Everyone even remotely connected to Jane was sought out by reporters. There was L. W. Ferdinand, for example, the gentleman who had briefly employed her in the summer of 1896, when she had accompanied his family to Cataumet and first fallen in love with the resort. Interviewed at his home in Cambridge, Ferdinand was asked if he “could throw any light upon the Davis case and the personality of Miss Toppan.” “No I can’t,” was his reply. His complete lack of useful information did not prevent the Globe from devoting an entire story to Ferdinand under the headline, “He Rented the Cottage.”
Ferdinand wasn’t the only tangential figure to find his name in the papers. Another was a Chelmsford woman named Lottie Parkhurst, a telegraph operator at the Middlesex Street station. Describing herself as “an intimate friend of Miss Toppan for many years,” Miss Parkhurst avowed that her confidence in Jane’s good character was such “that I would as readily have suspected my own sister of wrongdoing.” She did note, however, that “several years” earlier, her friend had been “jilted by a young man to whom she was engaged”—a “severe disappointment” that (so Miss Parkhurst implied) might well have started Jane on the road to multiple murder.
Other informants preferred to maintain their anonymity. A resident of Lowell—identified in the Globe as “one of the oldest women in the First Trinitarian Congregational Church”—described the peculiar changes she had recently noticed in Jane. “I have known Jennie Toppan since she was girl,” this grandam declared. “What has come over her I do not know . . . I saw her at the harvest supper in the First Trinitarian Congregational Church vestry. She passed me without speaking, but I thought she was very pale. Her conduct that night surprised me, as she was always very jolly.”
Another person who had recently had a surprising encounter with Jane was a gentleman named Drewett, who had run into her early on the morning of October 1, right after she’d been turned out of the Brigham house. According to Drewett, Jane—who was making her way on foot across the little bridge spanning the Merrimack River—told him that Brigham had thrown her out because of a letter she had sent to the wife of the Reverend Mr. Kennegott. Apparently in response to some unspecified snub, Jane had composed an abusive note in which she “used very plain language [and] told Mrs. Kennegott just what she thought of her.” When Brigham—a deacon in Reverend Kennegott’s church—got wind of what Jane had done, he had commanded her to pack up and leave.
At least that was Jane’s version of events leading to her expulsion. Drewett himself had no further light to shed on the matter other than to say that “Miss Toppan’s story had sounded very strange to me.”
The press was especially interested, of course, in people closely connected to the case, beginning with Oramel Brigham himself. After a lifetime of obscurity, the elderly deacon and baggage master—rumored to have been the object of Nurse Toppan’s desire—suddenly found himself in newspapers all across the state, his name in the headlines, his image plastered on page one. The widely reprinted portrait showed a stuffy-looking gentleman with a high, balding dome, full white muttonchops, and a look of bland benevolence.
The relentlessly proper, high-minded personality reflected in this picture was conveyed in his remarks concerning Jane. Despite her alleged crimes against him—poisoning his food, attempting to blackmail him into marriage—Brigham refused to speak ill of her, insisting that he felt “only the greatest charity toward Miss Toppan.”
According to Brigham, there was only one reasonable explanation for Jane’s recent behavior. “There is no doubt in my mind,” he told reporters, “that she was addicted to the morphine habit. This is a habit that a great many professional nurses unconsciously get into. It is certainly a very sad occurrence. In justice to her, however, I think it is best not to tell all I know concerning her actions before the trial is held.”
The assertion that Jane was addicted to morphine was, if not actively rejected, at least called into question by another important figure in the case: Dr. William H. Lathrop, Brigham’s family physician, who had been summoned to treat Jane after her suicide attempts. Like Brigham, Dr. Lathrop was the soul of discretion in his public comments, though he clearly disagreed with the deacon on several key points.
Whereas Brigham expressed “little doubt that Miss Toppan is insane,” Lathrop believed that attributing her crimes to “mental imbalance” was “a charitable view . . . of her case.” Certainly, he insisted, “she showed no sign of aberration” when he was treating her. He declared, moreover, that he had “no personal knowledge of her [alleged] morphine habit.”
