Speaker 1: Diversion audio. A note this episode contains mature content and
Speaker 1: descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners.
Speaker 1: Please take care in listening. Today's episode is the finale
Speaker 1: of our three part mini series on the first American
Speaker 1: female serial killer. If you miss the first two parts,
Speaker 1: I highly recommend that you pause me here, listen to
Speaker 1: those episodes, and then come back once you're caught up,
Speaker 1: because that backstory is integral to understanding how Jane's crimes
Speaker 1: got bigger, faster, and way slow. Beer. The town of
Speaker 1: catam Massachusetts, didn't really like the Davis family. The davis
Speaker 1: Is said they started their hospitality business because they enjoyed
Speaker 1: working with strangers, and they lived on the outskirts of
Speaker 1: town because they enjoyed it there. That might have been true,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't the whole truth. At first, the town
Speaker 1: was reluctant to get close to Alden Davis because it
Speaker 1: was the eighteen seventies in Massachusetts and Alden Davis had
Speaker 1: fought for the Confederacy. There's enough of an aversion already.
Speaker 1: But then there was the religious sect that Alden Davis
Speaker 1: was a part of. The Second Advent Church was run
Speaker 1: by Charles Freeman. And not only was it a fundamentalist
Speaker 1: Christian sect, the kind of which we still have to
Speaker 1: be wary, but it was, as they so often are,
Speaker 1: next level fundamentalist and not at all christ like. Charles
Speaker 1: Freeman lived near Katomic with his wife and two young daughters,
Speaker 1: four and six years old. His congregation admired him for
Speaker 1: his fervent convictions, and he was always preaching about the
Speaker 1: need to prove yourself through sacrifice. In April of eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine, he told his wife that what they needed
Speaker 1: to sacrifice was their four year old daughter. At two
Speaker 1: o'clock in the morning of May first, eighteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: Freeman woke up and told his wife he was doing it.
Speaker 1: He had been called and he would complete the sacrifice.
Speaker 1: She said, if it is the Lord's will, then I
Speaker 1: am ready for it, as if someone had released a
Speaker 1: huge weight. Charles went out to the shed and got
Speaker 1: a sharp sheath knife. He came back inside to his
Speaker 1: daughter's room. His eldest daughter woke up, and he sent
Speaker 1: her into the other room with his wife. Charles knelt
Speaker 1: to pray by the crib of the older child. He
Speaker 1: prayed that God would steal his will like he had Abrahams,
Speaker 1: even though Abraham did not actually kill his child. Charles
Speaker 1: prayed that she didn't wake up, but she did. She
Speaker 1: woke up just as he drove the knife down into
Speaker 1: her side. The next day, he invited the congregation over
Speaker 1: for a long, unhinged sermon before he took them into
Speaker 1: his daughter's bedroom to see her body. He claimed that
Speaker 1: she would rise again in three days. The community was
Speaker 1: gutted and appalled, and Charles Freeman was ultimately sent to
Speaker 1: an asylum for the criminally insane. But at least one
Speaker 1: of his neighbors stood by him. Alden Davis showed up
Speaker 1: to the four year old's funeral and declared there never
Speaker 1: lived a purer man than Charles Freeman. So everyone in
Speaker 1: the town took a big self preservationist step back from
Speaker 1: the Davis family. That's awful, you might think, But what
Speaker 1: does this atrocity have to do with Jane Toppin? Like
Speaker 1: I said, the town of Katama didn't really care for
Speaker 1: the Davises. They kept them at arm's length, which I
Speaker 1: think is pretty understandable. So when the Davises started dying,
Speaker 1: one right after the other, and I do mean one
Speaker 1: right after the other. The town kind of thought, well,
Speaker 1: whatever happens to that family, happens to that family. It
Speaker 1: was easy to see the demise of the Davises as
Speaker 1: the hand of God delivering punishment, rather than see it
Speaker 1: for what it actually was the work of an increasingly
Speaker 1: reckless and sloppy serial killer. Jane toppin Welcome to the
Speaker 1: Greatest True Crime Stories Ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer.
Speaker 1: I'm a writer of true crime, which means I live
Speaker 1: inside the research wormhole. But I'm not necessarily interested in
Speaker 1: the attention grabbing elements, the blood and the gore all that.
Speaker 1: I'm more interested in the people behind these stories and
Speaker 1: what we can learn about society by looking at their experiences.
