Hi! I know the timeline of this post may seem a bit off, but studying both serial killers during this time period and how they were caught is extremely interesting to me. Crime labs, police forces and technology as a whole weren't developed to the level they're at today, so I imagine that because of it, it was a lot easier to get away with murder back then. I love hearing about how they ended up getting caught, because I know there was a lot more work involved with investigating something back then than it is now. I especially enjoy studying the psychology behind it, because I feel like it was during this time period that the foundation for profiling was laid, which gives us so much more insight into these kinds of people and why they do the things they do. I think my real interest lies in the motives and psychology behind these things, because having to read or see what these people have done to others makes me sick. Anyway, some of these names may be familiar to you if you've done any research on serial killers, because they were to me and that's partially why I included them, but a lot of them were new to me. If you're squeamish like I am, put your food away for later and buckle up. lol
The Kelly Family
Never before have I heard of an entire family being serial killers and conspiring to kill people before. Maybe one or two members, but on a personal vendetta type of level, not serial killing. I read about this family and then the Bender family, who are also on this list, and it blew me away. The Kelly family consisted of a couple named William and Kate, and their two children, a 20-year-old son named Bill and an 18-year-old daughter named Kit. The family fled their home in Kansas in the late 1800s after their local community grew suspicious of what was going on in their boarding house. Travelers were going in but weren't coming out, and the whereabouts of missing local people could be traced to the Kelly house, but no further. When the empty home was searched, the body of a man who'd recently gone missing was discovered, along with the remains of nine other bodies. An ax was discovered nearby with blood and hair on the blade, so the victims were probably bludgeoned to death. A group of citizens took off after the Kellys, and from what I read, Kate's horse fell and I'm guessing that is how she died, because she isn't mentioned again. A couple of hours later they caught up with Bill and Kit. They were hanged almost immediately after their capture and another chase commenced to catch up with William, at which point he admitted that the entire family was in on what they'd done and confessed to being the reason behind why travelers were coming up missing. He too was hanged. William explained where they'd come from, so since they weren't native to the last area they lived in it's quite possible that other people were murdered besides the nine that were found in their last boarding house. Other than a financial motivation--most of the boarders had money--the only reason I can see that the family killed the travelers is because they wanted to. The press writing for this story, which is really the only place I was able to learn about the family from, confirms that the public felt the Kellys got exactly what they deserved. I agree.
Research resources: 1
'The Massachusetts Borgia' Sarah Jane Robinson
"The Massachusetts Borgia" was the name given to a Massachusetts woman by the name of Sarah Jane Robinson who killed several members of her family over the course of four years in the late 1800s. She was a member of a Massachusetts organization called The Order of Pilgrim Fathers, which was a group that helped bring more affordable life insurance to the blue-collar community. Because of that, all of her relatives were ensured. The motive for her killings was the insurance money, which was why she only murdered members of her family. She'd poison the intended victim with arsenic poisoning, then pretend to nurse them back to health, but in actuality she was just waiting for them to die. She claimed her first victim in her former landlord. He took ill and Sarah Jane lent her services, but he died a few days later. His family soon discovered that a large amount of money was missing, and it can only be assumed that Sarah Jane took the money to pay off the family's large amount of creditors. Because she was bad with money, she routinely mortgaged or pawned the family's belongings, accumulating more debt, until a large amount of cash would be needed to get everything settled. This would usually be when someone else would die, and she'd be able to walk away with their life insurance money. The next victim was her husband, followed by her sister, niece, brother-in-law, two daughters, nephew and finally her son. A local doctor and the Order had become suspicious with the death of her nephew and were quietly looking into it when Sarah Jane's son fell ill. A doctor came out to tend to him, suspicious as well, and had the contents of his stomach tested. It came back positive for arsenic, but it was too late and her son died. Sarah Jane was arrested and charged with her son's murder and a couple of months later, was indicted on four more murder charges (the murders of her sister and brother-in-law were combined into one case), of which she was found guilty. Initially sentenced to hang, public support later got the sentence changed to life in prison, and she died in solitary confinement eighteen years later.
Research resources: 1 | 2
The Bender Family
This family was nuts. The Benders, like the Kellys, were made up of four members. John and Elvira were known around their Kansas community as "Pa" and "Ma," and they also had two children, Kate, who fancied herself a psychic and a healer, and John, whose activities I wasn't able to find records of. The word about that is that Kate and John were actually married, not siblings, but she was always presented as a single woman. Ma and Pa were together and Ma and Kate were mother and daughter, and Ma's past suggests that she'd been killing for awhile. She had been married several times before meeting Pa, but all of her husbands--and a few of her older children, some say--met untimely deaths. The Benders ran a small store in the front portion of the house, and travelers were encouraged to stop in if they needed anything for their trip or needed somewhere to sleep at night. While travelers' last known locations could be traced to the Bender home, nothing was ever heard or seen of them after that point. The Benders worked much faster than the Kellys from what I read; there were fifteen confirmed victims of the Benders in two years.
