The First American Female Serial Killer (Pt 3)

Today’s episode is the finale of our three-part miniseries on “The First American Female Serial Killer", Jane Toppan. 

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
• Harold Schechter, Murderabilia
• And in case you’re interested in it, here’s a photo of what Hunyadi Mineral water looks like

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

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. Today's episode is the finale

(00:35):
of our three part mini series on the first American
female serial killer. If you miss 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

(00:56):
got bigger, faster, and way slow. Beer. The town of
catam Massachusetts, didn't really like the Davis family. The davis
Is said they started their hospitality business because they enjoyed

(01:17):
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

(01:38):
was the eighteen seventies 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

(02:03):
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 christ like. Charles

(02:25):
Freeman lived near Katomic with his wife and two young daughters,
four and six 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 eighteen

(02:49):
seventy nine, 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 first, eighteen seventy nine,
Freeman woke up and told his wife he was doing it.

(03:14):
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

(03:35):
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

(03:56):
prayed that God would steal his will like he had Abrahams,
even though Abraham did not actually kill his child. Charles
prayed that she didn't wake up, but she did. She

(04:17):
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

(04:41):
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

(05:09):
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

(05:29):
the Davis family. That's awful, you might think, But what
does this atrocity have to do with Jane Toppin? Like
I said, the town of Katama 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,

(05:52):
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

(06:14):
for what it actually was the work of an increasingly
reckless and sloppy serial killer. Jane toppin Welcome to the

(06:38):
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. 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

(06:59):
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

(07:21):
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 nineteenth century American tale
about how an orphan turned indentured servant bootstrapped herself into

(07:41):
a mad scientist murderer. Her story is the one I
spent years researching for my book America's First Female serial Killer,
Jane Toppin and the Making of a Monster, so I'm
excited to share it with you. In the finale of
this miniseries, Jane's crimes reached new levels of depravity and

(08:04):
recklessness before the law finally catches on. I also have
a conversation with Harold Scheckter, who wrote his own excellent
book on Jane Tappin, so stay tuned for that all
after the break. So this is our third of three

(08:39):
episodes about Jane Tappin. We did a deep dive into
her early years and now we're moving into her most
criminal period, right, Yeah, it gets more criminal. And the
interesting thing here that I want to point out is
that when I've told this story before at parties or whatever,
there's a point where people get her. I don't know

(09:02):
if I'm just telling the story in a way that
makes her a sympathetic character or what, but right around
the point where her favorite patients leave the hospital without
saying goodbye, that's when most people are like, yeah, I
could see how she would kill someone. They're not excusing
it by any stretch, but they get it, if that
makes sense. The typical refrain goes something like, if all

(09:22):
that shit happened to me, I'd kill someone too, except
for they didn't hurt people. May hurt people, but plenty
of folks had an upbringing as bad as or worse
than Jane, and they didn't murder thirty people. So what

(09:47):
I don't know that really is the question is it
situational or was it in her all along ye old
nature versus nurture debate, The answer is both, of course
and neither, And there's no one right answer, because really

(10:09):
there's no answer at all. But because it's the question,
we can't stop trying to answer it. Last episode, we
found Jane at the bedside of Elizabeth Brigham, her foster sister.
Jane spent the summers recuperating from her round the clock
freelance work as a private nurse, and she had invited

(10:32):
Elizabeth out to the seaside where she slipped her in
overdose of morphia mixed into mineral water, sent her into
a coma, and killed her. After that, Jane kept killing
her private nursing patients until June of nineteen oh one,

(10:53):
when Mattie Davis, wife of Alden Davis, arrived in Boston
to collect Jane debt. Jane tortured her for seven days
before finally administering the fatal dose of morphine that killed Mattie.

