integral to understanding Jane Toppan's criminal escalations, which we're going to get into in this episode. Mrs. Amelia Finney was 36 years old when her husband finally convinced her to go to the hospital for her pain. She was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital for a uterine ulcer. In the operating theater, physicians rendered her unconscious with morphine in front of an audience of nursing students. They demonstrated to the students how to treat an ulcer by burning it with silver nitrate. They closed Amelia's abdomen and returned her to the recovery wing. Pain from the procedure woke Amelia in the middle of the night and to her relief, she saw a nurse immediately by her side asking her how she was feeling. Amelia tried to explain that she couldn't bear the pain, and she was relieved when the nurse brought a cool glass of water to her lips. But it tasted bitter. Her vision fogged and the nurse blurred above her. She was surprised to feel the mattress sag as the nurse sat on the bed beside her. Then the nurse's arm was under her neck and her other hand was smoothing her hair back from her face like a lover would do. Amelia tried to say as much, but she found herself paralyzed. The light from a lamp flashed first in one eye as the nurse held back the lid and then the other. She brought the bitter water back to Amelia's lips and Amelia willed her jaw to clamp shut, but she still couldn't move. She felt the cup against her lips. At that moment, footsteps sounded in the hallway and the nurse disappeared. Amelia would try for years to remember that nightmare as only a dream. But it wasn't a dream. 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 and I'm constantly reading about crime. But I'm not necessarily interested in the attention grabbing elements like blood and gore. More interested in the people behind these stories and what we can learn about society by looking at their experiences. That's what I explore 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 these roles. As you probably already know, women can do anything. Today we're continuing our three part miniseries on the first American female serial killer. It's a 19th century American tale about how an orphan turned indentured servant bootstrapped herself into a mad scientist murderer, one of the most prolific murderers in history. I spent years researching her story for my book, America's First Female Serial Killer, Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster. So I'm excited to share her story with you. In this episode, Jane's extracurricular medical experiments start to escalate and what violent warp speed escalations they were. More about those after the break.
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- [06:45]
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- [07:15]
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- [07:57]
Mary Kay McBrayer
One thing that kept anyone from suspecting Jane Toppan is that she really didn't have a single victim profile. They were different ages, genders and abilities when most serial murderers have a pretty specific type. For example, Ted Bundy liked small white women with dark hair parted down the middle. The ones who don't have a type, like Richard Ramirez, the original Night Stalker, are much harder to find. She did start off with a type. They were her patients. But her patients didn't have much in common on paper. In our last episode, we followed Jane from the Boston Female Asylum, basically an orphanage, to indentured servitude with the Toppan family. When Auntie Toppan died and failed to leave Jane anything in her will, Jane was hurt and shocked, given she was all Jane knew of her mother. And to add insult to injury, her foster sister, Elizabeth Brigham, told her that she could stay on at their house for as long as she wanted if she continued being her servant. Jane took all that as a kind of challenge. She applied and got into the most prestigious nursing school of the time at Cambridge Hospital. All of this is pretty remarkable on its own. She's setting herself up with main character energy at the very least. This has all the trappings of an underdog success story, if only. The work at the hospital was grueling and Jane was awesome at it. She was a good bit older than most of her fellow students at 31. Her patients loved her. They often told other nurses they preferred Jane's care, and that made the other girls jealous. So they snitched on Jane for staying out past curfew and drinking alcohol, two things that were unforgivable in the administration's eyes. Granted, Jane did do those things. She also swiped any cash left unguarded and spent it on whatever she wanted, usually food or booze. When she heard that the other nurses tattled on her, she went to the head nurse herself and reported a few things that they'd done. Supposedly they were all untrue for some reason. Maybe because Jane was indispensable, or maybe because Jane was a very skilled liar, the administration believed Jane and they expelled the other nurses. Jane watched and giggled from her upstairs window as her enemies dragged out their belongings