Fatal

by Harold Schechter

  Though the city of Buffalo had recently opened a new General Hospital with a well-equipped operating amphitheater, Mann, in consultation with the other doctors who had gathered at the scene, chose to operate without delay—the first of several highly questionable decisions he would later be accused of making. At 5:20 P.M., the life-and-death operation on the Chief Executive of the United States began under the least favorable conditions imaginable. Mann, who had arrived without his surgical case, had to work with borrowed instruments. No one wore a cap or a gauze mask. Though the fairgrounds blazed each evening with the brilliance of millions of incandescent bulbs, there were no electric lights in the operating room. As the daylight waned, the doctors were reduced to using a mirror to reflect the rays of the setting sun onto the incision in McKinley’s abdominal wall.

  Exploring the President’s wound, Mann discovered that the bullet had gone straight through the stomach, puncturing both the front and rear walls. He couldn’t find the bullet itself, though. An X-ray machine was on display at the fair, but Mann declined to use it. He also chose not to drain the wound. The two holes in the stomach were sutured, the abdominal cavity was flushed with saline solution, and McKinley was stitched back up with the missing bullet still inside him. At 7:30 P.M.—two hours after the operation began—the groaning, corpse-pale President was taken from the hospital and transported back to the mansion of his Buffalo host.

  If the operation revealed the deplorable state of American medicine in 1901, its aftermath was equally grim. Over the course of the next week, the public was reassured by a steady stream of rosy communiqués from Buffalo. On Friday, September 6, the doctors reported that McKinley was “rallying satisfactorily and resting comfortably.” On Saturday, a bulletin described his condition as “quite encouraging.” On Sunday, one of his physicians, Dr. Herman Mynter, described the President as “first rate.” The official word on Monday was that his “condition [was] becoming more and more satisfactory.” By Tuesday, newspapers throughout the country were proclaiming that the President was “on the high road to recovery.”

  Not everyone was quite so optimistic, however. Concerned about the bullet that remained lost somewhere inside McKinley, his ever-faithful secretary, George Cortelyou, urged the doctors to search for it. At Cortelyou’s request, Thomas Edison himself shipped his most sophisticated X-ray machine to Buffalo, along with a trained operator. But the doctors refused to reexamine the wound.

  Their official prognoses grew more cheerful by the day. On Wednesday, September 11, Dr. Charles McBurney, a prominent New York surgeon, paid lavish tribute to his colleague, Matthew Mann, telling reporters that “the judgment of Dr. Mann in operating as he did within an hour of the shooting in all probability saved the life of the President.”

  But the President’s life had not been saved. Once again, Cortelyou—who had tried so hard to keep McKinley from attending the reception in the first place—saw his worst fears come true. At 5:00 P.M. on Friday the 13th, his venerated leader suffered a heart attack.

  Nine hours later—his stomach, pancreas, and one kidney poisoned by the gangrene that had spread along the path of the unfound bullet—William McKinley was dead.

  19

  They say that I do not like men, that I am a sour old maid and man hater. But it isn’t so. I like them and I like to nurse them.

  —FROM THE CONFESSION OF JANE TOPPAN

  IN COMPARISON TO OUR OWN TIME—WHEN YEARS OF legal maneuvering typically elapse between the commission of a capital crime and the ultimate punishment of its perpetrator—justice moved swiftly in the old days. On Tuesday, October 29, 1901—less than two months after he murdered the President of the United States—Leon Czolgosz was put to death at the state prison in Auburn, New York. Immediately after his electrocution, the top of his skull was sawed off and his brain examined for signs of mental impairment. His corpse was then stuck in a black-stained pine box, doused with sulfuric acid (to obliterate its identity), and buried in an unmarked grave in the prison cemetery.

  The utter ignominy of the assassin’s death and disposal was reflected in the meager news coverage accorded the event. The announcement of his death barely rated a headline in most papers (the New York Times relegated the story to page five)—as though the end of so contemptible a creature deserved nothing more than a passing notice. This was particularly true in New England, where Czolgosz’s execution was overshadowed by an event that happened on the very same day: the arrest of Nurse Jane Toppan in the case of the Davis family deaths.

