Fatal

by Harold Schechter

  With the continuing failure of the police to find a druggist who had ever sold arsenic to Jane, this theory quickly gained ground, since it identified a possible source of the poison she had presumably used on her victims—a link between the suspect and the ostensible murder weapon. Without such a link, the prosecution would be forced to build its case on the notion of “exclusive opportunity”—i.e., the theory that Jane had to be the killer since no one else had been alone with the victims. The state wasn’t eager to resort to this argument, which had been made, to no avail, at the Lizzie Borden trial.

  In their blind faith in Dr. Wood, it seems never to have occurred to District Attorney Holmes or any other official that the professor was wrong and that Jane’s victims hadn’t been poisoned with arsenic at all. There was, however, one man who arrived at precisely that conclusion. Not only did he harbor serious doubts about Wood’s findings; he had an alternate theory about Jane’s MO that would prove to be startlingly correct. This unlikely individual wasn’t a physician or a chemistry professor or an officer of the law. He was none other than Captain Paul Gibbs—the “bluff old veteran of the sea” (as the newspapers never tired of describing him) whose suspicions of Nurse Toppan had helped lead to her arrest in the first place.

  In their search for any scrap of information regarding Jane, reporters lost no time in tracking down Captain Gibbs. The first to interview him was a writer for the Boston Journal, who found the old man seated on a wheelbarrow at the sandy edge of the Drinnell estate in Cataumet, contemplating the waters of Buzzards Bay. No sooner had the reporter introduced himself than Gibbs—who hadn’t seen a paper in several days—eagerly asked for the latest news about Professor Wood’s analysis. The young man’s reply—that massive amounts of arsenic had been found in the viscera of both Genevieve Gordon and Captain Gibbs’s daughter-in-law, Minnie—left the old sailor deeply troubled.

  Bowing his head, he stood silently for several moments, so deeply lost in thought that he seemed to forget about the reporter. When the latter finally asked what was wrong, Captain Gibbs shook his head and replied: “I’m surprised to hear that arsenic was detected in the bodies. I suspected that they had been poisoned, but I didn’t think Jennie Toppan would use anything as easily detected as arsenic.”

  Even more striking than this response—which revealed a shrewder understanding of Jane’s criminal cunning than the police or prosecuting attorneys seemed to possess—was the old man’s next statement. When the reporter asked what sort of poison he believed Nurse Toppan had used, Captain Gibbs said that he “thought it might be found that Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Gordon had been killed by morphia and atropia.” He then went on to explain “that atropia expanded the pupils of the eyes, whereas morphia contracted them, so that if a person had been killed by these poisons, the pupils of the eyes would practically be in their normal state, and to detect the traces of poison would naturally be very difficult.”

  Exactly how the long-retired fishing-boat captain knew so much about morphine and atropine was never explained. Evidently, Captain Gibbs was one of those practical, hard-headed Yankees who took a keen interest in the way things work, and who—in the course of his seventy years—had picked up information on a wide range of subjects, including the physiological effects of the opiates so freely dispensed by the physicians of his day. In any event, his speculations would turn out to be remarkably precise, putting the authoritative pronouncements of the experts to shame.

  Gibbs went on to describe some of the things that had stirred his suspicions of Nurse Toppan. “She tried to make us believe that Mrs. Gordon committed suicide by taking Paris Green by injection,” the old man told the reporter. “She said she threw the syringe into the lavatory.” State Detective Whitney, however, had dug around in the outhouse muck and managed to locate the syringe, which had been sent to Professor Wood’s laboratory for chemical analysis. No trace of the lethal insecticide had been found.

  There were also the odd circumstances surrounding the shockingly abrupt death of his daughter-in-law, Minnie. According to Gibbs, the young woman was “as well as could be on the Monday before her death. We were all at Falmouth, and when we came back that evening she was lively and in the best of spirits.”

  The very next morning, however, Gibbs “was called to the Davis house, being told that Minnie was very sick. We knew she was not a rugged woman, but still it was strange that she could be taken so quick and in such a peculiar manner. She lay on her bed with her eyes partly open, barely breathing. I took hold of her hand and she could not speak. The next morning she was dead. Jennie Toppan had been caring for her all the time.” Later that same day, Genevieve’s widower, Harry, took the old captain aside and told him that, during the last hours of her illness, Minnie had seemed “afraid of Jennie Toppan, shrinking away from her whenever she came into the room.”

