January 2, 2024 • 40 mins
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.
The Greatest True Crime Stories is a production of Diversion Audio.
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This series is hosted by Mary Kay McBrayer. Check out more of her work at www.marykaymcbrayer.com.
This episode was written by Mary Kay McBrayer
Editorial Direction by Nora Batelle
Developed by Scott Waxman, Emma DeMuth, and Jacob Bronstein
Produced, edited, and directed by Mark Francis
Theme Music by Tyler Cash
Executive Produced by Scott Waxman, Mark Francis, and Jacob Bronstein
Special thanks to:
- Mary Kay McBrayer, America’s First Female Serial Killer: Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster
- Harold Schechter, Fatal
- Dariaan Berryman obituary, Lexington, KY, 9 March 2012.
- “Gunman Gets 20 Years in Georgia School Seizure” by Alan Blinder, New York Times, 16 September 2014
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Diversion audio. 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,
(00:31):
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
(00:53):
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.
(01:20):
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
(01:40):
are fast, shallow breathing, muscle stiffness, diarrhea, and chest pain.
Like morphine, atropine was readily available in the eighteen nineties
when this episode's story takes place. Both rugs were sold
(02:01):
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 them. If you were taking both,
(02:26):
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
(02:50):
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
(03:17):
greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay mcbrair.
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
(03:39):
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 core, the criminal, or a
(04:02):
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 toppin in the Making
(04:24):
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
(04:46):
than that. So this is the first of a three
part mini series 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
(05:06):
who betrayed her, of people who loved her, and of strangers.
I'll tell you all about it after the break. I
(05:37):
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
(06:00):
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
(06:21):
the monster that they became from firsthand experience. After college,
I did a ten 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
(06:47):
a unit of ten to twelve high cognitive teenage boys.
Most of them had explosive rage disorders and severe issues
with authority. I mean, if every ad 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
(07:07):
these things too. Most of my boys were awards 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
(07:29):
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 hip or regulations,
everything I'm about to tell you about two of the
(07:51):
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
(08:11):
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 Darien.
(08:35):
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
(08:57):
were shooting his dad. I don't know if that's true.
He was seventeen. 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
(09:19):
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 five. That place was the most
he knew of a home. Two years after I finished
(09:44):
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
(10:08):
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
(10:30):
I tell you the story I'm about to tell you
about Jane Toppin, 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
(10:52):
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 miss McBrayer, and he was always asking
if he could help. But there's just no getting around it.
He did something evil. I just really don't think it
(11:16):
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
(11:39):
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,
(12:03):
and this was in the eighteen seventies, a time when
businesses posted signs in their windows with the acronym NA
meaning no Irish need apply. They couldn't even be bothered
to spell their discrimination all the way out. So Peter
(12:24):
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
(12:53):
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. Substaunchly against the term underprivileged, so we're
calling it what it is, unfortunate. Essentially, this was a
(13:19):
temporary home for orphans. And if the kids weren't orphans,
then parents who couldn't provide for them in any capacity
could quote surrender them. That required that they never ever
come back to see their daughters. It had to be
(13:40):
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, an ainocps.
(14:02):
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 eleven, they could be indentured out
(14:24):
you heard me right, after their education was complete. A
local family could indenture a child to work in their
home until they turned eighteen. But wait, there's more. When
(14:46):
the child became an adult at eighteen, depending on the contract,
which they had no part in, never had to sign
or approve, shit, they would receive from their indentured family
fifty dollars and or a new set of clothes. And
then well, a lot of families invited the women to
(15:08):
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
(15:29):
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
(15:49):
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,
(16:13):
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 shrecked. There's not a
(16:55):
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 eight years old,
(17:17):
three 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 ten or eleven, because even though the
(17:38):
Boston Female Asylum was a sanctuary for girls with no home,
it was still an orphanage. The fact was, if the
words didn't land an indenture when they turned eighteen, they
really were out on their ass, and who could tell
when the next opportunity would come. You might have surmised
(18:04):
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 Honora's life, and I looked for
them hard. So what I'm telling you now is my
(18:24):
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 eight
years old. Eight is a lot different than eleven, and
the woman who indentured Honora Kelly seemed to know that
(18:47):
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
(19:08):
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 made of all work, she could
always turn to child labor. So that's what happened, and
Topphen inventured Anora Kelly from the Boston Female Asylum because
(19:41):
this was an image thing to begin with and set
her expectations Immediately, Honora was to call her Auntie, and
naturally she had to change a Nora's name. She couldn't
have her friends scared that an Irish person was in
her house. There was a lot of anti Irish discrib
at the time. As I mentioned, Irish people were stereotyped
(20:04):
as drunk, dishonest, and dangerous. So Auntie thought the appropriate
thing to do was to change her new servant's name
from Anora Kelly to Jane Toppin. 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
(20:25):
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
(20:45):
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 eighteen seventies, no
climate control. I live in Atlanta, But if you walked
(21:06):
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.
