Fatal (17 page)

It was a round cardboard box of “Pfeiffer’s Strictly Pure Paris Green,” a popular insecticide compounded of arsenic and copper. The extreme toxicity of this substance was apparent from the green-and-black label, which—in addition to a skillfully rendered drawing of a potato bug—featured a boldly printed “Poison” warning, complete with skull and crossbones and instructions in case of accidental ingestion (“Give immediately any emetic, such as mustard and water, hydrated sesquioxide of iron in large tablespoonful doses, large doses of castor oil”).

Given Genevieve’s extreme despondency since her mother’s death, her keen interest in this deadly substance was—so Jane told Minnie—a cause of real concern. Minnie couldn’t believe that her sister was seriously contemplating suicide. Still, melancholia—what we now call depression—ran in the family, Alden Davis having been subjected to periodic bouts of the affliction, among his various other “eccentricities.” The two women agreed to keep a close eye on Genevieve.

Just a few days later, on the evening of Friday, July 26, Genevieve Gordon became violently ill soon after finishing her dinner. She vomited until her throat was raw, then took to her bed. A few hours later, she was seized with another bout of nausea. When she emerged from the bathroom, she found Jane Toppan waiting for her with a glass of Hunyadi water. At Jane’s urging, the pale and trembling woman managed to empty the glass, then sank into her bed with a groan. It was after midnight by then, and the other two inhabitants of the house—Minnie Gibbs and Alden Davis—were fast asleep.

Jane entered Genevieve’s bedroom and locked the door behind her.

Just after daybreak the next morning, Minnie was roused by Jane Toppan, who grimly informed her that Genevieve had died during the night. The family physician, Dr. Leonard Latter, was immediately summoned to the house. On his official certificate, he ascribed the young woman’s death to “heart disease,” though the neighbors insisted she had perished of grief.

Jane stuck to her suicide story. Later that same day, she spoke to Captain Paul Gibbs, Minnie’s seventy-year-old father-in-law, who had hurried over to the Jachin House as soon as he heard the bad news. Taking the old captain aside, Jane told him that Genevieve had died by injecting herself with Paris Green. According to Jane, she had found the empty syringe lying beside poor Genevieve’s body, but—wishing to shield Minnie and Alden from the painful truth—she had thrown the needle down the hole of the outhouse.

At the grave site two days later, Jane wore a suitably
mournful expression as Genevieve was interred beside her mother. Beneath her mask of solemnity, however, she exulted in the occasion.

“I went to the funeral and felt as jolly as could be,” she would later confess. “And nobody suspected me in the least.”

I made it lively for the undertakers and gravediggers that time—three graves in a little over five weeks in one lot in the cemetery.

—F
ROM THE CONFESSION OF
J
ANE
T
OPPAN

T
WICE IN THE SPAN OF A SINGLE SUMMER MONTH
, Alden Davis had trudged to the Cataumet cemetery and watched in grief as two of his dear ones—first his wife of forty-odd years, then his beloved youngest child—disappeared forever into the ground. So perhaps, when Jane struck again, there was some validity to her usual rationalization. Perhaps putting the old man to death really was a mercy.

She did it less than two weeks after killing Genevieve Gordon. On the evening of Thursday, August 8, Alden Davis returned to the Jachin House after a day trip to Boston. The moment he entered his parlor, he practically staggered over to the horsehair sofa. The day had been another scorcher—nearly as brutal as the one on which his wife had made her own ill-fated journey just six weeks earlier. He was sweat-soaked, desperately thirsty, and tired to the point of prostration.

Thankfully, Nurse Toppan was there to offer relief. She fussed over him for a few minutes, then bustled off to the kitchen and returned with a tumbler of Hunyadi water.

Then she stood by and watched with satisfaction
as the parched old man gulped down every last drop.

The next morning, Alden Davis failed to show up for breakfast. Harry Gordon—Genevieve’s widower, who had traveled from Chicago to attend the funeral—sent his young daughter upstairs to check on the old man. A few moments later, the little girl came hurrying back downstairs, looking frightened and confused.