What seemed to interest Lathrop most about the case were its forensic implications. Indeed, in an extended interview with a reporter for the Globe, Lathrop used the occasion to ride his favorite hobby-horse—his opposition to the practice of cremation.
Lathrop was of the firm (and not entirely unjustified) opinion that “there are many more cases of willful poisoning than either the public or the medical profession have any idea of, and there have been some instances where bodies have been cremated under circumstances that, to my mind, were exceedingly suspicious.” Such cases, he continued,
do not, as a rule, occur among the poorer or more ignorant classes, but among the more intelligent, and the deed is likely to be done by persons who not only have some knowledge of the action of poisons but have intelligence enough to cleverly conceal their work.
Arsenic is a favorite agency with such persons, partly because it is about the easiest poison to obtain, and partly because it is practically tasteless. In the case of a body which has been buried in the usual manner, traces of arsenical poisoning may be detected a long time after interment, but in the process of cremation, the arsenic is absolutely dissipated.
There was only one way, according to Lathrop, to stem the epidemic of arsenic murder: by making cremations illegal and performing compulsory autopsies on every fresh corpse. “This is a very important point that should be looked into both by our lawmakers and physicians,” Lathrop declared.
He concluded his interview by taking issue with Oramel Brigham on one final point. Contrary to the latter’s conviction that he had been poisoned the previous summer, Lathrop stuck to his own belief that “Mr. Brigham’s illness was cholera morbus.” There was absolutely “nothing in his case to indicate arsenical poisoning,” he insisted.
Lathrop’s defense of his original opinion was, he claimed, a matter of simple justice. “It is not fair to the woman to state absolutely that Mr. Brigham’s own illness was due to the fact that he had been poisoned by his nurse.” Still—though Jane was certainly entitled to the presumption of innocence—Lathrop’s main concern appeared to be his own good name. To have misdiagnosed a case of arsenic poisoning was embarrassing (at best) for any physician, but particularly for one who presented himself as something of an expert on the crime.
One man who was unable to defend his somewhat tarnished professional reputation was Lathrop’s medical colleague Dr. Leonard Latter—the Cataumet physician who had attended Alden Davis and his daughters without ever having his suspicions aroused. There was a good reason for his silence. Just ten days before Jane Toppan’s arrest, Dr. Latter had died—of natural causes, unlike his three eradicated patients.
For investigators working on the Toppan case, his passing was a blow. For Jane, however, it was extremely convenient. Though publicly professing sorrow over his death, nothing could have suited her more. Without Latter around to contradict her, she could claim that he held the key to her exoneration.
On November 2, she did just that, issuing a statement through her attorney, James S. Murphy: “I know nothing about the poisoning either of Mrs. Gibbs or any members of the Davis family,” she declared, repeating her claims of innocence. “I suppose they all died of natural causes. I am willing to tell all about these cases. I have nothing to conceal. I am sorry that Dr. Latter is dead. Were he alive, I would not have the slightest difficulty in clearing my skirts.”
21
When we have told all
we know to support the charge we have made against Jane Toppan, the Robinson poisoning case, the most famous that has ever been heard in a Massachusetts court, will sink into insignificance.
—STATE DETECTIVE JOSEPHUS WHITNEY
THOUGH JANE HAD HER SUPPORTERS—SOCIAL acquaintances from Cambridge and Cataumet with fond recollections of her “jolly” personality, a few former patients who had recovered under her care—her guilt was never questioned by the press. On the contrary, each day’s papers carried new and more damning accusations. By Friday, November 1, the list of her suspected victims had climbed to seven: the four members of the Davis family, plus three women connected to Oramel Brigham—his wife, Elizabeth; his sister, Mrs. Edna Bannister; and his housekeeper, Florence Calkins. As the apparent death toll mounted, it seemed clear that—as the Boston Post proclaimed—Nurse Toppan was nothing less than “a new Lucretia Borgia.”
