A Brief History of Female Serial Killers
We mistakenly presumed that serial killers were a symptom of modernity; a product of the newly industrialized urban society with its mass of faceless crowds so inviting to the sick and lost to anonymously act out their most primitive and dark demented homicidal compulsions upon the weak and the expendable; every atrocity salaciously reported by a newborn mass media feeding the voracious imaginations of a rising wave of serial monsters and their victims.
Serial killing actually has been around since the beginning of recorded history in both the cities and the countryside and long before the industrial age. It ebbed and waned at different times in different segments of society. When we look back into history for the earliest traces of serial killers, we discover them among the ranks of old-world despots, dictators, emperors, and aristocrats who literally had the power of life and death over their subjects. Many appeared to have killed only because they could. This is precisely the kind of imperial power that so many serial killers today fantasize of wielding over their victims.
Did ordinary people of the past commit serial murder? Average people were extraordinarily busy years ago doing what we take for granted: finding food, building shelter, avoiding plague and disease, paying dues and taxes, and fighting off homicidal enemies, raiders, and slavers. There probably wasn’t a lot of leisure time to brood and foster compulsive homicidal sexual fantasies. Only the aristocracy could afford that kind of time.
If there were serial killers among commoners, it was not reported or recorded anywhere. Until very recently history was mostly written by elites for elites about elites—it was all about princes and kingdoms and empires and fortunes. The common people were irrelevant except on harvest and tax days.
Of course commoners committed serial killing and cases of it are surely imprinted on our collective imagination in the form of monsters: werewolves tearing, mutilating, and cannibalizing flesh; vampires biting, draining, and drinking blood from their victims. These are only a few of a horrific range of grisly acts serial killers are capable of perpetrating in reality—true tales of horror. And as unfathomable as these acts were then, even today they are explained in almost the same way: as incomprehensible acts of monsters. The modern serial killer is really our secular monster.
It was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that we began giving our monsters precise names and human identities when we could, and individual monikers when we couldn’t. That Jack the Ripper emerges in the London of the 1880s—the newspaper capital of the world—is no coincidence. It is only with the advent of cheap printing, resulting in the rise of popular mass media in the form of novels, pamphlets, broadsides, and eventually newspapers, that monsters began to be identified as real people and not mystical animallike creatures roaming in the dark of the woods.
Jack the Ripper really is the first industrial-age serial killer with lasting fame of any consequence, despite the fact there were so many others before and after him, and mostly females as we will see.105
For nearly a century Jack the Ripper framed our popular conception of serial killers until the 1970s, when Ted Bundy brought serial killing into the new age. He was the first postmodern serial killer—the handsome, angelic boy-next-door-with-a-college-degree, somebody who should never have been a serial killer. He was too much like so many of us! (Aileen Wuornos in her diametrically opposite way is our female serial postmodernist. We will see how in the next chapter.)
FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS IN EARLY HISTORY
Inevitably the earliest accounts of female serial killers take us into the ranks of the aristocracy. It is here that some historical record survives.
The names of murderous tyrants are infinitely familiar: Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Attila the Hun, Vlad the Impaler, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Saddam Hussein. Less familiar are their female equivalents, who we believed simply did not exist. They could not exist because (remember?) we thought women were only capable of emotionally driven “expressive” violence.
The Bible is the best reflection of the most inner corridors of the Western cultural psyche and there we find Salome—the female murderer who has John the Baptist’s head cut off in response to his condemnation of her mother’s “adulterous” marriage to King Herod. The figure of Salome is a typical example of the deeply rooted notion in our culture of female expressive violence.106 John lost his head because Salome got too emotional.
But a closer look at the historical record shows different kinds of killing by women with plenty of examples of carefully planned “constructive” acts of violence. Women were coldly seeking to achieve the same goals their murderous male counterparts yearned for: dominance, power, and wealth. Queens and empresses—how tainted are they with aberrant psychopathology or are they merely products of their times?
If in the Bible we find the psyche of Western civilization, then in the Roman Empire we find its spine. There is no better place to seek out early female serial killers than in Rome.
THE EMPIRE OF DEATH: FEMALE SERIAL KILLING IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
About two thousand years ago, Roman emperors Caligula and Nero reigned in the years immediately following the death of Christ (circa a.d. 33). Caligula and Nero represent the high madness of Imperial Rome on the path to collapse—the bloodlust of psychopath rulers who married, raped, and murdered family members as readily as strangers for the sake of power and amusement.
If one needed a fertile hothouse in which to raise and grow serial killers then Rome’s Imperial court would be perfect. Aside from its traditions of ruthlessness and cruelty in maintaining personal and state political power, Roman culture also celebrated acts of popular recreational serial death performed for paying spectators and guests in nearly two hundred stadiumlike arenas interspersed throughout the huge empire that stretched from Britain all the way down to North Africa. The Coliseum in Rome, the perpetual Super Bowl of slaughter with individually numbered seating for 70,000 drooling spectators, was merely the largest of these facilities, competing with each other to stage the most spectacular and gory shows of death for eager crowds. Professional warriors and slaves—gladiators—fought and killed each other all day, while the half-time noon show amused lunch-munching crowds with brutal torture-executions of helpless condemned prisoners.107 Christians were victims of these half-time cruelties, where exotic animals were first used to tear at the humans before being killed for the amusement of the crowds.
The presence of women in these games—other than as victims—is mostly confined to a few rare references to the occasional appearance of a female gladiator—the gladiatrix—and the descriptions of the prostitutes who plied their trade under the arches of the Coliseum to customers aroused by the bloodletting. About female spectators we know very little other than that there were many.
But in the corridors of power at the imperial court of the Caesars, the presence of women is more prominent in the historical record. We know their names and stories. Some of their faces we can still view on surviving Roman coins and sculptures.
Agrippina the Younger—the Empress of Poison
No Roman coinage perhaps features a portrait showing a more cruel determination and lust for power than those of the dark and pretty, curly-haired Agrippina the Younger—the “Empress of Poison”—the sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero, three Roman emperors in a row.
Agrippina, sometime referred to as the “she-wolf,” was born in a.d. 15 or 16 on the Rhine, where her father, a Roman general, was brutally putting down the revolt of barbarian Germanic tribes (as loosely portrayed in the movie Gladiator.) Agrippina’s lineage included some royal Roman superstars: she was the great-granddaughter of Mark Anthony and granddaughter of Caesar Augustus. She was born into a small incestuous power elite that ruled the Roman Empire and whose individual members were obsessively gnawing and murdering their way to the top through an endless cycle of corruption, conspiracies, and betrayals of each other.
When Agrippina was three years old, her father was murdered by the reigning Emperor Tiberius, for no reason other than his fear of her father’s popularity with the Senate and citizenry. In the ensuing years, Agrippina and her sisters and brothers lived in various imperial households, witnessing their mother’s plotting attempts to avenge her husband’s murder. As a result, by the time Agrippina was seventeen, her mother and her two eldest brothers were put to death for conspiring against Emperor Tiberius. Remarkably, after having killed almost her entire family, Tiberius adopted Agrippina’s youngest surviving brother, a very disturbed youth nicknamed Caligula, and eventually anointed him as his succeeding son.
Like his sister, Caligula grew up in Germany in his father’s military camp and ran loose among the Roman troops as a child, often dressing up in their armor. This earned him the nickname Caligula, which means “little boots.” (His real name was Gaius.) He was adopted by the Roman legionnaires as a sort of good-luck mascot. As a child he witnessed the brutalities of the Roman campaign in Germany against the pagan tribes. He survived being taken hostage in a mutiny and the assassinations of his father, mother, and two brothers. Then, at the court of the ruthless Tiberius—adopted by the very man who had killed his parents and brothers—Caligula let loose with an unbound sexual sadism, obsessively observing the torture and executions of condemned prisoners and disguising himself while raping both male and female victims.
A degenerate gambler and bisexual with vicious mood swings, Caligula eventually turned his sexual aggression onto his three surviving sisters—Julia, Drusilla, and Agrippina. It is unclear whether he forcibly raped them or whether they had their own agenda and voluntarily entered into incestuous relations with their unbalanced but up-and-coming brother. But when these acts of incest were brought to the attention of Emperor Tiberius, the sisters were immediately married off to suppress a scandal. Incest offended even their corrupt Roman sensibilities.
Agrippina was married to an aristocrat twenty-five years her elder and had a son who she promptly named for one of her murdered brothers—Nero. This would be the same Nero who would later become the infamous emperor who “fiddled as Rome burned” according to legend.
In a.d. 37, Tiberius died and was succeeded by crazy Caligula, who quickly installed his favorite sister, Drusilla, at his court as his mistress while at the same time re-established his incestuous relations with Agrippina. To keep up appearances, Drusilla was married to Caligula’s political ally and possibly his male lover, Lepidus. All three of Caligula’s sisters—Agrippina, Julia, and Drusilla—were elevated to imperial godlike status and in an unprecedented move appeared on Roman coinage during Caligula’s reign.
When Drusilla died from fever in a.d. 38, Agrippina attempted to take her place as Caligula’s favorite lover, in the hope that her son, Nero, could rise to succeed as emperor. To her dismay, her brother Caligula rebuffed her. It is here, at the age of twenty-two, that the homicidal career of Agrippina begins to ferment. Her motive was, as ascribed by Roman historian Tacitus, spes dominationis—“desire for power [hope to dominate].”
Upon being rejected by her brother, Agrippina turned to her widowed brother-in-law, Lepidus, and offered to marry him if he assisted her in assassinating Caligula. (Agrippina’s first husband had fallen ill and had died, perhaps with some help from her.) Caligula discovered the plot and executed Lepidus while exiling Agrippina. Agrippina’s son, Nero, was taken away and put into the care of her sister-in-law and rival, Domita Lepida. Agrippina remained in exile for eighteen months until Caligula became so erratically homicidal that his fearful courtiers assassinated him in a.d. 41.
The Senate selected Caligula’s (and Agrippina’s) fifty-year-old uncle Claudius as the new emperor, made famous by Robert Graves’s historical novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, and the 1970 BBC-PBS television series. Claudius was mature, intelligent, and easygoing, but because he had a speech impediment he was thought to be an idiot and was ignored (which did much to enhance his survival at the Roman court).
Agrippina and Valeria Messalina—the Teenage Killer
To the frustration of Agrippina—who was released from exile by her kind uncle Claudius—Claudius had married her sister-in-law’s daughter, the fifteen-year-old Valeria Messalina, who gave birth the next year to a male child, Britannicus. Despite the good turn in her fortune and return to Rome, with the birth of Britannicus, the chances for Agrippina’s son, Nero, of becoming emperor were rapidly fading.
The teenage Messalina was Agrippina’s match. Smart, cruel, and manipulative, she was also pathologically jealous of Agrippina and her sister Julia. Agrippina made things worse when she convinced her sister Julia to attempt to seduce Claudius. When Messalina got wind of this plot, she persuaded Claudius to send Julia back into exile and then had her secretly murdered. Some have speculated on Agrippina’s motives for persuading Julia to undertake such a dangerous gambit. With Julia dead, Agrippina remained her assassinated father’s only surviving child.
The teenage Messalina began a reign of terror as Claudius’s imperial wife. When she came to covet the beautiful gardens belonging to a prominent Roman senator, she convinced Claudius that the senator was plotting against him. The senator was forced to commit suicide and his gardens were expropriated and came into Messalina’s possession.
Messalina took on a series of lovers, and as she tired of each, she accused them of treason or embezzlement of state funds, not only sending them to their deaths, but also their friends and any other witnesses to her indiscretions with the victims. Completely enchanted with his pretty young bride, Claudius blindly believed in Messalina’s accusations. In a seven-year period, between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two, Messalina murdered dozens of imperial courtiers, many of whom had managed to survive the psychopath Caligula, only to randomly perish at the urgings of Messalina, merely because they were friends of one of her illicit lovers or had witnessed some aspect of her misconduct.
When the terrified courtiers conspired to murder both Messalina and Claudius, Messalina struck first, unleashing a murderous purge of the Roman aristocracy, confiscating more of their estates and property. Completely in control of Claudius, she not only had charge of the death lists but also sold imperial favors—citizenship, building contracts, and official appointments—to the highest bidder. Murdering anybody who dared to question her authority, Messalina built a lucrative empire of her own.
In the meantime, Agrippina remarried and bided her time carefully, monitoring Messalina’s debauchery and swearing vengeance for the murder of her exiled sister Julia despite her own role in her death. Finally, when Messalina was twenty-two, she went too far. In a.d. 49 she held a mock marriage ceremony with a lover in a roomful of invited guests while Claudius was away. Agrippina quickly rallied Claudius’s advisors to convince the Emperor that he could not survive such a humiliation. While the participants at the wedding were put to death, Claudius vacillated as to the final fate of Messalina, until one of his advisors had her executed before the brokenhearted Claudius could commute her sentence.
Now Agrippina made her move. She seduced the widowed Claudius and had her allies among his counselors convince him to marry her. Of course, one of the problems was that Agrippina had recently married again, but that was quickly dealt with when her husband died of a mysterious illness. The other problem was that Claudius was her uncle, but she secured a decree from the Senate authorizing her marriage with him, despite its incestuous nature.
Agrippina was thirty-three when she triumphantly entered Rome in her ceremonial carriage—a daughter of a popular and legendary Roman commander, the sister, wife, and future mother of emperors. Agrippina wielded a cruelly poisonous authority far exceeding Messalina’s petty murderous plots. The first to die was Caligula’s last wife, who had been a rival for Claudius’s hand in marriage in the wake of Messalina’s execution. Agrippina accused her of witchcraft and evil designs on the state, and convinced Claudius to have the Senate confiscate her property and exile her where she was secretly forced to commit suicide by Agrippina’s agents.
Agrippina then turned on her sister-in-law, Messalina’s mother, Domita Lepida, having her and all her trusted servants, aides, and allies executed or secretly murdered. Anybody remotely associated with Lepida was dismissed from the court, if not killed.
Agrippina’s objective was to propel her young son, Nero, into power as the next emperor. To consolidate Nero’s position in the imperial court, she sought to have him marry Octavia, Claudius’s daughter by Messalina. The problem was that the child Octavia was already married, but that did not stop Agrippina. She had Octavia’s husband accused of having an incestuous affair with his sister (much like the one Agrippina had with her brother Caligula, ironically), resulting in his exile.
As soon as Nero was engaged to Octavia, she began to urge that Claudius adopt him as his eldest son and therefore likely heir to the throne. This, of course, presented a problem because legally that would make Nero and Octavia brother and sister, again forcing the issue of incest to the surface. Agrippina resolved the issue by having Octavia adopted by another family.
Agrippina amassed a huge pool of wealth and power, frequently riding next to Claudius in his carriage and sitting with him at tribunals. The easygoing Claudius was more concerned about the nuts and bolts of governing the Roman Empire, from the details of taxation to those of the construction of ports and aqueducts. Claudius was content to leave the issues of power, politics, and security at the court to Agrippina, who ruthlessly murdered any potential opposition to herself or the regime.
