It turns them on.
• • •
Exactly when Jane Toppan began setting fires for pleasure is unclear. Certainly—based on what we know about psychopathology in general and pyromania in particular—it seems unlikely that she didn’t develop this perversion until middle age. It is entirely possible that, like other serial killers, she began committing arson as a child, though the documented facts about her early life in Lowell are too meager for us to say.
What we do know for certain is that, during that terrible summer of 1901, in the throes of her increasingly unbridled madness, Jane Toppan seemed bent not only on exterminating the entire Davis family but on obliterating their very home—reducing it to a smoldering heap of ashes.
• • •
Throughout his adult life, Alden Davis had always been known as an erratic, if not unstable, personality. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Freeman affair, he had suffered a nervous collapse and been confined to an asylum for a brief period. Now—fearful for the old man’s well-being after the devastating loss of his wife—Genevieve Gordon decided to defer her trip home to Chicago and remain with her father for as long as necessary. She was joined by her older sister, Minnie Gibbs, whose husband was still away at sea. Within days of the funeral, Minnie had closed up her home in Pocasset and, with her two young boys, Charles and Jesse, moved back into the Jachin House.
When Jane informed the sisters of her intention to return to Cambridge, they urged her to stay for the summer as their houseguest. At first, she put on a show of reluctance but eventually agreed. Both Genevieve and Minnie were vastly relieved. Grief-wracked as they were, they felt incapable of managing on their own. Jane—with her great competence and energy—could help run the household and keep an eye on their father’s fragile health. And her bubbly personality—what contemporary accounts consistently referred to as her “irrepressible, ever-present Irish love of fun”—would buoy up their spirits.
Having “Jolly Jane” around the house was sure to be a tonic—like drinking a tall, bracing glass of Hunyadi mineral water.
• • •
According to her later accounts, it was shortly after she settled into Jachin House that Jane set her first fire on the Davis premises.
It happened on a muggy night, less than a week after the funeral. Waiting until the family had retired to their beds, Jane stole into the parlor and ignited some old papers in a closet. As the flames sprang up and smoke began to billow, she retreated to her room and—as she described it—“danced with delight.”
Fortunately for the intended victims, Alden Davis—who had been suffering from insomnia since his wife’s death—smelled the smoke and rushed into the parlor in his nightclothes. Frantically, he shouted for help. To avoid suspicion, Jane came hurrying from her bedroom as though roused from a sound sleep and helped douse the fire. Beyond some charring of the parlor walls, there was little damage to the house—much to Jane’s disappointment.
“I was hoping all along that the house would burn down,” she later recounted. “But it didn’t.”
She tried again just a few days later. This time, after setting fire to a pantry, she strolled to the house of a neighbor—a Boston businessman summering in Cataumet—and, after knocking on his screen door, engaged him in a casual conversation. As the two stood on the porch, chatting about nothing in particular, the man noticed smoke pouring from a window of the Davis home. With Jane at his side, he immediately went for help. Once again, the fire was put out before substantial damage could be done.
A week or so later, Jane set yet another fire in the house. Again, it was caught and extinguished in time. Afterward, Jane took Alden Davis aside and told him that she’d spotted a stranger skulking about the property just before the outbreak of the blaze. Rumors quickly spread through the village that a “firebug” was on the loose—though why he’d targeted the Davis home no one could say.
To their neighbors, it must have seemed as if a dark cloud of misfortune had settled over the Davis home. First Mattie’s death, now a string of mysterious fires. The truth, of course, was far worse than anyone could have guessed. The Davises weren’t experiencing a run of terrible luck. They were being deliberately tormented by a monster they had invited into their home—a madwoman bent on their utter destruction.
14
Poor thing, she was grieving herself to death. . . . So life wasn’t worth living for her anyway.
—FROM THE CONFESSION OF JANE TOPPAN
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE, OF COURSE, TO MEASURE THE DEPTH of another person’s grief, and there is no doubt that Mattie Davis’s death was a terrible blow to all her survivors. Of her two married daughters, however, Genevieve Gordon appears to have been hit particularly hard by her mother’s passing.
