Fatal (29 page)

7. The prisoner’s disease-history and present mental state correspond with a well-recognized form of mental disease of a moral type due to congenital degeneration, in which there may be little or no intellectual disturbance that is apparent to the ordinary observer.

The mental features described in this summation—the congenital duplicity; the complete lack of any “moral sense”; the inability to feel either empathy or remorse; the bizarre sangfroid under intensely stressful conditions; the absence of any apparent “intellectual disturbance”—are, of course, the classic hallmarks of what we now call the psychopathic personality. In the era of Jane Toppan, that phrase had not yet come into use. Back then, the condition was technically known as “moral insanity” (or “moral imbecility”).

In his paper to the American Medico-Psychological Association, Stedman devotes a considerable amount of space to defining of that term, which he describes in the following way:

These patients have good memory and understanding, ability to reason and contrive, much cleverness and cunning, and a general appearance of rationality, coexistent with very deficient control, absence of moral sense and human sentiments and feelings, perverted and brutal instincts, and propensities for criminal acts of various kinds which may be perpetrated deliberately and cleverly planned, yet committed with little or no motive and regardless of the consequences to themselves and others.

It would be hard to find a more concise description of a criminal psychopath than this one. The real question, however, had to do with Jane’s responsibility. Stedman and his colleagues had no doubt that Nurse Toppan was—as they stated in their report—a “moral monster.” But was she legally insane? Jane herself insisted that she could not possibly be insane because she knew that she was “doing wrong” and had gone to great lengths to avoid detection. And, indeed—since sanity is generally defined as the ability to distinguish right from wrong—it is exceptionally difficult for even the most egregious serial killers to plead insanity for precisely that reason. However horrific their atrocities, the mere fact that they have taken pains to conceal their crimes and evade capture proves that they know that they have been engaged in wrongdoing.

Stedman and his colleagues recognized that Jane’s intellectual faculties were unaffected by her moral degeneracy—that, in perpetrating her crimes, she had exercised “a cool judgment, sagacious and sound” (to quote from Herman Melville’s memorable description
of the psychopathic villain of
Billy Budd
). And so the conclusion they ultimately reached was somewhat surprising: “Therefore,” they wrote, “we are of the opinion that the prisoner, Jane Toppan, was insane and irresponsible at the time of the homicide with which she is charged, and is so now; that her disease being constitutional, she will never recover; and that if ever at large again she would be a constant menace to the community.”

•   •   •

Though the shocking details of the report were kept from the public, the gist of it became known in mid-April. As the
Barnstable Patriot
announced on the 14th, Nurse Toppan had been “officially adjudged insane by the three alienists secured by the State to investigate her mental condition.”

The immediate and general belief was that there would be no trial. “It is expected that the Judge of the Superior Court will be asked by the District Attorney to dispose of Miss Toppan’s case by committing her to an asylum,” the
Patriot
reported. For the residents of Barnstable, this came as welcome news. For months, people had been grumbling about the fiscal burden of the case. The investigation had already cost taxpayers a considerable sum, and the local newspaper estimated that “if Miss Toppan is tried, the expense to Barnstable County will be in the vicinity of $15,000”—a substantial amount in 1902 dollars.

It was with a mixture of disappointment and relief that the citizens of Barnstable read the story that the
Patriot
ran on April 28. A trial would be held after all. After consulting with District Attorney Holmes and Fred Bixby, Attorney General Parker had “decided that Miss Toppan will be taken into court at Barnstable
and evidence given about the crimes with which she is charged and about her moral and mental condition.” Parker made this decision because he didn’t want to establish a precedent. “If Miss Toppan were committed without the evidence being passed upon by a jury,” he explained, “the same privilege might be demanded by some future defendant which the government might not feel like conceding.”

The good news was that the proceedings were not expected to take long. Fred Bixby told a reporter for the
Brockton Enterprise
, “The trial of Miss Toppan will be very brief. My client will presumably be found not guilty by reason of insanity and will then be committed to an asylum, either the Worcester Insane Hospital or the Taunton Insane Asylum—and if she goes to either, it will be to pass the remainder of her life.”

Her mania, as discovered by the medical commission, has no parallel in the history of extraordinary crimes and criminals in this country. To find an analogous case, one must go to the most degenerate localities of Europe and read the reports of scientists of most revolting passions that incited successions of murders that appeal only to psychologists.

—Boston Globe,
J
UNE
23, 1902

F
OR WEEKS PRECEDING THE START OF
N
URSE
T
OPPAN’S
trial, the people of Barnstable, it seemed, could talk of little else. Even the trial of the Pocasset fanatic Charles Freeman for the sacrificial murder of his four-year-old daughter hadn’t generated as much excitement. Sight-seers from up and down the Cape came to view the gray, Greek Revival courthouse, its four fluted columns half-concealed by shade trees. Even villagers who had passed by the building all their lives now paused to gaze at the place where the greatest murderess of the age would be brought before a jury during the last week of June 1902.