before she dressed for the Morning meal and prayers. With the snitches out of the way, Jane was free to do as she pleased. Almost. She still had to actually do her job, but she was great at that. Doctors adored Jane. She anticipated things they never thought of. And having her at their elbow made everything go so smoothly. And her patients loved her, too. At least most of them did, especially the ones whom she liked. But occasionally, the other nurses would hear that a patient was scared of Jane. Still, now that these nurses had seen everyone that tattled on Jane get fired, they were reluctant to speak up, which was really useful for Jane because the patient's concerns were warranted. Jane was becoming scary. She hated how her favorite patients would leave her without a second thought, abandoning her. So she started doing a little research. Harold Schechter, an incredible writer who covered Jane's story in his book Fatal, describes how her textbook started to naturally fall open to the pages detailing opiates. She had cracked the spine there. That was how often she studied these drugs, particularly morphine. By the way, I get to interview Schechter in the next episode of this miniseries, so be sure to follow the greatest true crime stories ever told and make sure you come back for that. But let me explain why Jane was obsessed with morphine. At the time, it was pretty popular as a surgical anesthesia and painkiller. So there was plenty of it around the hospital, and it was easy for Jane to access. And it did exactly what she needed it to do. Administered at the right dose, it would send a patient right into a coma. So Jane started administering that dose. If her patients were in comas, they certainly couldn't leave her. And the thing is, once Jane started experimenting on her patients, she liked how it made her feel. After administering the injection, she would stand by their bedsides to observe the effects. She watched their pupils contract, heard their breathing become louder, and touched their skin as they broke into a cold sweat. They would go into a coma almost immediately. A few hours later, they would die. But Jane found that didn't seem to bother her at all. After all, her patients were already sick in a hospital. Maybe death by her side was the best way to go. In fact, the only thing about this process that Jane didn't like was how straightforward it was. Not to mention, she knew these overdose deaths were easily identifiable. She had to improve her experiments. So she started adding atropine to her morphine injections. This drug complicated and sometimes even directly countered signs of a morphine overdose. For example, it dilated the pupils while morphine turned them into pinpoints doctors would see the patients having fits and diagnose them with epilepsy or stroke. The drugs Jane used in tandem were a perfect combination for generating misdiagnosis and masking her crimes. But there was more to Jane's choice in atropine. Atropine's effects are extreme when victims are given an overdose. Parched mouths, loss of motor function, and the grotesque picking at non existent things like a tick. And as it turned out, Jane's favorite way to watch her patients die was not peacefully in a coma, but rather with violent convulsions that multiple overdoses rendered. She started playing with the timing of the two drugs. First overdosing her patient with morphine and then giving them atropine. Sometimes she would give morphine and then dissolve atropine in water and let her patient drink it immediately, setting off all the side effects at once. Sometimes she let all the morphine symptoms happen and then rolled her patient over and administered the atropine via enema. It was a totally different show. Jane liked to see how the timing affected the symptoms. If experimenting on your patients isn't macabre enough, the most interesting, I mean fucked up thing is that Jane wasn't always trying to kill them. As she experimented, Jane developed a death fetish. Not only was she poisoning people to watch them suffer. As if that wasn't enough, rescuing patients whom she had poisoned from the brink of death became her thing. She liked the power of controlling death, of torturing people who were already sick of watching and feeling them spasm and suffocate and die from in their beds with them. She loved to overdose them on morphine to the very brink of death and see if she could nurse them back to health. It sounds crazy sloppy, but Jane's co workers actually overheard her saying there was, quote, no point in keeping old people alive. And if her co workers heard her, so did her patients. In fact, the complaints about Jane got so bad that the doctors couldn't ignore them anymore. And they really tried to ignore them. After all, to them, Jane was a godsend. One of their all time best nurses. They really hated to lose her. That's why after four years of escalating violence, they finally did let her go. And they let her go with raving references. That's how she left the most prestigious nursing school in disgrace. Only to be immediately admitted to the second most prestigious nursing school.