  On the subject of Jane’s motives, Gibbs was firmly convinced that Nurse Toppan had perpetrated her outrages for the most mundane of reasons: money. According to the old man, Jane—who owed several hundred dollars to the Davis family—had asked Minnie to sign a paper relieving her of the debt. “This my daughter-in-law refused to do,” said the old man grimly. “And so she died.”

  Gibbs also claimed that Alden Davis had received $500 as repayment of a loan shortly before his death. In fact, he was still carrying it around in his pocket when he took ill. The money had subsequently vanished without a trace. The old sailor insisted that Jennie Toppan—who had prepared Alden’s body for burial—was “the only person who had the opportunity to take it.”

  Captain Gibbs’s accusations—which he shared with other reporters—became immediate front-page news. “MOTIVE WAS TO GET CASH!” trumpeted the Herald. “DID JANE TOPPAN KILL FOR MONEY?” read the headline of the Daily Mail. The Globe—which had learned of Jane’s amorous designs on Oramel Brigham (including her efforts to blackmail him by claiming that he had gotten her pregnant) ran a variation of the theme in its Saturday headline: “MARRIAGE AND MONEY—MISS TOPPAN EVIDENTLY DESIRED BOTH.”

  Deacon Brigham himself—who had previously attributed Jane’s actions to morphine addiction—now seemed inclined to believe that she had been driven by mercenary motives, as Captain Gibbs claimed. Jane, it turned out, owed Brigham $800. Dr. Lathrop’s opinions notwithstanding, the deacon remained convinced that he had been poisoned by Nurse Toppan the previous summer. Was it possible that she had tried to do away with him in order to avoid repaying the debt?

  Other witnesses soon came forward with tales of Jane’s “peculations,” reinforcing the growing perception of her as a woman possessed by an “omnipresent and insatiable greed for the almighty dollar” (in the words of the Boston Daily Advertiser). A family friend of Brigham’s revealed that, after the sudden passing of Mrs. Edna Bannister—Oramel’s older sister, who had died at the deacon’s home while on her way to the Buffalo Exposition—“a pocketbook belonging to her and containing about $75 was found to be missing.” That Jane had a long history of such petty thefts quickly became apparent. An unnamed physician who had known her during her nursing days at Cambridge Hospital, for example, declared that he had always considered her “sly and deceitful and too much interested in matters that did not concern her,” including the “financial affairs” of her patients. According to this doctor, money was always disappearing from the sickrooms of her patients—a fact corroborated by another physician named Swan, who affirmed that there had been constant complaints of stolen money during Jane’s stint at the hospital, not only from patients but from other nurses as well.

  Acquaintances from her vacation days in Cataumet testified that Jane’s ill-gotten gains had been used to indulge her taste for high living. “All the money she ever possessed was quickly disposed of,” the Herald reported. “It is said that she did not hesitate to spend $10 or $12 for a day’s enjoyment in a carriage. Whatever she puchased was of the best. If she bought flowers, they were invariably the most choice of the season. If she purchased a box of confectionery, it wa
s always of the finest.”

  As a result of her free-spending habits, her long years of “peculation” hadn’t made her rich. “Whatever sums the woman may have obtained in this way,” the Herald went on, “it is the opinion of her friends that she has comparatively little money now, probably not enough to allow her to retain the best legal counsel for her defense.”

  The belief that Jane was a creature compelled mostly by greed was by no means universal, however. In the view of many people, the enormity of her crimes was simply too great to be explained by her fondness for ten-dollar carriage rides and expensive candy. Every day brought new and higher estimates of her alleged victims. On Friday, the death toll stood at seven. By Saturday, three more names had been added to the “long record of mortality following Nurse Toppan’s ministrations” (as the Boston Traveler put it): Israel and Lovey Dunham, the elderly couple she had boarded with for several years; and her old friend Myra Connors, whose position as dining hall matron at St. John’s Theological School in Cambridge Jane had so desperately coveted. One day later—under the headline “DEATH LIST IS GROWING!”—the Herald reported that Nurse Toppan was now a suspect in no fewer than twelve cases, including that of William H. Ingraham of Watertown and another man whose identity the District Attorney refused to divulge.

