Fatal (18 page)

Mrs. Davis died July 4th after illness resulting
from a fall. The younger daughter, Mrs. Harry Gordon of Chicago, who was with her mother, died very suddenly July 31st. Mr. Davis succumbed to paralysis Friday morning, 9th last. The death of Mrs. Gibbs from exhaustion removes the entire family.

Mr. Davis built his hotel in 1873, and thus began the development of Cataumet as a watering place. Through his efforts a railroad station was built, and in 1884 a post office established, he holding the positions of station agent and postmaster. He also carried on the marble business, and for a number of years was proprietor of a general store.

Perhaps the most striking thing about this article is what’s missing from it—i.e., the slightest hint that foul play might have been involved in the swift and utter destruction of one of the area’s most prominent families. To the residents of Cataumet, the tragedy appeared to be a singular act of God’s inscrutable will, what their Puritan forebears would have called a “remarkable providence”: a phenomenon to be noted and perhaps marveled at, but only as a particularly dramatic demonstration of the Lord’s awesome power to smite mortal man whensoever He chose.

Not everyone, however, took such a biblical view of the matter. Old Captain Gibbs had paid a visit to his daughter-in-law on the day before her final carriage ride. Though suffering badly from the loss of her loved ones—as who wouldn’t be?—she had appeared to be in good physical health. Forty-eight hours later, she had died under the watchful care of Jennie Toppan—the
same kind, loving nurse who had ministered so faithfully to the three preceding members of the doomed family. The old captain wasn’t a man who acted rashly, and he was reluctant at first to share his thoughts with anyone.

But alarming suspicions had begun to stir within his breast.

In general, treachery, though at first sufficiently cautious, yet in the end betrays itself.

—L
IVY
,
History, Prologue

I
N THE DAYS IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING HIS DAUGHTER
-in-law’s death, Captain Paul struggled with his doubts. It seemed inconceivable that Jennie Toppan—a woman well liked and trusted by everyone who knew her (including the old seaman himself)—was really a monster capable of wiping out an entire family of her closest friends. At the same time, it was inescapably true that all four of the Davises had died with shocking suddenness while under Nurse Toppan’s care.

And there were other disquieting circumstances, too. On the afternoon of Minnie’s funeral, Captain Paul had talked to Harry Gordon, who claimed that, on the morning of her death, Minnie had briefly regained consciousness. Harry, who was in the room at the time, was startled to see that—when Jane approached the bed to check the patient’s condition—Minnie seemed to cringe, as though in fear of the nurse.

Captain Paul himself had witnessed something odd. During his first visit to Minnie’s sickbed, he had come upon Jane in the act of administering an injection to the enfeebled young woman. There was something so
furtive in her manner that the old captain asked what she was doing. Jane had calmly replied that she was just following Dr. Latter’s orders. Captain Paul had thought no more of the matter. But now, the picture of Jennie Toppan, hunched over Minnie’s bedside, sliding a needle into poor Minnie’s arm, kept haunting him.

Still, he couldn’t yet bring himself to share his worst thoughts. Surely, he must be imagining things! Jolly Jane Toppan a fiend? It seemed too unbelievable. And so he decided to say nothing about his suspicions—not even to his newly bereft son, Irving.

Minnie had already been buried when her husband’s schooner, the
Golden Ball
, docked at Norfolk, Virginia. There, the young skipper found a telegraph waiting from his father, conveying the tragic news. He hurried back to Cape Cod at once.

Evidence suggests that Jane—who bore a deadly malice toward female acquaintances with happy homes and families—had killed Minnie Gibbs at least partly in the deluded hope of supplanting the thirty-one-year-old woman in her husband’s affections. It is certainly the case that, soon after the younger Captain Gibbs arrived back in Cataumet, Jane offered to move into his household and help care for his two nowmotherless children. Irving Gibbs declined the offer—though not, evidently, out of any suspicion of Jane’s motives. That he still regarded her as nothing other than a devoted friend and attentive nurse is demonstrated by a bitterly ironic fact.

Shortly after his homecoming, he presented Jane with a ten-dollar gold piece as a token of appreciation for the care she had given to his wife during her sad final hours.

Jane—disappointed in her deluded dreams of taking Minnie’s place—turned her sights in another direction. In the third week of August, she packed her belongings, bid good-bye to her surviving acquaintances in Cataumet, and journeyed back to her childhood town of Lowell.

Her destination was the home of another widower whose wife had died at her hands: Oramel A. Brigham, husband of Jane’s late foster sister, Elizabeth, whom she had poisoned in Cataumet exactly two summers before.

•   •   •

As it happened, the elder Captain Gibbs wasn’t the only person whose suspicions had been aroused by the swift destruction of the Davis family.

The day before his death, Alden Davis had taken the morning train to Boston to lodge a complaint against the coffin makers who had overcharged him—so he felt—for Genevieve’s casket. When he returned late in the day, a fellow passenger—a Brookline physician named Ira Cushing, who was vacationing in Cataumet for the summer—had observed Davis as the latter left the train. Knowing that Alden had recently suffered two terrible losses, Cushing was interested to see that the old man appeared to be in solid health. And so he was shocked to learn, the very next day, that Davis had suddenly taken sick and died. When Minnie Gibbs perished just a few days after her father, Cushing decided to take action.