Perhaps, as is sometimes the case, she had closer (or at least more complicated) emotional ties to her mother than her older sister did—though we know so little about the inner workings of the Davis family that it is impossible to say how any of them related to the others. Certainly, the circumstances surrounding Mattie’s death would have been particularly unsettling for Genevieve. While her sister, Minnie Gibbs, lived within easy walking distance of their parents’ home, Genevieve hadn’t seen her mother for a year, and had traveled from Chicago specifically for a long-awaited visit. Then—on the very day of their expected reunion—she had received the shocking news of Mattie’s collapse. She had spent the following week keeping a tense and increasingly desperate vigil at what turned out to be her mother’s deathbed.
Adding to her despondency was her longing for her husband, Harry, who had remained at home to attend to business. True, Minnie Gibb’s husband was also away. But as the wife of a sea captain, Minnie was used to frequent and prolonged separations. Genevieve, who would be away from Chicago until summer’s end, felt especially bereft of her husband’s comforting presence. Though she did her best to put on a show of strength—particularly for the sake of her father (whose fragile emotional and mental state was a continuous source of worry to both his daughters)—it was clear even to the neighbors that Genevieve was suffering badly.
It was certainly clear to Jane Toppan, who was living in the same household with the sorrowing young woman. And that was why—by her own admission—Jane resolved to kill Genevieve Gordon next.
• • •
It was not the first time that Jane had concluded that someone was better off dead. During her nursing school days, she had made that decision about at least a dozen people, who—in her estimation—were too old, sickly, or just plain bothersome to live. Telling herself that she was doing them a favor by ending their miserable existences was, of course, simply a way of rationalizing her own sadism.
On the sick wards of Cambridge Hospital, slipping a bedridden patient a fatal combination of morphine and atropine posed little problem. Genevieve Gordon, however, was no invalid. She was a healthy thirty-one-year-old with no history of medical problems. Dispatching her without arousing suspicion posed a greater challenge.
Jane, however, was equal to the task.
Sometime in the last week of July, she took Genevieve’s older sister, Minnie, aside and told her a worrisome bit of news. According to Jane, she had been strolling on the grounds earlier in the day, when she had spotted Genevieve inside the garden shed, closely inspecting a small container. Becoming aware that she was being watched, Genevieve quickly replaced the container on a shelf and hurried from the shed. Something about her demeanor had aroused Jane’s suspicions. She had waited until Genevieve was back inside the house, then returned to the shed to see what had so absorbed the young woman’s interest. At her first glimpse of the container, she had felt a jolt of alarm.
It was a round cardboard box of “Pfeiffer’s Strictly Pure Paris Green,” a popular insecticide compounded of arsenic and copper. The extreme toxicity of this substance was apparent from the green-and-black label, which—in addition to a skillfully rendered drawing of a potato bug—featured a boldly printed “Poison” warning, complet
e with skull and crossbones and instructions in case of accidental ingestion (“Give immediately any emetic, such as mustard and water, hydrated sesquioxide of iron in large tablespoonful doses, large doses of castor oil”).
Given Genevieve’s extreme despondency since her mother’s death, her keen interest in this deadly substance was—so Jane told Minnie—a cause of real concern. Minnie couldn’t believe that her sister was seriously contemplating suicide. Still, melancholia—what we now call depression—ran in the family, Alden Davis having been subjected to periodic bouts of the affliction, among his various other “eccentricities.” The two women agreed to keep a close eye on Genevieve.
Just a few days later, on the evening of Friday, July 26, Genevieve Gordon became violently ill soon after finishing her dinner. She vomited until her throat was raw, then took to her bed. A few hours later, she was seized with another bout of nausea. When she emerged from the bathroom, she found Jane Toppan waiting for her with a glass of Hunyadi water. At Jane’s urging, the pale and trembling woman managed to empty the glass, then sank into her bed with a groan. It was after midnight by then, and the other two inhabitants of the house—Minnie Gibbs and Alden Davis—were fast asleep.