By a.d. 54 Claudius’s natural son, Britannicus, was twelve and approaching adulthood by Roman traditions. Claudius was now 64 years old and in fragile health, and it is believed he was considering naming Britannicus as his appointed heir as soon as Britannicus achieved adulthood. He was also apparently tiring of Agrippina’s domination and was considering divorcing her and disinheriting Nero, who by most accounts was a young lout interested only in singing and performing.
Many Roman historians believe that Agrippina at this point killed Claudius by personally preparing his favorite dish of mushrooms and poisoning them with a dose of belladonna alkaloid from hemlock, aconite, or yew. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, Claudius lost his power of speech and then fell into a temporary coma. But then Claudius awoke and vomited the contents of his stomach, whereupon Agrippina either had him fed a poisoned gruel to “revive him” or administered another dose of poison by an enema, ostensibly intended to clean his bowels of the contaminated mushrooms. Whichever it was, it worked, for Claudius died the next morning and shortly afterward Nero was appointed emperor.
One would assume that with her own flesh and blood son as emperor, Agrippina was at the height of her power. Indeed, she was given the title of Augusta—Empress—and her portrait once again appeared on Roman coinage along with Nero’s, as it had when her brother Caligula was in power.
One can by now easily imagine the psychology of anyone brought up as a child in these murderous imperial households. Nero was fully the product of Agrippina’s psychopathic drive for power. Nero did not first yearn for power, but wanted to be an actor or singer, but failing in that, found a dark side to his urges satisfied through the exercise of his imperial power. He raped both boys and girls and squandered huge amounts of money. Nero’s public games reached new levels of cruelty and bloodletting, and Nero targeted a new religious sect appearing in Rome—the Christians. He devised a spectacular nighttime public display of torture by having Christians covered in tar and lit as torches.
At home, Nero displeased Agrippina by having an affair with a former slave girl, which Agrippina felt was a sign of disrespect to her and the marriage she had arranged for her son with Octavia. Then Nero exiled Pallus, a close confidant of Agrippina’s, who might have also been her lover at the time. In a classic “I made you and I can unmake you” case of power conflict, Agrippina threatened to have Nero removed and replaced by Claudius’s natural son, Britannicus. Coming from Agrippina, this was no idle threat, especially when she suddenly began to shower the hapless fourteen-year-old Britannicus with attention.
Nero struck first. He had Britannicus poisoned and then turned on Agrippina, murdering Pallus, stripping her of all her titles, and banning her from the imperial palace. Agrippina fought back, attempting to organize a coup against Nero but it was quickly discovered. Only her fast talking and previously placed allies managed to rescue her from being exiled or put to death by her own son.
The crazed, unhinged Agrippina now sought an old path to power—incest. She attempted to seduce Nero but was prevented by Nero’s close advisors, who warned him that the army would not tolerate such behavior. Nero then resolved to murder his mother.
Nero apparently made three attempts to poison Agrippina, but as she was skilled in that art, he failed. Next Nero invited her for a reconciliation on an island he was vacationing on and sent for her in a boat specially designed to come apart once in open water. Not only did Agrippina survive by swimming back to shore, but she witnessed a woman demanding to be rescued by claiming to be the “mother of the emperor” battered to death with an oar instead. Agrippina decided that the best strategy was to pretend she was not aware of her son’s attempts to murder her. She sent back a message to Nero stating that the gods had favored her during the “accidental” sinking of the vessel, and that while she was sure Nero wanted to visit her, he should wait until she recovered from the ordeal.
Instead, as the story goes, Nero dispatched soldiers to murder her, making it look like suicide. The details are unclear, but the monstrous Agrippina died at the age of forty-four at the hands of a monster she herself had borne and raised, leaving a trail of murdered victims in her wake. Nero is reported to have carefully handled his dead mother’s corpse, limb by limb, to ensure she was truly dead.
Certainly the environment and circumstances of their upbringing forged the murderous careers of Agrippina and Messalina. They killed because they could, and because they learned how to by example. Murder satisfied not only their desire for power but their emotional and material needs as well. They committed constructive and expressive violence interchangeably and if they felt any remorse they left no trace in the historical record.
Agrippina and Messalina can be considered paragons for many female rulers in subsequent history.108 Russia’s Catherine the Great and England’s Elizabeth the First both ruthlessly put down opposition by torture and murder. “Bloody Mary” Tudor had hundreds of Protestants burned at the stake in her attempt to reintroduce Catholicism into England. Between 1830 and 1860, Madagascar’s Queen Ranavalona, in a campaign to rid the island of Christianity, put missionaries and thousands of native converts to death by having them thrown from cliffs, beheaded, burned at the stake, or boiled alive in pits. Madame Mao engineered the detention and murder of hundreds of potential high-ranking opponents to her faction in “re-education camps” in China.
But we often dismiss these imperial serial killers—motivated by political power—as artifacts of a different time. Their crimes lack the sexual dimension we associate with modern serial killers. The first female who classically fits the bill of the modern serial killer is Elizabeth Bathory—the female Dracula.
Elizabeth Báthory—the True Story of the Blood Countess
Everyone by now has heard the story of the seventeenth-century female vampire serial killer in Transylvania—the Blood Countess, the female Dracula—Elizabeth Báthory.
Elizabeth was once said to be the first “real” female serial killer—one who killed for sadistic, sexual, hedonistic lust instead of political or personal power. Her victims were not her rivals but mostly peasant girls employed in her service or daughters from minor, declining aristocratic families. Elizabeth Báthory is special in that she is the only known female sexual sadistic serial killer without a dominant male partner—to this day, four hundred years later. We have never had another quite like her.
It was said that she bathed in the blood of her adolescent servant girls in the belief that it nourished the beauty of her skin. She was accused at one point of having killed as many as 650 girls—many tortured to death in the most savage and cruel manner.
Portraits of Countess Elizabeth from her youth show a beautiful woman with raven black hair pulled back from a high forehead, smoky, almond-shaped intelligent eyes, and sensual, pouting lips. Yet there is a cruel curve to her mouth and her face exudes a sullen petulance that betrays an underlying rage.
Elizabeth was born in 1560 into the powerful and wealthy Báthory family in the eastern regions of the Holy Roman Empire—a fluid confederation of territories today roughly covering Hungary, Austria, the former Czechoslovakia, Romania, and other Balkan States, and parts of Germany and Poland. This included the region bordering Hungary and Romania called Transylvania (of Dracula fame, and not coincidentally as we shall see) where her branch of the Báthory family had their seat of power.
At the age of eleven, as traditional with the aristocracy there, Elizabeth was engaged to marry when she would have turned fifteen a minor Hungarian count named Ferenc Nadasdy, five years her elder. A year before the marriage, Elizabeth became pregnant while “horse playing” with a peasant boy on her future mother-in-law’s estate. After having the child in a remote estate and giving it away to a local family, Elizabeth finally married Count Nadasdy in 1575 as scheduled.
The marriage was a happy match, although Elizabeth’s husband was away for years at a time fighting the Turks in the south where he developed a distinguished reputation as a warrior. Together the couple lorded over a vast network of castles, country manor houses, and palaces in Prague, Vienna, and other cities. At their country estates and inside the walls of their castles they had the power of life and death over their servants and peasants. The adolescent Elizabeth developed a reputation for excessive cruelty while disciplining her female servants.
Elizabeth used her power to torture to death in the most horrific and sadistic ways her servants, mostly peasant girls, burning their genitals with a candle; biting them to death; ripping their mouths open with her own hands; burning them with heated metal rods and rivets; beating them with whips, clubs, or iron bars; cutting and stabbing them; throwing them naked into the snow and pouring freezing water over them; pouring boiled water on them and tearing away their skin; hauling them up in suspended barrels spiked inside and rocking and rolling them while showering in their blood below; or closing them in spiked Iron Maidens like garlic in a garlic press.
Perhaps as many as 650 girls and young women were murdered over a thirty-five-year period—and at least between 37 and 51 in the last decade before Elizabeth’s arrest in 1610 at the age of fifty, when she started killing not only peasant girls, but girls of noble birth as well. This led to her downfall.
When her castle was raided during the Christmas holidays of 1610, it was said mutilated corpses of girls were found strewn in the courtyard and in the basement of the tower. When the arresting party burst into her chambers, according to legend, she was found sitting on a stool chewing on the mutilated dying body of a girl prostrate before her. The Hungarian authorities ordered that Elizabeth be walled-in for the rest of her life in a castle apartment with only a small open port for food. After four years she died at the age of fifty-four, her legendary cruel beauty still preserved. The true story of Elizabeth Báthory, however, is slightly more complicated, but horrific nonetheless in its details.
Báthory’s Place in the History of Serial Murder
There has been no female serial killer like Elizabeth Báthory because—depending upon what you believe about her—she was either a hedonist lust killer harvesting blood in which to bathe or a highly sadistic power-control freak who loved to torture young women. There have been lots of female serial killers like that, especially recently, but almost all with dominant male partners taking the lead. Not Elizabeth. She started on her own with her husband away at war, learned additional battlefield torture techniques from him when he was home visiting and—after his death in 1604—commanded a retinue of servant accomplices comprised of strong old hags and a manservant, who would lure peasant girls into the household service of the countess where they would be killed. Hundreds of girls vanished like that over the years.
Elizabeth also stands on the historical time line as a premodern serial killer. Her predecessor was Gilles de Rais—“Bluebeard”—the aristocrat in France who was executed in 1440 for the torture murder and necrophile rape of hundreds of male children, also lured by his servant accomplices into his household service.109 Elizabeth stands at the halfway point between the medieval world of aristocrat serial killers and the industrial modernity of Jack the Ripper, who ushered in a new age of serial killers in 1888. Between Gilles de Rais in 1440 and Jack the Ripper in 1888, we have no serial killers of any significant endurance in the public consciousness or imagination—except for Elizabeth Báthory.
The primary difference between Báthory’s era and that of Jack the Ripper is significant. Báthory came from an entirely different civilization—the ancient agrarian world where most people were illiterate and lived isolated in the countryside. Jack the Ripper belonged to the Industrial Age, where people lived in urban centers and read cheap, mechanically printed mass media. It is no coincidence that Jack the Ripper grew to fame in London, the newspaper publishing capital of the world at the time. Our knowledge of the existence of serial killers has as much to do with literacy, cheap paper, and high-speed printing technology as it does with any criminological, psychopathological, or social phenomena.
We actually came very close to never having heard of Elizabeth Báthory because her trial was held in secret in a remote Slovakian town in 1611 and her powerful family immediately sealed its records. There were no newspapers, pamphlets, or broadsides to report on it. None of the ruling families wanted the details of the horrendous charges against their relative released to public scrutiny—nor did they want Elizabeth’s estates confiscated by the crown or the crown’s debts to her family cancelled. Elizabeth was not even allowed to appear at the trial. Instead of a public execution, she was walled-in alive, in a room in one of her remote castles. Her servants and accomplices took her place on the executioner’s block while the countess herself survived in anonymity in her bricked-in apartment until the summer of 1615 when she was discovered dead on the floor.
While her family divided Elizabeth’s property among themselves after her death, the details of her crimes and trial vanished from the public record. The indictments, trial transcripts, and judgments were hidden away in closed archives. Her name was forgotten. Only legends and folktales of a blood-drinking female vampire circulated in the Transylvanian mountains until they were picked up two centuries later by authors like Bram Stoker and given a new life in the form of Dracula—inspired by another Transylvanian despot, Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes or Dracul (to whom Elizabeth was actually remotely related through marriage).
The Blood Bathing
Elizabeth Báthory would have remained merely an anonymous monster had not a Jesuit scholar, Father Laszlo Turoczy, discovered the trial records in 1720, about one hundred years after her death. Turoczy restored the legendary female vampire to human form with a name, identity, history, and detailed description of her crimes in a book published only in Latin.110
It 1796, Michael Wagener, in a book entitled Articles on Philosophical Anthropology, was the first to publicize the story of Elizabeth’s alleged bathing in blood skin-care motive, stating that after a chambermaid noted some hair out of place in Elizabeth’s coiffure, the countess struck her so hard that the girl’s nose spurted blood into Elizabeth’s face. When Elizabeth wiped the blood, according to Wagener, she discovered that her skin seemed rejuvenated. From then on she would bathe her entire body in fresh blood.111
These details, however, often differed depending on the source. The most common version states that Elizabeth’s handmaiden’s blood spurted onto the countess’s hand. Moreover, the girls had to be virgins or of aristocratic origins before Elizabeth would believe in the renewing power of bathing in their blood. What was the true story?
It was not until the 1970s that Boston College professor and Fulbright scholar Raymond T. McNally, along with his colleague Radu Florescu, established rare access to Hungarian and Romanian archives (then still behind the Iron Curtain) that led to their hugely popular book, In Search of Dracula, a history of the Transylvanian Prince Vlad Tepes, nicknamed Dracul (“Devil” or “Dragon”)—the historical figure who inspired Bram Stoker’s decision to name his fictional vampire “Dracula” and situate him in a Transylvanian castle.
In the wake of the success of In Search of Dracula, McNally returned to the archives in Transylvania and discovered an abundance of original documents from the trial of Elizabeth Báthory.112 It was not until 1983 that we began to get a more accurate glimpse of what crimes the Blood Countess was actually charged with, and the blood bathing became the first myth to fall. Nowhere in the trial record was there any mention of bathing in blood. It was local gossip and folklore picked up by writers in the eighteenth century. But still, the likely explanation for how this myth took root bodes darkly for what Elizabeth was really into: She was thought to have bathed in blood because she was so covered in it after torturing her victims, it appeared as if she had bathed in it.
Her Arrest
The events that precipitated Elizabeth’s arrest in 1610 began when a Lutheran reverend named Janos Ponikenusz was assigned to take charge of a church in the Slovakian village of Cachtice (Cséjthe), where the widowed Elizabeth lorded in a castle overlooking the village below. Reverend Janos was sent to replace the previous pastor who had recently died. On his journey, just like in a horror movie, the closer he came to Cachtice, the more Janos began to hear peasants’ mutterings of vampires and mutilations of young women in the town and guarded warnings of evil deeds in the castle.
On his approach into the village, Janos could see the gloomy castle perched on a steep crag overlooking the town below. Janos could feel the tension as he entered the town. The populace seemed sullen and frightened and very few young women were visible on the streets or the fields. Climbing up the steep deserted road to the castle, Janos reported to the Countess Báthory. The countess was fifty years old and recovering from an illness but her legendary beauty was still evident. She was courteous but Janos detected an unusual cowed tension among her servants and saw very little movement or life in the courtyard—parts of the castle appeared to be deserted and locked-down in silence.
