Lore - Episode 73: A Sweet Embrace

Episode Date: November 13, 2017

When our health is failing and our lives are at risk, trust is essential. The people who care for us often find themselves in a position of power, with our well-being entirely under their control. As history has shown us, however, there’s danger in handing that much control over to another person. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 1841, at the age of just 17, Lydia married an older man named Edward, and they went on to have seven children. Two decades later, though, her youngest child died of an intestinal illness. A year later, her husband died of consumption. Less than two months after that, three more of her children passed away. Fever and respiratory illness were blamed for those. Over the next two years, her last three remaining children would also die of horrible illnesses. And every time it happened, Lydia would be there, taking care of them and making them

comfortable. A cup of hot chocolate, a glass of cold water, medicine or the pain. She married again, but two years after that, that new husband passed away. The attending physician said it was most likely cholera that did it. But Lydia found a way to move on, marrying yet again in 1870 to a man with three children. She had a family once again. Years later, their youngest child died, then the next oldest. A year after that, the last child passed away, all under the care of poor Lydia.

So when her husband died next, one doctor decided to look a bit deeper, past the sympathy and bedside manner of the three-time widow, past the tragedy of so much illness and death, and what he found was horrifying. For eight years, Lydia Sherman had been slowly killing everyone around her with poison. In fact, her last husband had enough arsenic in his system to kill three men. It wasn't accidental or a product of carelessness. Lydia Sherman, the derby poisoner, did this for fun. Some historians think the driving force behind it all was a deep desire to care for people,

to be their anchor through horrible illness. In some twisted way, she wanted to help. In the end, though, she gave new meaning to the phrase, killing them with kindness. It's a vulnerable place to be on the edge of death. When illness or suffering have worn you down to a thread and you need to be cared for by someone else, we're at their mercy. In some instances, our life is literally in their hands. Without a doubt, that's a lot of power.

As some people have taken way too far. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. When Peter showed up on the doorstep of the Boston female asylum in February of 1863, he was a complete and utter wreck. He was a tailor with fondness for the bottle, but that was a relationship he had a difficult time controlling. It's hard to fault the guy, though. Life had certainly thrown a lot of speed bumps his way.

Soon after their third child was born, Peter's wife Bridget died from tuberculosis, leaving him as the sole provider for three daughters. His oldest, Nellie, would eventually be committed to a state mental institution where she would spend the rest of her life. Rumors about Peter Kelly swirled around the bustling city of Lowell, Massachusetts, causing him all sorts of troubles. He was usually described as angry, alcoholic, and more than a little insane, earning him the nickname Kelly the Crack, but he hadn't arrived at the Boston female asylum to get

help. No, he'd come to abandon his daughters. And they took them. This place was essentially a hybrid between a prep school and an orphanage. Girls would arrive young, be taught basic skills and manners, and then placed out into local homes as indentured servants who had to work off long contracts. It was a hard life. There's no doubt about that.

The oldest Kelly girl, Delia, took four years to be placed, but we don't know why. Maybe she was rebellious. Perhaps she protested against the slavery-like conditions that awaited her. All we know is that she went on to become a prostitute and eventually died after a life of too much drinking. The youngest, Nora, was placed much faster. In November of 1865, less than two years after arriving, she found herself moving into a new home.

In fact, it was a return to her hometown of Lowell, which must have offered at least a small bit of comfort in the middle of all of that chaos. The family took her in and gave her a new name, although there's no record that she was officially adopted by them. Still, from that point forward, she would be Jane. Jane had a tough climb ahead of her. The family had their own daughter, Elizabeth, but from everything I could find, the girls did not get along.

Jane was an orphan with no social status. Elizabeth, though, was well off, secure in her place in life, and set to inherit everything. Imagine the sibling dynamics between Cinderella and her stepsisters, and I think you'll get pretty close. The next 20 years were hard for Jane. She grew up. She learned about running a household. Her foster mother, Anne, passed away, but rather than find herself free to go and build

her own life, her sister Elizabeth took over the household and Jane's contract. She was stuck. She also watched the country recover from civil war and move on into what historians call the gilded age. It's a fancy term for an explosion of wealth in America in the late 1870s, but it also hides a dark underbelly. Yes, the rich became mega-rich, building massive estates in places like Newport, Rhode Island, but the poor only spiraled further downward.