(21:28):
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 twenty years older than Jane. It seems
like she was already married to the church deacon Ramel
Brigham by the time Jane moved in, even though she
still lived with her mother. It's possible that she and
(21:52):
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
(22:12):
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
(22:35):
constantly in trouble. Despite being very eager to please and
very hard working, Auntie spite poisoned the well by her teens.
Jane did not see Elizabeth as even a friend, let
alone as sister. I'm not sure how conscious Jane was
(22:56):
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,
(23:16):
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.
(23:39):
She was fun, she was entertaining. One of those friends
was James Stuart Murphy, which isn't relevant yet, but just
dogg your 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.
(24:08):
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
(24:32):
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
(24:55):
some say it's just a lie. Jane told later it's
really specific thick 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
(25:16):
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
(25:38):
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.
(25:59):
It's also why we called poultry light and dark meat
instead of breast and thigh, because watch out for the
seductive chicken. Okay, anyway, I can only imagine that must
have been devastating for Jane. Imagine how helpless that would
(26:19):
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
(26:39):
stayed on at the Toppin' house after she turned eighteen.
She got her contractual fifty dollars 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. She had to leave without a reference, which,
(27:02):
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
(27:25):
would sit up in the parlor of the home for visitation.
It's actually their reason we rebranded the parlor of 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
(27:46):
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
(28:08):
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.
(28:30):
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.
(28:51):
It pissed her off even more when Elizabeth told her
that Jane was welcome to stay on at the top
and 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.
(29:11):
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 with The way
(29:32):
Jane decided to help herself was pretty unorthodox. It was
now eighteen eighty five and two significant things had happened.
(29:56):
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 sixty pounds.
And I mean that in a good way. Remember these
(30:17):
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
(30:39):
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
are clear, natural skin and hair and owned lean bodies.
(31:01):
So tracing backward, what do we have to do to
get that? Because don't even trip. Natural is not natural,
Kira nightly 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.
(31:24):
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 dermatologists 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
(31:44):
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,
(32:07):
to put this in perspective, Jane Toppin 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
(32:28):
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 their 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
(32:50):
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 and Cambridge, Elizabeth made
(33:14):
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.
(33:35):
And Jane pretty much did. But again, her messages were
pretty unorthodox. When we think of nurses now, we think
of hard work. But in the eighteen eighties nursing was
everything it is now, plus more patients, plus buckets of
(33:56):
custodial work, everything from scouring the floor is to change bedpans.
For nursing students, we're talking fourteen 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.
(34:21):
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
(34:42):
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 hospit hospital. You were terrified, and then
(35:05):
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 instead. Her doctors loved her too.
(35:26):
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 and nicknamed that I
can only assume really pissed her off. If you think
(35:48):
being called jolly is a compliment, think about how you'd
react of someone called you jolly. But Jane responded to
the jealousy by simply out performing 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
(36:09):
staying out past curfew, both things that she did do,
she caught it mids dried and turned it back on them.
Jane got several nurses expelled by planting alcohol and their
belongings and then whistleblowing to supervisors. It's shitty, but they
shouldn't have been talking shit. Jane handled it on her own,
(36:32):
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,
(36:56):
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
(37:17):
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
(37:38):
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
(38:10):
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 mini series on Jane Toppin. My
research on this story goes really deep, and a lot
of my sources were primary sources I looked at while
(38:30):
writing my book, America's First Female serial Killer, Jane Toppin
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 this space to include in this mini series,
(38:52):
check out the full book. I'd also like to shout
out Herald Scheckter'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 Diversion Audio dot com.
(39:14):
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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. I'm Mary Kay mcbraer.
(39:38):
I wrote this episode and our editorial director is Nora Btel.