Fifteen years earlier, of course, the public had been riveted by another female serial poisoner who had also been branded a latter-day Borgia—Sarah Jane Robinson, whose victims included her husband, sister, brother-in-law, nephew, and as many as five of her own children. Languishing in a solitary cell in the East Cambridge jail—where she’d been confined since her death sentence was commuted—Mrs. Robinson had largely been forgotten by the outside world. Now, with interest in the Toppan case running so high, an enterprising reporter for the Boston Record sought an interview with the former “poison fiend” in the hope of learning her thoughts about New England’s newest celebrity killer.
Managing to gain admission to her cell during an inspection by the prison commissioners, the reporter found the forty-five-year-old multi-murderess in serene spirits-—getting on “very nicely,” as she herself declared. Apart from her jailhouse pallor and faded hair, she seemed healthy and content. Indeed, she had put on a good deal of flesh, a fact stressed again and again by the reporter, who appeared to be somewhat obsessed by her weight gain (or, as he euphemistically put it, “her tendency to embonpoint”). It seemed to strike him as a bitter irony that she should grow so fat in jail—this monstrous mother whose own children had died convulsing in digestive torment from the lethal meals she fed them.
From listening to her speak, of course, no one would have guessed at her pathology. She was perfectly composed as she conversed with the reporter. “Not a shadow of the seven relatives she sent to death with arsenic ever seems to float across her mind,” he noted. “Never a sign of remorse, never a mention of their former existence to show that she ever thinks of her crimes.” In the “calm blue depths of her eyes,” the young man could detect no indication of madness. A stranger meeting her on the street, he asserted, “would see in her the typical church worker.”
Her tiny cell was sparsely furnished with a bureau, table, washstand, and bedstead. The walls were decorated with engraved portraits of her murdered children, clipped from newspapers, along with various small artworks brought by her son, Charles—the “last of his branch, the only one to survive her terrible death-dealing poison.” The dutiful young man still visited his mother regularly, conversing with her through the mail-slot-sized opening in the steel door of her cell. Occasionally, Mrs. Robinson received visits from other callers, too—“religious people” who, in their “false zeal,” believed that she had been “found unjustly guilty.”
Her cell contained a window overlooking the prison yard. Flowers bloomed directly below the window, and vines clung to the wall. “But Mrs. Robinson sees them not,” wrote the reporter. “The glazed glass shuts out the scene,” allowing daylight into the room but affording her no glimpse of the outside world. Once a day, for the space of an hour, when the other prisoners were inside, she was allowed to take a stroll around the yard, an attendant guarding her every step.
Though she confessed that she was not especially fond of prison life, Mrs. Robinson never complained. However grim her existence, she had “never tried to escape, never thought of suicide. She calls herself a philosopher and grows fat.”
The supervisor of the jail, Sheriff Fairbairn, considered her a model inmate. “Never was there a more tractable, calm, contented prisoner,” he declared. “She gives no trouble and never did.” When the commissioners asked if there was anything she needed, she replied that she had “everything she wanted.” She enjoyed her occasional chats with the chaplain. She was permitted to borrow one book a week from the prison library. Invariably she chose religious works, her favorites being The Lives of the Saints and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. She regarded herself as a deeply devout person—“just as she did fifteen years ago,” the reporter dryly noted, “when she was poisoning her own family.”
As for the object of his visit—learning her thoughts on America’s latest homegrown “Borgia”—the reporter came away disappointed. Shut away from the world, Mrs. Robinson had never heard of Nurse Jane Toppan—another homicidal nurturer whose own eating habits would eventually become a matter of keen public interest.
22
Prof. Wood has evidence which will prove beyond a doubt that the arsenic found in the bodies, and which caused death, was not in the preservatives injected by the undertaker. These women were murdered by the administration of arsenic which they took with their food or drink.
