Fatal (16 page)

As the attending nurse, Jane was in sole charge of the
patient during the night, sitting up at Mattie’s bedside while the rest of the household slept. The arrangement was ideal for her purposes, allowing her to do whatever she wished to the comatose woman. Sometime in the early-morning hours of Tuesday, July 2—one week after she first poisoned Mattie with the drugged glass of mineral water—Jane injected her with a final, fatal dose of morphine, then watched intently while the old woman stopped breathing. Whether—as she’d done so many times before—she climbed into the deathbed and trembled with pleasure as she felt the life drain from her victim is something Jane never revealed.

From her later confessions, however, we
do
know what was going through her mind at the time of Mattie Davis’s burial. That somber event took place on the morning of Friday, July 5, 1901—one day after Mattie’s mortal remains arrived home by train from Cambridge. Jane and Melvin Beedle had accompanied the coffin on its final journey, Genevieve Gordon having hurried back to Cataumet immediately after her mother’s death to be with her grief-stricken father.

So many of Mattie’s friends and neighbors showed up for the services that the parlor of the Jachin House couldn’t accommodate them all. Afterward, at the grave site, Jane stood beside the sorrowing members of the Davis family—Alden, Genevieve, and the older daughter, Mrs. Minnie Gibbs, who lived in the neighboring village of Pocasset with her husband, Paul, a coastal schooner skipper away on a voyage.

Though the “hot wave” had broken, the day was uncomfortably warm. Gathered in the little cemetery, the mourners—the men in their black Sunday suits, the women in their long dresses and whalebone corsets—sweltered in the sun. As soon as the funeral
was over, they began to disperse. Several relatives from Cambridge began to make their way to the railroad station. Jane watched as they headed for the depot and, smiling inwardly, thought:
You had better wait a little while and I will have another funeral for you
.
If you wait
,
it will save you going back and forth
.

Already, she was imagining the horrors to come; for, in her spiraling madness, Jane Toppan had decided to wipe out the remaining members of the Davis family, one by one.

Bloch, in his endeavor to explain the pyromaniac tendency, has recourse to the assumption of a sadistic impulse and of a sexually toned destructive tendency. He points out that red is a color which plays a tremendous role in our
vita sexualis
. The thought or sight of the dark red flames exerts a sexually exhilarating influence, similar to the sight of the reddened bodily parts during flagellation, or of the flowing blood in sadistic indulgences.

—W
ILHELM
S
TEKEL
,
Peculiarities of Behavior

G
IVEN THEIR LUST FOR DESTRUCTION—THE JOY THEY
take in doing harm—it’s no surprise that, among their other twisted pleasures, many serial killers love to set fires, a practice they often begin at an early age. Indeed, along with animal torture and abnormally prolonged bed-wetting, childhood pyromania is one of the classic warning signs of budding sociopathology. Some of the most notorious serial killers of modern times, like David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, were juvenile arsonists. And their incendiary habits didn’t always end at adolescence.

Ottis Toole, for example—Henry Lee Lucas’s loathsome accomplice (whose alleged atrocities included the abduction and beheading of little Adam Walsh)—never lost his taste for torching buildings. And Carl Panzram—arguably the most unrepentant killer in the
annals of American crime—took positive pride in the havoc he could wreak with a matchstick. Besides serial murder and forced sodomy, arson was Panzram’s favorite pastime, and in his remarkable jailhouse memoirs, he provides a running tally not only of the people he slaughtered and raped, but of the property he incinerated during his lifelong vendetta against the world.

But it’s more than sheer malice that underlies the incendiary crimes of serial killers. According to specialists in the psychology of perversion, there is always an erotic motive at the root of pyromania. “There is but one instinct which generates the impulse to incendiarism,” writes Wilhelm Stekel in his classic work on aberrant behavior. “That is the sexual instinct, and arson clearly shows its connecting points with sex.” True, there are often “secondary motives” behind a pyromaniac’s acts—anger, frustration, revenge. But above all (as Stekel writes), “the incendiary is sexually excited by the flames; he likes to watch them burn.” In short, serial murderers who enjoy starting fires do so for the same reason that they love to torture and kill.

It turns them on.

•   •   •

Exactly when Jane Toppan began setting fires for pleasure is unclear. Certainly—based on what we know about psychopathology in general and pyromania in particular—it seems unlikely that she didn’t develop this perversion until middle age. It is entirely possible that, like other serial killers, she began committing arson as a child, though the documented facts about her early life in Lowell are too meager for us to say.

What we do know for certain is that, during that terrible summer of 1901, in the throes of her increasingly
unbridled madness, Jane Toppan seemed bent not only on exterminating the entire Davis family but on obliterating their very home—reducing it to a smoldering heap of ashes.

•   •   •

Throughout his adult life, Alden Davis had always been known as an erratic, if not unstable, personality. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Freeman affair, he had suffered a nervous collapse and been confined to an asylum for a brief period. Now—fearful for the old man’s well-being after the devastating loss of his wife—Genevieve Gordon decided to defer her trip home to Chicago and remain with her father for as long as necessary. She was joined by her older sister, Minnie Gibbs, whose husband was still away at sea. Within days of the funeral, Minnie had closed up her home in Pocasset and, with her two young boys, Charles and Jesse, moved back into the Jachin House.

