Fatal (19 page)

When Jane arrived in Lowell on Saturday, August 24, therefore, she expected to have Oramel all to herself. Much to her dismay, she found another female in the house—Oramel’s older sister, Edna F. Bannister.

A seventy-seven-year-old widow who lived with her married daughter in Turnbridge, Vermont, Mrs. Bannister had been hoping to visit the great Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo since it opened in May. Because of her recurrent heart trouble, however, she hadn’t felt strong enough to undertake the journey until mid-August. It had been nearly a year since Edna had last seen her younger brother, so she decided to combine her trip to the exposition with a family visit. During the last week of August, she bid farewell to her daughter, Mrs. Annie Ordway, and took the train down to Lowell, arriving at the Brigham house at 182 Third Street just a few days before Jane showed up.

Early in the afternoon of Monday, August 26—shortly after Oramel, his sister, and Jane finished lunch—Mrs. Bannister began to complain of dizziness. She immediately went to lie down in her room. By late afternoon, she was feeling much better. Jane, however, insisted that she continue to rest, and brought her a tumbler of mineral water.

Sometime during the night, while Jane kept watch over the patient, Mrs. Bannister slipped into a coma. Early the next morning, Dr. William Bass—the same physician who had attended Oramel’s late housekeeper, Florence Calkins—was summoned to the Brigham home. His efforts to revive Edna Bannister were in vain. She died that morning, Tuesday, August 27, 1901, at approximately ten o’clock. Dr. Bass attributed her death—as he had Florence Calkins’s—to heart disease.

•   •   •

That Jane felt compelled to murder Mrs. Bannister so soon after destroying the Davis family says a great deal about her rapidly deteriorating mental condition. Obviously, Oramel’s sister was not a romantic rival. Nor—since Edna planned to leave Lowell within days—did she represent an impediment to Jane’s (bizarre) matrimonial schemes. Despite her usual rationalizations (“Mrs. Bannister was a poor old woman,” she later wrote, “and was better off out of the way anyhow”), Jane kept killing because she couldn’t control herself.

It is also likely that, by this point, she had lost all rational sense of the risks involved in her behavior. After all, she had not only gotten away with dozens of murders throughout the years, but had just committed one of the most shocking crimes in New England history—the annihilation of an entire family under the very noses of their relatives and friends—without (to all appearances) arousing suspicion. It must have seemed to her that she was invulnerable—too cunning for the law. Certainly, such grandiose delusions are not uncommon among serial killers, who often compensate for their profound feelings of worthlessness with a belief in their own supposed omnipotence.

If so, her sense of confidence must have been badly shaken when she saw the front page on the
Boston Globe
on Saturday, August 31. “INQUIRY IS UNDER WAY,” blared the headline. “INVESTIGATION OF DEATHS OF CATAUMET FAMILY. A. P. DAVIS, WIFE, AND DAUGHTERS DIED SUDDENLY.”

According to the story, the bodies of Genevieve Gordon and Minnie Gibbs had been disinterred from their graves in Cataumet cemetery early the previous day. State detective Josephus Whitney had superintended the exhumation. The corpses were then carried to a nearby barn, where they were dissected by Dr. Robert H. Faunce, the medical examiner of Sandwich. Also present were Professor Edward Wood of Harvard; the Davises’ physician, Dr. Leonard Latter; and the Reverend Mr. Dicking of the Methodist Church of Cataumet.

Several internal organs, including the stomach, were removed from each cadaver, and these were given over to Professor Wood, who had transported them back to his laboratory in Cambridge. The results of his analysis were not expected to be known for some time.

To be sure, Jane might have taken comfort from certain statements in the article. Though she was identified by name as the nurse who had been “the attendant of each of the patients,” there was no suggestion that she had given them anything other than the best care “that medical skill and professional training could provide.” The article also stressed that, according to initial indications, the autopsies had turned up “nothing to warrant any suspicions as to the deaths having resulted from other than natural causes.”