So when her contract was completed in 1885, Jane moved out and decided to follow her dreams. What she wanted, what she needed, was a chance at a better life, a way to elevate herself above the poverty she seemed destined for. And she found her answer at Cambridge Hospital, where she went to attend nursing school. But that's where things got complicated, because Jane had a darker side and her training only seemed to draw it out. Perhaps we can blame that on her rough childhood or her deep desire to prove the elites around

her were wrong. Maybe she just wanted to be in control. Whatever the reason might have been, Jane became a problem very quickly. At first, it was just the line. She claimed that her father lived in a far-off land and that royalty had asked to hire her after school. She told lies about her classmates and managed to get others in trouble for things that she herself did.

Some of them were even expelled as a result. But the patients loved her. Some say it was her smile, how she would take care of their needs so cheerfully. They felt cared for and attended to, and that was an important skill for any nurse, and Jane excelled at that. The truth, though, was a lot less pleasant. Once during her training in Cambridge, she was heard to say, there's no use in keeping old people alive, which might explain how fast and loose she was with the drugs she administered

to them. Today, we live in a world very good at controlling dangerous medication. Pharmacists keep narcotic painkillers under lock and key. There are rules built around our complete understanding of how these drugs work. But remember, this was the 1880s. Jane and her fellow students didn't have the benefit of all that expanded knowledge. In fact, some drugs were completely misunderstood. Morphing, for example, wasn't seen so much as a painkiller back then as a sleep aid, albeit

one that was highly addictive. So much so that a former Confederate colonel named John Pemberton created a coca wine, sort of a tonic made of wine and cocaine, as a medicinal cure. When the city of Atlanta passed prohibition laws in 1886, Pemberton swapped out the wine for carbonated water, but the cocaine stayed in the beverage for almost two more decades. Today, Pemberton's drink is still sold as Coca-Cola, but the medicinal roots are long gone. Jane, though, wasn't looking for a solution.

In fact, she saw great potential in the veritable treasure trove of drugs at her disposal. Morphing, yes, but also Strychnine, Mercury, arsenic, and atropine, all of which were widely available, liberally used, and highly poisonous. And it was right there, at the intersection of Jane's training, her access, and her twisted ideas, at something horrifying, was about to be borne. Morphing was Jane's gateway drug. It was the tool that led to darker things. As a nursing student, Jane would often administer the sedative to elderly patients and watch

them slip into a coma. Then she would stand over them or sit beside them and wait for their last breath. It was her favorite part. As nursing school equipped her with more knowledge, Jane added tools to her kit. The stimulant atropine was the perfect pairing to morphine because it seemed to counteract the visible signs of poisoning. The patients who died under her care were more often than not completely overlooked tragic victims of heart failure or complications from diabetes.

Jane was getting away with murder and making it look easy, too. But at the same time, she was failing miserably at hiding her other less horrifying crimes. She continued to tell lies about her coworkers, to steal from patients and even steal drugs from the hospital. And it eventually caught up with her. In the summer of 1890, Jane was kicked out of Cambridge Hospital before she could complete her degree. Oddly, she stayed in town and set up shop as a private nurse, which led to glowing recommendations

from the physicians she interacted with, which led to, and I kid you not, a job offer from Cambridge Hospital. Yeah, the school that kicked her out ended up hiring her back. It didn't last as long as she wanted, though. Within months, one of the doctors on staff took notice of the disproportionate number of deaths that happened on Jane's watch. He assumed she was just incompetent, and he fired her. And today, that would be the end of it.

The future would look a lot less bright, and it certainly wouldn't involve caring for others as a professional nurse. This was a different time. In the darkness before the age of the internet and social media, paper trails were a lot harder to follow, and all you really had to do was just move on and start over. That was the spring of 1891. Jane was 32 and still had a lot of faith in her ability to sell her services as a private nurse.

For the next four years, that's exactly what she did. She lived in a spare room at the home of an elderly couple in Cambridge, although whenever necessary, she would move into the homes of her patients until they no longer needed her. It turns out, it was very good. Due to her round figure, cheerful mood, and ever-present smile, people began to call her Jolly Jane. Her patients loved her, and their families felt as if she really truly cared for their loved ones.

And maybe she did. Jane was twisted and broken, after all. To her, what she did was care. She was a matchmaker, in a sense, guiding them into the sweet embrace of death. Her favorite remedy was a glass of European mineral water that she imported from Budapest. She would mix in a combination of morphine and atropine, and then let the drugs do their work. Not just for patients, though.