  That such wholesale slaughter had been committed for the sake of a few hundred dollars struck many people as flatly unbelievable. Nothing but insanity could account for evildoing on such an appalling scale.

  And in fact—according to a woman named Jean-nette E. Snow, who claimed to be her cousin—there was a long history of mental illness in Jane’s background. Interviewed by a reporter for the Herald, Mrs. Snow revealed, for the first time, the basic facts of Jane’s family history: her birth as Nora Kelly in Boston’s North End; the early death of her “sweet-tempered” mother; her mistreatment at the hands of her father, whose extreme “peculiarities” of behavior earned him the nickname “Kelley the Crack”; and her subsequent adoption by Mrs. Abner Toppan of Lowell.

  “It would not surprise me to know that Jane Toppan is insane,” Mrs. Snow told the reporter. “And if she is, she inherited it from her father.”

  Indeed, according to Mrs. Snow, Jane had an older sister named Nellie who had gone “violently insane” in her twenties and been committed to a mental asylum for life. “When Nellie was a girl, she was one of the sweetest and prettiest little things I ever saw,” Mrs. Snow told her interviewer in a sorrowful voice. “But even then there was something peculiar about her. She had a strange love for little colored children, and every time she saw one on the street, she picked it up and kissed it. When the real insanity began to show in her, she had experienced a great change, and her condition soon became so serious that she could not be looked after at home. I went to see her once when she was in the mental asylum, and I never felt so badly in my life as I did then. I gave her some fruit, and while she muttered some senseless expressions, she lifted her clothing and began to push the fruit down her stockings. Poor Nellie! She did not know me, and it was terrible to watch her idiotic actions.

  “If Jane Toppan committed the crimes of which she is accused,” Mrs. Snow insisted again, wiping tears from her eyes, “she has inherited insanity from the source which was responsible for her sister’s condition.”

  Other longtime acquaintances of Jane’s—including those who had kind words to say about her “jollity and bonhommie”—attested to her history of “erratic” behavior, going back to her childhood. Like Mrs. Snow, they could only conclude that—should the facts serve to show that Jane really was guilty—she must have been in the grip of inherited insanity: possessed, in the words of the Boston Post, by “a murderous mania.” As that paper reported, “the theory of money troubles” was “far outweighed by the mass of evidence tending to show that Miss Toppan is classed by many people as a dangerous lunatic.”

  The debate over the true motive behind Nurse Toppan’s atrocities—money or mania—would continue to rage for many months. It would not be fully resolved until she herself provided the answer, in a confession that would startle the experts and send shock waves throughout New England and beyond.

  23

  Don’t blame me, blame my nature.

  —JANE TOPPAN

  JANE TOPPAN WASN’T THE ONLY KILLER NURSE WHO made the headlines in November 1901. In Illinois, two nurses at an insane asylum outside Chicago were accused of murdering a pair of female patients by deliberately starving them to death. The victims—Kate Neddo and Kate Kurowski—were given nothing to eat for nearly a month, beyond an occasional crust of bread and a few sips of weak tea. The motive for this outrage—according to the man who brought formal charges against the nurses, Secretary Follet Withbull of the Civil Service Reform Association—“was that the patients were especially obnoxious.”

  Crimes involving evil women appeared with striking frequency in the news. Under the headline “TAUNTED BY WIFE,” the Boston Globe reported the case of a newlywed named Virginia Leslie who goaded her husband into slitting his own throat during an argument at a popular Manhattan restaurant. Another young wife, Elizabeth Habash of Boston—who, in her own words, was feeling “sulky” after a quarrel with her husband—permanently disfigured him by hurling a teacup full of carbolic acid in his face. And then there was the story headlined “VICTIM OF A WOMAN’S HATE,” about Seamon L. Witherell of Vermont, who had spent years in state prison on a phony rape charge, trumped up by a spurned lover.