- [20:05]
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- [21:10]
Diversion Audio
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- [21:39]
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- [22:16]
Mary Kay McBrayer
The head nurse fought against admitting Jane to Massachusetts General Hospital, but not because of the rumors about her. She didn't want to hire Jane because she was Irish. Author Harold Schechter says very eloquently that the head nurse was an unreconstructed bigot who didn't want to admit Jane because of her low origins. References from some of the most prestigious doctors in Massachusetts, though, convinced even the head nurse that Jane deserved a spot. In fact, Jane passed her probationary period with such proficiency that when the same head nurse went on leave the next year, Jane took her position. That's where Jane experimented on Amelia Finney, who we started this episode with. And although Mrs. Finney would never forget that experience, and another nurse, McCutcheon, was sure that Jane had done something untoward. And she really tried to get the story out of Amelia. Amelia didn't say anything until years later. Keep in mind, these are the Victorians. They don't talk about things as base as, like, their own bodies and experiences. And I am being flipped. But really, Amelia relaying that story would ruin her own reputation, even if it was true and even if she was an incapacitated victim. As a culture, even now, we haven't quite moved all the way past that mentality. So it wasn't that gross misconduct with her patient, Amelia Finney, that got Jane in trouble. But Amelia wasn't Jane's only victim at Massachusetts General Hospital. The habits that Jane started at her previous hospital carried over into her new job almost immediately. The other nurses suspected Jane of hurting her patients. They didn't like her at all. She regularly disparaged their work and took credit for their accomplishments. She tampered with their fever charts and medical records and she stole. She also administered medication with wild disregard for protocol, which is really saying something. I mean, this is a time when you could buy cocaine over the counter, you could buy chocolate covered strychnine tablets at the drugstore to treat a stomachache. And I know there's a sort of bell curve with a lot of medicine where too little does nothing. The right amount treats the issue, and too much becomes an issue on its own. You have to hit the sweet spot or almost any medicine becomes poison. Absolutely true. But we know now that strychnine is overall a very strong poison. I mean, treat your stomachache with strychnine candy, and it could very possibly be your last stomachache. So Jane's flagrant disregard for protocol was really extreme if it caught the attention of the other nurses. And they suspected more than just that. They noticed how Jane's patients often seemed to die in strange, difficult to diagnose fit. The rumors, facts really about Jane flew all over Massachusetts General Hospital. But the thing that eventually got her kicked out was something small. She just left the ward without permission. It's not clear whether she was off for the evening and forgot to tell someone she was popping out, or if she was on duty and just walked off the job. But the rumors about Jane were no longer ignorable. It seems like this was the one rule they could actually confirm Jane was breaking. So they dismissed her. By this time, Jane had basically earned her nursing degree twice. But she was nothing if not tenacious. She worked as a private nurse for a year to build her references, and then she reapplied and was readmitted to Cambridge Hospital. Pretty unbelievable if you ask me. But it's true. As they say, old habits die hard. So back at Cambridge Hospital, when a nurse trainee fell ill, Jane was assigned to take care of her. After that, the trainee had two seizures, back to back when she'd never had them before and was overall in good health. Unlike many of the elderly patients Jane worked with, doctors weren't sure what exactly had happened, but at that point, they couldn't ignore the rumors that Jane was not administering drugs correctly. So they dismissed her again. You'd think that finally Jane would have to stop killing, if not because she was ruining her chance at a career by murdering people. At the very least because she was simply out of options. Except this is Jane Toppin. So she wasn't out of options. She just found a different way. She said about being fired, I didn't care because I had made up my mind that I could make more money and have an easier time by going out by the day. In families, Jane had made some connections in her years at Massachusetts most prestigious hospitals, and she decided it was time to use them. She would go into private nursing, where she could make a lot more money. That's exactly what she did. While the patient load of private nursing was lower, it was still very demanding. A nurse kept round the clock bedside vigils, and according to author Harold Schechter, she was expected to anticipate the patient's every need, to obey the doctor's every direction and to carry out the wishes of the family without question. While performing her duties, she was required to be a constant but unobtrusive presence, an unwaveringly cheerful disposition and a docile manner, never displaying the slightest trace of of discourtesy, fatigue, or irritation. Just reading that list makes me tired. And earlier when I said Jane made more money in private nursing, she made maybe $600 per year. That's about $20,000 today, still significantly more than she would have made at the hospital. But it's not a lot, especially given that fucking list. And as any freelancer will tell you, it is either feast or famine. You either have so much work you don't have time to breathe, or you are hunting down jobs and pinching your pennies. A lot of our world has changed since the 1890s, but not that that was the same for Jane as it is for us. So as you might know, you have to get creative when it comes to making money. For a lot of us, that means like opening a high yield savings account and scheduling payments to our checking so that we seldom feel the gap. Jane did not go that route. It could have been a personality thing, but honestly, she might not have been educated on how to do that. Plus, sometimes even her patients who could afford it didn't pay what they'd agreed simply because they didn't have to. Back then, there was no real way for a normal person to take a freelance contract to small claims court. You know, I mean, yeah, you could, but who has time for that? Who wants to risk their reputation? So Jane ran up some debt. And she had the habit of borrowing money from her employers. Not a lot. Or at least not a lot in one place at one time. But she'd never pay it back. I know that's dishonest. It is, but I'm also like shrug. They might not have paid her at all. But as I'm sure you've surmised, that's far from the worst thing Jane did. After going into private practice, she was still experimenting. Actually, I'm not sure we can call it experimenting anymore. Jane knew exactly what she was doing. When she got tired of nursing a patient, she'd offer them some mineral water. Hunyadi was her brand. It was Hungarian and it was very popular despite its bitter taste. She'd drop in the combination of morphine and atropine and serve it to her patient. Now she knew just what to expect. And yes, she still had her mad scientist sexual fetish. Every time she could, she got into bed with her victims and held them close while they shuddered and spasmed and struggled to breathe. Later, she recalled that thrill in disturbing descriptions. Voluptuous delight, delirious enjoyment, greatest conceivable pleasure. After all that work and the intense release of her sick pleasure, Jane needed time to recuperate. She liked to spend the summers at the Jakin House, a boarding house outside Boston at a place they called Buzzards B.