(11:14):
By then, Jane had decided to kill the whole Davis
family and burn their house to the ground. It wasn't
long after Mattie's funeral that her daughters, Genevieve Gordon and
Minnie Gibbs, invited Jane to move into the Jakin house
to help care for their father, who was always in

(11:36):
erratic personality, and keep the house. Jane was so fun
to be around that they thought she was sure to
lift their spirits. Genevieve hadn't seen her mother in a year,
so her mother's collapse and fairly sudden death afterward struck
her especially hard. That sadness was what Jane said made

(12:00):
her think Genevieve was better off dead. She would be
first on the list. But before that, Jane had to
start a few fires. It was a new experiment for her,
and you probably remember how she liked to experiment. They'd

(12:22):
only been settled in the house for a few days before,
the father, Alden, who'd suffered insomnia since his wife's death,
smelled smoke in the middle of the night. He yelled
for Jane to help him extinguish the flames, and she
came running from her room, looking as if she just
woke up. Together, they successfully put out the fire, and

(12:46):
then it happened twice more with the same results. It
seems like people should have grown suspicious, but the only
people who would have thought to do that, the Davis family,
were suffering with grief far too much to question Jane

(13:08):
when she claimed to have seen a stranger skulking about
the property and that stranger was probably the firebug trying
to burn the house down, everyone just went with it,
and then they started dying. Jane pulled one of the daughters, Minnie,

(13:33):
aside one afternoon and told her that the other day
she saw Minnie's sister, Genevieve in the garden shed eyeing
a box of Paris green rat poison. Jane intimated that
they should probably keep a close watch on Genevieve given
her recent depression. Within a few days, on July twenty sixth,

(13:58):
nineteen oh one, Genevieve started to vomit violently after dinner.
She threw up until her throat was raw, and when
she came out of the bathroom Jane was waiting for
her with a glass of mineral water. Genevieve was dead

(14:20):
by morning. The physician listed her cause of death as
heart failure. The neighbors said Genevieve died of grief. Jane
told Genevieve's surviving sister and father that she died by suicide.
She said that she'd found the syringe that she'd used

(14:43):
to inject herself with rat poison, but to spare their feelings,
she threw it in the outhouse. Genevieve was interred next
to her mother. Only a few weeks later, it was
Alden Davis's turn. During a heat wave of nineteen oh one,

(15:09):
he came home from a trip to Boston and all
but collapsed on the sofa from exhaustion. Jane fussed over
him for a few minutes, and then she came back
with a glass of Hunati mineral water. The next morning,
Minnie Gibbs, the surviving elder daughter of Mattie and Alden,

(15:32):
came over to see her parents with her two young children.
They lived in walking distance of Alden's house, which was
nice when Minnie's husband, Irving, a sea captain, was away
for months at a time. Harry Gordon, Genevieve's widower, was
also there with their daughter. The family gathered around the

(15:54):
breakfast table with Jane, but Davis didn't come down to
join them. Harry sent his little girl upstairs to wake
up her grandpa, but when she scampered back downstairs a
few minutes later, she said Alden wouldn't wake up. The

(16:21):
family called the doctor. The doctor took one look at
Alden and knew he was looking at a corpse. He
thought maybe his heart had given out, but after further examination,
he listed the cause of death as a cerebral hemorrhage.
Alden was the third body to be interred in the

(16:42):
family plot in two months, but Jane wasn't finished. Just
four days after Alden's funeral, on August twelfth, the remaining
family members all went on a joy ride around town.
Before they left, Jane urged Minnie to have a little

(17:05):
cocoa wine to soothe her nerves. It sounds gross, and
I can only imagine it tasted worse. After Jane dissolved
a tablet of morphia in it. Minnie didn't drink alcohol,
but she gave in to the nurse. Jane was, after all,

(17:27):
their professional, and she started feeling bad immediately. By the
time they got home that afternoon, she couldn't get up
the stairs. Jane brought her a glass of mineral water
into which she had already, of course, dissolved, a tablet
of morphine and a tablet of atropine. Around midnight, Jane

(17:53):
injected Minnie with another dose of morphine, which rendered her
completely still except for a twist leg. Normally, Jane would
pull back the covers and slide into bed alongside her victim,
but this time she did something that was arguably worse.

(18:35):
Jane had been feeding many lethal medications over the course
of the day, but this time, instead of getting in
her victim's deathbed to experience the pain the way she enjoyed, Instead,
Jane brought Minnie's ten year old son, Jesse, into her bed,

(18:56):
and she cuddled him while his mother died downstairs. Jane
had never seemed very concerned about getting caught for her crimes.
The atropine helped mask her use of morphine, but that's
about the only precaution She took to hide her behavior. Still,

(19:19):
murdering four members of the same family in less than
three months was absurdly blatant, even for her. The local
newspaper covered the events with the dramatic headline entire family
wiped out. Oddly, the paper never once mentioned foul play,