Our show is produced and directed by Mark Francis. Our
development team is Emma Dumouth and Jacob Bronstein. Theme music
by Tyler Cash. Executive producers Jacob Bronstein, Mark Francis, and
(39:58):
Scott Waxman. Diversion Audio
Diversion audio. 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,
(00:31):
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
(00:53):
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.
(01:20):
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
(01:40):
are fast, shallow breathing, muscle stiffness, diarrhea, and chest pain.
Like morphine, atropine was readily available in the eighteen nineties
when this episode's story takes place. Both rugs were sold
(02:01):
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 them. If you were taking both,
(02:26):
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
(02:50):
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
(03:17):
greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay mcbrair.
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
(03:39):
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 core, the criminal, or a
(04:02):
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 toppin in the Making
(04:24):
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
(04:46):
than that. So this is the first of a three
part mini series 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
(05:06):
who betrayed her, of people who loved her, and of strangers.
I'll tell you all about it after the break. I
(05:37):
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
(06:00):
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
(06:21):
the monster that they became from firsthand experience. After college,
I did a ten 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
(06:47):
a unit of ten to twelve high cognitive teenage boys.
Most of them had explosive rage disorders and severe issues
with authority. I mean, if every ad 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
(07:07):
these things too. Most of my boys were awards 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
(07:29):
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 hip or regulations,
everything I'm about to tell you about two of the
(07:51):
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
(08:11):
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 Darien.
(08:35):
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
(08:57):
were shooting his dad. I don't know if that's true.
He was seventeen. 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
(09:19):
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 five. That place was the most
he knew of a home. Two years after I finished
(09:44):
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
(10:08):
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
(10:30):
I tell you the story I'm about to tell you
about Jane Toppin, 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
(10:52):
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 miss McBrayer, and he was always asking
if he could help. But there's just no getting around it.
He did something evil. I just really don't think it
(11:16):
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
(11:39):
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,
(12:03):
and this was in the eighteen seventies, a time when
businesses posted signs in their windows with the acronym NA
meaning no Irish need apply. They couldn't even be bothered
to spell their discrimination all the way out. So Peter
(12:24):
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
(12:53):
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. Substaunchly against the term underprivileged, so we're
calling it what it is, unfortunate. Essentially, this was a
(13:19):
temporary home for orphans. And if the kids weren't orphans,
then parents who couldn't provide for them in any capacity
could quote surrender them. That required that they never ever
come back to see their daughters. It had to be
(13:40):
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, an ainocps.
(14:02):
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 eleven, they could be indentured out
(14:24):
you heard me right, after their education was complete. A
local family could indenture a child to work in their
home until they turned eighteen. But wait, there's more. When
(14:46):
the child became an adult at eighteen, depending on the contract,
which they had no part in, never had to sign
or approve, shit, they would receive from their indentured family
fifty dollars and or a new set of clothes. And
then well, a lot of families invited the women to
(15:08):
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
(15:29):
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
(15:49):
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,
(16:13):
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 shrecked. There's not a
(16:55):
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 eight years old,
(17:17):
three 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 ten or eleven, because even though the
(17:38):
Boston Female Asylum was a sanctuary for girls with no home,
it was still an orphanage. The fact was, if the
words didn't land an indenture when they turned eighteen, they
really were out on their ass, and who could tell
when the next opportunity would come. You might have surmised
(18:04):
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 Honora's life, and I looked for
them hard. So what I'm telling you now is my
(18:24):
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 eight
years old. Eight is a lot different than eleven, and
the woman who indentured Honora Kelly seemed to know that
(18:47):
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
(19:08):
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 made of all work, she could
always turn to child labor. So that's what happened, and
Topphen inventured Anora Kelly from the Boston Female Asylum because
(19:41):
this was an image thing to begin with and set
her expectations Immediately, Honora was to call her Auntie, and
naturally she had to change a Nora's name. She couldn't
have her friends scared that an Irish person was in
her house. There was a lot of anti Irish discrib
at the time. As I mentioned, Irish people were stereotyped
(20:04):
as drunk, dishonest, and dangerous. So Auntie thought the appropriate
thing to do was to change her new servant's name
from Anora Kelly to Jane Toppin. 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
(20:25):
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
(20:45):
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 eighteen seventies, no
climate control. I live in Atlanta, But if you walked
(21:06):
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.