- [33:18]
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- [34:22]
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 picks. Visit CheapCaribbean.com for up to $250 off. Offer ends February 3rd.
- [34:52]
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- [35:25]
Mary Kay McBrayer
Jane spent her summers at a cottage on the resort like property called the Jakin House in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. But it wasn't a complete vacation. She didn't give round the clock care, but she bartered with the proprietors, the Davis family, in exchange for being the sort of resident nurse, she got a reduced rate. Jane was at this cottage when she reached back out to her foster sister Elizabeth. Jane had kept in contact with Elizabeth and her husband, Oramel. What a wild name, right? But Jane and Elizabeth weren't exactly close. The Brighams were glad to let Jane stay in her old room in their house for a few days whenever she was in town, which was nice enough. There was a pretty big age gap between Elizabeth and Jane, but aside from that, Elizabeth experienced all of the advantages in life that Jane had not. She did not have to work, she had a family and she was able to marry. At best it was the relationship between a well treated menial and her boss. Elizabeth may not have recognized it that way, but Jane certainly did. Yet in the summer of 1899, after years of working as a private nurse, Jane invited Elizabeth out to Buzzards Bay. When Elizabeth told Oramel about the invitation, he encouraged her to go. She had recently experienced some melancholia, which is more or less the old timey term for depression, and he thought it would help. He sent her out from Lowell on the train with a steamer trunk and $50. On Saturday, August 26, 1899, the day after Elizabeth arrived, she and Jane had what sounds like a lovely day. They dressed in white summer dresses and carried a picnic of cold corned beef and saltwater taffy down to the pier, and they chatted in the sunshine for several hours before Elizabeth turned in for bed. Later, Jane would admit to what happened next. Jane said that this was her chance to exact her revenge on Elizabeth. She was the only victim who I actually hated and poisoned with a vindictive purpose. I let her die slowly, with gripping torture. I fixed mineral water so it would do that, and then I added morphia to it. I held her in my arms and watched with delight as she gasped out her life. Sunday morning, Jane went to her landlords, Maddie and Alden Davis. She said that her sister hadn't responded when Jane called her down to breakfast. She was very sick. They should call a doctor. And they did. Jane also sent a telegraph to Oramel back in Lowell, saying that Elizabeth was dangerously ill. By the time he could get out there the following morning, Elizabeth was in a coma. The physician whom the Davises had summoned said that she had apoplexy, or what today we call a stroke. Oramel was at her bedside all night until she died the following morning. You might have noticed that the confession I quoted said that Jane held Elizabeth while she died in the grotesque sexual way that she had held her other victims. But Oramel said he was there when Elizabeth died. To me, that means something doesn't add up. I'm not saying Jane didn't do it. She is for sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a total monster, absolutely capable of the story she gave. And I still don't think she actually said everything her confession in the hearse paper says she said. While I was researching, I was never quite able to reconcile what she said with some of the facts. So I'm looking forward to talking to author Harold Schechter about it. But back to the story. Oramel was crushed. He truly loved his wife, and his overwhelming grief was probably the reason that it took him a long time to realize when he went through Elizabeth's possessions that there was money missing from her purse. At least $50 gone. Before Oramel left the following morning, Jane asked to talk to him. Jane said that in one of her dying breaths, Elizabeth had asked that he make sure her gold watch went to Jane. If she died, Oramel gave it over right away. Even in her last breath, he thought his wife was so kind that she made sure to care for others. And it lifted his heart, if only a little. He wouldn't learn until much later when the police were going through receipts and documents that Jane had pawned that watch right away. At the end of the summer, Jane didn't settle up her tab at the Jakin house. She hadn't in years. Instead, she just left. Moved back to Boston and into an apartment and started searching out new nursing gigs. That's when Jane reconnected with her friend Myra Connors from Lowell. Myra was a 40 year old widow. The origins and nature of their relationship are still