Fatal (28 page)

How can I be insane? When I killed the people, I knew I was doing wrong.

—J
ANE
T
OPPAN

G
IVEN THE PERENNIAL HUMAN FASCINATION WITH
sensational crime, it’s hardly surprising that the New England press played up the Toppan story for all it was worth. Then as now, serial murder sold papers, and the competition among Boston’s various dailies was intense. The
Globe
, the
Post
, the
Herald
, the
Traveler
, the
Transcript
, the
Journal
, the
Daily Advertiser
, the
Morning Journal
, the
Evening Transcript
—all vied with each other for the attention (and the pennies) of the public. Every wild rumor and unsubstantiated charge became the basis of a blaring headline, and when dramatic new revelations were in short supply, reporters occasionally resorted to sheer fabrication (several supposedly exclusive jailhouse interviews with Jane, for example, turned out to be completely trumped-up).

With the handing-down of the indictments, however, the Toppan story disappeared for a time from the front pages. Only one significant bit of news found its way into the papers during the winter. In January, Chief Justice Mason granted James Murphy’s request and named a new lawyer—Fred M. Bixby—to defend Jane. Justice of the Brockton police court and a summer resident of Hyannis, Bixby was known—in
the words of the
Brockton Enterprise
—for his “good working knowledge of the law, good abilities as a public speaker, and a remarkable capacity for seeing a point quickly and turning it promptly to his own advantage. He has the gift of humor, he can wound with ridicule, and he can be impressively eloquent when occasion demands.” He had served as junior counsel in a case that had received a good deal of local attention some years earlier—the trial of a man named Arthur Albee for the murder of a barber named Leaman. Thanks in large measure to Bixby’s efforts, Albee had been acquitted.

Apart from Bixby’s appointment, however, there were no new developments in the Toppan case for months following her arraignment. It was not until the spring of 1902 that her name reappeared in the news. On the last day of March, papers reported that Jane had undergone an intensive psychiatric examination by a panel of experts, who had determined that she was insane.

Contrary to the earlier statements of District Attorney Holmes—who had confidently predicted that her trial would be “one of the longest” ever conducted in Massachusetts—it now appeared likely that Jane Toppan might not be tried at all.

•   •   •

Dr. Henry Rust Stedman was one of Boston’s most distinguished psychiatrists (or “alienists,” as they were commonly referred to back then). A native of Boston, he received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1871, then entered its medical school, graduating four years later at the age of twenty-six after surgical and medical service at Massachusetts General and Boston City hospitals.

After a period of private practice, he embarked on the study of psychiatry. He spent five years as Assistant Superintendent of the Danvers State Hospital for the Insane before moving to Great Britain, where he served as clinical assistant in the Edinburgh Royal Asylum and the West Riding Asylum at Yorkshire, England.

By 1884, he was back home in Boston, where he established the Bournewood Hospital, a private facility for the treatment of nervous and mental diseases. For thirty-four years, he would serve as superintendent and resident physician at Bournewood (which remains in operation to this day). A frequent contributor to the literature of mental diseases, Stedman served as president of the American Neurological Association, the New England Society of Psychiatry, and the Boston Society of Psychiatry and Neurology. Often called upon for his medicolegal opinions, he had taken part in many highly publicized trials.

Sometime at the beginning of the new year, District Attorney Holmes and Jane’s new senior counsel, Fred Bixby, approached Attorney General Parker with a proposal. To avoid the usual, befuddling courtroom situation—in which the opposing sides trotted out their respective expert witnesses to offer completely contradictory testimony—Bixby and Holmes wished to appoint an impartial commission of “insanity experts” to diagnose Jane’s mental condition “with reference to her responsibility.”

After considering the matter for several weeks, Parker agreed. Stedman was a natural choice for the commission. On March 20, 1902—along with two other prominent alienists, doctors George F. Jelly of Boston and Hosea M. Quinby, superintendent of the
Worcester Hospital for the Insane—he arrived at the Barnstable jail to conduct a series of interviews with the infamous killer nurse.

At first, Jane seemed suspicious of the doctors, treating them warily and giving terse, grudging answers to their questions. It wasn’t long, however, before she loosened up and (as Stedman later explained in a paper he presented to the American Medico-Psychological Association) “talked freely, volubly, and intelligently.” The calm, almost breezy, acceptance of her situation that reporters had noted since her arrest was very much in evidence. She appeared, as Stedman put it, “quite indifferent to her situation, and seemed to regard our visits as pleasant breaks in her monotonous life.”

Several aspects of Jane’s unwholesome personality quickly manifested themselves. There was, to begin with, the deep well of spite—even malignity—that lay just beneath the genial surface. “Her utter mendacity and disposition to speak slurringly of even her best friends and to make accusations against them, almost without exception—to praise one minute and blame the next—was very marked,” Stedman noted.

Though not clinically delusional, she was certainly a pathological liar, making many of the same outrageous claims she had been asserting since childhood: that her father had resided in China, for example, and that her sister had broken the heart of an English lord. She also spoke emphatically “of her horror of the dead, which was so great that she sometimes fell senseless at the mere sight of a corpse”—this despite the irrefutable fact that, as Stedman noted, “she had often laid out dead bodies as a matter of course” in her capacity as private nurse.

About her guilt Jane also continued to prevaricate—though only for a while. At first, she stoutly denied that she had committed any of the crimes with which she was charged. Finally, however, the truth came spilling out.