Still, it must have come as a blow to Jane—who
had felt so reassured after her recent talk with Henry Gordon Sr.—to learn that the Cataumet tragedy was under official investigation. And that, as the nurse in whose care the whole Davis family had perished, she herself was now an object of attention by the public, the police, and the press.

As it happened, the developments in Cataumet—which seemed so newsworthy on August 31—were about to vanish entirely from the papers, and Jane would enjoy a temporary respite from her budding notoriety. Within days of the exhumations, the country would be rocked by a killing so momentous that it would make every other crime—even a possible case of multiple murder in New England—seem trivial to the point of utter insignificance.

I don’t believe that Christians in this country had any idea of prevailing on God through prayer to work a miracle, even to save our President’s life. Their prayer was that God might give guidance to the surgeons, medical skill to the physicians, and care to the nursing.

—R
EV
. D
R
. W
ITHROW
, “D
ID THE
D
EATH OF THE
P
RESIDENT
P
ROVE
P
RAYER
U
SELESS
?”

E
VEN NOW, A HUNDRED YEARS LATER, THE CITY IS STILL
haunted by the tragedy. In September 1901, Buffalo, New York, was in its prime—a proud and wealthy metropolis with booming industries, splendid mansions, and a seemingly limitless future. In the century that followed, it suffered a stunning collapse, sliding from the eighth largest city in the nation to the fifty-ninth, and becoming a gray and dreary symbol of urban blight and Rust Belt decay. Various factors, of course, contributed to its deterioration. But to many of its inhabitants, the decline and fall of Buffalo could be traced to one shattering event—a single terrible moment that cast a permanent pall over their once-shining city and marked the beginning of the end.

It happened at the very place that was intended to ratify Buffalo’s status as one of the nation’s leading cities—the great Pan-American Exposition of 1901. First planned in the heady days following the country’s triumph in its war against Spain, the exposition
was designed to be the most spectacular event of its kind in nearly a decade. Like its celebrated predecessor—the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893—the Buffalo exposition was a blend of high-mindedness and low pleasure, part cultural showplace, part carnival midway: a 350-acre tribute to American progress in the realms of science, industry, and the arts, balanced with a healthy dose of crude, Barnumesque fun.

Compared to the Chicago fair—dubbed the “White City” in tribute to its marblelike, neoclassical look—the Buffalo exposition was a baroque fantasyland of riotous color and garish design. The “Rainbow City” some called it. In keeping with its overarching theme—a celebration of our country’s hemispheric bond with its Latin-American neighbors—the prevailing architectural style was something called “Spanish Renaissance.” Red roof tiles were ubiquitous. But many of the pavilions featured a wildly eclectic mix of elements, from Islamic minarets to Corinthian columns, Italian loggias to medieval turrets.

Sculptures were everywhere—adorning the fountains, lining the esplanades, flanking the entrances of the buildings. Some were historical, others allegorical, many purely ornamental. Within the space of six months, a small army of sculptors, working under the supervision of Vienna-trained artist Karl Bitters, churned out more than 500 plaster statues, from demurely draped classical nudes symbolizing the Four Seasons of the Year, to overall-clad laborers representing the Spirit of American Manufacturing.

And then there were the lights: more than two million of them festooning every building in the fair. At the very center of the grounds loomed the great Tower of Electricity, 400 feet high and covered with
nearly half-a-million eight-watt bulbs. At night, when the switches were thrown, the exposition was transformed into a glittering “fairy city” that left many observers breathless with wonder.

The level of innovation—industrial, scientific, technological—symbolized by this glorious spectacle was celebrated elsewhere throughout the fair: in the Machinery Building, the Hall of Manufactures, the Railway Exhibit, the Geodetic Survey Display. For countless fairgoers, however, the real highlight was not an edifying tour of the Hall of Ethnology or a glimpse of a hydraulic turbine in action but rather a trip to the Midway. Here, visitors could indulge in hours of Coney Island-style amusement and sideshow titillation. They could ride a camel, enjoy a simulated trip to the moon, or take a hair-raising spin on the Thompson Aerio-Cycle (a gigantic, Erector-set seesaw that suspended its passengers nearly 300 feet aboveground). They could descend into Dreamland, watch a graphic re-creation of the Johnstown Flood, or see premature babies kept alive in the amazing Infant Incubator. And all for the general admission fee of fifty cents.

