The Serial Killer Nurse
Unlike most serial killers, she was declared not guilty.
“I held her in my arms and watched with delight as she gasped her life out.” — Jane Toppan said of one of her victims.
Honora Kelley, who later became known as Jane Toppan, was a serial killer who confessed to 31 murders. As a nurse, her nickname was “Jolly Jane.”
Background
According to Michael Potts, a philosophy professor at Methodist University, Honora Kelley was born in Boston in 1857 in a poor Irish family. Her father was Peter Kelley, an alcoholic known as being “Kelley the Crack.” Her mother died when she was a year old of tuberculosis.
Jennifer Myers at the Lowell Sun says that Peter Kelley abused his family, and later put his two girls, Honora and her older sister, Delia, at the Boston Female Asylum, an orphanage, in 1863. According to Myers, Peter Kelley later sewed his eyelids closed and became institutionalized.
Delia later became a prostitute. In 1865, Honora was sent to become an indentured servant to Ann Toppan at Lowell, Massachusetts. Honora was never legally adopted by the Toppan family, but her name changed to Jane Toppan.
Jane would graduate at 18 from Lowell High School, and got along well with her foster sister, Elizabeth…
