Fatal (22 page)

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However devout Jane’s wish for obscurity may have been, she would never be anonymous again. A hundred years ago, no less than today, the press was only too happy to cater to the public’s perennial craving for sensationalism. The major difference between then and now was technological. In the era before CNN and CourtTV (or, for that matter, radio bulletins and newsreels), people had to settle for print. In the weeks following her arrest, the Boston papers—the
Globe
,
Post
,
Herald
,
Traveler
,
Daily Advertiser
,
Morning Journal,
and
Evening Transcript
—devoted lavish attention to the Toppan case, describing each new development in minute detail and accompanying their stories with crude photographic portraits of the accused multi-murderess and engraved illustrations of the unfolding events.

Every vague rumor, wild speculation, and trivial detail of Jane’s life was dished out for the titillation of the public. In an article headlined “Feared by Her Playmates,” the
Boston Globe
—citing an unnamed and clearly not very reliable source—claimed that “in her childhood days, Miss Toppan’s little playmates came to have a certain fear of her, and the result was that she had no intimates as a girl.” The same article reported—as though it were unassailable proof of her aberrant nature—that as Jane grew older, “one of her peculiarities was to refrain from partaking of any breakfast save a cup of coffee.” Equally inconsequential was a story headlined “Miss Toppan’s Clothing,”
which broke the less-than-earthshaking fact that most of her personal effects had been left behind in Amherst, where they were being “closely guarded by the Nichols family.”

Everyone even remotely connected to Jane was sought out by reporters. There was L. W. Ferdinand, for example, the gentleman who had briefly employed her in the summer of 1896, when she had accompanied his family to Cataumet and first fallen in love with the resort. Interviewed at his home in Cambridge, Ferdinand was asked if he “could throw any light upon the Davis case and the personality of Miss Toppan.” “No I can’t,” was his reply. His complete lack of useful information did not prevent the
Globe
from devoting an entire story to Ferdinand under the headline, “He Rented the Cottage.”

Ferdinand wasn’t the only tangential figure to find his name in the papers. Another was a Chelmsford woman named Lottie Parkhurst, a telegraph operator at the Middlesex Street station. Describing herself as “an intimate friend of Miss Toppan for many years,” Miss Parkhurst avowed that her confidence in Jane’s good character was such “that I would as readily have suspected my own sister of wrongdoing.” She did note, however, that “several years” earlier, her friend had been “jilted by a young man to whom she was engaged”—a “severe disappointment” that (so Miss Parkhurst implied) might well have started Jane on the road to multiple murder.

Other informants preferred to maintain their anonymity. A resident of Lowell—identified in the
Globe
as “one of the oldest women in the First Trinitarian Congregational Church”—described the peculiar changes she had recently noticed in Jane. “I have
known Jennie Toppan since she was girl,” this grandam declared. “What has come over her I do not know . . . I saw her at the harvest supper in the First Trinitarian Congregational Church vestry. She passed me without speaking, but I thought she was very pale. Her conduct that night surprised me, as she was always very jolly.”

Another person who had recently had a surprising encounter with Jane was a gentleman named Drewett, who had run into her early on the morning of October 1, right after she’d been turned out of the Brigham house. According to Drewett, Jane—who was making her way on foot across the little bridge spanning the Merrimack River—told him that Brigham had thrown her out because of a letter she had sent to the wife of the Reverend Mr. Kennegott. Apparently in response to some unspecified snub, Jane had composed an abusive note in which she “used very plain language [and] told Mrs. Kennegott just what she thought of her.” When Brigham—a deacon in Reverend Kennegott’s church—got wind of what Jane had done, he had commanded her to pack up and leave.

At least that was Jane’s version of events leading to her expulsion. Drewett himself had no further light to shed on the matter other than to say that “Miss Toppan’s story had sounded very strange to me.”

