Fatal (13 page)

Ultimately, Jane Toppan did confess to many, if not all, of her enormities, including the murder of her foster sister. From her brief but vivid account, we know what occurred in the rented summer cottage on the
evening of August 26, 1899, after the two women returned from their pleasant afternoon at Scotch House Cove.

Jane admitted that she had harbored a bitter resentment against her foster sister for many years, and saw Elizabeth’s visit to Cataumet as a “chance to have my revenge on her.” Elizabeth, she claimed, “was really the first of my victims that I actually hated and poisoned with a vindictive purpose.”

So inimical were her feelings toward Elizabeth that Jane didn’t merely want to kill her; she wanted to see her suffer. “So I let her die slowly, with griping torture,” she wrote. “I fixed mineral water so it would do that, and then added morphia to it.”

Then, as she had done with so many other victims, Jane slipped into bed beside the dying woman, snuggled close beside her, and gave herself over to the voluptuous feelings that cruelty and death aroused in her:

“I held her in my arms and watched with delight as she gasped her life out.”

This, above all, is what we must understand about extremely violent women, as we have always understood it about men. They were once needy girls, yes. Their lives were exploited, indeed. Patriarchal oppression incited them to desperate measures, perhaps. But none of that can be relevant to our social response. They are human first, and gendered second. They will destroy you in an instant, no slower than the men.

—P
ATRICIA
P
EARSON
,
When She Was Bad

F
ED UP WITH THE ENDLESS ACCOUNTS OF BLOODSHED
and crime that constitute the daily news, many people long for the good old days, when a reader could pick up his morning paper without being assaulted by the latest evidence of human vice and depravity. A look at the front-page stories that ran in the
Lowell Sun
during the summer months of 1899, however, suggests that such a golden age never existed.

To be sure, some events that made the headlines bespeak a more quaint and innocent time. When a young couple from Nashua, New Hampshire—seventeen-year-old Mary Tessler and her eighteen-year-old beau, Alfred Salvall—eloped to Lowell to get married against their parents’ wishes, the story was featured at the top of page one. The plight of six Lowell citizens who suffered food poisoning after eating badly preserved boiled lobster received equally
prominent coverage, as did the four-month sentence imposed on Miss Angeline Fontaine for shoplifting fifteen yards of ribbon worth seventy-five cents a yard.

Running alongside this trivia, however, were stories about crimes every bit as shocking as the horrors that dominate today’s headlines: matricide, lust-murder, juvenile sadism. In the short span of a few weeks, the front page of the
Lowell Sun
carried reports of a twenty-four-year-old prostitute named Dollie Hudson, found dead in her apartment with her throat slashed, the apparent victim of a sex-killer; a man named William Keating, who hanged himself in his jail cell with his suspenders after fatally shooting his wife and wounding two of her friends; a woman named Ella Shattuck, who shot her husband, Clarence, in the head and back, then placed his corpse in a wagon, hauled it across town, and laid it across the tracks of the Erie motor line; a pair of brothers, John and Joseph Seery, accused of beating their mother to death; and a thirteen-year-old named Arthur Slausen, who threw an eight-year-old playmate into a river, then returned to his fishing while the little boy drowned.

Readers of the
Lowell Sun
who sat down with their papers on the morning of Thursday, August 31, would have learned news of a tragic crime that had occurred many years in the past—the murder and disappearance of a local girl named Emily Newton, who had been killed by her lover in 1827 and whose skeletal remains had recently been turned up during the excavation of a vacant lot. They would also have learned the details of a very different, if no less tragic, event: the funeral of one of the town’s most prominent citizens, Mrs. O. A. Brigham, who had died so
unexpectedly while enjoying a brief vacation on Cape Cod.

The obsequies were held in the parlor of the Brigham home, 182 Third Street. The furniture and knickknacks had been moved aside and folding chairs set up to accommodate the mourners. So many people showed up, however, that the latecomers were forced to sit through the services in the dining room.

The Reverend George F. Kennegott, pastor of the First Trinitarian Congregational Church, officiated. In his eulogy, he described Mrs. Brigham as

a devoted wife and mother, and a true and helpful friend. The sorrowing sought her for sympathy, the needy for help. Always careful for the welfare of others, forgetful of self, her noble and generous nature readily responded to all. She was one with whom to form an acquaintance was a pleasure, and her noble life and her endearing manner won for her a high place in the estimation of all who were fortunate enough to come in contact with her. Her beautiful life will ever remain a loving memory. Because she has lived, the world is brighter and better.

Following the services, Mrs. Brigham’s remains were conveyed to the Lowell cemetery in a hearse driven by undertaker Charles C. Hutchinson and drawn by four plumed horses. Messrs. John C. Blood, J. V. Keyes, Daniel A. Eaton, and Charles Frothing-ham acted as pallbearers. As the casket was lowered into its place in the family plot, Reverend Kennegott led the assembled mourners in a final hymn of farewell:

Now she’s crossed the land of shadows,

Crossed the river’s brimming tide;

Wears a starry crown immortal.

Stands among the glorified.