No, she also used this trick on her landlords, the Dunham's, first poisoning the husband, and then two years later doing the same to his widow. Jane, it seems, was the sort of person who brought her work home with her. Every summer, though, she got away from it all. She packed up her room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and traveled south to the Cape Cod area, where she rented a cottage from an older couple, Alden and Maddie Davis. It was a way to get away from city life and enjoy the fresh air and ocean waves. But it wasn't all pleasure seeking.

Jane did her fair share of work there on the Cape, helping out when locals needed medical advice or a quick remedy. And they loved her for it. She would stay on for a few months, help the community in her spare time, and then move home to Cambridge at the beginning of winter. At the end of the summer of 1899, Jane received a letter from her original foster sister, Elizabeth, and invited the older woman to come visit her there on the Cape. By then, Elizabeth was married to a man named Oremil Brigham, and had enjoyed all the benefits

of wealth and privilege that Jane had only dreamt of. On August 26th, the two women spent the afternoon at the beach, soaking in the sunshine and salty air, and then returned home for their evening meal. Jane, always the thoughtful hostess, produced a cold glass of European mineral water and handed it to Elizabeth, the older woman, thirsty from the warm day, downed it quickly. When Elizabeth fainted a half hour later, Jane helped her to bed and quickly became the professional, experienced nurse that everyone believed her to be, except for the poisoning part, I suppose.

She was attentive and did her best to make the older woman comfortable. As Elizabeth became worse and worse, though, as that cocktail of toxic medication sent her body into fits of seizures and pushed in and out of sleep, Jane actually moved closer to the bed. She wanted to watch. She wanted to see it all happen, to see her foster sister suffer, and she did it all with that smile on her face. Then, when the end seemed near, Jane took her obsession one step further.

She climbed in bed with Elizabeth and laid herself down right beside her. Later, she would describe those final moments with a cold, clinical frankness that betrayed the sheer horror of it all. I held her in my arms, she said, and watched with delight as she gasped out her life. Jane left the Cape that autumn and returned to normal life in Cambridge, but it was more than that. She also left the emotional high of murdering her foster sister Elizabeth, only to slip back into her less eventful life as a private nurse.

That might explain why she went looking for a change. In January of 1900, only a few months after returning home, Jane caught word that an old friend of hers, Myra Connors, had become ill. She rushed to the woman's apartment to help her, but not out of some altruistic design to care for a friend. No, Myra had something that Jane wanted, and this was her chance to take it. Myra worked in town as a dining hall matron at St. John's Theological School. It was a job that came with a lot of perks, such as an apartment on campus and even a

housekeeper. It wasn't much, but it represented the high life that Jane had always wanted for herself. After all, if resentment of that sort of life fueled her murder of Elizabeth, perhaps murder could also be her way of achieving it. Jane arrived at Myra's apartment at the end of January. By February 11, her old friend was dead, and thanks to a bit of sweet talking and straight up lying, Jane managed to take her friend's job and home. But it didn't last long.

Just a year later, she was fired for the most ironic reason of all time. Poor workplace ethics. So back to nursing, she went. She rented a room for Mr. and Mrs. Beedle, an elderly couple in Cambridge, and settled into her old routine. And by routine, I mean killing patients by day and slowly poisoning her landlords at night. This went on for months, without a hint of trouble, until the summer of 1901, when Jane heard a knock on her door.

When she opened it, it was Maddie Davis. If you remember, Maddie and her husband, Alden, were the older couple that rented a cottage to Jane during her summers on the Cape. Maddie, it turns out, had traveled up to Cambridge to see her own daughter and thought she would stop in at Jane's to settle some business from the previous year. Jane, you see, hadn't been paying the full rent for years, claiming she would make up the difference later. But that deficit had begun to add up, and by the time Maddie Davis knocked on Jane's

door, her tab was roughly $500. Throw in economic differences and inflation, and that's roughly $15,000 in modern money. Jane smiled that warm, jolly smile of hers and welcomed Maddie inside. It was unusually hot outside, and with the sun blazing bright in the sky, it was better to have the conversation in the cool shade of her sitting room. Then Jane slipped away for a moment and returned with a tall, refreshing glass of mineral water for Maddie. A short while after the older woman had finished her drink, Jane offered to walk to the bank

with her and withdraw the funds to pay her debt. Maddie smiled and stood up and then sat back down as waves of dizziness washed over her. She didn't feel well, she told Jane. She didn't feel well at all. Jane kindly sent for Maddie's daughter and helped the older woman to a bed. When a physician arrived, she worked right alongside him to find the cause of the illness and restore Maddie's health. But it was a frustrating experience.