(21:28):
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 twenty years older than Jane. It seems
like she was already married to the church deacon Ramel
Brigham by the time Jane moved in, even though she
still lived with her mother. It's possible that she and
(21:52):
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
(22:12):
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
(22:35):
constantly in trouble. Despite being very eager to please and
very hard working, Auntie spite poisoned the well by her teens.
Jane did not see Elizabeth as even a friend, let
alone as sister. I'm not sure how conscious Jane was
(22:56):
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,
(23:16):
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.
(23:39):
She was fun, she was entertaining. One of those friends
was James Stuart Murphy, which isn't relevant yet, but just
dogg your 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.
(24:08):
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
(24:32):
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
(24:55):
some say it's just a lie. Jane told later it's
really specific thick 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
(25:16):
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
(25:38):
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.
(25:59):
It's also why we called poultry light and dark meat
instead of breast and thigh, because watch out for the
seductive chicken. Okay, anyway, I can only imagine that must
have been devastating for Jane. Imagine how helpless that would
(26:19):
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
(26:39):
stayed on at the Toppin' house after she turned eighteen.
She got her contractual fifty dollars 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. She had to leave without a reference, which,
(27:02):
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
(27:25):
would sit up in the parlor of the home for visitation.
It's actually their reason we rebranded the parlor of 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
(27:46):
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
(28:08):
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.
(28:30):
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.
(28:51):
It pissed her off even more when Elizabeth told her
that Jane was welcome to stay on at the top
and 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.
(29:11):
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 with The way
(29:32):
Jane decided to help herself was pretty unorthodox. It was
now eighteen eighty five and two significant things had happened.
(29:56):
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 sixty pounds.
And I mean that in a good way. Remember these
(30:17):
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
(30:39):
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
are clear, natural skin and hair and owned lean bodies.
(31:01):
So tracing backward, what do we have to do to
get that? Because don't even trip. Natural is not natural,
Kira nightly 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.
(31:24):
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 dermatologists 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
(31:44):
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,
(32:07):
to put this in perspective, Jane Toppin 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
(32:28):
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 their 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
(32:50):
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 and Cambridge, Elizabeth made
(33:14):
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.
(33:35):
And Jane pretty much did. But again, her messages were
pretty unorthodox. When we think of nurses now, we think
of hard work. But in the eighteen eighties nursing was
everything it is now, plus more patients, plus buckets of
(33:56):
custodial work, everything from scouring the floor is to change bedpans.
For nursing students, we're talking fourteen 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.
(34:21):
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
(34:42):
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 hospit hospital. You were terrified, and then
(35:05):
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 instead. Her doctors loved her too.
(35:26):
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 and nicknamed that I
can only assume really pissed her off. If you think
(35:48):
being called jolly is a compliment, think about how you'd
react of someone called you jolly. But Jane responded to
the jealousy by simply out performing 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
(36:09):
staying out past curfew, both things that she did do,
she caught it mids dried and turned it back on them.
Jane got several nurses expelled by planting alcohol and their
belongings and then whistleblowing to supervisors. It's shitty, but they
shouldn't have been talking shit. Jane handled it on her own,
(36:32):
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,
(36:56):
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
(37:17):
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
(37:38):
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
(38:10):
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 mini series on Jane Toppin. My
research on this story goes really deep, and a lot
of my sources were primary sources I looked at while
(38:30):
writing my book, America's First Female serial Killer, Jane Toppin
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 this space to include in this mini series,
(38:52):
check out the full book. I'd also like to shout
out Herald Scheckter'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 Diversion Audio dot com.
(39:14):
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. I'm Mary Kay mcbraer.
(39:38):
I wrote this episode and our editorial director is Nora Btel.
Our show is produced and directed by Mark Francis. Our
development team is Emma Dumouth and Jacob Bronstein. Theme music
by Tyler Cash. Executive producers Jacob Bronstein, Mark Francis, and
(39:58):
Scott Waxman. Diversion Audio
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How do the smartest marketers and business entrepreneurs cut through the noise? And how do they manage to do it again and again? It's a combination of math—the strategy and analytics—and magic, the creative spark. Join iHeartMedia Chairman and CEO Bob Pittman as he analyzes the Math and Magic of marketing—sitting down with today's most gifted disruptors and compelling storytellers.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!