The method of killing the victims was pretty brutal in itself, but the manner in which it was carried out was also a bit much. The entire family was usually in on these murders too, with everyone playing their part to put the intended victim at ease before murdering him. The initial thought was that the Benders killed their guests for their money, but some of their guests had little to no money, so it was established that they killed just to do it. Dinner would be prepared and the victim would be given the 'guest of honor' seat, which was really a seat with a trap door in the floorboard. A curtain was always behind the chair to disguise one of the Bender men, who was always hiding behind it. At some point, the unsuspecting victim would be hit in the side of the head by one of the men, then have their throat slit before the body was dropped through the trap door into the cellar. This was confirmed when a couple of former guests told the police their stories and how Ma Bender grew verbally abusive and violent on both occasions when the guest declined to sit in the designated spot. A young doctor went missing during his travels and his brother discovered that he'd stayed with the Benders but hadn't been seen since. After hearing that Ma Bender had threatened a woman with a knife, he grew suspicious of them and went to investigate the claims, but was pulled in by Kate's psychic claim that she could help him find his missing brother. He returned alone the following week and was murdered. The family then fled the area. The bodies were discovered in the apple orchard awhile later, which locals noted was always freshly plowed but nothing ever grew from the area. All of the victims' skulls were bashed in except for a little girl, who'd likely been buried alive. There was a hunt for the Bender family, but they were never captured and despite numerous claims that people matching their descriptions had been spotted over the years, none were ever substantiated. The cabin was destroyed by those eager to take souvenirs with them, and nobody ever heard from the Benders again.
Research resources: 1 | 2
The Harpes
Even though legend recognizes the Harpes as brothers, they were actually cousins. Micajah and Wiley Harpe were known as "Big" and "Little" Harpe, and they blazed a murderous trail across multiple states in the late 1700s. I know this predates my timeline, but I had to include these two on here. The two were born to Scottish immigrants in the South, but when their family sided with the Redcoats during the American Revolution and their Tory allegiances were exposed, it ended up impacting the boys for life. After the family's properties and items were seized, the boys were left on their own, and they learned to fend for themselves by stealing, hunting, and living away from civilization in various caves. After years living with--and turning on, from the sounds of it--the Cherokee, they struck out on their own. Both later took wives and brought another woman into the fold in a polyamorous marriage. Their first few robberies were without bloodshed, but this wasn't a trend that they would continue for very long. Their preferred method was either slitting the throat of the victim or driving Big Harpe's tomahawk through their heads. On a couple of occasions, an entire household was found dead. They killed anyone for the slightest reason--some were killed for the obvious, their money, some were killed for their food, others were killed for owing them money, and others still, like children, were killed because they were crying. Big Harpe had the blood of two babies on his hands, one his own relative. The child was crying and wouldn't stop, so Micajah slammed his head into a wall. The other was Moses Stegall's child, whose throat was slit. By far, the most heinous of the crimes that I read about was when a local man was murdered and dumped in a lake, but his innards had been completely removed and filled with stones instead.
The beginning of the end came when the Harpes came across a man named Tompkins who offered them shelter for the night. The Harpes had been masquerading as traveling pastors and were so in character that they forgot to kill him. Tompkins mentioned his gun being out of powder, so Big Harpe offered some of his own powder and the following day, they arrived at the Stegall's house to claim a debt. There was a male houseguest, but Big Harpe killed him in the middle of the night to silence his snoring. The following morning, he offered to help the baby stop crying and slit his throat, then buried the knife in the child's mother before setting the home ablaze. They fled and when Moses Stegall returned home a little while later, he figured out what had happened, so he and a group of men then set out after the Harpes, encountering a few dead travelers along the way. One of the wives was left behind on the trail and she helped direct the men to the Harpes. Big Harpe was shot by Tompkins while trying to run away, then stabbed by a man named Leiper, who some say was acting out of revenge for the Harpes killing his relative some years before, but the actual deed was done by Stegall himself, who decapitated Big Harpe and hung his head from a tree or pole, depending on the story. It is said that his head hung there for 10 years afterward, and this place is now known as Harpe's Head Road. Little Harpe escaped, but was the cause for his own downfall a few years later. After finding somewhere new to live and changing his name, he got back to his old tricks by stealing a man's horses. The guy never saw Little Harpe again, until two reward seekers walked into the courthouse holding the head of an outlaw the police had been searching for. Upon being identified as Little Harpe, he was promptly arrested, convicted and hung. The Harpe wives, who most suspect of having suffered from Stockholm syndrome while with the Harpes, quietly moved out of the area and started new lives. Future generations of the Harpes would change their names to separate themselves completely from the bloody history of their ancestors.
