Fatal

by Harold Schechter

  As he left the hospital, the reporter was struck with the sheer awfulness of her predicament. “An ordinary prison—or even death in the electric chair—would be wonderfully preferable to her life where she is,” he wrote. For if Jane Toppan were truly as sane as she appeared, then her entombment within the walls of the sprawling lunatic asylum was nothing less than “a hell on earth.”

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  Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

  —SHAKESPEARE, King Henry the Sixth, Part III

  IN POINT OF FACT (AND CONTRARY TO THE SPECULATIONS of the man from the Globe), Jane did not regard her circumstances as particularly unpleasant—not, at any rate, during her first few years at the asylum. Indeed, she adjusted quite comfortably to institutional life. According to the Medical Superintendent of the hospital, Dr. J. P. Brown, “She was, as a rule, sociable, cheerful, amiable, and spasmodically helpful, and spent much of her time reading. The change from the seclusion of the jail to the more active life of a large hospital ward interested her. In this period, she grew fat and was in excellent physical condition. . . . She soon developed a fondness for the company of the patients, in preference to that of the nurses.”

  That asylum life agreed with Jane was confirmed in a letter she wrote to an old friend in Lowell on the first anniversary of her commitment: “Just think, I’ve been here a year and find myself fond of the people and warmly attached to the place in some ways. Yes, we are well cared for, kindly and considerately.”

  Of course, there were certain details she withheld from her correspondent. It was not merely the “kind and considerate” treatment she received from the staff that made life in Taunton so appealing to Jane. The hospital had also proved congenial to her perverse sexual needs. In an early psychiatric report on Jane, Dr. Brown noted that she had developed a “particular fondness” for a “demented” female patient who was given to public masturbation—“open self-abuse,” in Brown’s Victorian terminology. On several occasions, nurses making their nightly rounds had caught Jane in bed with this patient.

  In her earliest interviews with Brown, Jane seemed frank and cooperative, exhibiting a genuine curiosity about her own mental condition. She was willing to concede that she was insane, but seemed sincerely perplexed as to what her insanity consisted of. “I don’t appear like these other patients,” she told Roberts. “I can read a book intelligently. I don’t have bad thoughts, so I don’t see where moral degeneracy comes in.”

  If Jane seemed puzzled by the nature of her illness, Brown himself had little doubt. In a report entered into the hospital records in April 1903, he provided a ringing affirmation of the diagnosis initially given by Dr. Stedman and his colleagues. In his description of Jane’s mentality and behavior, Brown sketches a portrait of a classic criminal psychopath, a serial killer who derived open pleasure from the suffering of others, and who—far from feeling any remorse for her enormities—took positive pride in her reputation as the most heinous poisoner in the annals of crime:

  My study of and observation of Jane Toppan since she has been in the hospital gives me the opinion that her mental disease should be classified as moral or affective insanity. She seems to me wholly devoid of moral sense, or a clear apprehension of what is right or wrong as to her relations to other people or to society. In all my conversations with her respecting the homicides, which she freely admits, she has exhibited no remorse, regret or sorrow for any of them, but rather a sense of pride and satisfaction that the number was so large as to give her distinction above all other poisoners whose histories are known.

  This lack of pity and sorrow for others in trouble or distress has been evident whenever any difficulty has occurred on the ward between patients, or between a nurse and patients. At such times, she has manifested a good deal of glee, and laughed like a silly child, but never expressed any sympathy or pity for the patient or person in distress or trouble. Trouble or pain for others seems to excite in her merriment and joy instead of sorrow.

  In speaking of her homicides, she says that at the time she committed them she was not conscious of any crime or doing any wrong for which she should be punished; that the thought of doing wrong did not enter her mind and gave her no concern whatsoever; and at the present time she has apparently no comprehension that the decree of the court was right and just.