Stedman and his colleagues had arrived in Barnstable knowing full well that Nurse Toppan was a criminal of an usually—even uniquely—pernicious stripe. They had, after all, been given full access to the evidence collected by the prosecution since the start of its investigation. And so they were unsurprised when Jane freely confessed to both pyromania and multiple murder. Even the number of homicides she initially admitted to—twelve—did not come as a shock, since government investigators had concluded by then that she was responsible for at least that number of deaths.

What Stedman and his colleagues weren’t wholly prepared for was the manner in which she related her crimes, as well as certain details that she divulged for the first time. These factors, even more than the sheer number of her enormities, would ultimately determine their diagnosis.

Once Jane started to speak about her murders, she did so, in Stedman’s words, with “utter calmness.” She described the deaths of her victims in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, adding what the psychiatrist described as occasional “eulogistic remarks,” i.e., fond reminiscences of the patients who had met such tragic deaths. She spoke of them as her friends, and “denied any hostility on either her side or theirs.”

At the same time, she displayed “not the slightest sign of remorse” for her murders. On the contrary, “for much of the time during the interviews she manifested a lack of seriousness and often a levity which
was in marked contrast to what was to be expected of one who had been brought to confess so many heinous crimes.”

Even Jane seemed somewhat nonplused by her lack of normal human responses. “When I try to picture it,” she told Stedman, “I say to myself, ‘I have poisoned Minnie Gibbs, my dear friend. I have poisoned Mrs. Gordon. I have poisoned Mr. Davis and Mrs. Davis.’ This does not convey anything to me, and when I try to sense the condition of the children and all the consequences, I cannot realize what an awful thing it is. Why don’t I feel sorry and grieve over it? I cannot make sense of it at all.”

When pressed for details of her crimes, Jane was only of limited help. She could not remember all the specifics because murder had become so routine. Poisoning, as she put it, “had become a habit of her life.”

Those facts she did provide, however, were deeply unsettling. There was nothing rash or frenzied about her murders. She planned them carefully and carried them out in a perfectly “calm and clear-headed” way. After doctoring a glass of mineral water with poison and making sure that her victim drank every last drop of the lethal brew, “she always experienced great relief and went to bed and slept soundly.” In the same bizarrely nonchalant tone, she revealed to the startled psychiatrists that she was in the habit of “laying in bed with the patient she had just poisoned.” Even more grotesque was her admission that, after administering poison to Minnie Gibbs, she had “taken [the latter’s ten-year-old son, Jesse] to bed with her.” This claim seemed so incredible that investigators subsequently took pains to verify it by interviewing the boy, and in the paper he later presented to the American Medico-Psychological
Association, Stedman went out of his way to emphasize that this appallingly perverse incident was “
a fact
.”

Stedman and his colleagues, however, were even more shocked by the motive Jane finally gave for her crimes. When pressed as to “what prompted her acts,” the plump middle-aged spinster let loose “with a shameless recital of a story of sexual excitement occurring in the presence of a dying person.” She was driven to murder by “an irresistible sexual impulse.” This need had grown increasingly powerful over the past year, and during the preceding summer she “had let herself go.”

So “startling” was this admission (in Stedman’s words) that he and his colleagues were reluctant to believe it. They had never heard of anything like it. There is something quaint in Stedman’s insistence that—as he wrote in his paper—Jane’s “representations as to the nature of this impulse and the conditions attending it were so at variance with any known form of sexual perversion that feigning was suspected by her interviewers.” Clearly, these proper physicians from Puritan Boston were unfamiliar with KrafftEbing’s
Psychopathia Sexualis
, whose pages are full of precisely such creatures as Jane Toppan—homicidal sadists who derive the greatest ecstasy from making other people die.

Beyond what Jane herself described as “the desire to experience sexual excitement by killing people,” she had no explanation for her criminal behavior. “Something comes over me, I don’t know what it is,” she said. “I seem to have a sort of paralysis of thought and reason. I have an uncontrollable desire to give poison without regard to consequences. I have no objection
against telling my feelings, but I don’t know my own mind. I don’t know why I do these things.”

•   •   •

It did not take long for Stedman and his colleagues to reach a consensus on Jane’s mental state. Their joint opinion was reported to the attorney general during the last week of March. Its main points, as summarized by Stedman, were as follows:

1. The prisoner, Jane Toppan, comes of a family in which intemperance and mental weakness and disorder are prominent disease features.

2. Her utter lack of moral sense has been evident from childhood in her incorrigible proclivity to falsehood, dishonesty, and mischief-making, general unreliability and probable theft. The good moral, mental, and religious training which she received in her youth resulted in no modification of her character, and were practically thrown away on her in that respect.

3. Her moral insensibility is further apparent in the absence of sense of fear before, during, or after the commission of her crime, and of remorse, sorrow, or genuine affection at any time. This defect is even more forcibly shown by the fact that her chief victims were her especial friends.

4. Her lack of any appreciation of her situation, her levity under such circumstances, and her inability to realize the enormity of her deeds are strong evidence of mental weakness.

5. That an irresistible propensity propelled her to crimes of arson and murder is shown by
the great frequency and variety of such acts and her continuance in them, regardless of consequences.

6. There is an absence of any apparent motive for her criminal acts in some cases, and inadequacy of motive in many of the others. This is shown in the total lack of evidence of pecuniary gain or satisfaction in revenge as a rule, except minor thefts and transient enmity. These would be powerless with sane criminals as an incentive to habitual homicide.