As Janos began to put in order the church records and accounts left behind by his predecessor he uncovered cryptic notes about horrors in the castle on the hill. He found unusually long lists of names of young women who had died in the employ of the countess, women his predecessor would inter only at night while making strange references to the unexplained nature of their deaths and his reluctance to bury them. One note indicated that he had recently entombed nine women in a single night in an underground crypt near the castle walls. Armed with the keys to the crypt, Janos proceeded to explore the tomb. No sooner had he unlocked and thrown open the crypt doors than the fetid smell of death rose up to meet him. In the gloomy chamber Janos discovered nine boxes stacked haphazardly in a corner. The lids were not even nailed shut, according to the deposition Janos later gave. Opening one box after another, Janos was shocked by the condition of the young women’s corpses. They were all mutilated, some partly burned, and all caked in dry, dark, crusted blood. On several bodies Janos saw to his horror the clear impressions of human bite marks and deep jagged wounds where it looked like their flesh had been bitten away. Clearly these women did not die of natural causes, disease, or in the clutches of animals or inhuman monsters: The bite marks were clearly human. The victims had been brutally tortured.
Reverend Janos immediately sent a messenger with a report to his ecclesiastical superior in the provincial capital, but his messenger returned shortly afterward with the news that the countess’s guards on the road out of the town had read and confiscated his message. Horrified at the news that the countess knew of his report, Janos attempted to flee the village. He was apprehended by her guard on the road leading from the town and ordered to return and remain in his church. Two hundred fifty years later, Bram Stoker introduced in Dracula the character of Jonathan Harker, the English realtor who journeys to Transylvania on business and finds himself imprisoned by the vampire in his castle. Reverend Janos was the real Jonathan Harker, held in a church beneath a horror castle wall by a female monster.
As the situation began unraveling and Janos waited for what would happen next, he gathered details from the villagers about what had been transpiring. His predecessor had been secretly burying bodies of young women who were dying of unexplained circumstances for years, until so many deaths had accumulated that he refused to bury any more. Dumped bodies were being found in the region—four mutilated corpses were found in a grain silo, several in a canal behind the castle, others in the cornfields, and woodcutters discovered freshly dug mass graves in the forest. All the bodies were horribly tortured and mutilated. To his dismay, Janos realized that he was not the first to discover the horror unfolding in Elizabeth’s castle.
Denunciations and complaints had been filing in to the Royal authorities for several years. Numerous parents who had sent their daughters to work at Elizabeth’s castles lodged official complaints that the countess unsatisfactorily explained their daughters’ disappearances. While reports of the cruel torture deaths of peasant girls in Elizabeth’s employ circulated for decades, nobody was overly concerned. Disciplining one’s servants to death was, in the 1600s, perceived as excessively cruel and impolite but nonetheless it remained an aristocrat’s prerogative. But reports began to filter in from other aristocratic families about their daughters’ disappearances while in the care of Elizabeth Báthory. These could not be ignored.
The year before her arrest, some twenty-five young women from declining minor noble families were invited to stay at Elizabeth’s castle. Some of these minor aristocratic families were happy to send their daughters to Elizabeth, hoping somehow to raise the prestige of their family through an association with the countess. But during their stay, several of the girls vanished. When concerned parents began to inquire into the fates of their daughters, the countess reported that one of the other girls had murdered the girls for their jewels before committing suicide. When her family demanded that the body of their daughter be returned, Elizabeth refused, stating a suicide fatality had to be immediately buried unmarked on unconsecrated ground. She explained other multiple deaths as being caused by outbreaks of disease, and cited the fear of an epidemic panic as the reason for secretly burying those victims.
By the time Reverend Janos finally managed to successfully smuggle out a letter to authorities, he was in the depths of traumatic paranoia. In the 1970s, Professor McNally discovered a letter in the Hungarian archives from Janos to his superior describing how Elizabeth had sent six invisible black cats and dogs to attack him in his home in the middle of the night. As he beat back the attack, screaming, “You devils go to hell,” none of his servants could observe any of the animals. “As you can see,” Janos wrote, “this was the doing of the devil.”113
While complaints from peasant families were largely ignored, the reports of missing girls of noble birth were investigated by the Hungarian parliament, situated in Bratislava at that time (the capital, Budapest, was under Turkish occupation). Throughout 1610 the parliament’s investigators gathered depositions against the countess from numerous witnesses of both noble and common rank. On December 27, 1610, spurred forward by urgent reports smuggled from Reverend Janos and news that four corpses of young women had been dumped over the castle wall in full view of the village, the parliament ordered Elizabeth’s superior (and relative through marriage) Prince George Thurzo to ride to Cachtice, raid Elizabeth’s castle and manor house, and arrest the countess.
It was the Christmas season and the countess was celebrating the holiday in her manor house in the town when on the evening of December 29 one of her servants, a young girl named Doricza from the Croatian town of Rednek, was discovered stealing a pear. Enraged, Elizabeth ordered that the girl be taken to the laundry room, stripped naked, and tied. Elizabeth and her female servants took turns attempting to beat Doricza to death with a club. Elizabeth was reported to be so soaked in blood that she had to change her clothes. Doricza was a strong girl and did not die in the beating. It was getting late into the night when Elizabeth tired of beating the girl and had one of her female servants finally stab Doricza to death with a pair of scissors. The girl’s corpse was dragged out and left by a doorway in the courtyard for disposal the next morning. At almost exactly that same moment, after traveling two days from Bratislava, Prince Thurzo’s raiding party arrived at the house and ordered the servants to stand aside. As the party burst into the courtyard they came upon the bloody, battered, and still warm body of the murdered girl. A search of the premises revealed the bodies of two more brutally murdered girls in the manor house. Reportedly, a further search of the castle on the hill revealed numerous decaying bodies hidden at the bottom of the tower, the bodies that Reverend Janos had earlier refused to bury.
Elizabeth Báthory was locked into her castle at Cachtice, but four of her servants—three elderly females and a young manservant—were taken away by Thurzo to his seat of power in the nearby larger Slovakian town of Bytca and there they were questioned and charged for their complicity in the murders. Here the story of Elizabeth Báthory’s trial becomes conspiratorial.
Her Trial
Prince Thurzo was related by marriage to Báthory’s powerful family, who were all aware of the deliberations taking place in parliament. (As was Elizabeth, who believed she was beyond the reach of the law.) Aside from their reputation, much was at stake for the family if Elizabeth ended up being convicted for murder or witchcraft—which the rumors of blood bathing warranted. Elizabeth’s wealth and properties would have been seized by the Hungarian crown if she were put to death under those circumstances.
Moreover, the Hungarian king had borrowed money from Elizabeth’s husband when he was still living, and as his widow, the debt was still owed her. If executed, the crown debt would be cancelled instead of being paid out to her surviving family members. Prince Thurzo had the title of Lord Palatine—meaning that he had the king’s judicial powers in his regional principality—and Thurzo staged the trials in his own jurisdiction in such a way as to ensure that Elizabeth’s property and the debts to her remained payable to all the surviving relatives. There emerged a vast literature in Hungary, particularly in the heady nationalist periods of the twentieth century, suggesting that Elizabeth Báthory was entirely innocent and a victim of a family plot to seize her wealth. Thanks to the discovery of more court transcripts and witness statements, Thurzo’s correspondence, and other archival records in the 1970s, the real story of Elizabeth Báthory is now better known.
The news of Elizabeth’s arrest and charges did not become widely known. A priest’s diary from the period, with detailed descriptions of events, only provides this short matter-of-fact notation: “1610. 29 December. Elizabeth Báthory was put in the tower behind four walls, because in her rage she killed some of her female servants.”
The secret trial began within three days of Báthory’s arrest, at Thurzo’s courts of justice in Bytca on January 2, 1611. All the court officials and jury members owed their allegiance to Prince Thurzo. The plan, apparently, was to quickly sentence the countess to life imprisonment (in perpetuis carceribus—“perpetual incarceration”) in a fait accompli while the parliament was on holiday to ensure that her properties were not seized or debt to her cancelled.
While the countess was locked away back in Cachtice, four of her servants were questioned at Bytca, including a session under torture to clear away any loose ends. Using the methodology developed by the Inquisition—which is said to be the first in history to use relational databases in investigative procedure—the same questions were put separately to each prisoner, and then their answers carefully cross-indexed and compared. At the end of the interrogations, the servants were charged as Báthory’s accomplices despite their pleas that they had no choice but to obey the countess’s orders.
The Trial Testimony
The four were put on trial three days later, on January 2, 1611. Their testimony was entered as evidence against Elizabeth. According to the defendants, the countess tortured her female servants for the slightest mistake. With her own hands, she tore apart the mouth of one servant girl who had made an error while sewing. Every day, young servant girls, who had committed some infraction, would be assembled in the basement of the castle for brutal torture. Elizabeth delighted in the torture of the young women and never missed a session. While torture of one’s servants in seventeenth-century Hungary was not a crime, it was by then considered “impolite.” Thus when traveling and visiting other aristocrats, the first thing the countess would do was to have a private room secured where she could torture her servants in privacy without offending her hosts. It was noted that the girls chosen for “punishment” seemed to be always those with the biggest breasts and they would be stripped naked prior to the torture.
The four accomplices testified:
The Countess stuck needles into the girls; she pinched the girls in the face and in other places, and pierced them under their fingernails. Then she dragged the tortured girls naked out into the snow and had the old women pour cold water over them. She helped them with that until the water froze on the victim, who then died as a result…Her Ladyship beat the girls and murdered them in such a way that her clothes were drenched in blood. She often had to change her shirt…she also had the bloodied stone pavement washed…She had the girls undress stark naked, thrown to the ground, and she began to beat them so hard that one could scoop up the blood from their beds by the handfuls…It also happened that she bit out individual pieces of flesh from the girls with her teeth. She also attacked the girls with knives, and she hit and tortured them generally in many ways…Her Ladyship singed the private parts of a girl with a burning candle. One time Her Ladyship lay sick and therefore could not beat anyone herself, so a servant was compelled to bring the victims to the Countess’ bed whereupon she would rise up from her pillow and bite pieces of flesh from the girls’ necks, shoulders and breasts.
The girls would be beaten so long that the soles of their feet and the surfaces of their hands bristled. They were beaten so long that each one, without interruption, suffered over five hundred blows from the women accomplices. If the folds of the Countess’ clothing were not smoothed out, or if the fire had not been brought up, or if the outer garments of the Countess were not pressed, the girls responsible were at once tortured to death. It happened that the noses and lips of the girls were burned with a flat-iron by Her Ladyship herself or by the old women. The Countess also stuck her own fingers into the mouths of the girls and ripped their mouths and tortured them in this way. If the girls had not finished their obligatory sewing chores by ten o’clock at night, they were immediately tortured…Her Ladyship with her own hands had keys heated red-hot and then burned the hands of the girls with them.
While at first it was believed that Elizabeth began her killing spree after her husband’s death, witnesses testified that the murders began while her husband was still alive and with his knowledge and participation.
At Sarvar during summer His Lordship Count Ferenc Nadasdy had a young girl undressed until stark naked, while His Lordship looked on with his own eyes; the girl was then covered over with honey and made to stand throughout a day and a night. [So that she’d be covered in insect bites. She collapsed into unconsciousness.] His Lordship taught the Countess that in such a case one must place pieces of paper dipped in oil between the toes of the girl and set them on fire; even if she was already half dead, she would jump up.
The accused servants who were in Elizabeth’s service for a period ranging from sixteen to five years, testified that they personally witnessed from a total of thirty-six to as many as “fifty-one, perhaps more” girls killed.
The Downfall of the Countess
In 1607 Elizabeth made the mistake of killing girls from privileged minor aristocratic families. It is unclear exactly why she took this path, but possibly because her reputation had spread by word-of-mouth among the peasants and few dared to go into her domestic service. Indeed, her last victims were girls recruited from distant Croatia where nobody had heard of Elizabeth. With aristocratic families she used a different approach, always selecting victims from minor and impoverished noble families, offering their daughters opportunities to raise the status of their families through Elizabeth’s superior status and contacts. But even this theory is cloudy as there was testimony stating that the servants sometimes washed, groomed, and tutored peasant girls to behave as noble ladies when presented to the countess. For some reason Báthory was specifically targeting nobles at that point. That, of course, led to speculation that she believed only the blood of noble girls would serve the purpose of restoring her skin. The problem with that theory is that the bathing in blood story does not appear in any of the affidavits or in the testimony at the trial. It might be entirely the stuff of peasant folklore picked up a hundred years later and reproduced in pamphlets and books dealing with Elizabeth.
Elizabeth became brazen and careless toward the end of her killing career. While staying in Vienna, she ordered a renowned choir singer from the Church of Holy Mary, Ilona Harczy, to perform privately for her at her apartments in the city on Augustinian Street. The girl was never seen again and witnesses claimed Elizabeth killed her when she could not sing for her, either out of fright or shyness.
As was common in those days, the trial lasted only a day. At the end of the trial two female servants were sentenced to have their fingers torn away with hot pincers before being thrown alive into a fire. The male servant, because of his youth, was sentenced to decapitation and his body also thrown on the fire. The fourth defendant was acquitted and vanished from the record. A few months later, another of Báthory’s female servants was charged, tried, and sentenced to death.
The case against Elizabeth Báthory herself was reviewed by a higher court five days later, on January 7, and Prince Thurzo himself testified before some twenty judges and jurors. Unlike the January 2nd lower court trial, the records of which were kept in Hungarian, the high court trial was transcribed in Latin. Thurzo and members of his raiding party described finding the still warm battered corpse of Doricza “ex flagris et torturis miserabiliter extinctam.” Depositions from thirteen witnesses were heard. It is here that a witness identified only as “the maiden Zusanna” testified that a register was discovered in Elizabeth’s chest of drawers listing her victims and that it totaled 650 names. Zusanna testified that in the four years she was in Báthory’s service, she witnessed the murder of eighty girls. The hearing was presided over by the king’s judge, and its purpose was to appear to gather sufficient evidence to sentence the countess to death, confiscate her properties, and cancel the crown’s debt to her. Thus the testimony of Zusanna might have been entirely contrived for that purpose. Báthory desperately petitioned the court to make an appearance to defend herself, but her family blocked those attempts. The high court held:
At the very entrance to the manor house they came upon things pertinent to this case. There was a certain virgin named Doricza who had been miserably extirpated by pain and torture, two other girls were found murdered in similar agonizing ways with that very manor house in the town of Cachtice, which was under the control of the widow Nadasdy. His illustrious Highness [Prince Thurzo], witnessing this evident and ferocious tyranny, having caught the bloody, and godless woman, the widow Nadasdy, in flagranti of her crime, placed her under immediate perpetual imprisonment in Castle Cachtice…
She remained imprisoned at Cachtice. Despite the crown’s attempt to hold a retrial of Báthory and condemn her to death, the agreement between Thurzo and Elizabeth’s family prevailed. When she attempted to challenge Thurzo’s authority, he condemned her in front of several of her relatives, saying, “You, Elizabeth, are like a wild animal. You are in the last months of your life. You do not deserve to breathe the air on Earth, nor to see the light of the Lord. You shall disappear from this world and shall never reappear in it again. The shadows will envelop you and you will find time to repent your bestial life. I condemn you, Lady of Cachtice, to lifelong imprisonment in your own castle.”