  Though Brown classifies Jane’s condition as a disease of her moral faculties, it wasn’t long before she started to show symptoms of far more extensive mental degeneration. Indeed, even at the time of his report, she had begun to manifest increasingly erratic behavior. “During the past three or four months,” Brown noted, “she has seemed more moody and emotional, either depressed or exhilarated at short intervals, and has exhibited less self-control, and with it she gives one the impression that her mind is weakening, and that she has less mental grasp of past and present events, and of her relation to the surroundings. Of this she seems to be painfully conscious herself. She has been observed to be laughing immoderately to herself, and when it is noticed by others, she blushes as though she would conceal it, and seems confused.”

  Her increasingly tenuous hold on reality was illustrated in a series of letters she wrote to her Lowell correspondent between May and October 1903. In the first, she strikes a note of bizarre joviality as she describes how much fun she has been having lately: “I’ve had a real good time in the sewing room for the past two days. I never can say that I like to [do] a thing until I get some fun out of it, and I really had quite a lot of fun. . . . Truly, I had a great, good time at the Barnstable jail after the first ten days, even then I did not have a bad time.”

  The next letter, written a month later, is even more manic. Referring to an unspecified incident that occurred in the sewing room, she writes: “It has left me rolling on the floor with laughter. I begin to feel like rolling on the floor now. I like to feel that way. I am having a big time, big in the sewing room.”

  A few weeks later, however, her tone had become far more somber: “Don’t ever ask me in your letters what I mean by what I write, I don’t know myself. I am talking through my hat. . . . I don’t like the locality I live in, either.”

  Shortly after the composition of this letter, in July 1903, Jane had a wild outburst in the night, waking the entire ward with such a “violent fit of screaming for no obvious cause” (in Brown’s words) that she had to be physically restrained by attendants. In the next letter written to her Lowell friend, her sense of identity has undergone a dramatic shift. She no longer refers to herself as Jane Toppan—reared since girlhood among the Unitarians of her adoptive home—but as the Boston-born Irish Catholic Honora Kelley: “I meditate and praise and pray all the time, and shall be ready at the end to take vows and become Mother Honora of the Seven Wounds.”

  Had it not been composed by a “moral monster” undeserving of sympathy, there would be something positively poignant about the last letter in this series, written during one of Jane’s increasingly rare periods of lucidity: “I do grieve to be in this state, I do, when I have thought-force to think it out. When I am discontented, I ask myself what I want, and I don’t know. A change of any kind seems torture to me even to think of, and why I want to live this way I don’t know.”

  • • •

  The process of Jane’s mental deterioration was closely charted not only by the hospital’s medical superintendent but by Dr. Stedman, a trustee of the asylum who visited on frequent occasions. For the eminent alienist, Jane’s case offered a unique opportunity to shed light on the “intricate disorder” of moral insanity.

  Stedman, along with others, had a theory about this phenomenon. It was his belief that there was “no such thing as a mental disease affecting the moral sphere alone.” “Intellectual involvement in some form,” he insisted, was an “essential feature of the disease.” Those who suffered from moral insanity, he felt, frequently developed “definite delusions, especially of suspicion and persecution.” In most cases, “their mental impairment advanced to noticeable
dementia.” In the progress of Jane’s disease, Stedman found a striking confirmation of his thesis, which he eventually set forth in a published paper, “A Case of Moral Insanity with Repeated Homicides and Incendiarism, and Late Development of Delusions.”

  As Stedman documents in this paper, within a few years of her commitment Jane had plunged into a state of active paranoia. By early 1904, she “had become generally antagonistic towards all about her, as well as highly suspicious and irritable.” In contrast to her earlier letters, praising the asylum and proclaiming how “warmly attached” she was to the place, she now “wrote voluminous tirades against the hospital and its management, treatment of patients, etc., making wholesale and absurd accusations and denunciations, some of them of an entirely delusional nature.”

