The First Cape Cod Serial Killer

By Evan J. Albright

This little patch of sand we call Cape Cod has bred two famous serial killers in the past century. Everyone remembers Antone Costa, the Provincetown man police believe butchered four women in the late 1960s. The late Leo Damore made the case famous in his bestselling "In His Garden."

Not as well known, but equally famous in her time was Nurse Jane Toppan. Jolly Jane, so called because of her jovial disposition, confessed to murdering 31 just before her trial in 1902. Newspapers at the time speculated that as many as 100 people had died under her unique brand of medical care.

She dispatched four of her victims on Cape Cod, in the Bourne village of Cataumet. She was only tried for the murder of one, Maryanne (Davis) Gibbs of Cataumet, and of that charge she was found not guilty by reason of insanity. She was committed to the Taunton asylum, where she lived until her death in 1938.

While Maryanne Gibbs may have been the only murder she was charged with, Jane confessed to wiping out Mrs. Gibbs' entire family. During the summer of 1901, Jolly Jane poisoned Mrs. Gibbs' mother, Mary Davis (although this murder occurred in Cambridge, when Mrs. Davis visited Jane); her sister, Genevieve (Davis) Gordon; her father, Alden Davis; and Mrs. Gibbs. She also confessed to murdering in 1899 her foster sister, Sarah Brigham, when the two were vacationing in Cataumet.

Incredibly, she murdered the entire Davis family over the course of the summer of 1901. And no one, not the family nor the people of Cataumet, ever suspected a thing.

Alden Davis and his wife Mary lived in Cataumet near what is today the village center. Their home had once been a small hotel called Jachin Cottage which the Davises had opened shortly after the railroad came to the village in the early 1870s. By the turn of the century, the Davises had retired, content to rent two small cottages on their property to select summer guests.

A favorite tenant had been Jane Toppan, one of the most well-respected private nurses in Boston and Cambridge. As good as she may have been, Jane somehow came to owe the Davises money which Mary Davis decided to collect in June of 1901.

Mrs. Davis boarded the train for Cambridge, where Jane Toppan was living. She came back a week later in a pine box. As she was old and known to be in poor health, it was thought she had been overcome by the unusual heatwave that had engulfed New England.

One of those who had been by Mary Davis' side at her death was daughter Genevieve. Genevieve asked Jane Toppan to accompany her and her dead mother back to Cape Cod for the funeral.

Jane stayed in Jachin Cottage with Genevieve and her father. They were joined by Maryanne, who closed her house a short distance away and moved back into the family home.

The death of Mary Davis hit Genevieve hard. She was depressed and frequently confined to bed, which is probably why no one suspected foul play when she was found dead in her bed one morning. There were even hints that she had committed suicide.

A few days later, Alden Davis followed his daughter. He had been old, and his health had been poor. The death of his wife and daughter proved too much for him, people in Cataumet thought.

Less than a week later, Maryanne took ill. Within hours she was dead.

Her husband, a ship captain named Irving Gibbs, had been at sea when she died. He could not believe that his wife had died of natural causes, for she was in strong health. He asked the doctor if perhaps she had killed herself, as Genevieve had supposedly done. Impossible, said the doctor, as her symptoms matched no known poison.

When suspicion finally fell on Jane Toppan weeks later, it came not from Cape Cod, where she was beloved. Jolly Jane's undoing came from Middlesex County, where she was under suspicion by the district attorney's office for allegedly poisoning one of her patients in Lowell, months before the murders of the Davis family.

When the Middlesex district attorney's office learned of the Davis deaths, he contacted his counterpart on Cape Cod and asked that the bodies of the two Davis daughters be exhumed. Not long after that, Jane was arrested in New Hampshire and charged with the murder of Maryanne Gibbs.

Just days before she went to trial, she confessed to poisoning the family using atropine and morphine. The two chemicals offset the symptoms of each other, but both will kill. She also admitted to killing her foster sister, Sarah Brigham, during a holiday in Cataumet in 1899, making her Cape Cod total five victims.

© 2002 Mystery Lane Press

rev. 3/16/02