There was something wrong with Grandpa. He wouldn’t wake up.

Instantly, the three adults at the table—Harry, Minnie Gibbs, and Jane—leapt to their feet and dashed upstairs. One glimpse of the gray-skinned figure on the mattress was all they needed to know that they were looking at a corpse.

Dr. Latter was summoned once again. After confirming the obvious, he consulted with Jane, who theorized that Alden’s heart had given out. The combined travails of the past month—the devastating losses, the alarming string of fires, the stress of his ill-advised trip to Boston—had taken their inevitable toll.

According to Jane, Alden had also been under strain from another source, having become embroiled in a nasty quarrel with the undertaker over the presumably exorbitant charges for Genevieve’s coffin, which, he felt, should have been given to him at its wholesale price. Jane also raised the possibility that the grief-wracked old man might have taken his own life.

In the end, Dr. Latter came to his own conclusion, diagnosing the cause of death as “cerebral hemorrhage.”

At the funeral, the neighbors seemed unsurprised to find themselves standing at the Davis family plot for the third time in less than two months. For years,
Alden had been notorious for his periodic breakdowns. Even a far more stable personality would have found it hard to bear up under the crushing burden of woe that the Good Lord had seen fit to place on the old captain’s shoulders.

•   •   •

It is often true of serial murderers that their blood lust becomes more urgent and irresistible the longer they continue to kill—as if (to quote Hamlet) “increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on.” Each new atrocity only makes them hungrier for more. The intervals between their killings—the so-called “cooling-off periods”—grow shorter and shorter. Eventually, they may lose control altogether and give way to a frenzy of sadism. To cite just one notorious example, Jeffrey Dahmer’s first two murders were separated by a nine-year span; his last two victims were slaughtered only four days apart.

That Jane Toppan was out of control in that terrible summer of 1901 is beyond question. Her murders were occurring with increasing frequency: a month between Mattie and Genevieve; two weeks between Genevieve and Alden. Only Minnie was left—and Jane would kill her just four days after Alden’s funeral.

But it wasn’t just the frenzied speed with which she wiped out the entire Davis clan that revealed her deepening mania. There was something else. For while murdering Minnie, Jane perpetrated an act of singular perversity.

Among the members of the Davis clan who assembled in Cataumet for Alden’s funeral was Minnie’s cousin, Beulah Jacobs, a vivacious, thirty-nine-year-old widow who lived with her parents in Somerville. Beulah had always been close to Minnie and—at the
latter’s urging—agreed to stay on as a guest at the Jachin House to help cheer her cousin up.

On the morning of Monday, August 12, Beulah proposed that the entire household—she, Minnie, and Jane, along with Harry Gordon and his daughter—take a jaunt to Woods Hole. It was a splendid morning, and the carriage ride would do everyone good.

Before leaving, Jane took Minnie aside and urged her to drink a glass of cocoa wine “to brace her up for the drive.” Minnie—reeling from the string of tragedies that had decimated her family—agreed. The drink, however, only made her feel worse. She chided herself for listening to Jane. Alcohol in any form never agreed with her, and she hardly ever indulged.

She had no way of knowing, of course, that the cocoa wine had been doctored with a tablet of morphia.

By the time they got home in the early afternoon, Minnie was feeling so poorly that she sank onto the parlor sofa with a groan, unable to drag herself upstairs. Jane immediately bustled away and returned with a glass of Hunyadi water. Minnie didn’t want to drink it, but Jane was insistent. The bitterness of the mineral water disguised the two tablets of poison—one of morphia, one of atropia—that Jane had dissolved in it.

Several hours later, unable to rouse Minnie from her stupor, Jane covered her with a blanket and retired upstairs. In the middle of the night, however, Jane slipped back down to the parlor and injected Minnie with more poison. By now, Minnie was in a deep coma. Apart from some twitching on the left side of her mouth and an occasional contraction of her left leg, she lay profoundly inert.

Under similar circumstances in the past, Jane liked to climb into bed with her moribund victims and savor the feel of their bodies as they slipped into death. This time, however, she did something even more grotesque.