—DISTRICT ATTORNEY LEMUEL HOLMES
IT WAS COMMONLY BELIEVED THAT—LIKE SARAH JANE Robinson and Lydia Sherman before her—Nurse Toppan had dispatched her victims with arsenic. Dr. William Lathrop, for example, was clearly operating under this assumption when he argued that, since Oramel Brigham had displayed no symptoms of “arsenical poisoning” the previous summer, his illness could not have been caused by Nurse Toppan. Neither Lathrop nor any other authority saw fit to question the findings of Professor Edward Wood of the Harvard Medical School, whose chemical analysis had turned up significant amounts of arsenic in the viscera of Genevieve Gordon and Minnie Gibbs—“enough to have depopulated the summer colony at Cataumet,” according to the Boston Globe. Wood, after all, was the country’s leading forensic expert. He had been involved in hundreds of criminal cases. His testimony had been instrumental in the conviction of Mrs. Robinson. And he had been a star witness at the most sensational murder case of the day, that of the Falls River parricide, Lizzie Borden.
It was only natural, therefore, that, in building its case against the suspect, the government began by attempting to tie Jane to the ostensible murder weapon—“to find evidence connecting Nurse Toppan to the purchase or acquisition of arsenic,” as the Boston Globe put it. No sooner had Jane been taken into custody than detectives began visiting pharmacies in Falmouth where, according to unverified reports, she had bought her arsenic. They were hoping, the Globe wrote, “to locate any druggist who remembers having sold the deadly compound to Miss Toppan.”
Nothing came of their efforts. Within days of Jane’s arrest, papers were reporting that “there is at least one missing link in the government’s chain of evidence against Miss Toppan. The government has failed to ascertain that Miss Toppan purchased at any place or any time any arsenic, the poison of which Prof. Wood says he found in the stomachs of Mrs. Gordon and Mrs. Gibbs.”
There was a very good reason for this failure. Jane had never made such a purchase in Falmouth or elsewhere. In the long course of her murderous career she had never resorted to arsenic. Professor Wood, it turned out, had come to the right conclusion for the wrong reason. Jane’s Cataumet victims had, in fact, been murdered—but not with arsenic.
How, then, did this substance end up in such lethal quantities in the intestines of the two sisters? The answer was provided by a gentleman named W. C. Davis. Davis (who was unrelated to the Cataumet clan murdered by Jane) was the owner of a large furniture store on Main Street in Falmouth. He was also the local undertaker, who had prepared the bodies of Minnie Gibbs and Genevieve Gordon for burial. Interviewed at his funeral parlor on Friday, November 1, Davis revealed that arsenic was a main ingredient in his embalming fluid.
Davis’s revelation was a godsend for
the defense. Jane’s attorney, James Stuart Murphy, was now free to argue that Genevieve Gordon and Minnie Gibbs had died of natural causes, just as his client claimed, and that their organs had become infused with arsenic during the embalming process.
The press took immediate note of the state’s vulnerability on this point. “It is understood here that the embalming fluid that the undertaker used in the preservation of the bodies of Mrs. Gordon and Mrs. Gibbs contained large quantities of arsenic,” one newspaper reported on Saturday, November 2. “If the undertaker filled the cavities of the bodies of the members of the Davis family with fluid that contained arsenic, it is asked how can the government prove that there were traces of that poison in the body of Mrs. Gibbs before her death and that it was arsenical poisoning that caused her demise?”
In spite of this serious flaw in their case, authorities doggedly stuck to their belief that Nurse Toppan had murdered her victims with arsenic. Interviewed in Boston on Sunday, November 3, District Attorney Lemuel Holmes stated unequivocally that the “arsenic found in the intestines of the Davis sisters had been administered by way of the mouth” and “could not have been any residue of the embalming fluid.”
By the following day, however, authorities were offering a revised theory. An unnamed official, quoted in the Boston Herald, acknowledged that the arsenic may indeed have come from W. C. Davis’s embalming fluid. He pointed out, however, that Nurse Toppan was known to be in the “habit of assisting the undertaker in preparation of bodies for burial.” “What would have been easier for her,” he proposed, “than obtaining the arsenical solution used for embalming purposes and subsequently giving it to her patients in the Hunyadi water many of them seem to have been given?”
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