The Lizzie Borden Connection

by Stefani Koorey

First published in August/September, 2004, Volume 1, Issue 4, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.

While reading Harold Schechter’s Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer (Pocket Books, 2003), a true crime account of Jane Toppan, a matronly New England sociopath whose tally of victims was more than five times higher than Jack the Ripper, I came across an interesting Lizzie Borden connection. Toppan, a personal nurse, was convicted of the serial poisoning of eleven of her friends and patients  – including one entire family of four – from the 1890s to the early 1900s. She later confessed to over thirty-one victims, although the experts believe this number was closer to one hundred. 

“Jolly Jane,” as she was affectionately known, perfected her MO with the use of “doses of morphine and atropine tablets dissolved in mineral water and sometimes in a dilution of whiskey.” Occasionally she supplemented these lethal drinks with deadly injections. Her particular sexual perversion manifested as the people under her care were in the final throes — she “kissed and caressed her helpless and insensible patients as they drew nearer and nearer to death.”

When asked if she had any remorse for her actions, Jane coolly replied, “I have never felt sorry for what I have done. Even when I poisoned my dearest friends, as the Davises were, I did not feel any regrets afterwards.”

At her trial in 1902, Toppan was declared insane and was confined at the Taunton Insane Hospital for the rest of her life. 

The Lizzie Connection

Several individuals involved in the Toppan case were also directly connected to the Borden investigation and trial. One of Toppan’s judges at her grand jury hearing in Barnstable was none other than Chief Justice Albert Mason. You will recall that Mason was one of the presiding judges at Lizzie’s trial. Mason lived in Brookline during the Toppan hearing and was the only jurist to arrive on time to the proceeding. Mason lived another three years, dying in Brookline at the age of 69 in 1905.

Integral to the Commonwealth’s case against Toppan was the expert testimony of the famed Professor Edward S. Wood of Harvard University. Much like he had done in the Borden case, Wood was hired in 1901 to examine several internal organs, including the stomachs, of two members of the Davis family to determine what contributed to their death. Interestingly, Woods incorrectly assumed that the poison he was to search for was arsenic and so did not pursue other avenues of lethal ingestion. He found “significant amounts of arsenic” in the viscera of the victims. Unfortunately, the police investigators were unable to find any druggist who had sold Toppan this particular deadly compound. This “missing link” in the Commonwealth’s case became one of its most embarrassing mistakes when it was revealed that the mortician who had prepared the bodies for burial said that arsenic was a main ingredient in his embalming fluid. 

Says Schechter, “in their blind faith in Dr. Wood, its seems never to have occurred to District Attorney Holmes or any other official that the professor was wrong and that Jane’s victims hadn’t been poisoned with arsenic at all.” An unlikely solution was offered by a local retired sailor named Captain Paul Gibbs, “whose suspicions of Nurse Toppan had helped lead to her arrest in the first place.” Gibb’s wife was one of Toppan’s victims as she was nursed through her minor illness. In a reporter’s interview, Gibbs was quoted as saying, “I’m surprised to hear that arsenic was detected in the bodies. I suspected that they had been poisoned, but I didn’t think Jennie Toppan would use anything as easily detected as arsenic” and that he thought (correctly) “it might be found that Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Gordon had been killed by morphia and atropia.” 

Further chemical analysis by Wood confirmed Gibb’s belief when it turned up lethal traces of morphine and atropine in the victim’s organs, leading Wood to conclude “that it was these drugs and not arsenic that killed Mrs. Gibbs.” 

Thus were Wood’s reputation and the Commonwealth’s case saved at the last minute, and the serial killer Toppan finally stopped. 

Note: Harold Schechter is the author of many true crime books, including Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Fiendish Killer! (1920s serial killer Albert Fish), Depraved: The Shocking True Story of America’s First Serial Killer (1890s serial killer H. H. Holmes), Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho, Fiend: The Shocking True Story of America’s Youngest Serial Killer (1870s serial killer Jesse Pomeroy), Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster (1920s serial killer Earle Leonard Nelson), and Fatal.