The 19th century nurse who confessed to killing 31 patients on Cape Cod.

Jolly Jane, or Jane Toppan and I first met when a library patron asked about an article in the 1961 issue of Yankee Magazine. Leafing through the bound volume in the Bourne Library periodicals room, I happened to see an article that caught my attention. It involved a local Cataumet family which had supposedly been poisoned by the nurse who had been a summer tenant and family friend. I read the article and, fascinated with the details, started to do some research on the woman known as Jolly Jane. Her story astounded me as I had not been familiar with women serial killers (most of us aren’t thank goodness!) Throughout the next 30 years, I had on several occasions the opportunity to delve into the mind of a person who was widely known in New England in the summer of 1901 but fell into relative obscurity. Her story surfaces every 10 years or so, usually resulting in more articles and further research into the reasons how (and why) someone could kill an entire family and not be found out immediately.  

Honora Kelley, the original name of the woman who became Jane Toppan (aka Jolly Jane) was born to an Irish couple, Bridget and Peter Kelley on March 31, 1857. To all intents, she was an ordinary child but quite possibly abused by her father, whose own sanity was questioned. Her mother died (some accounts say typhus, some pneumonia) when Honora was 6 and her sister, Delia, 8. One source reports that she had two sisters, both of whom came to untimely ends in prostitution and insanity. A newspaper account mentions a bizarre twist in her childhood: that her father sewed his eyelids shut before he died. (No wonder she...