(19:44):
but the hackles of the Davis clan were finally starting
to rise. Captain Paul Gibbs, Minnie Gibbs father in law,
remembered Jane administering some drug to many while she rested.
He told his son Irving about it when Irving arrived
home from SA Maybe that's why Irving declined when Jane

(20:10):
offered to move in and take care of him. Jane
just turned her attentions elsewhere. She was done with the
Davis clan for now, but her time enacting this intimate
familial revenge may have inspired her. Because she actually went
back to Lowell, back to the house where she'd grown

(20:31):
up and where Oramel Brigham still lived. She wasn't there
to kill for once. She was there to betray in
another way, to marry her foster sister's husband. You might
remember Oramel as the faithful, beloved widower of Jane's foster sister, Elizabeth,

(20:54):
and while he seems to have been a totally devoted
husband to Elizabeth, he wasn't you'd call a romantic figure.
Harold Scheckter says in his book Fatal that Romel was
a portly gentleman of advanced middle age, with a double chin,
bald dome, and bushy gray mutton chop whiskers. It didn't

(21:16):
matter what he looked like. When she arrived at his
house on August twenty fourth, nineteen oh one, Jane thought
she'd have Ormel all to herself because back in January,
the winter before she killed the Davises, Jane had actually
poisoned Ormel's longtime housekeeper. She thought the housekeeper was her
competition for his affection. Instead of being met by a

(21:41):
new housekeeper, Jane was met at the door by Ormel's
elder sister, who had come to visit on her way
to the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. Jane poisoned and
killed her four days after arriving. She didn't want eyes
on her while she tried to the widower of her
foster sister that she'd murdered. She did have eyes on her, though,

(22:21):
Right after many Davis was buried after the entire nuclear
Davis family had died in close succession. It wasn't just
the Davis's relatives that started to view Jane with suspicion.
She also finally caught the state authority's eyes. This may

(22:42):
explain why, despite the blatant natures of the crime, the
papers never mentioned the possibility of foul play. Authorities may
have asked them to keep those suspicions quiet to avoid
alerting Jane that she was under scrutiny. State Detective John S.

(23:05):
Patterson was assigned to watch her. He tailed her around
Buzzard's Bay. He was on the train with her when
she moved back to Lowell, and when Jane arrived to
stay with Oramel Brigham, Detective Patterson booked lodging down the street.

(23:25):
He didn't move fast enough, though. When Jane realized that
Ormel didn't intend to marry her or keep her on
in any permanent capacity, she decided to try a few
tricks to change his mind. First, she laced his tea
with morphia. She thought that the sudden onset of illness

(23:47):
might convince him that he needed her. When it didn't work,
she told his friends she was pregnant with his child
that had the opposite of the en tended effect. Ormel
ordered her out of his house that very moment. She
didn't go. Instead, she sulked up to her room as

(24:11):
if to pack, and she took an overdose of morphine herself.
By this time, though Ormel had wised up. He went
upstairs to make sure she was packing, and he found
her unconscious. He called the doctor right away, who made
her vomit and revived her. Ormel didn't have the sympathetic

(24:36):
reaction she was trying to induce in him. He assigned
her an in home nurse to watch her, but when
that nurse went to prepare her lunch, Jane poisoned herself again. Again,
her attempt was foiled. The doctor injected applemorphine into Jane

(24:58):
and made her vomit again. When she revived again, the
doctor asked her why she was doing this. She answered,
I'm tired of life. I know people are talking about me.
I just want to die. I just have to tell y'all. No,

(25:20):
she didn't. She didn't want to die. She wanted pity
so she could continue on her rampage. Although to be honest,
I'm not even sure that that was a conscious thought
by that time. It's hard to trace the leaps and cognition.
At first, Jane didn't want her favorite patients to leave,
so she made them sicker. Then she started experimenting with

(25:43):
counteractive medicines. Then she'd try to push them all the
way to the brink of death and see if she
could bring them back. I'm thinking this is where the
power complex escalated big time. But that's also when her
crimes turned sexual. That's when she would get in bed
with her patients while observing the overdos's effects, and then

(26:07):
she graduated to killing by poisoning. Her train had so
clearly jumped the tracks that her thought processes here get
more and more difficult to follow. Maybe by this time
she knew the detectives were onto her, but probably not.
She'd gotten away was so much for so long she