Speaker 1: That's what I explore here every week when I dig
Speaker 1: into crimes where a woman is not just a victim.
Speaker 1: She might be the detective, the lawyer, the witness, the coroner,
Speaker 1: the criminal, or a combination of those roles. As you
Speaker 1: probably already know, women can do anything. Today is the
Speaker 1: last episode of our three part miniseries on the first
Speaker 1: American female serial killer. It's a nineteenth century American tale
Speaker 1: about how an orphan turned indentured servant bootstrapped herself into
Speaker 1: a mad scientist murderer. Her story is the one I
Speaker 1: spent years researching for my book America's First Female serial Killer,
Speaker 1: Jane Toppin and the Making of a Monster, so I'm
Speaker 1: excited to share it with you. In the finale of
Speaker 1: this miniseries, Jane's crimes reached new levels of depravity and
Speaker 1: recklessness before the law finally catches on. I also have
Speaker 1: a conversation with Harold Scheckter, who wrote his own excellent
Speaker 1: book on Jane Tappin, so stay tuned for that all
Speaker 1: after the break. So this is our third of three
Speaker 1: episodes about Jane Tappin. We did a deep dive into
Speaker 1: her early years and now we're moving into her most
Speaker 1: criminal period, right, Yeah, it gets more criminal. And the
Speaker 1: interesting thing here that I want to point out is
Speaker 1: that when I've told this story before at parties or whatever,
Speaker 1: there's a point where people get her. I don't know
Speaker 1: if I'm just telling the story in a way that
Speaker 1: makes her a sympathetic character or what, but right around
Speaker 1: the point where her favorite patients leave the hospital without
Speaker 1: saying goodbye, that's when most people are like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: could see how she would kill someone. They're not excusing
Speaker 1: it by any stretch, but they get it, if that
Speaker 1: makes sense. The typical refrain goes something like, if all
Speaker 1: that shit happened to me, I'd kill someone too, except
Speaker 1: for they didn't hurt people. May hurt people, but plenty
Speaker 1: of folks had an upbringing as bad as or worse
Speaker 1: than Jane, and they didn't murder thirty people. So what
Speaker 1: I don't know that really is the question is it
Speaker 1: situational or was it in her all along ye old
Speaker 1: nature versus nurture debate, The answer is both, of course
Speaker 1: and neither, And there's no one right answer, because really
Speaker 1: there's no answer at all. But because it's the question,
Speaker 1: we can't stop trying to answer it. Last episode, we
Speaker 1: found Jane at the bedside of Elizabeth Brigham, her foster sister.
Speaker 1: Jane spent the summers recuperating from her round the clock
Speaker 1: freelance work as a private nurse, and she had invited
Speaker 1: Elizabeth out to the seaside where she slipped her in
Speaker 1: overdose of morphia mixed into mineral water, sent her into
Speaker 1: a coma, and killed her. After that, Jane kept killing
Speaker 1: her private nursing patients until June of nineteen oh one,
Speaker 1: when Mattie Davis, wife of Alden Davis, arrived in Boston
Speaker 1: to collect Jane debt. Jane tortured her for seven days
Speaker 1: before finally administering the fatal dose of morphine that killed Mattie.
Speaker 1: By then, Jane had decided to kill the whole Davis
Speaker 1: family and burn their house to the ground. It wasn't
Speaker 1: long after Mattie's funeral that her daughters, Genevieve Gordon and
Speaker 1: Minnie Gibbs, invited Jane to move into the Jakin house
Speaker 1: to help care for their father, who was always in
Speaker 1: erratic personality, and keep the house. Jane was so fun
Speaker 1: to be around that they thought she was sure to
Speaker 1: lift their spirits. Genevieve hadn't seen her mother in a year,
Speaker 1: so her mother's collapse and fairly sudden death afterward struck
Speaker 1: her especially hard. That sadness was what Jane said made
Speaker 1: her think Genevieve was better off dead. She would be
Speaker 1: first on the list. But before that, Jane had to
Speaker 1: start a few fires. It was a new experiment for her,
Speaker 1: and you probably remember how she liked to experiment. They'd
Speaker 1: only been settled in the house for a few days before,
Speaker 1: the father, Alden, who'd suffered insomnia since his wife's death,
Speaker 1: smelled smoke in the middle of the night. He yelled
Speaker 1: for Jane to help him extinguish the flames, and she
Speaker 1: came running from her room, looking as if she just
Speaker 1: woke up. Together, they successfully put out the fire, and
Speaker 1: then it happened twice more with the same results. It
Speaker 1: seems like people should have grown suspicious, but the only
Speaker 1: people who would have thought to do that, the Davis family,
Speaker 1: were suffering with grief far too much to question Jane
Speaker 1: when she claimed to have seen a stranger skulking about
Speaker 1: the property and that stranger was probably the firebug trying
Speaker 1: to burn the house down, everyone just went with it,
Speaker 1: and then they started dying. Jane pulled one of the daughters, Minnie,
Speaker 1: aside one afternoon and told her that the other day
Speaker 1: she saw Minnie's sister, Genevieve in the garden shed eyeing
Speaker 1: a box of Paris green rat poison. Jane intimated that
Speaker 1: they should probably keep a close watch on Genevieve given
Speaker 1: her recent depression. Within a few days, on July twenty sixth,
Speaker 1: nineteen oh one, Genevieve started to vomit violently after dinner.