  • • •

  Though the McKinley assassination and the nation’s subsequent mourning had diverted the public’s attention from Jane, she had, in fact, been under constant surveillance since early September.

  No sooner had the bodies of Minnie Gibbs and Genevieve Gordon been exhumed than a state police detective named John S. Patterson was assigned to keep a close eye on Jane. He was on the train when she left Cataumet during the last week of August, trailed her during her brief stopover at Cambridge when she paid a brief visit to Harry Gordon Sr., and followed her on to Lowell. There—under an assumed identity—he took a room in the home of a family named Stevens, not far from the Brigham house. For the next few weeks, wherever Jane went out in public—to the post office or the druggist or simply for a stroll—Patterson was close behind. Before long, he was thoroughly acquainted with her daily routines.

  Of course, he had no way of knowing what was taking place in private, behind the walls of Oramel Brigham’s residence at Number 182 Third Street. There, Jane’s behavior was growing more alarming by the day. As her mind became increasingly unmoored from reality and she slipped deeper into madness, she began to resemble the kind of lovelorn, frighteningly fixated personality familiar to modern-day audiences from movies like Fatal Attraction.

  At first, she sought to impress Brigham with her competence and devotion, taking over the running of his household and trying to prove herself indispensable to his daily life and happiness. When Brigham made it clear, however, that he had no intention of keeping her on in any permanent capacity—as either housekeeper or wife—Jane tried a different tack to “win his love” (as she later put it).

  She poisoned his tea with morphia.

  The dose was just large enough to make the sixty-year-old deacon sick. For the next several days, Jane remained constantly at his bedside, nursing him back to health. Surely, he would realize how much he needed her!

  But this ploy, too, failed to produce the desired result. Seething with a sense of betrayal and rejection, Jane then resorted to blackmail. She threatened to destroy Oramel’s reputation by spreading word among his neighbors that he was “the father of her unborn babe.”

  At that point, Brigham reached the end of his tether and ordered Jane out of his house. That same afternoon—Saturday, September 29—she took an overdose of morphine. When Brigham found her unconscious, he immediately summoned his physician, Dr. W. H. Lathrop, who administered an emetic that induced profuse vomiting. Before long, Jane had emerged from her stupor.

  A private nurse named Ann Tyler was summoned to remain at her bedside. The following morning, Jane seemed to be in such good spirits that Nurse Tylor decided to leave her alone and go downstairs for some breakfast. When she returned a short while later, she was stunned to discover that Jane had evidently taken another dose of poison. Her complexion was badly discolored and her face muscles so tightly clenched that Nurse Taylor could not force an emetic through her teeth. Just then, Dr. Lathrop happened to arrive for his morning visit, and immediately injected apomorphine in both of Jane’s arms. Within moments, she had emptied the contents of her stomach into a chamber pot.

  Seated at her bedside, the doctor asked Jane why she had poisoned herself.

  “I’m tired of life,” she answered. “I know that people are talking about me. I just want to die.”

  In spite of her statement, there is reason to doubt that Jane was serious about killing herself. After all, she had successfully murdered nearly th
ree dozen people with morphine, so it’s hard to believe that she wouldn’t have known what constituted a fatal dose. More likely, she was just trying to win Brigham’s sympathy and keep him from throwing her out.

  If so, the tactic didn’t work. No sooner was Jane back on her feet than Brigham finally managed to expel her permanently from his home.

  Jane spent the next several days recuperating in Lowell General Hospital under the care of Dr. F. W. Chadbourne. Even there, she was being watched. Feigning illness, Detective Patterson had himself admitted to the hospital. From his bed in an adjoining ward, he was able to keep constant tabs on the suspect.

  After being discharged, Jane—still shadowed by Patterson—traveled to Amherst, New Hampshire, to stay with her old friend Sarah Nichols, a middle-aged spinster who lived with her brother, George, in a handsome yellow farmhouse about a mile outside the village. The trip did wonders for her spirits. “I had a fine time out there,” she would later write, describing her visit to Amherst. “I don’t think I ever enjoyed myself as much as I did that fall. There was a jolly lot of people there, and I had the kind of time I like to have.”