Elizabeth Báthory was walled in in her castle apartment. The exterior windows were bricked up and only several small openings for ventilation and food gave her contact with the outside world. On August 21, 1614, one of the jailers observed the countess collapsed on the floor, dead. All mention of her name in Hungary was prohibited for the next one hundred years. The memory of her faded behind the mists of the vampire and monster legends of Transylvania until her identity was rediscovered in 1720.
Unanswered Questions
A number of questions remain—and oddly enough those same kinds of questions haunt several cases of high-profile convicted female serial killers dealt with in this book, including Aileen Wuornos and Nazi concentration camp monster Ilsa Koch, the Bitch of Buchenwald. Were the identities of these women as serial killers constructed from social, political, or propagandistic exigencies? The attempts of the Hungarian Crown to seize Báthory’s property were evident. Moreover, Báthory was a Protestant when the Counter-Reformation and restoration of Catholic power became the priority of the Hungarian parliament. Religious sectarian politics exposed the Báthory family to all manner of hostility during that period.
Moreover, Europe was in the throes of a witchcraft crisis, with thousands of women being accused of heretical and satanic crimes and burned at the stake or hung.
Yet at the same time, witchcraft was not one of the charges brought against Báthory. The rumors of her bathing in virgin girls’ blood were never introduced in any of the court proceedings simply because there was no evidence nor any testimony attesting to it.
Nonetheless, when we narrow down the charges to the murder of approximately fifty girls, there is a logical consistency to the descriptions of the offenses from many different witnesses. In the 1970s, two new archival sources were discovered in the Hungarian state archives. One source, dating from September 16, 1610—four months prior to Elizabeth’s arrest—contained thirty-four affidavits describing Elizabeth Báthory’s torture and murder of “many girls and virgins.”114 A second source, dated July 26, 1611, is from the Crown’s attempt to retry Elizabeth. In it is a massive collection of testimony from 224 witnesses attesting to the “diabolical impulses” of the countess who murdered “many innocent virgins of noble and non-noble birth.”115
If, indeed, Elizabeth Báthory was addicted to committing sadistic acts of torture since her adolescent years, then 650 victims over a thirty-five-year period works out roughly to a “mere” 19 victims a year. It is entirely conceivable—with the power of life and death she had over her servants—that she committed that many murders. The descriptions of the alleged tortures she inflicted on her victims pathologically fit a sadistic power-control or sexual lust murderer—particularly in her choice of young female victims and her desire to bite them on the shoulders and breasts. The crimes that Báthory allegedly committed alone or with accomplices under her command are similar to some committed by female serial killers in recent decades—but most of those women are accomplices to dominant males. But not Elizabeth Báthory—in her crimes, she stands alone among female serial killers.
FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS IN THE PREINDUSTRIAL AGE
Between the era of Agrippina and Elizabeth Báthory and the industrial age of Jack the Ripper, there were occasional reports of female serial killers. In Scotland, in the Galloway region, somewhere between 1560 and 1610, Sawney Beane and his family of cave-dwelling cannibals are said to have killed and eaten thousands of travelers over a forty-five-year period. His family, the product of incest consisting of eight sons and six daughters, eighteen grandsons and fourteen granddaughters, fed on human flesh, which was found by soldiers pickled and smoked in the caves. They were all put to death in Leith without standing trial. The historic authenticity of this episode, however, has not been resolved with any finality, as no contemporary documentation for the event has been identified.116
In Naples, Italy, between 1670 and 1719, a woman known only as La Tofania is believed to have been complicit in the murder of possibly as many as 600 male victims through her sale of a poison known as “aqua tofania.” She distributed the product free of charge to wives wishing to secretly murder their husbands. The vials of poison were labeled “Manna of St. Nicholas of Bari,” a name given to a legendary oil said to have dropped from the tomb of St. Nicholas, and had the power of curing many diseases.117 Tofania’s motive was attributed to her hate of men and she is said to have encouraged her clients to use small amounts of her potion in order to prolong the victims’ suffering. Tofania was seventy years old when authorities in Naples, overwhelmed with so many deaths of married men, finally traced the vials to her. Warned of her impending arrest, Tofania attempted to take refuge in a convent, but was dragged out by force, much to the consternation of church authorities. She was put to torture, confessed to hundreds of murders, and was strangled in 1723. Her corpse was then thrown back over the wall into the convent where she had sought refuge.
In France between 1664 and 1672, the aristocratic Marie de Brinvilliers was reported to have poisoned fifty or more victims. Prior to murdering her father, who opposed her marriage, and then her two brothers to seize an inheritance, Marie experimented with poisons concocted by her lover in hospital charity wards, where she began volunteering to care for patients. She carefully observed the effects of her poison on the patients, adjusting the doses accordingly. Marie was discovered and became a fugitive until she was captured in 1676 and beheaded in Paris.
THE RISE OF THE MODERN FEMALE SERIAL KILLER
In the two hundred years that followed the life and death of Elizabeth Báthory the world radically changed in a way it had not in all the previous centuries. The decision by landowners to fence in their rural land and the dawn of the Industrial Age in the mid-1700s uprooted millions of people from the countryside. In a period of several decades, they were rapidly forced into cities to seek work.
In the past, the presence of the poor in cities was a seasonal phenomenon—people would migrate to where the work was, often remaining in the countryside during the summer and autumn. But with factories, masses of the impoverished permanently settled in squalid, densely populated industrial city tenements.
In the past, the destitute found help in country parishes from family, church charities, and other small community aid. City churches could not deal with the masses of anonymous poor funnelling in and now trapped in decrepit, overcrowded city quarters cut off from all family or community support. There was no state welfare, soup kitchens, or health or disability insurance. An injury, a small miscalculation in income and expenses, the loss of a job, or an illness could all condemn a person and their dependent family to a precipitous fall into abject destitution and death from starvation or exposure. Making things worse, throughout the 1700s the manufacture and distribution of cheap gin created an epidemic of a crack cocaine–like addiction, destroying lives and families and driving many into deeper degradation.
Women were extra vulnerable in these times. It would not be until the nineteenth century that females began to find opportunities to work as laborers in factories and clothing mills, as clerks in department stores, and eventually in secretarial positions. Before then, women either hawked wares and produce on the street as in medieval times or they found work as domestic servants in the homes of the rapidly swelling middle-class, which was profiting enormously from the process of industrialization.
Domestic female work, however, was strictly disciplined. Young women, often country girls who left their families behind to seek employment in the city, slaved seven days a week as household servants in exchange for meager room and board. The slightest misstep and the girl would find herself thrown out into the street with no references and with no place to go. A pregnancy for a domestic servant was often tantamount to a death sentence for both mother and child: She would be immediately fired for disreputable behavior, expelled from her lodgings with no hope of finding other employment or any place to go for help. Throughout the 1700s and early 1800s, dead babies were routinely found in city streets, alleys, and empty lots. So prevalent was the murder of infants by destitute mothers that in England laws were introduced prohibiting “the concealment of birth” with a penalty of death by hanging if the child died.
Public executions for even the most minor property crimes further brutalized industrial societies through the 1700s and up until the early 1800s. Literally thousands of women found themselves with no means of support except through theft, at the risk of hanging, or through street prostitution, at the risk of murder and disease. It was precisely these desperately destitute lower-class prostitutes that Jack the Ripper would come to victimize in 1888, in the same way today that some serial killers victimize drug-addicted street hookers.
THE BIRTH OF MASS MEDIA AND TRUE-CRIME LITERATURE
In England, the tone for the despair and brutality of these times was set by the expanding new phenomena of mass media in the form of print. Lurid true crime was one of the first popular genres marketed to the growing newly literate masses. In the 1700s, cheap pamphlets and folded broadsides, illustrated with woodcuts, featured sensationalistic reports of murders and recent executions. The Police Gazette in England began publishing in 1772, while in the U.S. the National Police Gazette was founded in 1845.
It is estimated that by 1830 probably between two-thirds and three-quarters of the working class could read. This fed a rapid expansion of mechanically printed media dedicated to true crime.118 The 1840s brought the introduction of the popular Sunday newspaper, and the abolition of the Stamp Act in 1855 and the paper duty in 1861 brought the cost of newspapers down to one penny first, and to a halfpenny by 1868.
This literature was as intricately focused on the lurid details of murder as true-crime literature and TV are today. As the British publication Punch pointed out in a tongue-in-cheek manner in 1849:
Upon the apprehension of a criminal, we notoriously spare no pains to furnish the nation with his complete biography; employing literary gentlemen, of elegant education and profound knowledge of human nature, to examine his birthplace and parish register, to visit his parents, brothers, uncles, and aunts, to procure intelligence of his early school days, diseases which he has passed through, infantile (and more mature) traits of character, etc. We employ artists of eminence to sketch his likeness as he appears at the police court, or views of the farm-house or back kitchen where he has perpetrated the atrocious deed. We entertain intelligence within the prison wall with the male and female turnkeys, gaolers, and other authorities, by whose information we are enabled to describe every act and deed of the prisoner, the state of his health, sleep and digestion, the changes in his appearance, his conversation, his dress and linen, the letters he writes and the meals he takes…119
Although Punch uses the masculine pronoun, nineteenth-century true-crime reporting focused on women as often as men—in fact, female criminals were of a particular interest to the public as their crimes represented such a dramatic contradiction of the feminine ideal of the period. When, in 1849, Maria Manning and her husband, Frederick, were put on trial and executed for the murder of Maria’s former lover, the trial was reported in special daily printed reports—the Court TV of the period. According to Judith Knelman, a historian of nineteenth-century British true-crime press, one publisher’s sales of those reports reached a circulation of an astonishing 2.5 million readers—more than ten percent of England’s total population at the time.120
By the time Jack the Ripper made his appearance in 1888, the press was primed for and experienced in its coverage of horrendous crimes. Jack the Ripper is often celebrated as the “first” serial killer. He is at least the first to become famous as a certain urban predatory type targeting strangers. But the real fear of serial killers in the nineteenth century unfolded several decades before Jack the Ripper and focused on the female killers who were using poison to kill victims.
The press reports of serial murder by women using arsenic were so alarming that the British parliament urgently enacted special laws to deal with what appeared to be a crisis—very much like the “serial killer epidemic” in the U.S. in the early 1980s to which an alleged disappearance of thousands of children every year was attributed.121
Accounts of female serial killers begin to crop up in true-crime literature in the early part of the nineteenth century but from the 1840s onward the accounts began to increase in frequency.
Jane Scott
Twenty-one-year-old Jane Scott is probably one of the earliest known nineteenth-century female serial killers. Sentenced to death in 1828 for the poisoning murder of her mother, she was also accused of having killed her father, her own illegitimate four-year-old son, and an eighteen-month-old niece out of revenge after a quarrel with her sister. The motive for murdering her parents was that she was getting married and wanted their furniture.
Jane Scott probably typifies the early nineteenth-century female serial killer in that she killed for meager material gain and to relieve herself of the financial burden of her child. The murder of her niece in revenge is more unusual. Greed and desperation were the primary motives of female killers at that time. Desperation sometimes led to parents killing one or more of their children to ensure that enough was available for the remaining children. With no compulsory schooling, the disappearance of children at the hands of their own parents was not be particularly noticed nor did it alarm the community. Single mothers were especially in desperate straits.
BURIAL INSURANCE AND THE RISE OF FEMALE SERIAL MURDER
With the 1840s, something new began to happen. One way that the working classes responded to the absence of state welfare, health or life insurance, was to pay into various private mutual aid, welfare, and medical insurance associations. Such insurance schemes also existed for funerals and were called “burial clubs.” Subscribers paid small weekly fees and when they died the burial club would pay for their funerals. These payouts would be made, of course, to the nearest surviving relatives. Death from disease and accidents was common in the nineteenth century and the scheme was meant to protect families from bearing the cost of a funeral, which many could not afford. But there was a loophole: If death occurred soon after enrollment in the club, then the amount paid out by the club for the funeral would far exceed the amount paid in dues. Burial clubs charged up to seven pence every three months and paid out as much as ten pounds on a death, depending upon the size of a club. The best of working class funeral services cost only half that amount—a tidy profit to take home.
Mothers began to bet on their sickly children’s lives, enrolling them in burial clubs just in time to benefit from the maximum payout. Sometimes they would enroll them in several burial clubs at the same time. When children spoiled the gambit by recovering from their illness, some desperate mothers used arsenic to help them along in the opposite direction. Family members enrolled relatives without their knowledge. And since there were no regulations requiring that death certificates be signed by a medical practitioner giving a cause of death, it was easy to disguise a murder. And even if there was a doctor attending to a death, it was easy to miss signs of poisoning among all the other diseases that frequently killed people in those times.
THE GREAT FEMALE SERIAL KILLER EPIDEMIC OF THE HUNGRY ’40S
By the 1840s instances of female serial killers increased dramatically: At least nine women were executed in cases of serial murder between 1843 and 1852. This “epidemic” coincided with a severe downturn in Britain’s economy, beginning with a decline in the silk, cotton, and woolen industries in 1839. Food became scarce as people’s purchasing power collapsed to a fifteen-year low in 1842. The amount of property crime shot up dramatically in those years. While the economy recovered slightly between 1843 and 1845, a poor harvest the next year along with a rise in the price of cotton and the collapse of railway investment shares drove the economy into another depression for the remainder of the decade, which subsequently became known as the “Hungry ’40s.”
Elizabeth Eccles
The first of the notorious female killers of the Hungry ’40s was Elizabeth Eccles, in her late thirties, who in the autumn of 1842 reported the death of her thirteen-year-old stepson—a common enough occurrence. He was employed at a mill at three shillings a week, which he would promptly turn over to her. He was also enrolled in the mill’s burial club. Eccles applied to the mill for burial funds and received fifty shillings. She then promptly asked for another fifty to bury her daughter, who apparently died at about the same time. Since the mill did not employ the daughter, the company refused to pay and alerted the authorities. A coroner’s inquest detected the presence of arsenic in the two bodies and in the body of another daughter who had died in 1840. She confessed that she killed her stepson when he threatened to tell his father that she had been drinking and killed her daughter for “the love of money.” Elizabeth Eccles was hanged in May 1843.
ARSENIC AND ITS EFFECTS
In the 1840s, arsenic was available as a common household material from any corner druggist. It was a common ingredient for rat poison and as a beauty product as well, said to cure pimples and other skin blemishes. It was cheap: An ounce of white arsenic would cost about ten pence. It was colorless, odorless, and soluble in hot water. Two to four grains—a fraction of a teaspoon—was a lethal dose of the substance. (There are 437.5 grains in one ounce.)
Symptoms of arsenic poisoning are horrific and begin within an hour of ingestion: an acrid sensation in the throat and the onset of unbearable nausea followed by uncontrollable vomiting, which continues long after the stomach is empty. The victim begins to vomit a whitish fluid streaked with blood. The mouth becomes parched, the tongue is thickly coated, and the throat is constricted. The victims suffer from an intense thirst but any attempt to drink immediately results in further bouts of vomiting. In the next stage, the victim suffers from uncontrollable bloody diarrhea and intense abdominal pain with more vomiting, accompanied by a severe burning sensation from the mouth all the way down to the anus. The urine is meager and bloody. Symptoms can include cardiac arrhythmias and ventricular fibrillation often leading to the misdiagnosis of a heart attack in the victim. Whitish lines (Mees’ lines) that look much like traumatic injuries are found on the fingernails.