Research resources: 1 | 2 | 3
'The Black Widow' Mary Ann Cotton
I've noticed (then had confirmed) that many female serial killers are dubbed as being 'femme fatales' or 'black widows.' Mary Ann Cotton was one of the latter. Twenty of her relatives, most of them being children and husbands, were murdered between 1852 and 1872. The longest that she went without killing anyone was 3-4 years. In some years, she'd killed as many as four people within the calendar year, sometimes within the same month. Her drug of choice was arsenic, the symptoms of which aligned with symptoms of typhoid fever (or gastric fever as it was called back then), an extremely deadly disease especially with the lack of medicine, so nobody raised any eyebrows. At first. The death was usually a very painful, slow one, so a mercy killer she definitely was not. Because she was a nurse, it made sense that she'd be called on if someone fell ill, but people didn't suspect that the reason they weren't getting any better was because Mary was poisoning them. She and her first husband had five children together but four of them died of typhoid, all within a four-year time span. She went through three more husbands, all while having a lover on the side. The second and fourth husbands, their children together and any of her own ended up dying. The third husband saved his life without realizing it when he threw her out upon hearing that she was forcing the kids to pawn things for money. Her own mother wasn't immune either, as she died a few days after Mary came to visit. The lover eventually died as well. Her sister-in-law was killed towards the end of her spree, and the final victim, who ended up being the one to tie Mary to his death, was her stepson. She'd made an offhanded comment to someone shortly before the boy's death that she wouldn't be marrying his father just yet because of him, but she wasn't too concerned because she wouldn't be troubled for long. The comment could be taken a number of ways, but the meaning behind it became clear when the boy died not long after. This aroused suspicions and the body was exhumed. After the discovery that arsenic was in the boy's body, she was arrested and hung after a 3-day trial.
Research resources: 1 | 2
'Jolly Jane' Jane Toppan
If you read
Day 4 of Octoberfest last week, then you might remember me mentioning this name from the Taunton entry. Jane Toppan was a nurse at Massachusetts General and Cambridge Hospitals before and during her killing spree in the late 1800s. First she would just toy with the patients, giving them unauthorized doses of morphine, to see the effect it had on them. After awhile, she progressed to giving the patients near-fatal doses of medicine and bring them to the cusp of death. Once the patient recovered enough, she'd do it again but this time with a fatal dosage. She was known for climbing into bed with the patients and holding them as they died. The 'Jolly Jane' moniker came from her demeanor and since she was essentially being allowed to murder freely, her jolly mood makes perfect sense. SMH Anyway, she continued with this tradition after starting a new job at Massachusetts General until she was fired. A return to Cambridge resulted in her being fired a year later for prescribing medicine recklessly, so she changed her path a little bit and became a private nurse.
This is when she went for broke, killing the landlords she rented from, followed by her foster sister. Her preferred method was overdosing the victim with drugs, either strychnine, morphine, opium or atropine.
[Mandy's Note: While I was researching the story, this is where the timeline gets a little shaky because each resource differed around this point so I'm not sure if I'm telling this chronologically correct or not. I apologize if it's incorrect.] After murdering her sister, she tries to court her brother-in-law but after she poisons him, has a change of heart and ends up allowing him to recover. His housekeeper and a traveling boarder, however, were not so lucky. She became the nurse to the family of a recently deceased friend of hers
(she'd killed the woman) by the name of Davis. After her 'friend' dies, she begins to work on the family. She ends up killing two of the Davis daughters and Mr. Davis himself. Her crimes finally begin to catch up with her when the husband of one of the Davis daughters confesses his suspicions about the nature of his wife's death to the police. An autopsy revealed a lethal dose of drugs in her body, and after exhuming her father, who'd previously believed to have died of a stroke, his suspicions were confirmed again. The police began to investigate Jane quietly, and in 1901 her killing spree was finally brought to an end. Jane expressed no remorse or guilt for her actions during her trial and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. She later confessed to nearly, if not slightly over, 100 murders but could only provide proof for 31. Jolly Jane spent the rest of her days at Taunton, where she died in 1938.
The Unknown History of Misandry has a post that I believe is a case study from Jane's doctors throughout her time at Taunton. It's a good read.
Research resources: 1 | 2
I don't know why I'm not more surprised that most of the killers on this list were women. I didn't do it intentionally, but after I put the list together I realized that the majority of the people on it were women. Statistically speaking, most serial killers are male, so I kind of like how this turned out anyway because it shows that despite statistics, there were and still are some cold-blooded broads out in these streets. LOL There were two other entries on this list, but the first, H.H. Holmes, is the subject of a Netflix documentary called
H.H. Holmes: America's First Serial Killer that I highly recommend you watch. The second,
The Derby Poisoner, was pretty much in the same vein as Sarah Jane Robinson in killing her relatives, partially for the insurance money. Regardless, I still hope you enjoyed this post. Now that it's finally finished, I can eat again so that's what I'm off to do. I hope you're having a lovely weekend and I'll see you soon!
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