unknown. What we do know is that Myra fell ill with peritonitis and Jane went home to Lowell to help her friend out. Within a few months, Myra died of strychnine poisoning. Jane went back to her standby private nursing. She took on several private nursing clients whom she helped. And then when they got to quote her too fussy, she murdered them. By 1901, she was living in the Boston home of her clients, Eliza and Edward Beadle. That's when Maddie Davis, the landlady at the Jakin house, came down from Buzzards Bay to collect on Jane's debts from the previous summer. Maddie was fed up. Yes. They had agreed over five years ago that Jane would get a discounted rate in exchange for being the sort of resident nurse at the property. But discounted didn't mean free. Jane's bill kept climbing and she never did anything about it. There was no payment plan in place. So in June 1901, Maddie got a train ticket to Boston. She climbed into her seat on the train and stewed. Imagine for a second that you own a bed and breakfast and you're balancing your checkbook. Or, okay, looking at your P and L if you want to really update the situation. You realize then that this woman who's been coming to stay there for years on end hasn't paid you a cent. I would be boiling. And because that's not how you do business, taking people's word that they're good for their debts. You know it was your husband who let it slide. So now, here you go in your best dress. Because you're not to be trifled with on this long ass hot ass train across the state to get your money. If that was me, I would be really playing out the possible situations, working up the decision tree of if she says this, then I'll do this just so she couldn't catch me off guard. Like I was going to face off with a bully. I would stare out the window and scheme. I can only imagine that's what Maddie Davis brain was doing the whole way to Boston. So imagine Maddie's surprise when she arrives at the Beatles home and Jane answers the door thrilled to see her. Still, Maddie stood her ground. She said she was there to collect what Jane owed them. And Jane's said, sure, of course, let's go to the bank and get your money. Maddie had to have been shocked and she probably looked shocked. And then James said, why don't you come in for a second and have a glass of water first and you may as well stay for lunch. So Maddie stayed for the meal, talked with the Beatles for a while, and then she and Jane set out on foot to the bank. But they didn't get far before Maddie fainted. Jane brought her back to the house and set her up in bed. She hung iced sheets all around the room to keep it cool. And she called Maddie's daughter Genevieve to come stay while her mother recovered. But Maddie didn't recover. Jane tortured her for a long time. She was at the Beatles home for seven days while Jane alternated her doses of morphine and atropine. She even brought Maddie into full state of lucidity before sending her back into a coma and eventually killing her with a final dose of morphine. She wanted to make it look like Maddie had died of natural causes. And that's what the doctor claimed. Jane attended the funeral at the Jakin House on July 5th. And that's when she decided she was ready for a new kind of challenge. She decided she would wipe out the whole Davis family one by one. Actually, she didn't want to just take out the family. She wanted to burn their whole house to the ground. Join me next week on the greatest true crime stories ever told for the finale of our three part miniseries on Jane Toppan. You'll get to hear how Jane's crimes escalated even more before the law finally caught up with her. I also have a conversation with Harold Schechter, author of the book on Jane called Fatal. 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 the upcoming finale. For more of the details that I don't have the space to include in this miniseries, check out the full book. And 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 podcasts, more shows you'll love from Diversion and 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. Mary I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, I wrote this episode and our Editorial director is Nora Battell. 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.
- [49:26]
Diversion Audio
Diversion Audio this week we 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 picks. Visit CheapCaribbean.com for up to $250 off. Offer ends February 3rd.
- [50:01]
Mary Kay McBrayer
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- [50:06]
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- [50:20]
Mary Kay McBrayer
Next time, save yourself the pain and let Amazon Pharmacy deliver your meds right to your door. Amazon Pharmacy Healthcare just got less painful.
- [50:31]
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