Transcript
Diversion Audio (0:07)
Diversion Audio.
Mary Kay McBrayer (0:11)
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 the finale of our three part miniseries on the first American female serial killer. If you missed the first two parts, I highly recommend that you pause me here, listen to those episodes and then come back once you're caught up. Because that backstory is integral to understanding how Jane's crimes got bigger, faster and way sloppier the town of Catamit, Massachusetts didn't really like the Davis family. The Davises said they started their hospitality business because they enjoyed working with strangers and they lived on the outskirts of town because they enjoyed it there. That might have been true, but it wasn't the whole truth. At first the town was reluctant to get close to Alden Davis because It was the 1870s in Massachusetts and Alden Davis had fought for the Confederacy. There's enough of an aversion already. But then there was the religious sect that Alden Davis was a part of. The Second Advent Church was run by Charles Freeman, and not only was it a fundamentalist Christian sect, the kind of which we still have to be wary, but it was, as they so often are, next level fundamentalist and not at all Christlike. Charles Freeman lived near Katamet with his wife and two young daughters, 4 and 6 years old. His congregation admired him for his fervent convictions and he was always preaching about the need to prove yourself through sacrifice. In April of 1879, he told his wife that what they needed to sacrifice was their four year old daughter. At two o'clock in the morning of May 1, 1879, Freeman woke up and told his wife he was doing it. He had been called and he would complete the sacrifice. She said, if it is the Lord's will, then I am ready for it. As if someone had released a huge weight, Charles went out to the shed and got a sharp sheath knife. He came back inside to his daughter's room. His eldest daughter woke up and he sent her into the other room with his wife. Charles knelt to pray by the crib of the older child. He prayed that God would steal his will like he had Abraham's, even though Abraham did not actually kill his child. Charles prayed that she didn't wake up, but she did. She woke up just as he drove the knife down into her side. The next day he invited the congregation over for a long, unhinged sermon before he took them into his daughter's bedroom to see her body. He claimed that she would rise again in three days. The community was gutted and appalled and Charles Freeman was ultimately sent to an asylum for the criminally insane. But at least one of his neighbors stood by him. Alden Davis showed up to the four year old's funeral and declared, there never lived a purer man than Charles Freeman. So everyone in the town took a big self preservationist step back from the Davis family. That's awful, you might think, but what does this atrocity have to do with Jane Toppan? Like I said, the town of Pottamet didn't really care for the Davises. They kept them at arm's length, which I think is pretty understandable. So when the Davises started dying one right after the other, and I do mean one right after the other, the town kind of thought, well, whatever happens to that family, happens to that family. It was easy to see the demise of the Davises as the hand of God delivering punishment, rather than see it for what it actually was, the work of an increasingly reckless and sloppy serial killer. Jane Toppan. Welcome to the greatest true crime stories ever told. Mary I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. I'm a writer of true crime, which means I live inside the research wormhole. But I'm not necessarily interested in the attention grabbing elements, the blood and the gore, all that. I'm 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 those roles. As you probably already know, women can do anything. Today is the last episode of our three part miniseries on the first American female serial killer. It's a 19th century American tale about how an orphan turned indigenous injured servant bootstrapped herself into a mad scientist murderer. Her story is the one I spent years researching for my book, America's First Female Serial Killer, Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster. So I'm excited to share it with you. In the finale of this miniseries, Jane's crimes reach new levels of depravity and recklessness before the law finally catches on. I also have a conversation with Harold Schechter, who wrote his own excellent book on Jane Toppan. So stay tuned for that all after the break.