One minute she would be in a deep sleep, and the next she would be awake and having seizures. No one could make rhyme or reason of it all. No one, that is, except Jane. When no one was looking, she was dosing the woman with her usual cocktail of medication, reveling in the chaos and suffering that it was creating. And she did this for an entire week, at the end of which she gave Maddie one massive dose of morphine and then let the drug do its job. Maddie Davis died a short while later.

What happened next was a whirlwind of damage control and covering her tracks. First, Maddie's two daughters, Genevieve and Minnie, both converged on Jane's house and asked her for help. Their father Alden, now widowed and heartbroken, needed someone to look after him. They trusted and loved Jane and wanted her to travel to Cape Cod and take care of him. I think it serves as a powerful testimony to just how confident Jane was in her ability to fool the people around her. She had just killed their mother, and yet here they were, practically begging her to

go help their father. She must have felt like a kid in a candy store, thinking of all the fun she would have. So she agreed and traveled south. Jane wasn't done though. In fact, as far as the Davis family was concerned, she was only getting started. When she arrived at Alden's home in Cape Cod, everyone in the family let out a sigh of relief. Jane, their favorite nurse, had come to help. She was a ray of hope in the midst of their darkness.

But Jane would quickly prove to be something else entirely. An Angel of Death. Jane's arrival at the Davis home was met with a sigh of relief. She was very good at her job, after all. But Alden Davis and his two adult daughters were still completely unaware of just how much Jane was very good at. So they opened their home and welcomed her in. For what she had planned, Jane needed to build a case.

She needed the answers to be obvious when people started asking questions. And they were certainly going to be asking a lot of questions. People around her always did. So she said about planting evidence that could help her later on. Convenient reasons why people might be dying. She started by setting random fires throughout the house. And I'll be honest with you, I'm not really sure what her plan was with those. Maybe it was just an attempt to get it all over with and kill everyone at once.

But that wasn't Jane's style. I think she just wanted the family members to suspect each other of being a bit unstable. She told Minnie, the older of the two sisters, that she'd seen Genevieve in the garden shed. Just sort of standing there, eyes focused on a box of rat poison. She told Minnie that she was worried about how her sister was handling the loss of their mother and suggested that they all keep an eye on her. Less than a week later, on July 26th, Genevieve was dead. When the family went looking for answers, Jane brought up the rat poison again.

She even told someone else that she'd seen a syringe on the young woman's bedside table. Perhaps she suggested it was simply a tragic suicide. And having planted those stories days before, everyone seemed to accept it. Not that it was easy. This would be the second family funeral within a month. And that was a lot of emotional weight to carry around. Obviously, Alden Davis and his last remaining daughter, Minnie, were devastated, as well as being more than a little numb throughout the funeral.

Jane, though, was doing much better. In fact, she later told people, I went to the funeral and felt as jolly as could be. And nobody suspected me in the least. Two weeks later, another Davis was gone. This time, it was the father, Alden, and the stories that were whispered painted an innocent, if tragic picture. He'd already been old and unhealthy, add in the loss of his wife and one of his children, and, well, it all just seemed to be a bit too much for him to handle.

After that, there were three people left in the Davis household. Good old Jolly Jane herself, Minnie Davis Gibbs, and Minnie's 10-year-old son, Jesse. It was a precarious place to be, with all of the tragedy that had occurred and the town filling up with questions and theories. But Jane held on and stayed the course. Her work, however horrible it was, wasn't finished just yet. When she found the right moment, Jane asked Minnie about the debt she had owed her parents, and wondered if, perhaps, in light of their recent deaths, that debt might be forgiven.

Minnie was appalled and refused to even consider it. I think left Jane with only one option to pursue. Just four days after the death of her father, Minnie went to bed sick in the afternoon of August 12th. It seemed to be digestive, but all she'd had before feeling ill was one of those early Coca-Cola-type drinks known as a cocoa wine. She was emotionally drained and overstressed and had certainly needed something to settle her nerves.