Jane entered Genevieve’s bedroom and locked the door behind her.
Just after daybreak the next morning, Minnie was roused by Jane Toppan, who grimly informed her that Genevieve had died during the night. The family physician, Dr. Leonard Latter, was immediately summoned to the house. On his official certificate, he ascribed the young woman’s death to “heart disease,” though the neighbors insisted she had perished of grief.
Jane stuck to her suicide story. Later that same day, she spoke to Captain Paul Gibbs, Minnie’s seventy-year-old father-in-law, who had hurried over to the Jachin House as soon as he heard the bad news. Taking the old captain aside, Jane told him that Genevieve had died by injecting herself with Paris Green. According to Jane, she had found the empty syringe lying beside poor Genevieve’s body, but—wishing to shield Minnie and Alden from the painful truth—she had thrown the needle down the hole of the outhouse.
At the grave site two days later, Jane wore a suitably mournful expression as Genevieve was interred beside her mother. Beneath her mask of solemnity, however, she exulted in the occasion.
“I went to the funeral and felt as jolly as could be,” she would later confess. “And nobody suspected me in the least.”
15
I made it lively for the undertakers and gravediggers that time—three graves in a little over five weeks in one lot in the cemetery.
—FROM THE CONFESSION OF JANE TOPPAN
TWICE IN THE SPAN OF A SINGLE SUMMER MONTH, Alden Davis had trudged to the Cataumet cemetery and watched in grief as two of his dear ones—first his wife of forty-odd years, then his beloved youngest child—disappeared forever into the ground. So perhaps, when Jane struck again, there was some validity to her usual rationalization. Perhaps putting the old man to death really was a mercy.
She did it less than two weeks after killing Genevieve Gordon. On the evening of Thursday, August 8, Alden Davis returned to the Jachin House after a day trip to Boston. The moment he entered his parlor, he practically staggered over to the horsehair sofa. The day had been another scorcher—nearly as brutal as the one on which his wife had made her own ill-fated journey just six weeks earlier. He was sweat-soaked, desperately thirsty, and tired to the point of prostration.
Thankfully, Nurse Toppan was there to offer relief. She fussed over him for a few minutes, then bustled off to the kitchen and returned with a tumbler of Hunyadi water.
Then she stood by and watched with satisfaction as the parched old man gulped down every last drop.
The next morning, Alden Davis failed to show up for breakfast. Harry Gordon—Genevieve’s widower, who had traveled from Chicago to attend the funeral—sent his young daughter upstairs to check on the old man. A few moments later, the little girl came hurrying back downstairs, looking frightened and confused.
There was something wrong with Grandpa. He wouldn’t wake up.
Instantly, the three adults at the table—Harry, Minnie Gibbs, and Jane—leapt to their feet and dashed upstairs. One glimpse of the gray-skinned figure on the mattress was all they needed to know that they were looking at a corpse.
Dr. Latter was summoned once again. After confirming the obvious, he consulted with Jane, who theorized that Alden’s heart had given out. The combined travails of the past month—the devastating losses, the alarming string of fires, the stress of his ill-advised trip to Boston—had taken their inevitable toll.
According to Jane, Alden had also been under strain from another source, having become embroiled in a nasty quarrel with the undertaker over the presumably exorbitant charges for Genevieve’s coffin, which, he felt, should have been given to him at its wholesale price. Jane also raised the possibility that the grief-wracked old man might have taken his own life.
In the end, Dr. Latter came to his own conclusion, diagnosing the cause of death as “cerebral hemorrhage.”
At the funeral, the neighbors seemed unsurprised to find themselves standing at the Davis family plot for the third time in less than two months. For years, Alden had been notorious for his periodic breakdowns. Even a far more stable personality would have found it hard to bear up under the crushing burden of woe that the Good Lord had seen fit to place on the old captain’s shoulders.