In the final stages, the victim goes pale and the skin takes on a bluish hue, accompanied by a sheen of foul-smelling perspiration. Breathing becomes harsh, irregular, and shallow, the hands and feet go very cold and numb, and the heartbeat grows feeble. Finally, the victim’s limbs convulse while their legs are seized by painful cramps. Death comes anywhere from six hours to several days after the ingestion of arsenic, depending upon the amount of poison ingested and physique of the victim.
Essentially, arsenic affects how the body’s cells function, disabling their ability to absorb and use proteins and chemicals necessary to sustain human life.
The symptoms of arsenic poisoning resemble cholera, a common deadly infectious disease at the time, the cause of which medical science would not understand until the 1880s. (Bacteria in the water supply or on drinking and eating utensils was often found to be the culprit.) The traces of arsenic left no visible evidence during an autopsy. However, it could be detected by chemical tests—and could be sometimes detected in exhumed corpses several years after death. But it would be several years before coroners began to catch on to the series of murders being secretly committed by some women and testing for arsenic became routine in suspicious cases. In 1847 the Daily News trumpeted: “The earth no longer covers the dead. The chemical test discovers what the autopsy left hidden.” While the British medical journal The Lancet pronounced as late as 1862, “The secret poisoning of the Middle Ages was…only a secret because the art of chemical analysis was then very imperfect.”122
Sarah Dazely
In the meantime, the revelations of serial poisoning murders continued. In March 1843, authorities charged Sarah Dazely with murder. Although in her twenties, Dazely had already been married seven times with her last three husbands dying inexplicably. She was about to be married an eighth time when her husband-to-be, upon hearing neighbors referring to his bride as “a female Bluebeard,” decided to cancel the wedding and bring his suspicions to the police. The three husbands were disinterred along with an infant who had died in 1840. Chemical tests revealed the presence of lethal doses of arsenic in two of the husbands while the other corpses had decomposed too much for testing to be possible. Financial gain was never identified as a motive in the murders by Sarah Dazely—she seemed to kill almost vacantly, simply to remove impediments her husbands presented in her desire to marry somebody else. On August 5, 1843, she was hanged publicly before an unruly crowd of 10,000 spectators.
Eliza Joyce
In July 1843 an alcoholic Eliza Joyce was tried for the attempted murder in September 1842 of her stepson. She was already suspected in the death of her 18-month-old stepdaughter in October 1841 and in the death of her 3-week-old daughter in January 1842. Chemical testing could not detect any traces of arsenic and Joyce was acquitted. Her family, however, disowned her entirely and after a year of misery with another infant in a workhouse, Joyce broke down and confessed she had used overdoses of laudanum, a popular opium-based drug used for pain relief and as a sedative for ailments ranging from colds to meningitis to cardiac diseases in both adults and children.
On August 2, 1844, she was hanged before a crowd of 5,000.
Sarah Freeman
The case of 29-year-old Sarah Freeman, who was executed in 1845, was reminiscent of twentieth-century female serial killers who continually murdered their family members without any response from authorities. In a thirteen-month period, Freeman murdered her illegitimate 7-year-old son, her husband, her mother, and her brother. Having completed seven years of school, Freeman was relatively well-educated for the times, but apparently had some sort of personality disorder—she was reported to be so violently short-tempered that her parents expelled her from their home.
Sarah supported herself through prostitution and had two illegitimate children. In 1840 she married a laborer named Charles Freeman and then promptly poisoned him and her son for the twenty-pound payout from a burial club she had enrolled them in. She opened a small shop with the money and moved back in with her parents and brothers. Once again, her violent temper forced them to ask her to leave. She then proceeded to murder her mother and then one of her brothers. It was only after the fourth death that the doctor sent Charles’s stomach and intestines for chemical analysis and discovered massive amounts of arsenic.
In the press much was made of the fact that, despite the evidence that members of the same family were dying in the same way, no investigation by the coroner was undertaken. The coroner’s office was accused of economizing on the conduct of tests at the expense of working-class citizens. Tried only for her last murder, Sarah Freeman apparently cursed out the court and jury when sentenced to death and was executed on April 23, 1845, before a crowd of 10,000 spectators.
Mary Ann Milner
In July 1847 Mary Ann Milner was tried for poisoning her mother-in-law and sister-in-law. She was found guilty in the case of her sister-in-law. She also eventually confessed to murdering her sister-in-law’s infant daughter by feeding her cereal laced with arsenic. Her father-in-law, who ate a poison rice pudding served up by Milner, survived but sustained brain damage. Milner appeared to be underdeveloped intellectually and emotionally, barely able to read or write. She apparently “did not get along” with her in-laws. She committed suicide on July 29, a day before her scheduled hanging.
Sarah Chesham
Cases that surfaced in the countryside appeared to be more disturbing in that there were indications that neighbors were not only aware of poisoners but actually used their services. The Times would claim in 1851 that in one district, “the use of arsenic became a kind of family secret, a weapon in the hands of the weaker vessel by which an ill-favored husband or a troublesome family might be readily put out of the way.” At the center of these accusations was the 35-year-old Sarah Chesham, who was accused of poisoning an illegitimate baby in the village of Clavering at the behest of the father. The mother of the infant claims that Chesham had inexplicably visited her on two occasions and fed the baby “sugar” and that each time the infant became ill afterward. According to the Times, the village was aware that Chesham had killed her own children with poison and was someone who
…could put any expensive or disagreeable object out of the way. The village of Clavering seems to have long ago taken it for granted that the prisoner had poisoned her children, and yet they say little more about it than if she had killed her pigs. It is beyond question that an accepted and reputed murderess walked abroad in a village unchallenged and unaccused, and that all the inhabitants had seen her children buried without a remark or outcry…123
Nothing could be proven in the death of the infant, but police exhumed the bodies of two of her sons who died under suspicious circumstances within days of each other. The doctor attending the death of the first son recalled that Chesham refused to order a coffin for him, explaining that one coffin can easily hold two bodies. Several days later, her second son died and the two sons were buried together in one coffin. Both had been enrolled in a burial club. When the bodies of her sons were tested, massive doses of arsenic were detected. The problem was that the arsenic could not be conclusively traced to Chesham, and she was acquitted. She went back to the village where she offered advice on how to prepare “special” mince pies that would alleviate any financial family burden. (This kind of rural deprivation-driven serial murder was also reported in the Tiszazug region of Hungary in the 1920s, when police arrested a small secret cabal of female killers who prepared potions for those wanting to murder inconvenient relatives. Some forty murders were uncovered.)124
Mary May
In the meantime, Mary May, also in her late thirties, was executed in August 1848 for enrolling her half-brother in a burial club without his knowledge and then serving him a drink laced with arsenic. She planned to use the money to buy a horse and cart so that she could peddle her wares village to village. Mary May had sixteen children, fourteen of whom had died. Shortly before her execution, she also confessed to having murdered her husband, but denied killing the children.
The next year, Sarah Chesham was back in the news, now accused of murdering her husband, Richard, when he became ill and died after Chesham insisted on caring for him. The news of her bragging and offering advice on poison pies to her neighbors was the focus of outraged press reports. Chesham was again tried and this time convicted and executed in March 1851.
A panic was fanned by these press reports, which hinted that secret societies of female serial killers exchanged recipes for poisoned dishes that could be served to husbands, children, and other family members to profit from burial club payments or to simply relieve oneself of them. By now Parliament had passed a bill banning insurance payments of more than three pounds on any child under the age of ten. In 1855 this ban would be raised to six pounds for a child under five, and ten pounds for a child between the ages of five and ten. A death certificate from a physician was required before funds could be released to a beneficiary.
THE SALE OF ARSENIC ACT (1851)
As Chesham was awaiting execution, the House of Lords debated a proposed Sale of Arsenic Act, which required that purchasers of arsenic identify themselves and the amount of and purpose for the poison be registered in the vendors’ records along with the purchaser’s name. Arsenic was then tinted with a warning color and nobody could purchase less than ten pounds of uncolored arsenic without endorsement by a witness and a written explanation why uncolored arsenic was required. As the history of Chesham’s role as a possible village human exterminator-for-hire made the rounds of the press, the House of Lords proposed an amendment to the act adding a clause restricting the sale of arsenic to adult males only. Referring to lower-class rural women, one of the Lords proposing the amendment warned, that “there was a degree of mysterious horror attached to the use of poison, which seemed to attract and fascinate a certain class of minds.”
Some opposed the proposed restriction. The nineteenth century liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill lobbied against the amendment, arguing that it:
…singles out women for the purpose of degrading them. It established a special restriction, a peculiar disqualification against them alone. It assumes that women are more addicted than men to committing murder! Does the criminal calendar, or the proceedings of the police courts, show a preponderance of women among the most atrocious criminals?
…If the last two or three murderers had been men with red hair, as well might Parliament have rushed to pass an Act restricting all red haired men from buying or possessing deadly weapons.125
In fact, the House of Commons had collected extensive statistics on gender and murder from all the judicial districts in the United Kingdom between 1840 and 1850. Historically, females represented ten to eleven percent of all of convicted murderers, except in the murder of children where the proportion of female killers is higher than males. But when it came to poisoning in the U.K. in that period, females represented 54 percent of the total of 235 defendants tried for murder or attempted murder by poison in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland.126 (A more recent study determined that there were 342 charges of murder by poisoning in England alone between 1750 and 1914. Females represented nearly 62 percent of the murderers charged in those cases—a total of 210 women.)127 Despite the unfavorable statistics, cool heads prevailed and when the Sale of Arsenic Act was finally adopted on May 23, 1851, there was no clause excluding women from purchasing arsenic. The only restriction was that the purchaser had to be an adult.
Mary Emily Cage
There was one more case of a female serial killer from the 1840s when Mary Emily Cage was hanged in August 1851 for the poisoning of her husband. Six years earlier, five of her fourteen children had suddenly died in a two-week period in unexplained circumstances, but there was no conclusive evidence that she was responsible.
Not much detail is known about the 1840s generation of female serial killers other than that they were lower-class impoverished women of limited or no education, frequently living in rural areas or small towns, who used poison to kill both male and female victims related to them. The motive was usually to either profit from burial club payments or to simply relieve themselves of their husbands, children, or other family members. Revenge and rage appeared to be the motive in one of the cases (Mary Ann Milner).
Catherine Wilson
The epidemic of female-perpetrated arsenic serial murders appeared to cease as the 1850s unfolded. There were no comparable cases to those of the 1840s but it is debatable whether that was the result of the Sale of Arsenic Act or murders simply went undetected because female killers began to use other methods. The arrest of Catherine Wilson in 1862 revealed an entirely new profile of the female serial killer.
Unlike the downtrodden, uneducated women who killed their impoverished family members for burial money, Catherine Wilson moved effortlessly among the upper-middle classes posing as a servant or nurse. She was intelligent and cunning. She killed family members, acquaintances, and patients for inheritance or simply to steal their possessions. She developed trusting relationships as a nurse and often convinced her patients to include her in their wills. She did not use arsenic to kill, preferring instead to murder her patients with overdoses of medicine or having them drink sulphuric acid. Leaving behind a trail of victims, she moved around Britain from town to town until she settled in London. Her murders were traced as far back as 1854. She was convicted of murdering her landlady and executed before a huge crowd of 20,000 spectators on October 20, 1862.
Mary Ann Cotton
No sooner had Catherine Wilson been executed than Mary Ann Cotton apparently began her killing. An ordinary-looking former Sunday school teacher and one-time nurse in her late thirties, Cotton reputedly murdered between fifteen and twenty victims in an eight-year period from 1864 to 1872. Killing those in her care, she is believed to have murdered eleven of her own children, five stepchildren, three husbands, a sister-in-law, a lodger, and her own mother. Using arsenic, Cotton easily circumvented the Sale of Arsenic Act by extracting it from rat poison, the sale of which was not controlled. Moving from town to town and remarrying, sometimes bigamously, Mary Ann changed names and identities as she left corpses in her wake. She killed almost mindlessly to relieve herself of the burden of her children or for inheritance. Because she changed jurisdictions so frequently, authorities did not notice a pattern of similar deaths around her—most attributed to “gastric fever.”
Mary Ann Cotton was only caught because she tried to unload one of her dying victims into a workhouse. When the victim died, the suspicious workhouse doctor detected arsenic poison and Cotton was arrested on July 18, 1872. Because she was pregnant, her trial was delayed. But after the birth of a daughter in jail, it began on March 5, 1873. Cotton was convicted for one murder and executed on March 24.
Cotton became legendary with even a children’s rhyme celebrating her notoriety:
Mary Ann Cotton
She’s dead and she’s rotton
She lies in her bed
With her eyes wide oppen. [sic]
After Mary Ann Cotton, burial insurance regulation, improved testing for poison, and the control of arsenic sales on a retail level contributed to a decline in what we might call desperate amateur poisoning. But it did not stop women who were coldly determined to kill.
Catherine Flannagan and Margaret Higgins
In 1884 in Liverpool, two sisters, 55-year-old Catherine Flannagan and 41-year-old Margaret Higgins, were jointly convicted of the murder of Thomas Higgins, Margaret’s husband. The two had managed to insure him with five different burial clubs to the tune of £108. Then they cleverly soaked arsenic flypaper, the sale of which was not regulated, until they extracted sufficient arsenic for a lethal dose. Higgins’s brother apparently had been aware that his sister-in-laws had been profiteering from insuring people in their slum neighborhood who all seemed to have had untimely but profitable deaths for the two sisters. After his brother’s death, he alerted authorities and the sisters fled, after Flannagan instructed her daughter to remove and destroy a photograph of her framed in her house. After their capture, investigators charged that the two sisters had murdered eight people in addition to Thomas Higgins, including Mary Higgins, Margaret’s stepdaughter, John Flannagan, Catherine’s husband, and a woman and her father who had lodged with Flannagan. They were tried and executed, however, only for the death of Thomas.
Another form of serial murder was connected to “baby farming” and “baby sweating.” For small fees women informally accepted and promised to care for babies that mothers could not afford to keep. Numerous cases arose where the baby farmers simply murdered the infants or allowed them to die from starvation and neglect, while still collecting the fees. “Baby sweating” involved the murder of infants with the knowledge of the mother, often arranged for while the mother was still pregnant. The newly born infant would be taken away by the baby sweater and never seen again.
The next generation of female poisoners differed from their sisters of the Hungry 40s. The 1850s are divided between past and present by the career of the nurse Florence Nightingale, who became the most famous woman in Victorian Britain after Queen Victoria herself. Nightingale shaped the cottage industry of female nursing into a new disciplined and highly respectable profession, especially after her heroic nursing mission during the Crimean War in 1854–57 when she and a staff of 38 volunteer female nurses reduced British casualties significantly.