It wasn’t until much later that she revealed what went on that night to another human being—specifically, to a court-appointed alienist named Henry Rust Steadman, who examined her after her arrest. What Jane told Dr. Steadman was that—instead of taking the comatose woman into her arms—she went back upstairs and gently woke up Minnie’s ten-year-old son, Jesse.

Then she brought the little boy into her own bed, and held him close while his mother lay dying downstairs.

•   •   •

Beulah Jacobs arose before dawn the next morning—Tuesday, August 13—and hurried downstairs to check on Minnie. At her first glimpse of her cousin, she was seized with alarm. Minnie still lay fully clothed on the sofa, her face ashen, her breathing so shallow as to be barely perceptible.

Beulah immediately roused Harry Gordon, who managed to carry the shockingly limp woman upstairs to her bedroom. Then he ran to the little general store near the depot and used the telephone to summon Dr. Latter, who arrived shortly after 5:00
A.M.

Consulting with Nurse Toppan, Latter learned about the previous day’s outing. Minnie, Jane opined, was “all tired out.” Though the trip was meant to boost her spirits, it had clearly been too much for the debilitated woman.

Latter prescribed absolute quiet and regular sips of cocoa wine as a stimulant. Then he took his leave, promising to come back after breakfast.

In his absence, Jane remained at the patient’s bedside, lavishing her usual depraved attention on the helpless woman. In her stuporous condition, Minnie couldn’t be made to drink any more drugged cocoa wine; the concoction simply dribbled from her lips. So Jane prepared a poison enema by dissolving a morphia tablet in a mixture of whiskey and water and administered it rectally. As the narcotic coursed through Minnie’s bowels, Jane stood at her side, gently stroking the strands of hair away from her forehead and making soft, comforting sounds. Minnie Gibbs had always been Jane’s favorite member of the Davis family. Indeed—as she later confessed—she always thought of Minnie as her “best friend.”

When Dr. Latter returned shortly after 9:00
A.M.,
he was dismayed to find that Minnie’s condition was even graver than before. He spent the next several hours vainly attempting to rouse her back to consciousness. By early afternoon, the situation had grown so critical that he summoned a colleague, Dr. Frank Parker Hudnut of Boston, who was vacationing nearby in North Falmouth.

Dr. Hudnut arrived around 2
P.M.
By then, Captain Paul Gibbs—Minnie’s seventy-year-old father-in-law—had gotten word of the crisis and hurried to her bedside.

Hudnut, like Dr. Latter, was thoroughly perplexed by Minnie’s symptoms. Her skin was dry and deathly pale, her fingers discolored. Lifting her eyelids, he saw that the pupils were dilated and totally unresponsive. When he tried her limbs, he was unable to elicit the slightest reflex. Her pulse was racing at such an accelerated speed that he couldn’t take an accurate count,
while her heartbeat was so faint that he had trouble detecting it.

He tried different medications, administering a fiftieth of a grain of nitroglycerin, followed by the same dose of digitalin. When neither drug produced a discernible effect, he injected her with a twentieth grain of sulfate of strychnine.

Nothing worked.

At approximately 4:10
P.M
on Tuesday, August 13, thirty-nine-year-old Minnie Gibbs died without ever regaining consciousness. Dr. Latter certified the cause of death as “exhaustion.”

•   •   •

Remarkably, even the death of Minnie Gibbs—the fourth and final member of the Davis family to perish suddenly and unexpectedly within a month-and-ahalf—failed to arouse the suspicions of the community at large. On page two of its August 19, 1901 issue, for example, Barnstable’s weekly newspaper,
The Patriot
ran the following story:

ENTIRE FAMILY WIPED OUT

Four Members of a Cape Family Die in Period of Six Weeks

The death of Mrs. Irving F. Gibbs, which occurred at her home in Cataumet last Tuesday, takes away the last member of a family of four in six weeks. Mrs. Gibbs was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Alden P. Davis, well-known throughout this section as proprietors of the “Jachin,” the first summer hotel to be built on Buzzards Bay shore.