Speaker 1: She threw up until her throat was raw, and when
Speaker 1: she came out of the bathroom Jane was waiting for
Speaker 1: her with a glass of mineral water. Genevieve was dead
Speaker 1: by morning. The physician listed her cause of death as
Speaker 1: heart failure. The neighbors said Genevieve died of grief. Jane
Speaker 1: told Genevieve's surviving sister and father that she died by suicide.
Speaker 1: She said that she'd found the syringe that she'd used
Speaker 1: to inject herself with rat poison, but to spare their feelings,
Speaker 1: she threw it in the outhouse. Genevieve was interred next
Speaker 1: to her mother. Only a few weeks later, it was
Speaker 1: Alden Davis's turn. During a heat wave of nineteen oh one,
Speaker 1: he came home from a trip to Boston and all
Speaker 1: but collapsed on the sofa from exhaustion. Jane fussed over
Speaker 1: him for a few minutes, and then she came back
Speaker 1: with a glass of Hunati mineral water. The next morning,
Speaker 1: Minnie Gibbs, the surviving elder daughter of Mattie and Alden,
Speaker 1: came over to see her parents with her two young children.
Speaker 1: They lived in walking distance of Alden's house, which was
Speaker 1: nice when Minnie's husband, Irving, a sea captain, was away
Speaker 1: for months at a time. Harry Gordon, Genevieve's widower, was
Speaker 1: also there with their daughter. The family gathered around the
Speaker 1: breakfast table with Jane, but Davis didn't come down to
Speaker 1: join them. Harry sent his little girl upstairs to wake
Speaker 1: up her grandpa, but when she scampered back downstairs a
Speaker 1: few minutes later, she said Alden wouldn't wake up. The
Speaker 1: family called the doctor. The doctor took one look at
Speaker 1: Alden and knew he was looking at a corpse. He
Speaker 1: thought maybe his heart had given out, but after further examination,
Speaker 1: he listed the cause of death as a cerebral hemorrhage.
Speaker 1: Alden was the third body to be interred in the
Speaker 1: family plot in two months, but Jane wasn't finished. Just
Speaker 1: four days after Alden's funeral, on August twelfth, the remaining
Speaker 1: family members all went on a joy ride around town.
Speaker 1: Before they left, Jane urged Minnie to have a little
Speaker 1: cocoa wine to soothe her nerves. It sounds gross, and
Speaker 1: I can only imagine it tasted worse. After Jane dissolved
Speaker 1: a tablet of morphia in it. Minnie didn't drink alcohol,
Speaker 1: but she gave in to the nurse. Jane was, after all,
Speaker 1: their professional, and she started feeling bad immediately. By the
Speaker 1: time they got home that afternoon, she couldn't get up
Speaker 1: the stairs. Jane brought her a glass of mineral water
Speaker 1: into which she had already, of course, dissolved, a tablet
Speaker 1: of morphine and a tablet of atropine. Around midnight, Jane
Speaker 1: injected Minnie with another dose of morphine, which rendered her
Speaker 1: completely still except for a twist leg. Normally, Jane would
Speaker 1: pull back the covers and slide into bed alongside her victim,
Speaker 1: but this time she did something that was arguably worse.
Speaker 1: Jane had been feeding many lethal medications over the course
Speaker 1: of the day, but this time, instead of getting in
Speaker 1: her victim's deathbed to experience the pain the way she enjoyed, Instead,
Speaker 1: Jane brought Minnie's ten year old son, Jesse, into her bed,
Speaker 1: and she cuddled him while his mother died downstairs. Jane
Speaker 1: had never seemed very concerned about getting caught for her crimes.