(26:28):
probably didn't realize that. When she was admitted to the
hospital right after her attempts at suicide, the patient just
down the hall was Detective John Patterson. When the hospital

(27:02):
discharged Jane, she went to live with a couple of
friends in Amherst, New Hampshire, and yes, Detective John Patterson
was still following her. In fact, he was again lodging
just down the street when three other police officers showed

(27:23):
up at his door on October twenty ninth, nineteen oh
one with good news. After Minnie Gibbs was buried, one
detective approached Minnie's father in law, Captain Paul Gibbs. I
just have to tell y'all right quick that in my
narrative nonfiction book about this case, I associated that character

(27:44):
with my late grandfather, who suffered no fools. He is
by far my favorite person in this story. After getting
permission from Minnie's widower, Irving, which I can only imagine
that his father Paul urged him to give, officials had
exhumed all four of the Davis' bodies, many gives viscera

(28:10):
had turned up lethal traces of poison arsenic. This is
what Detective Patterson needed to move in on his suspect.
On October thirtieth, nineteen oh one. Jane's arrest made headlines
the following day on Halloween. People everywhere were stunned that

(28:35):
someone could brutally murder an entire family. They were even
more shocked that she was a nurse and a woman.
But the readers who were most surprised of all were
the people who knew Jane. They couldn't believe it. They

(28:55):
didn't believe it, and they later wrote to her in
Jai telling her so. Jane, though, wasn't really surprised. She
was too smart not to anticipate that her increasingly blatant
crimes would call attention. She'd just gotten too far down

(29:17):
the path of depravity to stop herself, and now her
most salient emotion was she was irritated that the detective
stood in the room while she packed. At first, she
was only charged with the murder of Many Gibbs. I'm
not sure why, but I'm assuming they only tried her

(29:38):
for the one because they had the most evidence there,
and because if that case failed, they had more crimes
to try her on. Later, at the jailhouse, she learned
that her childhood friend James Murphy would defend her pro bona.
Murphy was especially thrilled when he realized that the poison

(29:59):
found in Mean Gibbs was arsenic. Arsenic, you might recall
from other stories we've covered on this show, was a
key ingredient in embalming fluid in this era. For exactly
that reason, even Captain Paul Gibbs, who believed Jane committed

(30:21):
the crimes, was surprised when he heard the investigators were
relying on the presence of arsenic to pin her. The
old Salt said as much in this quote. I suspected
they had been poisoned, but I didn't think Jenny Toppin
would use anything as easily detected as arsenic. He went

(30:47):
on to put the professionals even mortishamee. He thought that
Davis's quote had been killed by morphia and a tropia.
A tropia expanded the pupils of the eyes, whereas more
contracted them, so that if a person had been killed
by those poisons, the pupils of their eyes would practically
be in their normal state, and to detect the traces

(31:09):
of the poison would be very difficult. Officials thought that
was a good idea, so they tested the bodies for
those and their findings were positive. No one ever found
out how Captain Paul Gibbs, the retired fishing boat captain,

(31:30):
worked it out, but he did. Still, Jane received letters
of support and gifts from her friends and former patients
at the jailhouse, where she had what she called a
nice rest, and at first she pled not guilty until

(31:53):
abruptly she about faced and confessed. I couldn't find a

(32:16):
clear reason behind this shift. That's one reason why I
have a hard time fully accepting the confession that William
Randolph Hurst published in one of his newspapers. I'm just
not sure how it came to be, if you paid her,
if she even wrote it. So I just don't really

(32:36):
trust it. But rest assured that whole confession question is
definitely something I'll get Harold Scheckter's take on when I
interview him. Regardless of the details behind that Hurst confession, though,
Jane definitely did change her plea to guilty, and she
started talking from what she said. By this point, Jane

(33:03):
had lost count of her victims. She recounted it all
with full calm and composure to Henry R. Steadman at
the American Medico Psychological Association. The article is long, but
I think it's important to read to you, at least

(33:25):
this part of it. When I try to picture it,
I say to myself, I have poisoned Manny Gibbs, my

(33:46):
dear friend. I have poisoned mister Davis and missus Davis.
This does not convey anything to me and when I
try to sense the condition of the children and all
the consequences, I cannot realize what an awful thing it is.