The press was especially interested, of course, in people closely connected to the case, beginning with Oramel Brigham himself. After a lifetime of obscurity, the elderly deacon and baggage master—rumored to have been the object of Nurse Toppan’s desire—suddenly found himself in newspapers all across the state, his name in the headlines, his image plastered on page one. The widely reprinted portrait showed a stuffy-looking gentleman with a high, balding dome, full
white muttonchops, and a look of bland benevolence.

The relentlessly proper, high-minded personality reflected in this picture was conveyed in his remarks concerning Jane. Despite her alleged crimes against him—poisoning his food, attempting to blackmail him into marriage—Brigham refused to speak ill of her, insisting that he felt “only the greatest charity toward Miss Toppan.”

According to Brigham, there was only one reasonable explanation for Jane’s recent behavior. “There is no doubt in my mind,” he told reporters, “that she was addicted to the morphine habit. This is a habit that a great many professional nurses unconsciously get into. It is certainly a very sad occurrence. In justice to her, however, I think it is best not to tell all I know concerning her actions before the trial is held.”

The assertion that Jane was addicted to morphine was, if not actively rejected, at least called into question by another important figure in the case: Dr. William H. Lathrop, Brigham’s family physician, who had been summoned to treat Jane after her suicide attempts. Like Brigham, Dr. Lathrop was the soul of discretion in his public comments, though he clearly disagreed with the deacon on several key points.

Whereas Brigham expressed “little doubt that Miss Toppan is insane,” Lathrop believed that attributing her crimes to “mental imbalance” was “a charitable view . . . of her case.” Certainly, he insisted, “she showed no sign of aberration” when he was treating her. He declared, moreover, that he had “no personal knowledge of her [alleged] morphine habit.”

What seemed to interest Lathrop most about the case were its forensic implications. Indeed, in an extended
interview with a reporter for the
Globe
, Lathrop used the occasion to ride his favorite hobby-horse—his opposition to the practice of cremation.

Lathrop was of the firm (and not entirely unjustified) opinion that “there are many more cases of willful poisoning than either the public or the medical profession have any idea of, and there have been some instances where bodies have been cremated under circumstances that, to my mind, were exceedingly suspicious.” Such cases, he continued,

do not, as a rule, occur among the poorer or more ignorant classes, but among the more intelligent, and the deed is likely to be done by persons who not only have some knowledge of the action of poisons but have intelligence enough to cleverly conceal their work.

Arsenic is a favorite agency with such persons, partly because it is about the easiest poison to obtain, and partly because it is practically tasteless. In the case of a body which has been buried in the usual manner, traces of arsenical poisoning may be detected a long time after interment, but in the process of cremation, the arsenic is absolutely dissipated.

There was only one way, according to Lathrop, to stem the epidemic of arsenic murder: by making cremations illegal and performing compulsory autopsies on every fresh corpse. “This is a very important point that should be looked into both by our lawmakers and physicians,” Lathrop declared.

He concluded his interview by taking issue with Oramel Brigham on one final point. Contrary to the
latter’s conviction that he had been poisoned the previous summer, Lathrop stuck to his own belief that “Mr. Brigham’s illness was cholera morbus.” There was absolutely “nothing in his case to indicate arsenical poisoning,” he insisted.

Lathrop’s defense of his original opinion was, he claimed, a matter of simple justice. “It is not fair to the woman to state absolutely that Mr. Brigham’s own illness was due to the fact that he had been poisoned by his nurse.” Still—though Jane was certainly entitled to the presumption of innocence—Lathrop’s main concern appeared to be his own good name. To have misdiagnosed a case of arsenic poisoning was embarrassing (at best) for any physician, but particularly for one who presented himself as something of an expert on the crime.

One man who was unable to defend his somewhat tarnished professional reputation was Lathrop’s medical colleague Dr. Leonard Latter—the Cataumet physician who had attended Alden Davis and his daughters without ever having his suspicions aroused. There was a good reason for his silence. Just ten days before Jane Toppan’s arrest, Dr. Latter had died—of natural causes, unlike his three eradicated patients.

