In Judaism, it is generally accepted that when the angel of death comes for a person, he holds a knife in his hand, at the end of which there are three drops of poison. At the sight of a terrible black angel, a person opens his mouth in horror, drops fall there, and the person dies from this. But there are quite real people who also bear such a gloomy nickname - “killers in white coats”. Among them is the American Jane Toppan, on whose account 31 victims.
In criminology, "angels of death" refer to hospital staff or nurses who care for critically ill people and deal with their patients. According to criminal psychologists, "angels of death" enjoy the death of people dependent on them.
There is even a portrait of the average criminal of this type. It is believed that the "angels of death" begin to kill after the age of 21, they act for about two years, and during this period they manage to send 6-8 people to the next world, after which they are exposed.
It happens that the “angels of death” in female guise are driven by selfish motives. Sometimes nurses, nannies and nurses kill patients out of selfishness and curiosity. But the motives of perhaps the most sinister of them all, Jane Toppan, remain a mystery. It may be worth looking for them in her difficult heredity and sad childhood.
As a child, Jane was called Honor Kelly. She grew up in the US state of Massachusetts and was very young when her mother died. Some time later, in 1863, his father took six-year-old Honor and her eight-year-old sister Delia Josephine to a women's shelter in Boston. And he never visited or saw his daughters again. Maybe it’s for the better, because later my father went crazy, and before he died he sewed his eyes up in his sewing workshop.
So, in addition to early orphanhood, his daughters also got a heavy heredity. Perhaps this is what brought Delia Josephine to the panel when she left the orphanage. She died in poverty in a squalid shelter. And the pretty fatty Honora was lucky.
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At the orphanage she was spotted by Mrs. Ann Toppan, who lived in Lowell. She took the girl into her service. The hostess was kind to the little servant, although she refused to officially adopt her. However, this information is contradictory: according to some reports, Mrs. Toppan, on the contrary, treated the girl rather harshly, giving all the affection to her own daughter Elizabeth.
Nevertheless, everything seemed to be going well. Former Honor trained as a nurse, was the soul of any company, she was even given the nickname Merry Jane. Only on the personal front, the girl did not work out.
She was seriously injured by the escape of the groom right from under the aisle. It was not just offensive, it was a shame on the whole world and for a period of time the main discussed event in Lowell. Merry Jane decided not to forgive anyone else.
Due to the nature of her work in the medical field, Jane had to care for sick, helpless people to whom she injected large doses of morphine and atropine. The patients first lost consciousness and then died. As Toppan admitted to police, at these moments she experienced the strongest sexual arousal, feeling like a god who holds human life in her hands.
It is curious that nurse Toppan in the clinic was considered the same Merry Jane who entered the ward with a smile and looked after the patients with kindness in her voice.
Over time, nurse Toppan dawned on a career growth. She was invited to the Massachusetts Hospital, and she left the low-level Lowell without any regrets. And then she completely moved to England, where she was offered a job in Cambridge. However, her career in Britain did not go well. There, drug control was stricter than in American clinics. Soon she was convicted of negligent handling of opiates and fired.
Toppan had to return to America. Having tarnished her reputation as a nurse, she retrained as a private nurse and began caring for the elderly. It is not known how Mrs Toppan angered Jane, but Merry Jane did not spare either her adoptive mother or her husband, sending them to the next world in 1895 with her treatment. Then it was the turn of the half-sister, with whom they did not share the man.
Mr. Foster chose Elizabeth and thus signed her death warrant. The poor thing in the prime of life, as a result of a harmless illness, suddenly stopped heart. It was her half-sister who poured a horse dose of strychnine into her mug with medicinal tincture. Jane consoled Mr. Foster touchingly, helping him cope with the loss. But he was not yet ready for a new relationship.
Resentment at the whole world and lack of male attention turned her into a monster.
In 1901, Toppan was hired to take care of a certain Mr. Alden Davis, who lost interest in life after the death of his beloved wife (Jane was also involved in her death). Gradually, Jane became a kind of family doctor for the Davis family, treating both old and young. Only for some reason the members of this family began to leave the mortal world one by one. Alden Davis himself was the first to rest in Bose.
After him, his daughter Minnie Gibbs passed into the world. When Minnie's 10-year-old son died, the surviving relatives began to suspect that the matter was unclean. They contacted Harvard Medical School professor Edward Wood, considered an expert in toxicology, and asked him to examine the bodies of the deceased.
Jane did not wait for the medical luminary's opinion and returned to Lowell. Mr. Foster had already survived the loss of his wife and began to court Jane. True, he didn’t look very persistently. And then Toppan, in order to warm up his attention to her person, committed a slight self-poisoning so that Foster would show her, if not love, then at least sympathy. The poor fellow did not know that he was walking on a razor blade.
If Jane thought he offended her, she would surely have found a way to heal him to death. But Foster survived, and Toppan remained an unmarried lady, since she was arrested in October 1901. Edward Wood concluded that members of the Davis family did not die a natural death.
During the investigation, Jane confessed to eleven murders and explained their motives with a desire to "kill as many helpless people as possible than any other man or woman who has ever lived."
She told her lawyer that she sent not 11, but 31 people to the next world. Some experts put forward a version that in fact she killed at least fifty people. However, for Toppan herself, the quantity no longer mattered.
On June 23, 1902, the court found Jane Toppan not guilty due to insanity. This was facilitated by the conclusion of psychiatrists, who testified that she "from birth suffered from a weakness of the nervous system and a lack of moral feeling and self-control." At the same time, the court considered it dangerous to leave her at large.
Since then, the former nurse was to be treated herself in a psychiatric clinic until the end of her days. In the psychiatric hospital, Jane played out the genes of her crazy father, who sewed up his eyes. She was maniacally afraid of poisoning, so she refused to eat. I had to force feed her. However, Toppan lived in captivity for another 36 years and died quietly in 1938 at the age of 81.
The image of the villainous woman has become attractive to writers and filmmakers for many years. It is believed to be best portrayed by writer William March in The Bad Seed and directed by John Keyes in American Nightmare.
Oleg Loginov