Speaker 1: The atropine helped mask her use of morphine, but that's
Speaker 1: about the only precaution She took to hide her behavior. Still,
Speaker 1: murdering four members of the same family in less than
Speaker 1: three months was absurdly blatant, even for her. The local
Speaker 1: newspaper covered the events with the dramatic headline entire family
Speaker 1: wiped out. Oddly, the paper never once mentioned foul play,
Speaker 1: but the hackles of the Davis clan were finally starting
Speaker 1: to rise. Captain Paul Gibbs, Minnie Gibbs father in law,
Speaker 1: remembered Jane administering some drug to many while she rested.
Speaker 1: He told his son Irving about it when Irving arrived
Speaker 1: home from SA Maybe that's why Irving declined when Jane
Speaker 1: offered to move in and take care of him. Jane
Speaker 1: just turned her attentions elsewhere. She was done with the
Speaker 1: Davis clan for now, but her time enacting this intimate
Speaker 1: familial revenge may have inspired her. Because she actually went
Speaker 1: back to Lowell, back to the house where she'd grown
Speaker 1: up and where Oramel Brigham still lived. She wasn't there
Speaker 1: to kill for once. She was there to betray in
Speaker 1: another way, to marry her foster sister's husband. You might
Speaker 1: remember Oramel as the faithful, beloved widower of Jane's foster sister, Elizabeth,
Speaker 1: and while he seems to have been a totally devoted
Speaker 1: husband to Elizabeth, he wasn't you'd call a romantic figure.
Speaker 1: Harold Scheckter says in his book Fatal that Romel was
Speaker 1: a portly gentleman of advanced middle age, with a double chin,
Speaker 1: bald dome, and bushy gray mutton chop whiskers. It didn't
Speaker 1: matter what he looked like. When she arrived at his
Speaker 1: house on August twenty fourth, nineteen oh one, Jane thought
Speaker 1: she'd have Ormel all to herself because back in January,
Speaker 1: the winter before she killed the Davises, Jane had actually
Speaker 1: poisoned Ormel's longtime housekeeper. She thought the housekeeper was her
Speaker 1: competition for his affection. Instead of being met by a
Speaker 1: new housekeeper, Jane was met at the door by Ormel's
Speaker 1: elder sister, who had come to visit on her way
Speaker 1: to the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. Jane poisoned and
Speaker 1: killed her four days after arriving. She didn't want eyes
Speaker 1: on her while she tried to the widower of her
Speaker 1: foster sister that she'd murdered. She did have eyes on her, though,
Speaker 1: Right after many Davis was buried after the entire nuclear
Speaker 1: Davis family had died in close succession. It wasn't just
Speaker 1: the Davis's relatives that started to view Jane with suspicion.
Speaker 1: She also finally caught the state authority's eyes. This may
Speaker 1: explain why, despite the blatant natures of the crime, the
Speaker 1: papers never mentioned the possibility of foul play. Authorities may
Speaker 1: have asked them to keep those suspicions quiet to avoid
Speaker 1: alerting Jane that she was under scrutiny. State Detective John S.
Speaker 1: Patterson was assigned to watch her. He tailed her around
Speaker 1: Buzzard's Bay. He was on the train with her when
Speaker 1: she moved back to Lowell, and when Jane arrived to
Speaker 1: stay with Oramel Brigham, Detective Patterson booked lodging down the street.
Speaker 1: He didn't move fast enough, though. When Jane realized that
Speaker 1: Ormel didn't intend to marry her or keep her on
Speaker 1: in any permanent capacity, she decided to try a few
Speaker 1: tricks to change his mind. First, she laced his tea
Speaker 1: with morphia. She thought that the sudden onset of illness
Speaker 1: might convince him that he needed her. When it didn't work,
Speaker 1: she told his friends she was pregnant with his child
Speaker 1: that had the opposite of the en tended effect. Ormel
Speaker 1: ordered her out of his house that very moment. She
Speaker 1: didn't go. Instead, she sulked up to her room as
Speaker 1: if to pack, and she took an overdose of morphine herself.