For investigators working on the Toppan case, his passing was a blow. For Jane, however, it was extremely convenient. Though publicly professing sorrow over his death, nothing could have suited her more. Without Latter around to contradict her, she could claim that he held the key to her exoneration.

On November 2, she did just that, issuing a statement through her attorney, James S. Murphy: “I know nothing about the poisoning either of Mrs. Gibbs or any members of the Davis family,” she declared,
repeating her claims of innocence. “I suppose they all died of natural causes. I am willing to tell all about these cases. I have nothing to conceal. I am sorry that Dr. Latter is dead. Were he alive, I would not have the slightest difficulty in clearing my skirts.”

When we have told all we know to support the charge we have made against Jane Toppan, the Robinson poisoning case, the most famous that has ever been heard in a Massachusetts court, will sink into insignificance.

—S
TATE
D
ETECTIVE
J
OSEPHUS
W
HITNEY

T
HOUGH
J
ANE HAD HER SUPPORTERS—SOCIAL
acquaintances from Cambridge and Cataumet with fond recollections of her “jolly” personality, a few former patients who had recovered under her care—her guilt was never questioned by the press. On the contrary, each day’s papers carried new and more damning accusations. By Friday, November 1, the list of her suspected victims had climbed to seven: the four members of the Davis family, plus three women connected to Oramel Brigham—his wife, Elizabeth; his sister, Mrs. Edna Bannister; and his housekeeper, Florence Calkins. As the apparent death toll mounted, it seemed clear that—as the
Boston Post
proclaimed—Nurse Toppan was nothing less than “a new Lucretia Borgia.”

Fifteen years earlier, of course, the public had been riveted by another female serial poisoner who had also been branded a latter-day Borgia—Sarah Jane Robinson, whose victims included her husband, sister, brother-in-law, nephew, and as many as five of her own children. Languishing in a solitary cell in the East
Cambridge jail—where she’d been confined since her death sentence was commuted—Mrs. Robinson had largely been forgotten by the outside world. Now, with interest in the Toppan case running so high, an enterprising reporter for the
Boston Record
sought an interview with the former “poison fiend” in the hope of learning her thoughts about New England’s newest celebrity killer.

Managing to gain admission to her cell during an inspection by the prison commissioners, the reporter found the forty-five-year-old multi-murderess in serene spirits-—getting on “very nicely,” as she herself declared. Apart from her jailhouse pallor and faded hair, she seemed healthy and content. Indeed, she had put on a good deal of flesh, a fact stressed again and again by the reporter, who appeared to be somewhat obsessed by her weight gain (or, as he euphemistically put it, “her tendency to
embonpoint
”). It seemed to strike him as a bitter irony that she should grow so fat in jail—this monstrous mother whose own children had died convulsing in digestive torment from the lethal meals she fed them.

From listening to her speak, of course, no one would have guessed at her pathology. She was perfectly composed as she conversed with the reporter. “Not a shadow of the seven relatives she sent to death with arsenic ever seems to float across her mind,” he noted. “Never a sign of remorse, never a mention of their former existence to show that she ever thinks of her crimes.” In the “calm blue depths of her eyes,” the young man could detect no indication of madness. A stranger meeting her on the street, he asserted, “would see in her the typical church worker.”

Her tiny cell was sparsely furnished with a bureau,
table, washstand, and bedstead. The walls were decorated with engraved portraits of her murdered children, clipped from newspapers, along with various small artworks brought by her son, Charles—the “last of his branch, the only one to survive her terrible death-dealing poison.” The dutiful young man still visited his mother regularly, conversing with her through the mail-slot-sized opening in the steel door of her cell. Occasionally, Mrs. Robinson received visits from other callers, too—“religious people” who, in their “false zeal,” believed that she had been “found unjustly guilty.”