The nurse became a new identity and profession for independent women in Victorian society, despite the strict rules and regulations of nursing orders. That mantle of respectability and admiration that nurses garnered was also adopted by late nineteenth-century female serial killers, many of whom were either trained as nurses or pretended to be nurses. This new generation of murdering women was not the class of uneducated, peasant, quasi-medieval, downtrodden female casualties of industrialization, but modern women with professional caregiving status. When Catherine Wilson was arrested, Britain’s medical journal Lancet commented that her crimes were especially troubling because she posed as a nurse as she killed, a shocking perversion of the ethical principles of medical care and nursing. The “angel of death” female serial killer came to us in the wake of Florence Nightingale and has been with us right up into the twenty-first century.
England would soon become obsessed with Jack the Ripper. But in the U.S. the focus would remain on female serial killers. Although in the usual American way, they put a spin to their crimes uniquely their own.
FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY U.S.
One social critic observed that the American Western was really about serial killing all along.128 And indeed, we encounter some of the first female serial killers in the rural frontier society of the U.S. Kate Bender and her murderous family in Kansas are probably the most famous. The Benders consisted of the 60-year-old father, John, his wife, who was about 50, their 25-year old son, John Jr., along with 24-year-old Kate. Nobody knew where the Benders had come from other than they spoke with a German accent. Upon their arrival in the small railway town of Cherryvale, Kansas, in 1871 they erected a crude cabin measuring 20 by 16 feet. One side of the cabin functioned as their living quarters, while the other side, separated by a canvas sheet, functioned as general store, restaurant, and cheap hotel.
The young Kate Bender appeared to be the pivotal member of the family. She was attractive and claimed to be a psychic and healer, traveling around the towns in the area giving public lectures and séances as Professor Miss Katie Bender. Some of her handbills still survive, which claim that she could “heal all sorts of diseases, can cure blindness, fits, deafness and all such diseases, also deaf and dumbness.” The father and mother stayed mostly in the background, while John Jr., it was reported, was an imbecile. Between 1871 and 1873, the Benders murdered numerous travelers stopping to eat or stay at their cabin. Kate would sit them with their backs to the canvas sheet and, while distracting them with her charm, one of the Bender men would come from behind the sheet and smash the victim in the head with a sledgehammer. Kate would then throw herself on the unconscious victim and slit his throat. A specially dug pit and chute in the back allowed them to quickly dispose of a body before another traveler would come in.
Things went wrong when they murdered William York in March 9, 1873, who was returning home from visiting his brother nearby and told him before he left that he planned to stop and have lunch at the Benders’ cabin. When William failed to return home, his brother and a posse retraced his journey several weeks later. His trail appeared to go cold at the Bender cabin. After the posse visited the cabin and inquired about the missing man, the Benders packed their things, stripped the cabin bare, and vanished on May 5, 1873.
By then all sorts of suspicious stories were circulating about the Benders and how the men would melt away behind the canvas curtain when customers came in to eat. Several reported that Kate was abusive when they declined to sit against the canvas curtain and took their meals at the counter instead. Another recalled a gust of wind blowing Kate’s apron open, revealing her gripping a knife beneath it.
Upon receiving news that the Benders had fled, the posse returned to the cabin and searched it. They immediately discovered the pit and detected a powerful smell of blood rising from it. A search of the grounds around the pit revealed ten or twelve bodies, depending upon the account. The bodies were all male except for one woman and a child. It was estimated that the Benders had robbed their victims of somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000.
The fate of the Benders remains a mystery. It is believed that the posse successfully caught up with them and murdered them, splitting the loot among themselves. The wagon in which the Benders had escaped was later found bullet-ridden. Two members of the posse, one in 1909 and another in 1910, made deathbed confessions that they had killed the family and buried their bodies at the bottom of a twenty-foot dried-out well, although despite attempts, the well could not be found.
Another lesser-known frontier-age female serial killer was Patty Cannon, who between 1802 and 1829 murdered at least twenty-five victims in Delaware, many of them slave traders, whose slaves she’d take and resell for a profit.
Lydia Sherman—American Borgia
While the number of female serial killers flagged in frequency in Britain after the introduction of the Sale of Arsenic Act, in the U.S., where no such legislation was enacted, the 1860s bore witness to the phenomenon that had swept the U.K. One of the first cases garnering major notoriety was that of Lydia Sherman in the 1860s. Lydia would become known as the “American Borgia” in reference to Lucrezia Borgia, a Renaissance-era Italian papal aristocrat reputed to have poisoned several victims in her family’s struggles for power. (Although it was never definitively determined to what extent she was complicit in the poisonings.)
Lydia was born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1824 and was orphaned at 9. She and her brother were raised by an uncle in a devout Methodist upbringing. When Lydia was 16 the family moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she worked as a seamstress and faithfully attended the local Methodist Church. It was in church that she met 38-year-old Edward Struck, a widower with six children who worked as a carriage blacksmith. Lydia was 19 when she married Struck in 1843.
Despite the age difference, the marriage appeared to work. In the ensuing years, Lydia had seven children of her own in addition to the six that Edward had from his previous marriage. With thirteen children to support, Lydia and Edward did what many do in their search for fortune—they moved to New York City, eventually settling on 125th Street in Harlem, which was, in that period, a white middle-class neighborhood.
In 1857, Edward, then aged 53, managed to enlist in the New York Police Department, a secure job with additional lucrative opportunities if the officer also happened to be corrupt. Edward apparently was not—to the consternation of his corrupt fellow officers at his precinct—and in his six years of service on the NYPD, he remained honest. This could have been the motive behind his sudden dismissal for cowardice in the autumn of 1863 when Edward was accused of not responding to a barroom fight on his beat. Edward had argued that the fight had been over by the time he arrived, but the dismissal stood.129
Edward and Lydia had been married for twenty uneventful years. Seven of their children, six of whom were from Edward’s previous marriage, were now adults living on their own, but the couple still had six sons and daughters to care for, the youngest of which, an infant boy named William, had just been born a few months earlier.
Edward was devastated and shamed by the charges of cowardice. At the age of 59, after a lifetime of an up-and-down struggle as a carriage blacksmith, Edward had expected the regular work on the NYPD to cushion the late years of his life. There might even have been a municipal pension in the end. But now that it was suddenly torn from him, Edward could not imagine starting over. Over the winter Edward sunk into a deep depression, unable to seek new work or even leave the family’s first-floor apartment. At one point he took a pistol and threatened to commit suicide. By the spring of 1864 he had stopped getting out of bed, washing, dressing, or feeding himself.
Lydia, his faithful wife of twenty years, did her best to help her husband. She took in sewing work at home to make ends meet and cared for him and the children. Eventually she went to see Edward’s superior at the police department, Precinct Captain Hart, who had opposed Edward’s dismissal, hoping to get him to help her to somehow have her husband reinstated on the force. There was not much Hart could do, and when Lydia described Edward’s desperate mental state and the burden he had become to her, Hart suggested that Edward be hospitalized. As he put it, according to Lydia’s later testimony, Hart advised that Edward be “put out of the way.”
Lydia testified that her husband “caused me at this time a great deal of trouble.” After twenty years of marriage, or perhaps precisely because of it, Lydia went to a local pharmacy and purchased an ounce of white arsenic for ten cents. The pharmacist never questioned her purchase of the commonly used household substance—it could have been purchased as easily for poisoning rats as for preventing pimples. The next morning, on May 23, 1864, she fixed Edward a bowl of porridge, mixed a thimbleful of arsenic into it, and gently propping up her husband on a pillow, spoon-fed him the arsenic meal. By the afternoon Edward was in the throes of poisoning, vomiting and suffering from agonizing abdominal pain. As the night wore on Edward was soaked in fetid perspiration while Lydia fed him more poisoned gruel and sat by his bedside wiping his brow and watching her husband curled up in pain. As Lydia explained it, it was the most merciful thing she could do for her husband, for he “would never be any good to me or to himself again.”
Edward died the next morning. An attending physician decided that he had died of natural causes—of “consumption” (what tuberculosis was known as in those days). This was 1864 and it would not be until the 1880s that medical science would conclusively identify and understand the relationship between bacteria and certain diseases. Now in her forties, the unsuspected Lydia was a widow with six children, the youngest of whom were 9-month-old baby boy William, 4-year-old Edward Jr., and 6-year-old Martha. It took some five weeks for Lydia to grow despondent and conclude that the youngsters “could [do] nothing for me or for themselves.” After thinking about it for a day, in July 1864 she murdered her three youngest children one after the other. The 4-year-old Edward, she recalled, “was a beautiful boy, and did not complain during his illness. He was very patient.”
All three children died painfully but there was no suspicion in their deaths. All were attributed to “remittent fever” and “bronchitis.” In the 1860s children died even more routinely than adults of a host of illnesses, none entirely understood by the medical science of the day.
With three fewer mouths to feed, Lydia felt she could sustain the remaining three children in her family: 14-year-old George and two older girls, 12-year-old Ann and her 18-year-old namesake, Lydia. Moreover, after witnessing the tender care Lydia gave her three dying children, a neighborhood physician hired her as a full-time nurse. (No evidence was found later, however, that Lydia killed any patients during that period of employment.)
Employed as a nurse, with her son George working as a painter’s assistant for $2.50 a week and her daughter Lydia clerking at a dry-goods store in Harlem, the family seemed to get along financially. But then George developed what was then known as “painter’s cholic”—a disabling disease resulting from lead poisoning from handling paint. Lydia nursed her son for a week, but when he failed to regain his health sufficiently fast enough to go back to work, she recalled that she became “discouraged.”
Lydia confessed later, “I thought he would become a burden upon me, so I mixed up some arsenic in his tea. I think he died the next morning.”
In the winter, little Ann became frequently sick with chills and fevers, requiring that her sister Lydia remain home from the dry-goods store to care for her while her mother worked as a nurse. Eventually, the sister had to leave her employment at the store and take on the much less-paying home job of sewing hat and bonnet frames. The mother later said, “I thought if I got rid of her that Lydia and myself could make a living.”
Lydia went to a drugstore and bought some cold medicine, into which she then mixed arsenic. Ann began to vomit and suffer agonizing stomach pains as her mother attempted to “nurse” her. The physician who employed Lydia diagnosed her daughter as suffering from typhoid fever and gave Lydia time off work to stay at home to “care” for her little girl. It took Ann four days to die her horrific death.
Only the two Lydias remained. Mother and daughter moved into a smaller and cheaper apartment on upper Broadway, but in May the young Lydia came down suddenly with a fever. Despite her mother’s efforts to nurse her back to health, young Lydia was buried in a family plot in New York’s Trinity graveyard next to her father and five brothers and sisters. Despite the recollections of a pastor who witnessed the daughter’s convulsive death, the same physician diagnosed it as typhoid fever again. Lydia herself, while confessing to the other murders, insisted that she had nothing to do with the death of her eldest daughter.
Lydia’s adult stepson was suspicious of his father’s death and the rapid demise of his stepbrothers and sisters. He urged the New York District Attorney’s office to exhume all seven bodies and conduct tests for arsenic. But it was too late. Lydia, totally free of any familial obligations for the first time in twenty-two years, had disappeared.
In his study of American female poisoners, Harold Schechter writes that, “In her own grotesque way, the forty-two-year-old ex-wife and mother was authentically American: a true believer in the possibility of endless self-renewal, of leaving the past behind and reinventing her life.”130 Lydia had left her work as a nurse and moved back downtown, finding employment as a clerk in a sewing machine store on Canal Street. There she met and charmed a customer from Stratford, Connecticut, who was impressed with her lively personality and experience as a nurse, and hired her to take care of his invalid mother for room and board and eight dollars a week. Within weeks of arriving in Stratford, Lydia met a wealthy old farmer, Dennis Hurlburt, whose wife had recently died. Hurlburt was looking for a housekeeper and Lydia leapt at the opportunity. She later stated that she had been there only a few days when the old man wanted to marry her.
Lydia was a relatively attractive woman. Her photograph from the period shows a thin, delicately featured woman with a full mouth and slightly melancholic eyes who looks younger than her 40 years. In addition to her good looks, if she was a psychopath she might also have had the typical psychopath’s charismatic personality that mesmerized the physician who employed her, the gentleman who hired her to take care of his mother, and now the widowed farmer who wanted to marry her.
Lydia later confessed that she agreed to marry Hurlburt if he promised, “all that he was worth should be mine.” The old man signed a will leaving his entire estate to Lydia. Witnesses later recalled that for more than a year they saw Lydia greeting her husband at the door with kisses, cooking his meals, mending his clothes, and even shaving him when his hands began to tremble too much.
One Sunday morning in 1868 as Hurlburt was preparing to go to church, he felt suddenly dizzy and fell ill. As the day went on, he became progressively weaker. Noting his absence, neighbors dropped by the next day and brought along some freshly dug clams, from which Lydia diligently prepared a chowder laced with arsenic. Throughout that Monday, Hurlburt twisted with abdominal pains and vomiting. On Tuesday, at his insistence, a physician was called, who later recalled that he could immediately see that Hurlburt was at death’s door. The physician was touched by how much care Lydia lavished on her dying husband, wiping his brow and attempting to keep his strength up with broth and medicines she carefully prepared herself. Hurlburt died an agonizing death the next day, which the physician certified as “cholera morbus.”
The 46-year-old widow inherited $20,000 in property and $10,000 in cash, a substantial amount in those days. She had no financial cares left in her life and no husband or children to cramp her space or cause her concern. Just as Lydia had recalled when her last child died, she now “felt good…I had nothing to fret or trouble me.”
Within a year Lydia took up with another widower, Horatio N. Sherman, an outgoing, heavy-drinking factory mechanic whose wife had just recently died leaving him with four children, one of whom was a sickly infant child, and a mother-in-law living in his house. It is hard to explain Lydia’s motives. Horatio was actually in debt, and Lydia ended up paying the $300 he owed—he was no cash cow. Perhaps by now Lydia was addicted to a surge of power she felt every time she put a victim to death.
Lydia and Horatio Sherman married in September 1870. Two months later, Lydia put arsenic in Horatio’s infant son’s milk and after a bout of terrible stomach pains the already sickly infant died the same night. The next month, Horatio’s 14-year-old daughter, Ada, well known in the town as a pretty and sweet child, became ill during the Christmas holidays. Lydia did her best to nurse Ada back to health, diligently making sure she drank the tea she prepared for her every day. Ada was a strong and healthy girl and for five days suffered from constant vomiting, bloody diarrhea, and excruciatingly painful abdominal spasms until she succumbed on New Year’s Eve.
By April 1871, the couple was said to have taken separate bedrooms. Despondent over the death of his infant son and his young daughter, Horatio went on a drinking binge in New Haven. Lydia sent his 17-year-old son to find him and bring him home, which he did. The next day, Horatio went back to work at the factory. When he returned home, Lydia was waiting for him with a delicious cup of hot chocolate. It took Horatio four days to succumb to an agonizing death on May 12, despite the efforts of his physician Dr. Beardsley.
Beardsley was an experienced physician who had treated several cases of accidental arsenic poisoning and who immediately recognized the symptoms. While treating Horatio, Beardsley had asked if he had taken any medicines other than the ones he prescribed. Horatio respond with his last known words, “Only what my wife has given me.”