The funeral over, the dispersing crowd paused to pay their final condolences to the members of Mrs. Brigham’s immediate family: her tearful husband, Oramel, and her foster sister, Jane, who had made the trip from Cataumet to see Elizabeth buried and to offer the grieving widower whatever comfort she could.

For poison, it must be pointed out, is the most intimate form of murder; one can be stabbed or shot by an enemy, but the bane-draught is usually poured by an intimate, posing as a friend.

—H
ENRY
M
ORTON
R
OBINSON
,
Science Catches the Criminal

T
HE ARRIVAL OF
J
ANUARY
1, 1900,
WAS GREETED WITH
none of the hoopla or apocalyptic hysteria that surrounded New Year’s Day a century later. On the contrary, little significance was attached to the event. The
New York Times
ran more than a dozen front-page stories that Monday morning, on everything from the fighting in the Philippines to the case of a New Jersey man who was “driven nearly insane” when a cricket crawled into his left ear. Nowhere, however, does the paper take any special note of the date. For most Americans, 1900 represented the last year of the nineteenth century, not the first year of the twentieth—an end, not a beginning.

Jane Toppan’s case was somewhat different. For her, January 1900 did, in fact, bring the promise of something new, something she’d been waiting for—the opportunity to lead a different kind of life.

That opportunity presented itself when Mrs. Myra Connors—described in contemporary newspaper accounts as one of Jane’s “intimate friends”—fell ill during
the last week of January. A forty-year-old widow, Mrs. Connors had been employed for many years as the matron of the refectory of St. John’s Theological School in Cambridge. Her only surviving photograph shows a prim, severe-looking woman in pince-nez eyeglasses, who might have served as the model for the mythic Mrs. Grundy. Exactly how the two women first met is unknown, though they had been friends for several years before Jane Toppan decided to kill her.

The day after Mrs. Connors was stricken, she called for her physician, Dr. Herbert H. McIntire, who diagnosed her condition as “localized peritonitis” and prescribed powdered opium and arrowroot poultices. A week later, on February 7, Jane Toppan showed up to help care for her old friend. Almost immediately, the patient—who had been “progressing favorably,” according to Dr. McIntire’s subsequent testimony—took a violent turn for the worse. On the morning of February 11, she died in great agony, suffering such terrible convulsions that her left arm was bent nearly double.

Though Dr. McIntire was baffled by the symptoms—which, as he would later state, resembled the effects of strychnine poisoning—he didn’t seriously suspect foul play. He knew nothing, of course, about the long and growing list of patients who had succumbed to Nurse Toppan’s ministrations. Nor was he aware that—along with her usual sadistic motivations—Jane Toppan had other reasons for wishing her old friend out of the way.

Though Jane had borne a particularly bitter grudge against Elizabeth Brigham, her foster sister was not the only person she envied. Another was Myra Connors.
For some time, she had secretly coveted Myra’s job at the Theological School.

Exactly why is unclear. By early 1900, her homicidal impulses were growing stronger by the day. It is possible that she was trying to stop herself from spiraling totally out of control by quitting the nursing profession. Like other people in the grip of irresistible drives, compulsive killers sometimes try to restrain their behavior by removing themselves from temptation.

On the other hand—given the nature of Myra Connors’s position as dining hall matron—the opposite may also be the case. For a confirmed poisoner like Jane, the thought of overseeing the daily food intake of dozens of unwary theology students might have seemed like a dream come true: a classic case of setting the wolf to watch the sheep.

And then, of course, there were the perks of the position, which included a spacious apartment in Burnham Hall, complete with a private maid to do her housework and wait on her at mealtimes.

No sooner had Myra Connors been laid in the ground than Jane approached the dean of the Theological School, Dr. Hodges. She explained that, before getting sick, Myra had been making plans for a sabbatical and—intending to recommend Jane as a temporary replacement—had instructed her in all the duties of the matron.

With no one else to assume the position, Hodges offered it to Jane. With her usual cunning, she professed some reluctance, and asked for a little time to consider the offer. A few days later, she informed the dean that, despite her reservations about abandoning nursing, she had decided to accept the job. She felt she owed it to poor Myra. Privately, Jane exulted in
the success of her scheme. Everything had worked out just as she’d planned. And killing her old friend with strychnine—a method Jane occasionally used when she sought some variety from her usual MO—had provided her with almost as much pleasure as the murder of her foster sister, six months earlier.

Her sense of contentment didn’t last long, however. Questions about Jane’s competence began to arise almost immediately. She was accused of poorly superintending the dining hall and suspected of various financial irregularities. When the school broke for summer vacation, she took a job at the mess hall at the newly established biology institute at Woods Hole. The following fall, she resumed her job as matron of the Theological School. By early November, however, so many complaints had been lodged against her that Dean Hodges could no longer ignore them. When several employees under her direct supervision accused her of failing to pay their salaries, she was finally asked to resign.

Her dismissal was a devastating blow. Like other psychopathic personalities, Jane Toppan was certainly capable of feeling pity—but only for herself. After being discharged by Dean Hodges, she returned to her apartment in Burnham Hall to pack her belongings.

Then, this middle-aged spinster who had murdered dozens of people without feeling anything besides sexual arousal, threw herself on her bed and blubbered like a baby.