Jane Toppan
Jane Toppan – real name Honora Kelley – was abandoned to an orphanage by a father well-known in his Boston neighborhood as being off his rocker (a local rumor had him sewing his own eyelids shut, explaining why he was known as “Kelly the Crack” – short for crackpot). Honora was a difficult child in the orphanage, and later as an indentured servant in the home of Ann Toppan in Lowell, Massachusetts. Honora Kelley became Jane Toppan, although never adopted by Mrs. Toppan, and it was under that name that she entered Cambridge Hospital to study nursing.
As a nurse, Jane became fascinated with drugs such as morphine and atropine, and used her access to them to alter the dosages prescribed by doctors for her patients. As a resident Jane experimented with her usually elderly patients, bringing them to the brink of death before reviving them, only to then dispatch them with another altered dose. During this time of drug-induced mortal peril, she would lie in the bed with the patient, obtaining what she later described as sexual gratification.
Jane next worked at Massachusetts General Hospital, claiming additional victims before dismissal for using dangerous drugs recklessly. It was as a private nurse, her next occupation when her killing began in earnest. Her landlords were her first victims, followed by her sister, then the elderly patient she was hired to care for after his wife died (she had killed the wife earlier). She followed that murder by killing the couple’s two daughters. Jane preferred to use strychnine as her poison of choice, easily available in the rodent-infested Victorian Age, but difficult to trace.
When Jane was caught she confessed to 31 murders, all by drugs or poisons, and stated that had she ever married and had a family she would never have resorted to killing. Found not guilty by reason of insanity, Jane spent the rest of her natural life at the Taunton Hospital for the Insane.