Speaker 1: By this time, though Ormel had wised up. He went
Speaker 1: upstairs to make sure she was packing, and he found
Speaker 1: her unconscious. He called the doctor right away, who made
Speaker 1: her vomit and revived her. Ormel didn't have the sympathetic
Speaker 1: reaction she was trying to induce in him. He assigned
Speaker 1: her an in home nurse to watch her, but when
Speaker 1: that nurse went to prepare her lunch, Jane poisoned herself again. Again,
Speaker 1: her attempt was foiled. The doctor injected applemorphine into Jane
Speaker 1: and made her vomit again. When she revived again, the
Speaker 1: doctor asked her why she was doing this. She answered,
Speaker 1: I'm tired of life. I know people are talking about me.
Speaker 1: I just want to die. I just have to tell y'all. No,
Speaker 1: she didn't. She didn't want to die. She wanted pity
Speaker 1: so she could continue on her rampage. Although to be honest,
Speaker 1: I'm not even sure that that was a conscious thought
Speaker 1: by that time. It's hard to trace the leaps and cognition.
Speaker 1: At first, Jane didn't want her favorite patients to leave,
Speaker 1: so she made them sicker. Then she started experimenting with
Speaker 1: counteractive medicines. Then she'd try to push them all the
Speaker 1: way to the brink of death and see if she
Speaker 1: could bring them back. I'm thinking this is where the
Speaker 1: power complex escalated big time. But that's also when her
Speaker 1: crimes turned sexual. That's when she would get in bed
Speaker 1: with her patients while observing the overdos's effects, and then
Speaker 1: she graduated to killing by poisoning. Her train had so
Speaker 1: clearly jumped the tracks that her thought processes here get
Speaker 1: more and more difficult to follow. Maybe by this time
Speaker 1: she knew the detectives were onto her, but probably not.
Speaker 1: She'd gotten away was so much for so long she
Speaker 1: probably didn't realize that. When she was admitted to the
Speaker 1: hospital right after her attempts at suicide, the patient just
Speaker 1: down the hall was Detective John Patterson. When the hospital
Speaker 1: discharged Jane, she went to live with a couple of
Speaker 1: friends in Amherst, New Hampshire, and yes, Detective John Patterson
Speaker 1: was still following her. In fact, he was again lodging
Speaker 1: just down the street when three other police officers showed
Speaker 1: up at his door on October twenty ninth, nineteen oh
Speaker 1: one with good news. After Minnie Gibbs was buried, one
Speaker 1: detective approached Minnie's father in law, Captain Paul Gibbs. I
Speaker 1: just have to tell y'all right quick that in my
Speaker 1: narrative nonfiction book about this case, I associated that character
Speaker 1: with my late grandfather, who suffered no fools. He is
Speaker 1: by far my favorite person in this story. After getting
Speaker 1: permission from Minnie's widower, Irving, which I can only imagine
Speaker 1: that his father Paul urged him to give, officials had
Speaker 1: exhumed all four of the Davis' bodies, many gives viscera
Speaker 1: had turned up lethal traces of poison arsenic. This is
Speaker 1: what Detective Patterson needed to move in on his suspect.
Speaker 1: On October thirtieth, nineteen oh one. Jane's arrest made headlines
Speaker 1: the following day on Halloween. People everywhere were stunned that
Speaker 1: someone could brutally murder an entire family. They were even
Speaker 1: more shocked that she was a nurse and a woman.
Speaker 1: But the readers who were most surprised of all were
Speaker 1: the people who knew Jane. They couldn't believe it. They
Speaker 1: didn't believe it, and they later wrote to her in
Speaker 1: Jai telling her so. Jane, though, wasn't really surprised. She
Speaker 1: was too smart not to anticipate that her increasingly blatant
Speaker 1: crimes would call attention. She'd just gotten too far down
Speaker 1: the path of depravity to stop herself, and now her
Speaker 1: most salient emotion was she was irritated that the detective
Speaker 1: stood in the room while she packed. At first, she
Speaker 1: was only charged with the murder of Many Gibbs. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure why, but I'm assuming they only tried her
Speaker 1: for the one because they had the most evidence there,
Speaker 1: and because if that case failed, they had more crimes
Speaker 1: to try her on. Later, at the jailhouse, she learned
Speaker 1: that her childhood friend James Murphy would defend her pro bona.