  The good times, however, weren’t destined to last. On Tuesday, October 29, Detective Josephus Whitney arrived in Amherst, accompanied by two other officers, Inspector Thomas Flood and Deputy Marshall Wheeler. Seeking out Patterson, who was lodged at a boardinghouse a short distance from the Nichols residence, they informed him that the autopsy on Minnie Gibbs had turned up lethal traces of poison in the dead woman’s viscera.

  The four officers immediately proceeded to the Nichols house, where—brandishing a warrant—Whitney informed Jane that she was under arrest for the murder of Minnie Gibbs. Jane took the news with perfect composure. When Whitney ordered her to pack her belongings, she complied without a word of protest. Only one thing bothered her, she would later confess. “I was annoyed because the detective insisted on remaining in my room while I was getting ready, and I did not think it was very gentlemanly.”

  If Jane seemed unperturbed by her arrest, it came as a terrible shock to her hosts. They had no idea, of course, just how lucky they were.

  Jane later revealed that—had Detective Whitney not shown up when he did—“I might have killed George Nichols and his sister, too.” She never gave a reason. Apparently, after her pleasant four-week vacation at their home, she was feeling like her old self again, and drugging her longtime friends to death was just something she wanted to do. For the hell of it.

  PART FOUR

  MURDERESS

  20

  I have no statement to make. I do not even want to get my name in the newspapers.

  —JANE TOPPAN, OCTOBER 31, 1901

  FROM THE MOMENT SHE WAS TAKEN INTO CUSTODY, Jane Toppan was big news. On Thursday, October 31, her arrest made the front page of the New York Times (though a story about tainted pastry from a neighborhood bakery in Manhattan—“Scores Poisoned by Eating Crullers!”—was given even greater prominence). Unsurprisingly, the case was a particular sensation in New England, where it would dominate the headlines for weeks.

  Within twenty-four hours of her arrest, newspapers throughout Massachusetts were already predicting that Nurse Toppan would prove to be one of the most extraordinary killers in the annals of American crime. According to the Boston Herald, the story was shaping up to be “the most famous poisoning case Massachusetts has ever had”; while the Boston Journal declared that it “promises to be one of the most remarkable cases the State has ever known.” The Boston Post went even further, predicting that Nurse Toppan would turn out to be “one of the most remarkable of murderesses, a Lucretia Borgia without parallel in modern times.”

  Though Jane had only been charged with a single murder at this point—that of Minnie Gibbs—she was clearly the prime suspect not only in the deaths of the other members of the Davis family but in a number of other cases as well. In its page one story of October 31, the Post referred to Oramel Brigham’s “serious illness” while Jane was staying at his home in September; the “sudden and suspicious death” of his sister, Edna Bannister; and the “sudden and mysterious illness” of “Mr. M. C. Beedle of Cambridge while Miss Toppan was living with his family last winter.”

  No one yet guessed that these cases represented only a fraction of Jane’s crimes. Another six months would pass before the full extent of her enormities became known to a stunned and disbelieving world.

  • • •

  In the meantime, Jane steadfastly maintained her innocence, insisting that she had nothing to do with the tragedy that befell the Davis family. “Those people all died of natural causes,” she told her escort—a detective named Simon F. Letteney—on her way back to Cape Cod. “Excepting old man Davis. He was crazy, and I think he poisoned himself.”

  Her mood was relaxed and upbeat. Letteney reported that she had “chatted pleasantly” throughout the trip and even “laughed and joked about the stories of her arrest and alleged crimes which she read in newspapers on the train.”

  When the train arrived in Barnstable on Wednesday afternoon, a flock of newspapermen were waiting on the platform to catch a glimpse of the country’s latest criminal celebrity. Jane seemed unperturbed by the attention. “She appeared cheerful and full of animation and good spirits” as she was led to the little red-brick jailhouse, one paper reported.