(34:08):
Why don't I feel sorry and grieve over it? I
cannot make sense of it all. Something comes over me.
I don't know what it is. I seem to have
a sort of paralysis of thought and reason. I have
an uncontrollable desire to give poison without regard to consequence.

(34:35):
I have no objection against telling my feelings, but I
don't know my own mind. I don't know why I
do these things. Later in court, she wondered how they
could possibly find her insane. She could not possible be

(35:00):
insane when she knew full well that she was doing wrong,
and she went to great links to avoid being caught.

(35:26):
So when the court ruled her not guilty by reason
of insanity, Jane thought for sure that the court would
eventually overturn the sentencing, but they didn't. The court ruled
that quote her disease being constitutional, she will never recover,

(35:50):
and then she was committed to Taunton Asylum, where she
stayed for the remainder of her life. She died August seventeenth,
nineteen thirty eight. By then she was eighty four. My
godfather actually gave me a copy of her obituary as

(36:12):
a book release gift. The obituary refers to her as
a mass poisoner. It says she gave the names of
thirty one victims, but that she quote killed at least
one hundred from the time I became a nurse at
Boston Hospital, where I killed the first one, until I

(36:34):
ended the lives of the Davis family. The obit also
says she died at the asylum as just another quiet
old lady. But that's not what the nurses on her
ward said. They said from time to time Jane would

(36:54):
beckon them over and tell them to get the morphine
she would just share to her other patients and say,
you and I will have a lot of fun seeing
them die. And now, dear listeners, I am super pumped

(37:30):
to share with you the conversation I got to have
with Harold Scheckter. He not only wrote his own heavily
research book, Fatal, about Jane, but he's also written about
Ed Gain and Albert Fish. You definitely definitely know who
he is, even if you don't know you know who

(37:50):
he is. He's written many true crime books, and he's
very frequently the expert interview in true crime documentaries and
shows like America's Most Wanted. He is in short, amazing,
and he's here. That's after the break, Harold. I'm so

(38:28):
excited to talk to you today. Thank you so much
for coming on and talk to us about Jane. My
first question is like, where'd you get your start? Like
how'd you do it?

Speaker 2 (38:37):
My day job for forty two years until my relatively
recent retirement was as a professor of American literature. At
some point I decided that I needed to supplement my
meager academic salary somehow, so I decided to try to
write commercial books. And I was basically writing books at

(38:59):
that time about whatever interested me at the moment, and
I was writing a book about movie special effects when
I came across the fact previously unknown to me that
both Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which are my two
favorite horror movies, had been inspired by the same true
life case, that of ed Geen. So I pitched that

(39:22):
idea to my editor. She bought it. I did that book, Deviant.
So when I was actually researching Deviant, I was in
touch with Robert Block. Robert Block wrote the novel Psycho
that the movie was based on, and I said to Block,
why do you think people are so fascinated with ed
Gean And he said, because they've forgotten about Albert Fish.

(39:45):
So that led me to do my second book on
Albert Fish anyway before I knew it, much to my surprise,
because it wasn't the career path I had foreseen for myself.
I had become a true crime ime writer when I started.
The serial murder thing hadn't really become this big phenomenon

(40:07):
the way it did in the eighties and nineties. In fact,
the word serial murder I don't think appears anywhere in
My Green Book or my Fish Book because it was
coined much earlier, but it really didn't enter the language
in the nineteen eighties. When I first started doing it,
I didn't even think of it as true crime. I
thought I was inventing a new genre called true horror,

(40:30):
that I was writing stories about those rare American criminals
who were really monsters and who had entered into somehow
the cultural consciousness is these monsters. In my life as
an academic and a literary critic, One of my mentors

(40:51):
said that one characteristic of a genuinely mythic character in
literature is that everybody knows the character, but relatively few
people can tell you who created him. So when I
was teaching, I would say, you know, to my class, well,
how many people have heard of Sherlock Holmes? And everybody

(41:11):
raised their hands, and then they'd say, how many of
you know who created Sherlock Holms?

Speaker 1 (41:16):
Right?

Speaker 2 (41:17):
And you know, the same thing is true, have had
a elect everybody's heard of had a elector relatively few
people if you ask, would say Thomas Harris. He created
a genuinely mythic monster there in the form of a
serial killer. But I mean it ties into the way
in which, at a certain period the serial killer became

(41:37):
this mythic embodiment of different kinds of free floating fears
and anxieties, and it's kind of remained that way.