• • •
It is often true of serial murderers that their blood lust becomes more urgent and irresistible the longer they continue to kill—as if (to quote Hamlet) “increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on.” Each new atrocity only makes them hungrier for more. The intervals between their killings—the so-called “cooling-off periods”—grow shorter and shorter. Eventually, they may lose control altogether and give way to a frenzy of sadism. To cite just one notorious example, Jeffrey Dahmer’s first two murders were separated by a nine-year span; his last two victims were slaughtered only four days apart.
That Jane Toppan was out of control in that terrible summer of 1901 is beyond question. Her murders were occurring with increasing frequency: a month between Mattie and Genevieve; two weeks between Genevieve and Alden. Only Minnie was left—and Jane would kill her just four days after Alden’s funeral.
But it wasn’t just the frenzied speed with which she wiped out the entire Davis clan that revealed her deepening mania. There was something else. For while murdering Minnie, Jane perpetrated an act of singular perversity.
Among the members of the Davis clan who assembled in Cataumet for Alden’s funeral was Minnie’s cousin, Beulah Jacobs, a vivacious, thirty-nine-year-old widow who lived with her parents in Somerville. Beulah had always been close to Minnie and—at the latter’s urging—agreed to stay on as a guest at the Jachin House to help cheer her cousin up.
On the morning of Monday, August 12, Beulah proposed that the entire household—she, Minnie, and Jane, along with Harry Gordon and his daughter—take a jaunt to Woods Hole. It was a splendid morning, and the carriage ride would do everyone good.
Before leaving, Jane took Minnie aside and urged her to drink a glass of cocoa wine “to brace her up for the drive.” Minnie—reeling from the string of tragedies that had decimated her family—agreed. The drink, however, only made her feel worse. She chided herself for listening to Jane. Alcohol in any form never agreed with her, and she hardly ever indulged.
She had no way of knowing, of course, that the cocoa wine had been doctored with a tablet of morphia.
By the time they got home in the early afternoon, Minnie was feeling so poorly that she sank onto the parlor sofa with a groan, unable to drag herself upstairs. Jane immediately bustled away and returned with a glass of Hunyadi water. Minnie didn’t want to drink it, but Jane was insistent. The bitterness of the mineral water disguised the two tablets of poison—one of morphia, one of atropia—that Jane had dissolved in it.
Several hours later, unable to rouse Minnie from h
er stupor, Jane covered her with a blanket and retired upstairs. In the middle of the night, however, Jane slipped back down to the parlor and injected Minnie with more poison. By now, Minnie was in a deep coma. Apart from some twitching on the left side of her mouth and an occasional contraction of her left leg, she lay profoundly inert.
Under similar circumstances in the past, Jane liked to climb into bed with her moribund victims and savor the feel of their bodies as they slipped into death. This time, however, she did something even more grotesque.
It wasn’t until much later that she revealed what went on that night to another human being—specifically, to a court-appointed alienist named Henry Rust Steadman, who examined her after her arrest. What Jane told Dr. Steadman was that—instead of taking the comatose woman into her arms—she went back upstairs and gently woke up Minnie’s ten-year-old son, Jesse.
Then she brought the little boy into her own bed, and held him close while his mother lay dying downstairs.
• • •
Beulah Jacobs arose before dawn the next morning—Tuesday, August 13—and hurried downstairs to check on Minnie. At her first glimpse of her cousin, she was seized with alarm. Minnie still lay fully clothed on the sofa, her face ashen, her breathing so shallow as to be barely perceptible.
Beulah immediately roused Harry Gordon, who managed to carry the shockingly limp woman upstairs to her bedroom. Then he ran to the little general store near the depot and used the telephone to summon Dr. Latter, who arrived shortly after 5:00 A.M.
Consulting with Nurse Toppan, Latter learned about the previous day’s outing. Minnie, Jane opined, was “all tired out.” Though the trip was meant to boost her spirits, it had clearly been too much for the debilitated woman.
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