Speaker 1: Murphy was especially thrilled when he realized that the poison
Speaker 1: found in Mean Gibbs was arsenic. Arsenic, you might recall
Speaker 1: from other stories we've covered on this show, was a
Speaker 1: key ingredient in embalming fluid in this era. For exactly
Speaker 1: that reason, even Captain Paul Gibbs, who believed Jane committed
Speaker 1: the crimes, was surprised when he heard the investigators were
Speaker 1: relying on the presence of arsenic to pin her. The
Speaker 1: old Salt said as much in this quote. I suspected
Speaker 1: they had been poisoned, but I didn't think Jenny Toppin
Speaker 1: would use anything as easily detected as arsenic. He went
Speaker 1: on to put the professionals even mortishamee. He thought that
Speaker 1: Davis's quote had been killed by morphia and a tropia.
Speaker 1: A tropia expanded the pupils of the eyes, whereas more
Speaker 1: contracted them, so that if a person had been killed
Speaker 1: by those poisons, the pupils of their eyes would practically
Speaker 1: be in their normal state, and to detect the traces
Speaker 1: of the poison would be very difficult. Officials thought that
Speaker 1: was a good idea, so they tested the bodies for
Speaker 1: those and their findings were positive. No one ever found
Speaker 1: out how Captain Paul Gibbs, the retired fishing boat captain,
Speaker 1: worked it out, but he did. Still, Jane received letters
Speaker 1: of support and gifts from her friends and former patients
Speaker 1: at the jailhouse, where she had what she called a
Speaker 1: nice rest, and at first she pled not guilty until
Speaker 1: abruptly she about faced and confessed. I couldn't find a
Speaker 1: clear reason behind this shift. That's one reason why I
Speaker 1: have a hard time fully accepting the confession that William
Speaker 1: Randolph Hurst published in one of his newspapers. I'm just
Speaker 1: not sure how it came to be, if you paid her,
Speaker 1: if she even wrote it. So I just don't really
Speaker 1: trust it. But rest assured that whole confession question is
Speaker 1: definitely something I'll get Harold Scheckter's take on when I
Speaker 1: interview him. Regardless of the details behind that Hurst confession, though,
Speaker 1: Jane definitely did change her plea to guilty, and she
Speaker 1: started talking from what she said. By this point, Jane
Speaker 1: had lost count of her victims. She recounted it all
Speaker 1: with full calm and composure to Henry R. Steadman at
Speaker 1: the American Medico Psychological Association. The article is long, but
Speaker 1: I think it's important to read to you, at least
Speaker 1: this part of it. When I try to picture it,
Speaker 1: I say to myself, I have poisoned Manny Gibbs, my
Speaker 1: dear friend. I have poisoned mister Davis and missus Davis.
Speaker 1: This does not convey anything to me and when I
Speaker 1: try to sense the condition of the children and all
Speaker 1: the consequences, I cannot realize what an awful thing it is.
Speaker 1: Why don't I feel sorry and grieve over it? I
Speaker 1: cannot make sense of it all. Something comes over me.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it is. I seem to have
Speaker 1: a sort of paralysis of thought and reason. I have
Speaker 1: an uncontrollable desire to give poison without regard to consequence.
Speaker 1: I have no objection against telling my feelings, but I
Speaker 1: don't know my own mind. I don't know why I
Speaker 1: do these things. Later in court, she wondered how they
Speaker 1: could possibly find her insane. She could not possible be
Speaker 1: insane when she knew full well that she was doing wrong,
Speaker 1: and she went to great links to avoid being caught.
Speaker 1: So when the court ruled her not guilty by reason
Speaker 1: of insanity, Jane thought for sure that the court would
Speaker 1: eventually overturn the sentencing, but they didn't. The court ruled
Speaker 1: that quote her disease being constitutional, she will never recover,
Speaker 1: and then she was committed to Taunton Asylum, where she
Speaker 1: stayed for the remainder of her life. She died August seventeenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty eight. By then she was eighty four. My
Speaker 1: godfather actually gave me a copy of her obituary as
Speaker 1: a book release gift. The obituary refers to her as
Speaker 1: a mass poisoner. It says she gave the names of
Speaker 1: thirty one victims, but that she quote killed at least
Speaker 1: one hundred from the time I became a nurse at
Speaker 1: Boston Hospital, where I killed the first one, until I
Speaker 1: ended the lives of the Davis family. The obit also
Speaker 1: says she died at the asylum as just another quiet
Speaker 1: old lady. But that's not what the nurses on her
Speaker 1: ward said. They said from time to time Jane would
Speaker 1: beckon them over and tell them to get the morphine
Speaker 1: she would just share to her other patients and say,
Speaker 1: you and I will have a lot of fun seeing
Speaker 1: them die. And now, dear listeners, I am super pumped
Speaker 1: to share with you the conversation I got to have
Speaker 1: with Harold Scheckter. He not only wrote his own heavily
Speaker 1: research book, Fatal, about Jane, but he's also written about
Speaker 1: Ed Gain and Albert Fish. You definitely definitely know who
Speaker 1: he is, even if you don't know you know who
Speaker 1: he is. He's written many true crime books, and he's
Speaker 1: very frequently the expert interview in true crime documentaries and
Speaker 1: shows like America's Most Wanted. He is in short, amazing,
Speaker 1: and he's here. That's after the break, Harold. I'm so
Speaker 1: excited to talk to you today. Thank you so much
Speaker 1: for coming on and talk to us about Jane. My
Speaker 1: first question is like, where'd you get your start? Like
Speaker 1: how'd you do it?