Speaker 1 (41:45):
So I want to ask about the Jane I remember
when I read the Terrible True Confession in the Hearst periodical.
Do you remember that one where she kind of laid
out everything? Well, how do you feel about it?

Speaker 2 (41:58):
You know, many notorious killers also wrote a true confession
for hers, and they were all totally fabricated. None of
them were real confessions. Hurst would sometimes pay them a
bunch of money. You have to understand that Hurst was
one of the great pioneers of what was called the
yellow Press. It was basically Hurst and Pulitzer and the

(42:20):
yellow Press that was a precursor of the tabloids. And
not just things like those confessions. They just make stuff
up in their news stories. You know that old saying,
never let the facts get in the way of a
good story. That was their credo. You know, they were
just making that stuff up. So I learned you had

(42:41):
to be very very, very very careful when you relied
on that kind of journalism.

Speaker 1 (42:48):
Right, Well, thank you for validating that which I had
in the back of my head. And then I wanted
to ask you about the book that you are releasing
I think in the fall. Can you tell us about it.

Speaker 2 (43:03):
Well, it's a book called murder Abelia, A History of
Crime in one hundred Objects. It's a book that I've
been wanting to do for a long time. When I
write books, I like to have a certain object connected
to the crime that I keep with me. These things
radiate with some kind of meaning, and it often makes

(43:24):
what I'm writing about more real to me. I don't
know if you remember John Walsh, you know, the America's
most wanted guy. He had a son, Adam, who was
abducted and horribly murdered. Anyway, Walsh had a kind of
overra like show for a while and he asked me
to be on the subject of people who collect all
these murder relics. And I was on with a guy

(43:46):
named Andy Kahan, who works for some kind of victim
advocacy department in the Houston Police Department. And Andy was
very horrified by the fact if there were people who would, like,
you know, collect a lock of Charles Manson's hair or something.

(44:07):
And he's the one who coined the term murderabilia. And
on the show I pointed out to him that there
was nothing new about this. I mean, you can go
back to the eighteenth hundreds and every time there was
a sacial crime, you know, crowds would converge on the
crime scene and take splinters of the house or whatever.

(44:32):
Back then, one of the perks of being an executioner
was you got to keep the noose, and these executioners
would cut the noose up into one inch pieces and
sell them. So for whatever reason, these dark, macabre relics.
I've always exerted this fascination, and you know I don't
collect them, but for one reason or another, I have

(44:53):
come into possession of a few of them. So the
book is not the history, but it's a history of
crime starting in the eighteen hundreds by eighteen thirty, and
each crime is accompanied by a picture of some object
that relates to the crime, and the object becomes kind
of a springboard for my talking about the crime.

Speaker 1 (45:16):
Did you have an object for the Jane book?

Speaker 2 (45:18):
Well, actually, I have a bottle of Hyundai mineral water,
which was her favorite beverage, which you dispensed what poison?

Speaker 1 (45:26):
Did it still have the water in it? No, Okay, that.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
Would be wild. Yeah, it's a beautiful bottle. So yes,
So what's in Murder of Bilia?

Speaker 1 (45:42):
I'm so glad I got to share that with y'all.
Just a fun little aside that I didn't mention in
the interview because I didn't want to pull focus onto myself.
But when my book released mid Pandemic, my godfather also
sent me a bottle of Hunyati mineral water to celebrate.
I'll link in the show notes to the photo of
us choosing like my at the Murder Abelia. We also

(46:03):
have links to Harold Scheckter's books, both the one about
Jane Toppin and the forthcoming one entitled Murder Abelia, and
we'll have a link to my book there too. Join
me next week on the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever
Told for the remarkable story of Holly Dunn, the only

(46:24):
survivor of the Railroad serial Killer. For more information about
this case and others we cover on the show, visit
Diversion Audio dot com. Sign up for Diversion's newsletter and
be among the first to hear about special behind the
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(46:45):
more shows you'll love from Diversion and our partners, and
other exclusive tidbits you can't get anywhere else. That's Diversion
Audio dot Com to sign up for the newsletter. The
Greatest Through Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of
Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. I wrote this episode

(47:08):
and our editorial director is Nora Batel. 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 Scott Waxman. Diversion

(47:40):
Audio