Beardsley secured permission to autopsy Horatio’s body and sent specimens to a toxicology expert at Yale. Enough arsenic was found in Horatio’s liver to kill several men. A warrant was immediately issued for Lydia Sherman’s arrest, but she had already left town, returning to New Brunswick. In the meantime, the bodies of Horatio’s two children and Lydia’s second husband, Hurlburt, were exhumed and arsenic was also found in their bodies. Soon, police also learned of the seven deaths linked to Lydia in New York.
On June 7, 1871, detectives followed Lydia on a shopping trip from New Brunswick to New York. That evening, when she returned to New Brunswick, she was arrested as she stepped off the commuter train at the station. She was tried in New Haven, Connecticut, in April 1872, in a highly publicized eight-day trial. Nicknamed the “American Borgia” and “Queen Poisoner” Lydia became the subject of numerous books and songs and poems. The American public was fascinated with this serial murderess.
So inexplicable and insane were Lydia Sherman’s murders that the authorities could not see their way to charging her with capital murder and instead she was tried for the murder in second-degree of Horatio Sherman. Her murders to relieve herself of the burden of her spouses and children are reminiscent of Susan Smith, the 23-year-old woman who in 1994 in South Carolina let her car roll into a lake with her two children strapped in the backseat. The defense attempted to argue that she had “accidentally” murdered Horatio—or that perhaps he had committed suicide after the death of his children and that there was no conclusive evidence Lydia poisoned anyone.
But in the end a jury convicted Lydia on circumstantial evidence. She was sentenced to life imprisonment. She had only served five years when she became ill and died in prison in May 1878 at the age of 54.
Sarah Jane Robinson
No sooner had Lydia Sherman died than Sarah Jane Robinson made her appearance. While the murders committed by Sherman were inexplicable in their motive, Sarah Robinson was on a hedonistic murder-for-profit campaign. Sarah was born in Ireland around 1837. When her parents died within months of each other in 1850 the 14-year-old Sarah took her 9-year-old younger sister, Annie, and sailed to America to join their older brother in the Boston area. Once in the U.S. the sisters, although remaining close, lived separate lives. Annie McCormick married, but unfortunately her husband was killed in an industrial accident. Several years later, in 1879, she married for a second time, an unskilled laborer named Prince Arthur Freeman. They lived in crushing poverty, Prince making a few dollars a week at a metal foundry while Annie worked as a seamstress. Shortly after their second child was born, Annie contracted pneumonia in February 1885 and needed bedside care.
Sarah volunteered for the task and settled in the Freeman residence, dismissing the nurse hired by Prince’s mother to care for Annie. Sarah, although a seamstress by trade like her sister, claimed to have also had nursing experience. Sarah appeared to be a caring, outgoing, energetic, friendly, and diligent, churchgoing woman, but there was trouble lurking in the shadows. Sarah was married to laborer Moses Robinson and had eight children, three of whom had died. Although she had a reputation as a trustworthy seamstress with private and corporate clients, she was always behind in her rent and bills. She attempted to raise money by renting furniture and then mortgaging it several times over to different companies, but ended up being caught.
It was 1881 when Sarah is thought to have committed her first murder. When her family’s landlord, 70-year-old Oliver Sleeper, fell ill, Sarah offered to nurse him. He died of “heart disease” despite Sarah’s constant bedside care. Sarah charged his estate fifty dollars for her services but instead received a remission on her rent, which she sold on discount for cash to other tenants. Sleeper was known to have $3,000 cash on hand, but it was never found. It’s unknown whether Sarah got her hands on that money.
The next year Sarah husband, Moses, suddenly died. Moses had been insured for $2,000 with the Order of Pilgrim Fathers insurance association. But when Sarah attempted to collect on the insurance it was discovered that an agent had stolen the premium payments Moses had made. The company refused to pay out and Sarah sued. The lawsuit was pending when she was arrested for murder several years later.
By the time Sarah arrived at the Freeman’s tenement apartment, her sister’s health had significantly improved. But Sarah, who claimed to have psychic powers, insisted that she had dreamt that Annie was going to get only sicker and die. And sure enough, the first night that Sarah nursed Annie, she suddenly developed wrenching stomach pains and started vomiting. As hard as Sarah tried to nurse Annie, making sure Annie took down every medicinal drink she prepared for her, Annie eventually died on February 27, 1885.
The caring and generous Sarah revealed to the family that Annie’s last wish was that her husband, Prince, and their two children—1-year-old Elizabeth and 6-year-old Thomas—move in with her. Stunned at the sudden death of his wife and overwhelmed by the warmth of his sister-in-law, Prince and the two children moved into Sarah’s home in April.
Three weeks later, tragedy struck again. Elizabeth contracted an intestinal disorder and despite the care that Sarah lavished on the little girl in her attempt to nurse her back to health, the girl died painfully. Sarah sat Prince down for a heart-to-heart talk. Death and disease were rampant among the poor of their class, Sarah explained. Prince had wisely purchased a $2,000 life insurance policy, also from the Pilgrim Fathers, but the beneficiary, Annie, had died. Would it not be wise if she were made the beneficiary, Sarah suggested. Who would care for his little boy, Thomas, should anything happen to him, Sarah argued. On May 31, Prince made Sarah the beneficiary of his $2,000 insurance policy.
Witnesses would later testify that Sarah’s kind and caring treatment of Prince immediately vaporized to be replaced by a harsh and critical attitude. She told friends that Prince was “good-for-nothing” and that she wished it had been he who died and not her poor sister. She began to get her psychic visions again with premonitions of death for somebody in the household.
On June 17, 1885, she told Prince that it might be a good idea that he visit his mother because it might be the last chance to see her. Prince, who believed in Sarah’s psychic powers, rushed over to his mother’s home, but to his relief found her in excellent health.
On the morning of June 22, 1885, Sarah served Prince a bowl of oatmeal and molasses and saw him off to work. On his way to work Prince was overcome with nausea. He managed to get to work but was so wracked with abdominal pains that he was sent home. Two different physicians attended to Prince and they recognized symptoms of poisoning but assumed that he somehow was poisoned accidentally in the workplace. Nobody suspected the caring and gregarious Sarah Jane Robinson. When Prince’s sister came to nurse her brother, it appeared that he might still recover, but when his health improved so much that his sister returned home, Sarah took up nursing him again. That same night, on June 27, Prince died.
Sarah collected the $2,000 insurance benefit from the Order of Pilgrim Fathers and set out to pay her debts, move into a larger apartment, buy new clothes and furniture, and take a trip to Wisconsin. With the last of the money she bought an insurance policy on the life of her 25-year-old daughter, Lizzie. Just in time, too, because six months later, in February 1886, Lizzie contracted some kind of stomach ailment and, despite all the nursing done by Sarah, she died an agonizing death.
In the year since his father’s death, the now 7-year-old boy Thomas was virtually ignored by Sarah and often treated brutally. When neighbors remarked that the lad appeared to be undernourished, Sarah commented that his health was not all that good to begin with. On July 19, 1886, little Tommy fell ill with some form of gastric infection and died on July 23, curled up in pain.
In the meantime, Sarah’s adult son, William, shortly after his sister’s death, insured his life with the Order of Pilgrim Fathers, making his mother the beneficiary. A month later he felt nauseous after eating a breakfast prepared for him by Sarah. In the evening, after drinking tea his mother served him, William began to suffer from stomach cramps.
The next morning a physician was sent for to look at William. The doctor was affiliated with the Order of Pilgrim Fathers and was acutely aware of the strange series of deaths dogging this family whose members had bought insurance policies. The doctor secretly took a sample of William’s vomit and sent it to a Harvard toxicologist, who discovered massive amounts of arsenic. But it was too late: By the time the test results arrived, William had died. The last words witnesses heard him saying were, “The old lady dosed me.”131
Sarah Jane Robinson was arrested for the murder of her son while authorities exhumed the bodies of six of her victims: her brother-in-law, Prince; her daughter, Lizzie; her sister, Annie; her nephew, Tommy; her husband, Moses; and her aged landlord. Tests revealed massive traces of arsenic in all the corpses.
Sarah was charged with first-degree murder because of the obvious profit motive, but her defense attorney argued that mere financial profit could not be motive alone for so many murders. Sarah had to be suffering from “uncontrolled depravity,” the attorney insisted. She was a monster. “I do not know that the law hangs monsters,” Sarah’s lawyer argued. The jury thought otherwise and Sarah was convicted for murder and sentenced to death, but the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. She died in prison in 1906 at the age of seventy. She insisted on her innocence to the end.
Jane Toppan—American Female Serial Killer Superstar
While the eight murders attributed to Sarah Robinson were clearly committed for profit, the thirty-one or more killings perpetrated by Jane Toppan between 1880–1901 were entirely inexplicable. Unlike the poor lower-class wretched females who murdered for small financial gains, Jane Toppan was a trained nurse who moved effortlessly among the middle and upper-middle classes. While we know very little about the early lives of the female serial killers so far described, we know more about Jane Toppan.
She was born Honora A. Kelly somewhere between 1854 and 1857—sources vary on her age—and was the youngest of four sisters from a desperately poor family of Irish immigrants in Massachusetts. Her mother died when she was a year old and her father, Peter Kelly, a tailor, attempted to raise the girls. Unfortunately, the father was mentally ill and several years later he was confined to a mental institution for the rest of his life. A grandmother attempted to raise the children but soon found herself destitute and unable to keep them. The girls were turned over to the Boston Female Asylum for Destitute Girls and adopted out to different families.
An English protestant family named Toppan, who already had two adult daughters, adopted Honora when she was 5 years old under a type of indentured adoption where if unsatisfied they could send her back to the asylum at anytime up to the age of 18. Her name was changed to Jane Toppan. With thick black hair, olive skin, a prominent nose, and big brown eyes, Jane was passed off as an Italian orphan whose parents had died at sea. To have been Irish in those days was humiliating, and Ann Toppan, Jane’s WASP stepmother, whom Jane called “Auntie,” reminded her that just because she was born Irish she did not have to behave that way. Jane developed a loathing for her family heritage.
Ann Toppan was a strict disciplinarian and treated Jane as a household servant. Despite the fact Jane carried the Toppan name, she was never accepted on equal terms as a family member. When she turned 18, she was emancipated from her indenture and received a payment of fifty dollars from the Toppans. Although now free, she remained living at home providing housekeeping services in exchange for room and board.
Several years later, when Jane’s stepmother died, she left an inheritance to her two daughters, but made no mention of Jane in her will. One of the daughters, Elizabeth, took over the house. Jane remained living in the house, basically performing the same household servant functions for Elizabeth that she had for her mother, but unlike their mother, Elizabeth treated Jane with kindness and respect.
Witnesses who went to school with Jane recalled that she was a gregarious and popular girl but that she told exaggerated lies about herself—that her father had sailed around the world and lived in China, that her brother was personally decorated by Lincoln at Gettysburg, and that her sister was a renowned beauty who had married an English lord. In fact, one of Jane’s natural sisters would be confined in an insane asylum when she was in her twenties. Nevertheless, Jane was regarded among her peers as the “life of the party” and attended picnics, skating, and boating parties.
What we can see in Jane’s childhood profile are the potential seeds for a psychopath: an early breaking of the bonds between mother and child, possible traumatic childhood events, mental illness in the family, lack of genuine affection and nurturing from her stepparents, a tendency to fantasize and tell lies, a sense of disempowerment and shame. While Jane maintained an outwardly open and friendly personality, internally she was locked down in a defensive posture, even though after her adoption she was not necessarily abused severely. In the territory between her outward personality and her inward psyche, fantasies were at play, possibly focused on empowerment and esteem, which she clearly lacked. The grandiose lies she told hinted at the vast gulf between her desire and her actual life.
Jane’s stepsister Elizabeth married a church deacon, Oramel Brigham, who moved into the house. Jane continued to live in the house with the newlywed couple in exchange for her services as a maid. Jane had no inheritance, no social status, no profession or higher education, no husband or family of her own. Despite the fact the Brighams apparently treated Jane kindly, some kind of unarticulated seething hostility eventually led to relations becoming so strained that in 1885 Jane moved out of the home she had lived in for nearly twenty years. Nevertheless, Elizabeth told Jane she was welcome to visit her home anytime and that “there would always be a room waiting for her.”
Almost nothing is known about what Jane did for the next two years. Few rewarding opportunities were available for a “respectable” single woman in those days: schoolteacher, seamstress, housemaid, or textile worker. None of these appealed to Jane, who had grandiose ideas of being destined for something better. And so it came to pass that in 1887, at the age of 33, the psychopathic Jane decided on a career in nursing. She was admitted to the Cambridge Hospital nursing school in Boston.
Jolly Jane
In the nineteenth century, going to nursing school was akin to becoming a nun in terms of lifestyle, commitment, and discipline. This is not unusual considering that traditionally church monasteries functioned as the first organized hospitals in the medieval era with nuns serving as nurses and monks as physicians. Florence Nightingale had introduced a new standard of professional disciplined nursing in the 1850s, which demanded strict conformity, obedience, and sacrificial devotion to duty.
In the 1880s nurses in America typically trained for two years in grueling conditions: They worked seven days a week for fifty weeks a year—no Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving holidays. Several student nurses would share a small room, sleeping on narrow cots. They would be awakened at 5:30 a.m. and given time to make their beds, dress, and prepare their own breakfasts. They typically worked twelve-to-fourteen-hour shifts with seventy-five-minute breaks for lunch and supper, which were provided for them. The food was so bad that they frequently had to purchase their own provisions. Each nurse would have approximately fifty patients to take care of: prepare food for and feed, bathe, dress, clean their wounds, change their bandages, wash their clothing and bed linen. Student nurses were also expected to take care of their wards by cleaning, dusting, washing the floors and windows, and stoking the stove.
Discipline administrated by head nurses was strict—the smallest infraction such as lateness, failing to clean properly, leaving the ward without permission, or even complaining about the food could be punishable by dismissal or penalizing comments in the student’s record. The nurses would sign a contract by which they were bound to serve a period of two years. In exchange they received room and board, a bib apron and nurse’s cap, and a salary of seven dollars a week, from which they had to pay for clothes, textbooks, and other expenses.132 Once a week they were required to attend lectures in the evening on medical theory. At the end of two years the students would be examined on their medical and nursing knowledge by a board of physicians and, if they passed, were issued a diploma certifying them as professional nurses.
Jane Toppan’s fellow nursing students remembered her as a gregarious and cheerful person but with a hidden threatening side to her. Jane Toppan tended to spread gossip and rumors about student nurses she did not like and implicated several students in infractions they did not commit but which resulted in their dismissal. Several of her acquaintances would later testify to the glee with which Jane celebrated the innocent students’ dismissals from nursing school. If we accept anthropologists’ assertions that gossip and slander are early signs of female aggression, then Jane Toppan fits the bill.
Along with the gossip, Jane also spun exaggerated, aggrandizing lies about herself, claiming, for example, that the Tsar of Russia had offered her a nursing position with his family.