Speaker 2: My day job for forty two years until my relatively
Speaker 2: recent retirement was as a professor of American literature. At
Speaker 2: some point I decided that I needed to supplement my
Speaker 2: meager academic salary somehow, so I decided to try to
Speaker 2: write commercial books. And I was basically writing books at
Speaker 2: that time about whatever interested me at the moment, and
Speaker 2: I was writing a book about movie special effects when
Speaker 2: I came across the fact previously unknown to me that
Speaker 2: both Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which are my two
Speaker 2: favorite horror movies, had been inspired by the same true
Speaker 2: life case, that of ed Geen. So I pitched that
Speaker 2: idea to my editor. She bought it. I did that book, Deviant.
Speaker 2: So when I was actually researching Deviant, I was in
Speaker 2: touch with Robert Block. Robert Block wrote the novel Psycho
Speaker 2: that the movie was based on, and I said to Block,
Speaker 2: why do you think people are so fascinated with ed
Speaker 2: Gean And he said, because they've forgotten about Albert Fish.
Speaker 2: So that led me to do my second book on
Speaker 2: Albert Fish anyway before I knew it, much to my surprise,
Speaker 2: because it wasn't the career path I had foreseen for myself.
Speaker 2: I had become a true crime ime writer when I started.
Speaker 2: The serial murder thing hadn't really become this big phenomenon
Speaker 2: the way it did in the eighties and nineties. In fact,
Speaker 2: the word serial murder I don't think appears anywhere in
Speaker 2: My Green Book or my Fish Book because it was
Speaker 2: coined much earlier, but it really didn't enter the language
Speaker 2: in the nineteen eighties. When I first started doing it,
Speaker 2: I didn't even think of it as true crime. I
Speaker 2: thought I was inventing a new genre called true horror,
Speaker 2: that I was writing stories about those rare American criminals
Speaker 2: who were really monsters and who had entered into somehow
Speaker 2: the cultural consciousness is these monsters. In my life as
Speaker 2: an academic and a literary critic, One of my mentors
Speaker 2: said that one characteristic of a genuinely mythic character in
Speaker 2: literature is that everybody knows the character, but relatively few
Speaker 2: people can tell you who created him. So when I
Speaker 2: was teaching, I would say, you know, to my class, well,
Speaker 2: how many people have heard of Sherlock Holmes? And everybody
Speaker 2: raised their hands, and then they'd say, how many of
Speaker 2: you know who created Sherlock Holms?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And you know, the same thing is true, have had
Speaker 2: a elect everybody's heard of had a elector relatively few
Speaker 2: people if you ask, would say Thomas Harris. He created
Speaker 2: a genuinely mythic monster there in the form of a
Speaker 2: serial killer. But I mean it ties into the way
Speaker 2: in which, at a certain period the serial killer became
Speaker 2: this mythic embodiment of different kinds of free floating fears
Speaker 2: and anxieties, and it's kind of remained that way.
Speaker 1: So I want to ask about the Jane I remember
Speaker 1: when I read the Terrible True Confession in the Hearst periodical.
Speaker 1: Do you remember that one where she kind of laid
Speaker 1: out everything? Well, how do you feel about it?