When Jane informed the sisters of her intention to return to Cambridge, they urged her to stay for the summer as their houseguest. At first, she put on a show of reluctance but eventually agreed. Both Genevieve and Minnie were vastly relieved. Grief-wracked as they were, they felt incapable of managing on their own. Jane—with her great competence and energy—could help run the household and keep an eye on their father’s fragile health. And her bubbly personality—what contemporary accounts consistently referred to as her “irrepressible, ever-present Irish love of fun”—would buoy up their spirits.

Having “Jolly Jane” around the house was sure to be a tonic—like drinking a tall, bracing glass of Hunyadi mineral water.

•   •   •

According to her later accounts, it was shortly after she settled into Jachin House that Jane set her first fire on the Davis premises.

It happened on a muggy night, less than a week after the funeral. Waiting until the family had retired to their beds, Jane stole into the parlor and ignited some old papers in a closet. As the flames sprang up and smoke began to billow, she retreated to her room and—as she described it—“danced with delight.”

Fortunately for the intended victims, Alden Davis—who had been suffering from insomnia since his wife’s death—smelled the smoke and rushed into the parlor in his nightclothes. Frantically, he shouted for help. To avoid suspicion, Jane came hurrying from her bedroom as though roused from a sound sleep and helped douse the fire. Beyond some charring of the parlor walls, there was little damage to the house—much to Jane’s disappointment.

“I was hoping all along that the house would burn down,” she later recounted. “But it didn’t.”

She tried again just a few days later. This time, after setting fire to a pantry, she strolled to the house of a neighbor—a Boston businessman summering in Cataumet—and, after knocking on his screen door, engaged him in a casual conversation. As the two stood on the porch, chatting about nothing in particular, the man noticed smoke pouring from a window of the Davis home. With Jane at his side, he immediately went for help. Once again, the fire was put out before substantial damage could be done.

A week or so later, Jane set yet another fire in the house. Again, it was caught and extinguished in time. Afterward, Jane took Alden Davis aside and told him that she’d spotted a stranger skulking about the property
just before the outbreak of the blaze. Rumors quickly spread through the village that a “firebug” was on the loose—though why he’d targeted the Davis home no one could say.

To their neighbors, it must have seemed as if a dark cloud of misfortune had settled over the Davis home. First Mattie’s death, now a string of mysterious fires. The truth, of course, was far worse than anyone could have guessed. The Davises weren’t experiencing a run of terrible luck. They were being deliberately tormented by a monster they had invited into their home—a madwoman bent on their utter destruction.

Poor thing, she was grieving herself to death. . . . So life wasn’t worth living for her anyway.

—F
ROM THE CONFESSION OF
J
ANE
T
OPPAN

I
T IS IMPOSSIBLE, OF COURSE, TO MEASURE THE DEPTH
of another person’s grief, and there is no doubt that Mattie Davis’s death was a terrible blow to all her survivors. Of her two married daughters, however, Genevieve Gordon appears to have been hit particularly hard by her mother’s passing.

Perhaps, as is sometimes the case, she had closer (or at least more complicated) emotional ties to her mother than her older sister did—though we know so little about the inner workings of the Davis family that it is impossible to say how any of them related to the others. Certainly, the circumstances surrounding Mattie’s death would have been particularly unsettling for Genevieve. While her sister, Minnie Gibbs, lived within easy walking distance of their parents’ home, Genevieve hadn’t seen her mother for a year, and had traveled from Chicago specifically for a long-awaited visit. Then—on the very day of their expected reunion—she had received the shocking news of Mattie’s collapse. She had spent the following week keeping a tense and increasingly desperate vigil at what turned out to be her mother’s deathbed.

Adding to her despondency was her longing for her
husband, Harry, who had remained at home to attend to business. True, Minnie Gibb’s husband was also away. But as the wife of a sea captain, Minnie was used to frequent and prolonged separations. Genevieve, who would be away from Chicago until summer’s end, felt especially bereft of her husband’s comforting presence. Though she did her best to put on a show of strength—particularly for the sake of her father (whose fragile emotional and mental state was a continuous source of worry to both his daughters)—it was clear even to the neighbors that Genevieve was suffering badly.

It was certainly clear to Jane Toppan, who was living in the same household with the sorrowing young woman. And that was why—by her own admission—Jane resolved to kill Genevieve Gordon next.

•   •   •

It was not the first time that Jane had concluded that someone was better off dead. During her nursing school days, she had made that decision about at least a dozen people, who—in her estimation—were too old, sickly, or just plain bothersome to live. Telling herself that she was doing them a favor by ending their miserable existences was, of course, simply a way of rationalizing her own sadism.

On the sick wards of Cambridge Hospital, slipping a bedridden patient a fatal combination of morphine and atropine posed little problem. Genevieve Gordon, however, was no invalid. She was a healthy thirty-one-year-old with no history of medical problems. Dispatching her without arousing suspicion posed a greater challenge.

Jane, however, was equal to the task.

Sometime in the last week of July, she took Genevieve’s
older sister, Minnie, aside and told her a worrisome bit of news. According to Jane, she had been strolling on the grounds earlier in the day, when she had spotted Genevieve inside the garden shed, closely inspecting a small container. Becoming aware that she was being watched, Genevieve quickly replaced the container on a shelf and hurried from the shed. Something about her demeanor had aroused Jane’s suspicions. She had waited until Genevieve was back inside the house, then returned to the shed to see what had so absorbed the young woman’s interest. At her first glimpse of the container, she had felt a jolt of alarm.