Although it was never proven, she apparently committed acts of petty theft against fellow students and from hospital supplies, but evaded detection every time. Many of the students and supervisors came to detest Jane, but senior staff and patients were completely enamored with her happy disposition and daily good cheer. She was nicknamed “Jolly Jane.”
Jane Toppan appreciated the admiration that some patients gave her. She liked those patients so much that when there was the possibility that they had sufficiently recovered from their illnesses to be released, Jane would doctor their medical charts to indicate worsening conditions or she would administer small overdoses of medicine causing alarming symptoms that would result in the patients being held longer in the hospital. But for those patients Jane did not like, another fate awaited.
Jane’s Addiction
After her arrest, investigators found numerous textbooks, many of them showing extra wear on pages dealing with poisons and dangerous drugs—particularly morphine, an opiate used for pain relief, but which in a massive dose can cause death. According to her confession later, Toppan became addicted to the thrill of watching patients die from morphine overdose. She would stand over their beds, looking into their dying eyes and watching their pupils contract, listening to the breath shorten and then cease. She said that these murders became “a habit of her life” and caused her “delirious enjoyment.”
Eventually, she began to experiment with combinations of drugs, such as morphine with atropine, which had opposite effects from morphine. Overdoses of atropine would cause the pupils to dilate, the heart rate to increase, and spasms to shake the patient. Often there was delirium and seizures with the patient hallucinating and losing all muscular control. Toppan would first inject morphine and as the patient sank into a coma she would then revive her victim with doses of atropine, which would then cause death. She was sadistically transfixed by her patients’ deaths. She would inject alternating doses of morphine and atropine just to watch their opposing effects on the victims’ pupil sizes. Like a deranged, mad scientist, she toyed with different combinations of lethal doses of the two drugs, which misled the physicians, who failed to note any kind of recognizable pattern in the symptoms of the dying patients. All this, she confessed, gave her a “voluptuous delight”—a Victorian way of saying “sexual pleasure.”
There was only one known survivor of Toppan’s murders, who was able to describe what transpired. Thirty-six-year-old Amelia Phinney was hospitalized with a uterine ulcer and was tossing in her bed in pain, unable to sleep. Then Jane Toppan came in, raised her head and put a glass to her lips. She told Phinney to drink the liquid because it “would make her feel better.” Phinney recalled feeling her mouth and throat go unusually dry, her body grow numb, and her eyelids feel heavy as she began to slip into unconsciousness. Then a strange thing happened: She felt the blankets pulled back, the bed creak, and the mattress sag as Toppan got into the bed with her. Toppan cuddled with her, stroking her hair and kissing her face. She remembered Toppan then getting up on her knees next to her and peering into her eyes, no doubt observing the state of her pupils. Phinney was convinced she was dreaming, but when Toppan lifted up the glass again to her lips and told her to drink some more, Phinney mustered up all her strength and turned away. The last thing she remembers is Toppan suddenly jumping off the bed and dashing out of the room. Somebody must have been approaching.
Phinney awoke the next morning in an extremely groggy state, but her recollections of the night were so weird that she was not sure whether she had hallucinated them or not. Moreover, they were embarrassing. Phinney did not report her experience until years later when Toppan was arrested.
Although “Jolly Jane” charmed senior staff and particularly physicians—who had sporadic contact with her—her immediate supervisors and fellow students developed an intense dislike for her. Her constant tall tales and her gossiping about others alienated people around her. She was also suspected of thieving hospital supplies and patients’ belongings, but nothing could be proven. Nor could anything be proven about the unusually high rate of death among patients in Jane’s care. It would have been inconceivable that a student nurse was deliberately murdering them.
Despite this, or precisely because of it, Toppan transferred in 1888 to the Massachusetts General Hospital nursing school. She arrived with a handful of glowing recommendations from Cambridge Hospital physicians. Very soon, however, she alienated her immediate supervisors at Massachusetts General. In the summer of 1890, shortly after having successfully passed her exams, Toppan was reported to have left a ward without permission and was immediately dismissed without a diploma being issued.
Toppan secured employment as a head nurse at another Cambridge hospital using a forged diploma, but she was dismissed a few months later after the forgery was discovered when she was again suspected of stealing patients’ property and doctoring patient records.
Toppan then decided to go out on her own as a private nurse. She still had excellent recommendations from physicians and over the next ten years she received so many testimonials and referrals from physicians that she became known as Cambridge’s most successful private nurse. She had a host of clients from New England’s prominent families and physicians clamoring for her services for their wealthy patients. As a private nurse, she earned twenty-five dollars a week, a fortune compared to the five dollars a week that women on average earned in the U.S. in that era. Despite this success, minor complaints from patients continued to dog Toppan: She borrowed money without repaying it, she fibbed, and she was suspected of small thefts from the patients’ homes she visited. These faults, however, were overlooked because of the cheerful and exuberant manner in which Jane Toppan nursed her patients. Jane had developed a dual personality: With clients she was demure, never drank, and was pleasantly well-behaved, but to the friends she socialized with she showed another side, telling obscene jokes, drinking beer, and displaying a seething vindictiveness against those she thought might have crossed her. She took great delight in causing grief for no reason by telling tales, gossiping, and turning people against each other.
Victims
It is unclear how many patients Toppan murdered during her period as a student nurse and later as a private nurse. In the end, Toppan confessed in detail to the murder of thirty-one victims between 1880 and 1901. In her later stage of killing she focused her attentions on individuals other than her patients. After befriending her elderly landlord couple, 77-year-old Israel Dunham and his wife, Lovey, Jane murdered them one by one: first the husband in 1895 and then, two years later, his widow. According to Jane, they had become “feeble and fussy” and “old and cranky.” Several witnesses from nursing school and from her period as a private nurse would recall Toppan commenting “there was no use in keeping old people alive.”
In December 1889, 70-year-old Mary McLear, while visiting her granddaughter in Cambridge over the Christmas holidays, fell ill. The attending physician sent for “one of his best nurses”—Jane Toppan—to care for the elderly woman. McLear died on December 29 after four days in the care of “Jolly Jane.” After the funeral, relatives noticed that some of McLear’s best clothing had gone missing and voiced suspicions to the doctor who immediately assured them that nurse Toppan was one of “the finest women and best nurses he knew.” The issue was dropped.
Jane Toppan was in demand and well paid. Financial gain could not have been a pressing motive in these murders. The stealing must have been the final exercise of her power over her victims or perhaps a satisfaction of her need for trophies, a characteristic of some serial murders.
A Cold Dish of Vengeance
Eventually, Jane Toppan turned her murderous attention on her older stepsister Elizabeth and her deacon husband, Oramel Brigham. Every once in a while “Jolly Jane” would take Elizabeth up on her offer to visit and stay at the house she was raised in. The tensions of years ago had long been forgotten and soothed by Jane’s good-natured cheer. She was sincerely welcomed at the house.
But in the summer of 1899 Elizabeth found herself suddenly unable to shake off a persistent winter melancholy. Jane came to the rescue. She invited her sister for some picnicking on the beach and fresh air at a cottage she was renting on Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts. Giving her fifty dollars for expenses, Oramel saw his wife off on August 25, entrusting her into Jane’s care. Two days later, he received an urgent telegram from Jane informing him that Elizabeth had fallen seriously ill. By the time Oramel arrived on the train, Elizabeth was in a deep coma. According to an attending physician, she had had a stroke. She died the next day on August 28.
Broken-hearted, Oramel was packing Elizabeth’s things when he noticed that her handbag had only five dollars in it. Forty-five dollars were missing and when he asked Jane about it, she said she knew nothing about it. As Oramel was leaving, Jane told him that Elizabeth, in her last dying days, had wanted Jane to have her gold watch and chain as a reminder of her. Touched by his wife’s tender concern for her younger stepsister, Oramel immediately gave Jane the watch. In later years he was equally touched by Jane’s reluctance to carry the watch—she had such fond respect for a precious artifact in Elizabeth’s memory. He had no way of knowing that Jane had immediately pawned it. A few years after her arrest, police would find the pawnshop ticket dated shortly after her stepsister’s death.
In her confession several years later, Jane admitted to inviting Elizabeth to the cottage specifically to “have my revenge on her.” Toppan explained that for decades she had hated her sister; she was the first of her victims that she “actually hated and poisoned with a vindictive purpose.” She took years to lull and cheer Elizabeth into a trap. She confessed that she had deliberately prolonged Elizabeth’s death to torture her and that she had climbed into Elizabeth’s bed and cuddled and groped her as she died: “I held her in my arms and watched with delight as she gasped her life out.”
Jane’s Downfall
By June 1901, after five summers at the cottage, Jane owed a total of $500 in unpaid summer rentals to the Davis family, the parents and two adult daughters who owned the cottage and who had befriended “Jolly Jane.” From June to August she methodically murdered the four members of the family—wiping out the family entirely.
Jane then packed her things and headed to her childhood home where 60-year-old Oramel Brigham lived. Jane was set in her mind to marry Oramel. She later would confess: “Everything seemed favorable for my marrying Mr. Brigham. I had put the three women to death who had stood in the way.”
The first woman was, of course, her stepsister Elizabeth. The second was Oramel’s longtime housekeeper, a middle-aged widow Jane had killed the year before while on a visit when she was still welcomed by Oramel. Jane later explained, “I was jealous of her…I knew she wanted to become Mr. Brigham’s wife.”
In the wake of the murder of the Davis family, Jane arrived at Oramel’s home on August 24, but to her dismay she found his older sister, the 77-year-old Edna Bannister staying there. Despite the fact that Edna had already made plans to leave in a few days and was not a romantic rival, she was dead within three days of Jane’s arrival. The same physician who a year earlier had certified the housekeeper’s death, certified Edna’s death as a result of heart disease. Jane now prepared herself for marriage to Oramel Brigham. She would finally become the mistress of the house she grew up in and slaved in.
Back in Massachusetts, authorities had become suspicious about the four sudden deaths of the Davises and Jane Toppan’s proximity to them. At the end of August they decided to exhume the bodies and send samples to Harvard Medical School for analysis.
In the meantime, Jane had encountered a problem. Despite her attempts to impress Oramel Brigham with her housekeeping skills, he made it clear to her that he had no intention of keeping her as a housekeeper or as a wife. Jane then attempted another strategy, as she said, “to win his love.” She poisoned him with a dose just enough to make him sick and then nursed him back to health. When this ploy failed to change his mind, she then threatened to ruin his reputation by claiming that he had impregnated her.
Brigham ordered her out of his house on September 29, at which point Jane took an overdose of morphine. It took several days for her to be nursed back to health and then she was moved out of the house into a local hospital. By this time, Jane Toppan was being followed by a Massachusetts state detective who was ordered to watch her pending the results of the autopsy. Upon her release from the hospital, the detective followed Jane to Amherst, New Hampshire, where she went to stay with a middle-aged friend, Sarah Nichols, and her brother George.
The final report on the autopsies was issued near the end of October. Traces of lethal amounts of arsenic in the exhumed bodies had been found. On October 29, 1901, state police and deputy marshals arrested Jane Toppan at the Nicholses’ house. She was charged with a single count of murder in the death of the married Davis daughter, Minnie Gibbs.
Toppan’s arrest made big news. Nobody could believe it. A torrent of letters poured in from influential and happy former patients, who praised Jane Toppan as a fine, cheerful, respectable, compassionate, highly skilled, and effective nurse. Physicians praised her dedication and professionalism and expressed their trust in her care for their patients. The funeral home came to Jane’s defense, pointing out that the embalming process they used with Minnie involved massive amounts of arsenic. It looked like Jane might go free. But then the prosecution dropped a bombshell: Jane did not use arsenic. She killed with combined doses of morphine and atropine, the traces of which had been found in the victim.
“Don’t Blame Me, Blame My Nature. I Can’t Change What Was Meant to Be, Can I?”
Toppan’s motives were equally confounding. At first it was suggested that Jane had become a depraved morphine addict, but no evidence of that surfaced. The idea that she had killed for profit held sway for some time, but as more victims were identified it became patently clear that there was no profit to be had from some of the murders. Was she insane? In the winter of 1902, the prosecution and defense agreed that an impartial committee of “alienists”—what psychiatrists were called in those days—would interview Jane to determine whether she was insane. It is from those interviews that the full extent of Jane’s murders and her motives (or lack of ) became known.
Jane told the committee, “When I try to picture it, I say to myself, ‘I have poisoned Minnie Gibbs, my dear friend. I have poisoned Mrs. Gordon. I have poisoned Mr. and Mrs. Davis.’ This does not convey anything to me, and when I try to sense the condition of the children and all the consequences, I cannot realize what an awful thing it is. Why don’t I feel sorry and grieve over it? I cannot make sense of it at all.”
Jane’s description of her lack of empathy with her victims and absence of remorse for the pain she caused could come straight out of a current psychiatric diagnostics manual for psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder. Toppan herself attempted to explain her motives clearly in terms of sexual impulses, as she put it, “the desire to experience sexual excitement by killing people.”
The stodgy Boston puritan psychiatrists were skeptical, characterizing her admission in their report as “a shameless recital of a story of sexual excitement occurring in the presence of a dying person…[Jane’s] representation as to the nature of this impulse and conditions attending it were so at variance with any known form of sexual perversion that feigning was suspected by her interviewers.”
Jane herself summed it all up: “I seem to have a sort of paralysis of thought and reason. I have an uncontrollable desire to give poison without regard to consequences. I have no objection against telling my feelings, but I don’t know my own mind. I don’t know why I do these things.” A Boston newspaper quoted Jane as saying, “Don’t blame me, blame my nature. I can’t change what was meant to be, can I?”
Toppan told the psychiatrists, “Most of the people I killed were old enough to die, anyway, or else had some disease that might cause death. I never killed children. I love them.”
Jane was charged with one count of homicide. Her defense attorney admitted that she had committed eleven murders in the recent years. In her psychiatric interviews, Toppan provided the details of thirty-one murders she committed, mostly since nursing school. If one was to include the string of patients she killed as a student nurse, Jane claimed to have killed more than a hundred victims.
At her trial she was found not guilty by reason of insanity, which Jane herself questioned, claiming that she could not be insane because she knew she was doing something wrong. Indeed, had Jane been tried today, the insanity plea would not have held—psychopathic serial killers are not insane by legal definition, which requires that the offender not understand what he or she is doing or understand that it is wrong. Serial killers are acutely aware of the wrong they are committing and go out of their way to evade getting caught for it. The only element of “insanity” with serial killers is the irresistible compulsion buried somewhere in their psyche that drives them in their addiction to killing.
On June 24, 1902, Jane Toppan was committed to a mental hospital at the age of 48. She died at the age of 84 on August 17, 1938, after thirty-six years of confinement. It was reported that she was a quiet patient in her old age but that she would occasionally taunt the hospital nurses by inviting them to “Get some morphine, dearie, and we’ll go out in the ward. You and I will have a lot of fun seeing them die.”133
Jane Toppan might have wrapped up the nineteenth century for female serial killers, but there was much to come in the twentieth.