Speaker 2: You know, many notorious killers also wrote a true confession
Speaker 2: for hers, and they were all totally fabricated. None of
Speaker 2: them were real confessions. Hurst would sometimes pay them a
Speaker 2: bunch of money. You have to understand that Hurst was
Speaker 2: one of the great pioneers of what was called the
Speaker 2: yellow Press. It was basically Hurst and Pulitzer and the
Speaker 2: yellow Press that was a precursor of the tabloids. And
Speaker 2: not just things like those confessions. They just make stuff
Speaker 2: up in their news stories. You know that old saying,
Speaker 2: never let the facts get in the way of a
Speaker 2: good story. That was their credo. You know, they were
Speaker 2: just making that stuff up. So I learned you had
Speaker 2: to be very very, very very careful when you relied
Speaker 2: on that kind of journalism.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, thank you for validating that which I had
Speaker 1: in the back of my head. And then I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask you about the book that you are releasing
Speaker 1: I think in the fall. Can you tell us about it.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a book called murder Abelia, A History of
Speaker 2: Crime in one hundred Objects. It's a book that I've
Speaker 2: been wanting to do for a long time. When I
Speaker 2: write books, I like to have a certain object connected
Speaker 2: to the crime that I keep with me. These things
Speaker 2: radiate with some kind of meaning, and it often makes
Speaker 2: what I'm writing about more real to me. I don't
Speaker 2: know if you remember John Walsh, you know, the America's
Speaker 2: most wanted guy. He had a son, Adam, who was
Speaker 2: abducted and horribly murdered. Anyway, Walsh had a kind of
Speaker 2: overra like show for a while and he asked me
Speaker 2: to be on the subject of people who collect all
Speaker 2: these murder relics. And I was on with a guy
Speaker 2: named Andy Kahan, who works for some kind of victim
Speaker 2: advocacy department in the Houston Police Department. And Andy was
Speaker 2: very horrified by the fact if there were people who would, like,
Speaker 2: you know, collect a lock of Charles Manson's hair or something.
Speaker 2: And he's the one who coined the term murderabilia. And
Speaker 2: on the show I pointed out to him that there
Speaker 2: was nothing new about this. I mean, you can go
Speaker 2: back to the eighteenth hundreds and every time there was
Speaker 2: a sacial crime, you know, crowds would converge on the
Speaker 2: crime scene and take splinters of the house or whatever.
Speaker 2: Back then, one of the perks of being an executioner
Speaker 2: was you got to keep the noose, and these executioners
Speaker 2: would cut the noose up into one inch pieces and
Speaker 2: sell them. So for whatever reason, these dark, macabre relics.
Speaker 2: I've always exerted this fascination, and you know I don't
Speaker 2: collect them, but for one reason or another, I have
Speaker 2: come into possession of a few of them. So the
Speaker 2: book is not the history, but it's a history of
Speaker 2: crime starting in the eighteen hundreds by eighteen thirty, and
Speaker 2: each crime is accompanied by a picture of some object
Speaker 2: that relates to the crime, and the object becomes kind
Speaker 2: of a springboard for my talking about the crime.
Speaker 1: Did you have an object for the Jane book?
Speaker 2: Well, actually, I have a bottle of Hyundai mineral water,
Speaker 2: which was her favorite beverage, which you dispensed what poison?
Speaker 1: Did it still have the water in it? No, Okay, that.
Speaker 2: Would be wild. Yeah, it's a beautiful bottle. So yes,
Speaker 2: So what's in Murder of Bilia?
Speaker 1: I'm so glad I got to share that with y'all.
Speaker 1: Just a fun little aside that I didn't mention in
Speaker 1: the interview because I didn't want to pull focus onto myself.
Speaker 1: But when my book released mid Pandemic, my godfather also
Speaker 1: sent me a bottle of Hunyati mineral water to celebrate.
Speaker 1: I'll link in the show notes to the photo of
Speaker 1: us choosing like my at the Murder Abelia. We also
Speaker 1: have links to Harold Scheckter's books, both the one about
Speaker 1: Jane Toppin and the forthcoming one entitled Murder Abelia, and
Speaker 1: we'll have a link to my book there too. Join
Speaker 1: me next week on the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever
Speaker 1: Told for the remarkable story of Holly Dunn, the only
Speaker 1: survivor of the Railroad serial Killer. For more information about
Speaker 1: this case and others we cover on the show, visit
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Speaker 1: Greatest Through Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of
Speaker 1: Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. I wrote this episode
Speaker 1: and our editorial director is Nora Batel. Our show is
Speaker 1: produced and directed by Mark Francis. Our development team is
Speaker 1: Emma Dumouth and Jacob Bronstein. Theme music by Tyler cash
Speaker 1: Executive producers Jacob Bronstein, Mark Francis and Scott Waxman. Diversion
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