But as I'm sure you've already guessed, that beverage had been prepared by Jane. The nurse did her best to help by heavily medicating Minnie. By that evening, she was in a deep sleep, completely unresponsive and unaware of her surroundings. Then, right before her usual bedtime, Jane did something entirely unexpected. Rather than toying with her victim a bit more, she prepared a syringe with a massive dose of her morphine cocktail. Then, injected it into Minnie.

Then she walked upstairs and gathered Minnie's sleeping son, Jesse, in her arms and carried him back down. I'm sure she woke him up, either on purpose or just through the sheer act of lifting him. Then she sat down beside Minnie's bed, Jesse on her lap, and watched as the woman's body spasmed and violently convulsed. Or Jesse could do nothing but watch as his mother died. Right before his eyes. Later, the family doctor would scratch his head and chalk Minnie's death up to severe

exhaustion. The town was stunned. An entire family, two generations of the Davis clan, gone in just six weeks. The local newspaper ran the headline, Entire Family Wiped Out. And yet Jane had already left town. Later, when her past had caught up with her and she had nothing left to lose, Jane was a bit more honest about her true feelings on the events that summer in Cape Cod. After being asked how she felt about killing so many people so quickly, her answer was

delivered with that trademark smile and a twinkle in her eye. I made it lively, she said, for the undertakers and the gravediggers. It takes a lot of trust to place ourselves in the hands of a caretaker when we're sick. Because as a way of taking away our power, we are at our weakest and most vulnerable. So it's understandable to want that caretaker to be someone we know and trust. On so many levels, the Davis family did absolutely nothing you or I wouldn't have done in their shoes. Then again, trust is a funny thing, isn't it?

We assume the people around us are who they claim to be, that they have our best interests at heart, that they care. But all too often, the faces we see are nothing more than a mask that hides a darker purpose, a mask very much like Jolly Jane's cheerful smile. I wish Jane's story ended in the Davis home. I really do. This is where we all want it to end, I think. She'd already done so much, taken so many lives and caused so much pain and suffering.

Now an entire family was gone. For most stories, this would be more than enough. She kept trying, but her luck seemed to have run out. While still near the Davis family, she asked Minnie's widower if she could be his housekeeper, but he declined. Next, she headed north to Lowell to try and seduce the husband of her late foster sister, Elizabeth. But that plan sort of fell apart.

Perhaps as a cry for attention, she took a dose of her own morphine, but was discovered and taken to a hospital. But she wasn't the only newcomer there with a secret. One of the patients in a nearby room was not who they claimed to be. The man, who had entered the hospital pretending to be ill, was actually a detective hired by Captain Paul Gibbs, the father-in-law of Minnie Davis. The detective was there to watch Jane, because Captain Gibbs had some suspicions about the nurse's true nature.

Back on the cape, the old captain was putting those suspicions into action by having the body of Minnie Davis exhumed. He was looking for evidence of foul play, and it wasn't long before they found it. Jane, who had since left the hospital to stay with friends, was arrested on charges of murder and brought in for questioning. It was finally over. The trial, though, exposed just how horrible her spree of health care killings had been. According to Jane herself, she had murdered at least 31 people that she could name, but

there were dozens more that were less known. Some estimates put the number somewhere closer to 100. Jane was declared morally insane by the court, and on June 23, 1902, she was transferred to the Taunton Insane Hospital in Massachusetts. It said that she entered the facility fully confident she would recover and be set free. The time proved her wrong. Her smile slowly slipped from her face and was replaced by outbursts of yelling and complaints about everything around her.

She even suspected the hospital staff of poisoning her food, and in the end, she refused to eat. She passed away on August 17 of 1938 at the age of 80. There's irony in her final years, of course. This woman, a nurse who claimed to care for so many while actually delivering death to them in a glass of water, found herself in the care of other nurses. It's no wonder she suspected the staff of sinister plots. She had authored nearly 100 deaths with that same pen of trust and power. They say old habits die hard, and that's very often the case.

Sure, Jane had been removed from society, but it was a lot more difficult to remove the thing that made her jolly Jane. One last tale provides us with chilling proof of that. Years after Jane died, one of the nurses who had cared for her there in Taunton told the story about one experience she had. Sometimes, she said, Jane would wave her over to her chair with a twinkle in her eye. Then she would point toward the door. Get the morphine, dearie, and we'll go out into the ward.

Then with a wide grin, she would add, you and I will have a lot of fun, seeing them work just calling. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marseille, Crockett, and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than a podcast. There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic. You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com slash now. And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.