It seemed to him that Captain Paul Gibbs—a venerable old-timer with close ties to the Davis clan—was the right man to get an investigation started. Cushing, however, barely knew Captain Paul and hesitated to approach him directly on so sensitive a matter. As it happened,
the two men had a mutual acquaintance—another old salt named Ed Robinson. Cushing immediately sought out and spoke with Robinson, confiding his belief that the Davises had been poisoned, probably with arsenic. Robinson wasted no time in conveying the information to Captain Paul.

With his own suspicions now validated, Captain Gibbs was finally ready to do something about them. He wasn’t quite sure how to proceed, however. Fortunately, he was acquainted with a man who had no trouble taking quick and decisive action in a crisis.

The man’s name was Leonard Wood.

•   •   •

Apart from a handful of professional historians, few people today have heard of Leonard Wood. In his own time, however, he was a figure to be reckoned with. The son of a country doctor, he graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1884 and joined the U.S. army the following year as an assistant surgeon. His service in the Southwest—where he took part in the Indian campaign of 1886 that led to the capture of the Apache chief, Geronimo—earned him a Congressional Medal of Honor. (According to the citation, Wood “voluntarily carried dispatches through a region infested with hostile Indians, making a journey of 70 miles in one night and walking 30 miles the next day. Also for several weeks, while in close pursuit of Geronimo’s band and constantly expecting an encounter, [he] commanded a detachment of Infantry, which was then without an officer, and to the command of which he was assigned upon his own request.”) By 1891, the thirty-one-year-old Wood had been promoted to captain.

Seven years later, at the outbreak of the Spanish-American
War, he and his friend Teddy Roosevelt (who called him “the best fellow I ever knew”) formed the 1st U.S. Volunteer Calvary—the legendary “Rough Riders.” Though most Americans think of Roosevelt as the leader of the unit, Wood was actually the officer in charge. “T.R.” was his second-in-command. Wood’s meritorious conduct at the battles of Las Guasimas and San Juan Hill brought him promotion to brigadier general. From 1899 to 1902, he served as military governor of Cuba, earning praise as an effective administrator who helped modernize the island’s educational, judicial, police, and sanitation systems.

At the time of the Davis murders, Wood—then serving his second year as military governor of Cuba—had returned for a summer visit to his boyhood home of Pocasset, where he had grown up in a square whitewashed house known locally as the Josiah Godfrey place, or simply “the old house on the bay,” an ancient dwelling with vines snaking through the shingles and a stairway so narrow that, according to local legend, a particularly obese visitor had once become wedged inside it while climbing to the second floor. Wood had come home to refresh his spirits—never imagining, of course, that he would end up playing a role in one of the most notorious multiple murder cases in the annals of U.S. crime.

Captain Paul Gibbs had been good friends with the Wood family for many years, and had implicit faith in Leonard’s judgment. And so, in the last week of August, he visited the general at home and confessed his suspicions.

As Captain Paul had hoped, Wood knew just what to do. By the following day, he had contacted a former
teacher of his at Harvard Medical School, a man who shared his last name (though the two were unrelated): Dr. Edward S. Wood. A distinguished professor of medical chemistry and renowned toxicologist, Dr. Wood had unique qualifications in such matters. Fifteen years earlier, he had been instrumental in bringing about the arrest of Sarah Jane Robinson—the “American Borgia”—after determining that her son, William, had been poisoned with a massive dose of arsenic.

With the involvement of both Leonard Wood and his eminent namesake, the investigation into the calamitous end of the Davis family finally got under way. Within days, the district attorney of Barnstable County, Lemuel Holmes, had assigned a state detective to the case, a man named Josephus Whitney.

Holmes took another critical step, too. Operating under the assumption that, of all four Davis deaths, the most unaccountable were those of the two previously healthy young women—Genevieve Gordon and her sister, Minnie Gibbs—the DA ordered that their bodies be exhumed from Cataumet cemetery and autopsied for signs of foul play.

Everything seemed favorable for my marrying Mr. Brigham. I had put the three women to death who had stood in my way.

—F
ROM THE CONFESSION OF
J
ANE
T
OPPAN

O
N HER WAY BACK TO
L
OWELL
, J
ANE STOPPED OFF AT
Cambridge to pay a brief visit to Harry Gordon’s seventy-one-year-old father, Henry Sr. Inevitably, they spoke of little else besides the terrible events at Cataumet. When Jane asked him how he accounted for the shocking sequence of death, the senior Mr. Gordon gave a sad, philosophical shrug. The most likely explanation, he opined, was that “as the family was an old one, it was dying out.”

It quickly became clear to Jane that the possibility of murder had never crossed the old man’s mind. As far as he believed, the deaths were all due to natural causes. Certainly, he hadn’t heard or read anything to make him think otherwise.

After a few hours in the old man’s company, Jane took her leave and boarded a train to Lowell—satisfied (as one of her alienists would later report) “that her guilt had escaped discovery, and that it would be safe for her to go on killing.”

•   •   •

Since murdering her foster sister, Elizabeth Brigham, exactly two summers before, Jane had continued to
harbor connubial fantasies about Elizabeth’s stodgy, sixty-year-old widower, Oramel. She had, in fact, taken active steps to eliminate any potential competition for his affections. The previous January, during a holiday visit to her old family home, she had poisoned Oramel’s longtime housekeeper, a middle-aged widow named Florence Calkins, because (as Jane later put it) “I was jealous of her . . . I knew she wanted to become Mr. Brigham’s wife.”