The festivities on opening day—May 1, 1901—drew a crowd of 20,000. More than five times that number showed up for Dedication Day several weeks later. By the time the exposition ended on Saturday, November 2, it had drawn a total of 8,120,048 people. How many more dreamed of attending is, of course, impossible to say—though we know of at least one person who longed to see the fair but never made it: Oramel Brigham’s sister, Edna Bannister, whose journey to the grand Pan-American Exposition was violently aborted when she stopped off to visit her brother in Lowell, Massachusetts and had the misfortune
of being present at his home when Nurse Toppan showed up.

Needless to say, however, it wasn’t the poisoning of an obscure Vermont widow that gave the Buffalo fair its permanent association with tragedy. It was another, infinitely more earthshaking crime that delivered a deathblow not only to the illustrious victim, but to the Exposition itself—and even, some say, to the city of Buffalo.

•   •   •

President William McKinley held an exalted opinion of world fairs. To him, they were not merely gala events but “the record of the world’s advancement”—“the timekeepers of progress.” He had enjoyed himself mightily at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and Atlanta’s Cotton States Exposition two years later. Now—like so many of his countrymen—he was eager to visit the great Pan-American Exposition.

Originally, he intended to travel to Buffalo in early June. But the sudden illness of his beloved wife, Ida—a chronic invalid who suffered from a range of ailments, including petit mal epilepsy—necessitated a postponement of the trip. The couple passed the summer of 1901 at their modest home in Canton, Ohio, where Ida enjoyed a steady recuperation, while her husband indulged himself in the simple relaxations of the placid Midwestern town—picnics, drives in the family roundabout, excursions to nearby farms and county fairs, evening hymnsings, and an occasional game of euchre. As the summer progressed and Ida continued to improve, his plans to visit Buffalo were renewed. By late August, newspapers around the country were announcing that President’s Day at the Pan-American Exposition had been officially rescheduled for Thursday, September 5.

Not everyone was thrilled with the plan. George Cortelyou—McKinley’s fiercely devoted personal secretary—was especially concerned about the proposed public reception, slated for the afternoon of September 6 and certain to draw enormous crowds hoping to shake the President’s hand. Fearful for McKinley’s safety, Cortelyou urged him to reconsider. But McKinley pooh-poohed his worries. “I have no enemies,” he serenely declared. “Why should I fear?”

At fifty-eight years old and six months into his second term, McKinley was, in fact, a widely beloved leader—the country’s most popular President since Lincoln. Even so, Cortelyou’s anxiety was far from unfounded. At a time when Pennsylvania coal miners made less than $400 a year while millionaire industrialists dined from solid gold plates and smoked cigars wrapped in hundred-dollar bills, the country was seething with labor unrest. Only a short time earlier, a Secret Service operative named Moretti had managed to infiltrate an Anarchist cell in New Jersey and uncovered an international plot to kill members of the ruling elite—two of whom, Empress Elizabeth of Austria and King Humbert of Italy, had already been assassinated by the summer of 1901.

Desperate to dissuade McKinley from holding the planned public reception, Cortelyou tried a final tack. At best, he argued, the President would be able to shake hands with only a few of the thousands who would undoubtedly show up to greet him. The rest would go away deeply disappointed.

Once again, however, McKinley brushed aside the objection. “Well,” he said, “they’ll know I tried, anyhow.”

In the end, Cortelyou was forced to bow to his
chief’s wishes. Before the special train departed for Buffalo, however, he made sure to fire off a telegram to local officials, warning them that no security precaution was to be spared during the President’s planned two-day trip to their city.