  Immigrants were also much in the headlines. Raids on gambling dens in Boston’s Greek community (“GREEKS GRABBED!”) and savage killings committed by Italians (“MURDERED ITALIAN FOUND IN BARREL!”) were among the stories that conveyed a widespread anxiety about the social effects of unfettered immigration.

  That anxiety was particularly acute in Jane Toppan’s adopted hometown of Lowell, a manufacturing city that had experienced both a large influx of foreign-born workers and a sharp rise in crime in recent years. Two front-page stories appearing in the Lowell Daily Mail during the week of Jane’s arrest reflected the growing concerns about the breakdown of law and order in the “spindle city” (so called because of its large number of textile mills). The first—headlined “LOWELL THE DANGEROUS”—recounted the ironic case of a New Yorker named Harry English who had come to Lowell from the sin-infested streets of Manhattan, only to be robbed and beaten in a Merrimack Street barroom.

  The second described the Sunday sermon of Rev. George F. Kennegott of the First Trinitarian Congregational Church, who spoke on the subject of “crime in Lowell.” The reverend stressed that—in spite of the mounting hysteria over the city’s alarming moral decline—“Lowell is not a Sodom. It has not many dens of vice or sinks of iniquity. Our police department is efficient. Our city government is honest.”

  After offering this reassuring view, however, he immediately went on to contradict it by admitting that Lowell’s “unenviable reputation” as a place of rampant criminality was not wholly unearned. “Sin in its most horrible form has visited us,” he thundered. “Murder, embezzlement, and abnormal lust have raged. The same old causes—love of money, love of pleasure—are the influences that play havoc with the brain of man.”

  The solution proposed by Reverend Kennegott was of the sort that might be expected from a man of the cloth: self-restraint combined with religious piety. “If men would only try to live within their incomes—if men strong in passion and desire would only satisfy their desires in a normal way—if men were strong religiously—the problem would be solved. Pray to God that we may be kept clean. When temptation lures you to false pleasures, pray to God. And when you see someone taking his or her first step along the path of vice, save them with God’s help at any cost.”

  Though he never mentioned her by name, it is hard to believe that Reverend Kennegott didn’t have Nurse Toppan in mind when he delivered his sermon. Not only was the accused muti-murderess a lifelong resident of Lowell, she was a regular at Kennegott’s own church, where her brot
her-in-law, Oramel, served as deacon.

  Indeed, it was Reverend Kennegott who had delivered such an eloquent eulogy for Oramel’s wife, Elizabeth, following the latter’s shockingly sudden death in August 1899, while she was visiting her foster sister, Jane Toppan, in Cataumet.

  • • •

  Even as Reverend Kennegott was delivering his homily, religious services were taking place in the Barnstable jail, where his notorious congregant was spending her first Sunday.

  The ceremony was held in the ground floor corridor, Reverend Mr. Spence of the Unitarian Church officiating. Jane, however, was not allowed to attend. Already her infamy was such that everyone wanted a glimpse of her. Her jailer, Sheriff Cash, felt that her presence would prove too disruptive, detracting attention from the minister and exposing Jane to the stares of the other prisoners.

  From her cell in the southeast corner of the upper floor, Jane was completely isolated from the proceedings. She couldn’t hear the prayers of the pastor or the singing of the worshipers. If she felt bad about missing the services, however, she showed no sign of it. She passed a pleasant morning, enjoying the ample breakfast prepared by Sheriff Cash’s wife, who acted as the jailhouse matron.

  In fact, to all outward appearances, Jane had made an easy adjustment to life behind bars. Though confined to her cell for all but one hour of the day (when she was permitted to walk up and down the corridor), she never complained about the conditions. Always an avid reader, she spent hours immersed in the women’s magazines and popular novels supplied by Mrs. Cash. Her barred window afforded her a view of the railroad station, and she enjoyed watching the trains pass up and down the Cape and the people bustling to and from the depot. At mealtimes, Mrs. Cash would arrive with a tray and remain to chat while Jane tucked into the solid home-cooked fare (supplemented, as the papers reported, “with occasional dainties”).