  In one letter—addressed to her old friend from Lowell—she wrote: “Do you know, the supervisor put some poison in my tea. A patient saw her and told me and I didn’t touch it. The lady heard the supervisor say she had fixed Jane Toppan this time.”

  In her increasingly psychotic view, it was not just the hospital staff that had it in for her. Everyone was part of the conspiracy—even her devoted correspondent from Lowell. “Sometimes it strikes me you are one of the gang,” Jane wrote to this person in early 1904. “If you have fooled me also, I shall say damn you. Oh, damn you, anyway.” She made a similar accusation against her lawyer and childhood friend, James Stuart Murphy, denouncing him as one of the “gang” out to “fix” her.

  The sewing-room staff—for whom she had professed such affection in her earlier letters—also came in for attack. “I don’t wish to associate with the low and vulgar people employed in the sewing room,” she announced to Dr. Brown. “They talked about me before the other patients in a low and vulgar manner.” She then proceeded to describe (as Brown told Stedman) “a revolting scene, impossible on the face of it, enacted by the two employees in charge—self-respecting, modest women—and gave an account of talk and actions on their part of the vilest kind, in a manner highly suggestive of delusions, of persecution, and hallucinations of hearing.”

  The real focus of her paranoia, however, was food. She became increasingly convinced that every member of the staff, from the ward nurses to Dr. Brown himself, was out to poison her.

  “No, thank you, Dr. Brown,” she wrote to him in early 1904, after refusing to eat the beefsteak she had been served for dinner. “I will stick to bean soup and keep safe aboveground. Some steak strikes some people right. This steak is sure death.”

  In another letter, dated March 1904, she wrote to James Stuart Murphy (who had recently been made her guardian):

  I am the victim of nerve paralysis, the result of food. I have to eat or I am fed with a tube with nerve-paralyzing food that I choose from the tray. Oh, I think that you and Mr. Bixby were criminals to put me through this. It was an awful thing to do to any human being, and I have my opinion of everybody who takes a hand in it. I think as the nerves of my body get more benumbed, my brain becomes clearer to the outrageous course that has been taken with me. I suppose the next thing, something will be given to put me out of the way altogether. That would be a mercy to this.

  Stedman himself received a number of similar letters from Jane. “I wish to inform you that I am alive in spite of the deleterious food which has been served to me,” she wrote to him in April 1904. “Many efforts have been made to poison me in this institution, of that I am very sure. I am thin and very hungry all the time. Every nerve is calling for food. Why can’t I have help? I ate a pint of ice cream and four oranges Saturday. That was all.”

  Another letter to Stedman (preserved among his papers at the Harvard Medical School) offers an intensely disquieting picture not only of Jane’s deepening “delusional insanity” but of the kind of treatment that intractable patients were subjected to, even in mental hospitals as ostensibly humane as Taunton:

  Doctor Stedman:

  I wish to tell you that I am dead sick of the treatment I receive in your institution. I cannot eat this food. I do not dare to and in consequence I am held down by the head by a Dr. & by both hands and arms by an attendant and another attendant sits on my legs and another feeds me with a stomach tube. I was given a custard today and the whites of the eggs were wrong that is, bad. I don’t think I shall live long and I think I shall die here soon. I had some Indian mush this noon but the attendant never puts molasses on mine as he does the others.

  I am full of aches and pains from my head to my toes and am in torture of body and mind day and night.

  Norah Kelley

  In her spiraling dementia, she attempted to draw other patients into her paranoid fantasy world, “going so far as to shout to a melancholic whom the nurse was trying to feed, not to eat the food as it was poison.”

