Today in History: An Early Serial Murderer

On this day (October 29) in 1901, Jolly Jane Toppan was arrested for murdering the Davis family. She would go on to confess to 31 murders and famously said she wanted "to have killed more people—helpless people—than any other man or woman who ever lived". Toppan had a fascinatingly tragic background. She was born Honora Kelley and her mother died of tuberculosis when she was very young. Her abusive father abandoned her and her sister in an orphanage when she was eight. (The father, Peter “Kelley the Crack” went insane later in life where a popular story about him reported that he sewed his own eyes shut.) Two years later she was placed with the Toppan family as an indentured servant and took their name.

She trained as a nurse and was apparently so well liked she received the nickname, Jolly Jane, but she became fascinated with death. She would administer drugs to her victims and stare into their eyes as she brought them to the brink of death and back again. She would hold them close and reported to the police that she received a sexual thrill from the process of killing them. Her victims included her foster sister, the families of people she worked for, and even a housekeeper whom she murdered so she could get her job and access to a family she had decided to kill. At her trial she argued she was sane because she knew that what she was doing was wrong, but the jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity anyway. She was committed to the Taunton Insane Hospital.