  The situation was very different the following day—Thursday, October 31—when Jane was arraigned in the Bristol district court before Judge Swift. By then, her cheery mood had evaporated and the gravity of her situation had finally sunk in. According to her jailer—a balding mustachioed fellow named Judah Cash—she had passed a sleepless night. In the morning, she appeared to be “on the verge of collapse.” A sizable crowd had assembled outside the courthouse for the occasion. As Jane approached the colonnaded building on the supporting arm of Detective Letteney, her steps seemed to falter. The Boston Globe offered a vivid, if slightly overwrought, description of scene:

  Miss Toppan was very pale, and beneath her jet black hair, but slightly streaked with gray, her sunken cheeks seemed very white, and there was the darkness beneath the eyes that showed that the night had not been a restful one in the county jail. She wore a black tailor[ed] skirt and jacket and a white shirtwaist with a band of black about her throat. Upon her head her hastily combed hair was concealed by a black hat trimmed with black muslin. She carried her gloves and veil, but even these light objects were a burden as she dropped them while ascending the two steps to the courthouse.

  Entering the little courtroom with tottering steps, she seated herself on the wooden bench that served as the prisoner’s dock of the district court. She had no legal representation, her attorney, James Stuart Murphy, having not yet arrived from Lowell. When her name was called, she arose unsteadily, clinging to the wooden railing in front of her as the clerk read the complaint.

  “What do you say to this complaint?” he asked when he was finished.

  “Not guilty” she answered in a shaky voice, then sank back onto the bench.

  The case was continued to November 8 at the request of the state, and Jane was remanded without bail. The entire proceedings took less than three minutes. When it was over, Jane arose, stepped halfway through the doorway, then quickly clutched the frame, as if she required support. After pausing for a moment, she made her way unsteadily along the narrow hallway, keeping one hand on the wall to brace herself until she reached the exit. As she descended the courthouse steps, she nervously dropped her gloves and veil again. Detective Letteney gallantly stooped to retrieve them, then escorted her back to her cell on the second floor of the woman’s wing of the jail, where she stripped off her jacket and hat and collapsed on her cot.

  In a message transmitted through Letteney, reporters let Jane know that their papers “would be very glad to publish anything she cared to say in her defense.” Jane, however, demurred. “Thank them very much,” she had Letteney tell the newsmen, “but I think I shall keep my own counsel until I have an
opportunity to talk with my attorney.”

  She repeated her claims of innocence, insisting that she knew “nothing about the deaths of the members of the Davis family, excepting that I supposed they all died from natural causes.” Significantly (and characteristically), the only person she felt bad for was herself. “I am very sorry that I am obliged to endure this wide publicity,” she said in her statement, “and the only wish I could offer would be that my name does not appear in the papers anymore.”

  • • •

  However devout Jane’s wish for obscurity may have been, she would never be anonymous again. A hundred years ago, no less than today, the press was only too happy to cater to the public’s perennial craving for sensationalism. The major difference between then and now was technological. In the era before CNN and CourtTV (or, for that matter, radio bulletins and newsreels), people had to settle for print. In the weeks following her arrest, the Boston papers—the Globe, Post, Herald, Traveler, Daily Advertiser, Morning Journal, and Evening Transcript—devoted lavish attention to the Toppan case, describing each new development in minute detail and accompanying their stories with crude photographic portraits of the accused multi-murderess and engraved illustrations of the unfolding events.

  Every vague rumor, wild speculation, and trivial detail of Jane’s life was dished out for the titillation of the public. In an article headlined “Feared by Her Playmates,” the Boston Globe—citing an unnamed and clearly not very reliable source—claimed that “in her childhood days, Miss Toppan’s little playmates came to have a certain fear of her, and the result was that she had no intimates as a girl.” The same article reported—as though it were unassailable proof of her aberrant nature—that as Jane grew older, “one of her peculiarities was to refrain from partaking of any breakfast save a cup of coffee.” Equally inconsequential was a story headlined “Miss Toppan’s Clothing,” which broke the less-than-earthshaking fact that most of her personal effects had been left behind in Amherst, where they were being “closely guarded by the Nichols family.”