Chronic Murder

Two fresh shudders went up the spine of Cleveland, Ohio last week. Negroes picking over a lakefront dump found the dissected body of a young white woman, wrapped in butcher's paper. From its condition it had apparently been kept on ice for some time before being buried on the dump. While police were examining this find, morbid onlookers discovered, 100 ft. away, parts of another, older cadaver, apparently a Negro's. Cleveland's police declared the crimes to be jobs No. 12 and No. 13 of "The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run" (a title conferred by Cleveland newspapers). The mysterious murderer is believed to have murdered at least five women and six men, parts of whose bodies, all skilfully dismembered, have been discovered between 1934 and last week. Counting last week's two, only five of 13 heads have been found.

Chronic murderer though he may be, Cleveland's "mad butcher" is probably an amateur, compared to a quiet old lady of 81 who died last week in the Taunton (Mass.) State Hospital. She, Jane Toppan, declared before they locked her up in 1902: "It would be safe to say that I killed at least 100 persons."

Jane Toppan was a trained nurse from 1892 to 1901, reputed the best in Cambridge. Her specialty was poisoning. Her first attempt, upon a fellow nurse in Massachusetts General Hospital in 1886, was unsuccessful. Thereafter she seldom failed. Born Honora Kelly, daughter of a loony sot called "Kelly the Crack," she poisoned Captain & Mrs. Abner Toppan of Lowell, who had adopted her. She poisoned Mrs. Myra Connors, matron of Episcopal Theological School in 'Cambridge, in order to get her job.

Usually Nurse Toppan's victims were her patients, but she had a habit of giving them less-than-lethal doses to prolong their illnesses if she liked working for them. One day in 1901, her old friend Mrs. Alden P. Davis came to visit her, died in convulsions after dinner. Nurse Toppan accompanied the body to the Davis home at Cataumet. When people came with flowers (Nurse Toppan later said), "I wanted to say to them: 'You had better wait and in a little while I will have another funeral for you.'" Sure enough, within 40 days she had done away with Mr. Davis and two Davis daughters.

Four deaths in 40 days were too many even in 1901. The police took Nurse Toppan. In her confession she said she had murdered "for the fun of it." At the insane asylum she became a model inmate, but at first they had to put her in a strait jacket and force-feed her. She thought someone was trying to poison her.

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