  Jane’s psychological disintegration was evident in her physical decline. The woman who had always taken such care with her dress—spending hours on the morning of her trial debating which outfit to wear—now grew utterly neglectful of her appearance, “even having to be told to wash her face.” By December 1903, Stedman writes in his paper, “her physical condition had fallen off greatly”:

  She had lost fifty pounds in weight in a few months, in consequence of her refusal of food because of false belief in regard to it. Owing to her weak condition she was removed to the infirmary. There she became more disturbed, as well as destructive and dirty in habits, enraged and somewhat violent, threatening to kill her nurses, etc. By February, 1904, she was greatly emaciated, having lost over eighty pounds, or about half her normal weight, and was so weak that forced feeding with the tube was resorted to for several days, since which time she has eaten voluntarily, but just enough to avoid being fed again.

  In March 1904, soon after her release from the infirmary, Stedman paid her a visit. He found her “in good spirits, talking volubly and aimlessly at the nurses.” No sooner did he ask about her health, however, than she launched into a bitter

  tirade against the hospital, its officers, and all its belongings. She insisted that everything was “rotten,” that the meat was “embalmed” beef, etc. etc. Everything was filthy, she said, even the brick walls which must be “saturated with the filth of years”; the water was “polluted with sewage”; the vegetables were “rank poison.” Occasionally she would burst out unexpectedly with peculiar and piercing shrieks of laughter which would seem impossible to one in her weak condition.

  Stedman left the asylum that day more convinced than ever that Jane Toppan was “weakminded” beyond cure. It seemed that Fred Bixby’s prediction had come true. Jane may or may not have been clinically insane when she was committed to Taunton. But after less than two years in the lunatic asylum, she displayed the kind of symptoms that, as Stedman wrote, were “only to be found in the imbecile.”

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  But they’re all after me now—thirty one of them! Some want to poison me, and some come at me with their skeleton hands as if they would choke me! See! They’re coming for me now! Help! MURDER!

  —JANE TOPPAN, American Journal-Examiner, AUGUST 7, 1904

  THE SITUATION WAS EXQUISITELY IRONIC: THE WORLD’S greatest poisoner was dying of starvation, convinced that she was being poisoned herself. When the newspapers got wind of it, they had a field day.

  The Boston Daily Advertiser broke the story on July 12, 1904. “TERROR-STRICKEN POISONER AFRAID OF DEATH BY POISON” ran the headline. Flatly asserting that “Jane Toppan has become an imbecile,” the paper portrayed her awful descent into persecutory madness as an object lesson in divine retribution.

  Jane, according to the story, had arrived at the Taunton asylum “cool and jaunty,” convinced “that she had fooled justice.” Before long, however, she began “thinking of the many people she had put out of the way” with her “black arts.” Within less than two years,

  Jane Toppan, who went to the asylum boasting of the way she had fooled the experts, fell a victim to her fears. Today, she shudders at what she believes is a plot to put her out of th
e way in an asylum, where none of the outside world knows what is going on. She whispers to herself when anyone draws near. She says that she will not touch the “poisoned” food. And, if she had her own way, she would die of slow starvation, a victim to her own evil broodings.

  The moral of the story was clear. “The collapse of the woman once noted for her indomitable nerve and relentless cruelty is in itself a remarkable instance of relentless justice,” the article concluded. “Not the justice of man, but of the invisible will of the gods.”

  Following on the heels of the Advertiser piece were a series of even more overwrought articles, appearing in the Sunday supplements of various newspapers. In exploiting the full, titillating potential of the story, these articles pulled out all the sensationalistic stops. Each was accompanied by a lurid illustration. In one, Jane is shown hunched over a dinner table beside an untouched bowl of porridge, recoiling in horror as a horde of black-shrouded specters closes in on her. In another, she stares fearfully out from a spider’s web, as though caught in the devious strands of her own evil designs. Still a third shows her in the grasp of her ghostly victims, who are drawing her inexorably toward the grave.

  Along with these drawings were before-and-after photographs, depicting Jane’s transformation from the plump, matronly figure of her pretrial days into a hollow-cheeked, haunted-eyed madwoman. As for the texts of the articles, they shared the identical tone, typical of the tabloid sensibility: a kind of prurient gloating disguised as awestruck piety in the workings of God’s will.