On the day before the trial, curiosity-seekers by the score poured into Barnstable. By Sunday evening, every vacant room within a mile of the courthouse had been rented out. The
Boston Post
reported that farmers were “sleeping in their kitchens and letting their own bedchambers.” Even so, there were not
nearly enough rooms to accommodate the crush of visitors. Dozens of people were forced to seek quarters in Hyannis, five miles away. Others chose to forgo lodgings at all. One party of women—determined to secure the best seats in the house—arrived from Truro late Sunday afternoon and camped out overnight on the courthouse lawn. To cater to the crowd, a lunch counter was set up in the corridor of the courthouse.

That the impending trial had provoked such intense fascination was only to be expected. Though the details of the alienists’ report had not been made public, enough information had leaked out to the public to make it clear that Jane Toppan was a monster whose crimes had no precedent—at least in this country. To find parallels to her atrocities, the
Boston Globe
suggested, one would have to turn to scientific accounts of European serial killers—degenerate foreigners whose “revolting passions” incited them to commit “successions of murders.” In America, there were no analogous cases at all—with one possible exception. “The nearest approach to it,” the
Post
noted, “is that of Jesse Pomeroy”—the notorious “Boston Boy-Fiend,” whose mutilation murders of young children, perpetrated in the early 1870s, had terrorized the city.

Despite the
Post
’s insistence that such “revolting” matters could “appeal only to psychologists,” these tantalizing hints about the appalling nature of Jane’s crimes were guaranteed to inflame the prurient interest of the God-fearing, law-abiding folk of New England. Those who flocked to Barnstable to have their morbid curiosity fully gratified, however, were doomed to disappointment. “So horrible is the plain,
unvarnished description of Miss Toppan’s homicidal mania,” declared the
Post
, “that it is doubtful if only the most general terms can be used to indicate its character to the jurors.”

Nevertheless, the journey to Barnstable was clearly worth the trouble for many people. Even if the juicy details of Jane’s atrocities were to be withheld from them, they would still get something deliciously titillating from the trip—a first-hand glimpse of one of the most depraved murderers the country had ever produced.

•   •   •

The village was astir early on June 23, a warm, sparkling Monday. The sun had barely risen when spectators began swarming into town. Within a few hours, the lawn that stretched between the jail and courthouse was packed. The jurors began arriving around 7:00
A.M.,
some by carriage, others on the morning train from Provincetown.

A second train—this one from Boston—steamed into the Barnstable depot at around 9:40
A.M.
Most of the court officials were on board, along with nearly all the witnesses, including Harry Gordon, Professor Wood, Mrs. Beulah Jacobs, Oramel Brigham, State Detective Whitney, and the three alienists, Drs. Stedman, Jelly, and Quinby.

The iron doors of the courthouse swung open at precisely nine o’clock. Within minutes the gallery was filled to capacity—the floor being reserved for the fifty-five prospective jurymen and nearly thirty-five witnesses. Shortly before 10:00, the two judges who were to hear the case—Charles U. Bell and Henry K. Braley—entered. Following the roll call of the jurors, Rev. Mr. Spence of the Unitarian church offered a
prayer. Attorney General Parker then asked that Assistant District Attorney General of Fall River be appointed to assist him. The request was promptly granted by the court.

Then, straining forward in their seats for a better view, the spectators fixed their eyes on the doorway to watch Jane Toppan make her entrance.

•   •   •

Prisoners were normally awakened at 6
A.M.,
but Jane was allowed to sleep late on the morning of the trial. The day was bound to be long and stressful, and the kind-hearted matron, Mrs. Cash, persuaded her husband to grant Jane an extra hour of rest.

When Mrs. Cash showed up with the breakfast tray, Jane seemed her usual composed, carefree—and ravenous—self. The hearty meals she had been devouring for the past eight months—combined with an almost complete lack of physical activity—had produced the inevitable result. Always plump, she now bordered on the obese, having gained nearly fifty pounds since her last appearance in public.

As Mrs. Cash seated herself on the chair beside the prisoner’s cot, Jane dug into the heaping plateful of eggs and hashed potatoes, making cheery small talk between mouthfuls. The coming events of the day seemed the last thing on her mind.

Indeed, for the past few weeks, Jane had seemed much less preoccupied with her looming trial than with her current literary undertaking. For months, she had been working on a book. It was not—as might have been expected—an autobiography or jailhouse memoir, but rather a love story. Since girlhood, Jane had been an avid reader of the cloyingly sentimental fiction of the day—books with titles like
A Noble
Heart
and
When Love Commands
. She had long aspired to become a writer of popular romance herself. Even on her long watches during her student-nursing days, she had often stolen off to a remote corner of the hospital and worked on her writing. At Cataumet, she was often seen “scribbling” in a notebook (as Captain Paul Gibbs told reporters).

With so much time on her hands, Jane had set about writing in earnest, and in recent weeks, her novel seemed to be all she could think about. Just the previous afternoon, when James Stuart Murphy had come by her cell to prepare her for the trial, he had found it difficult to get Jane to focus on the business at hand. All she wanted to discuss was the title of her book. She was debating among three possibilities and wanted to know which he thought was most “catchy”—
Maude’s Misery
,
Fair Fettered Florence
, or
Sweet Blue Eyes
. When Murphy had grown impatient and reminded her that there were more important matters at the moment, she had huffily replied that he, of all people, should take an interest in the book, since she planned to pay his fees with the profits. It was, after all, destined to be a bestseller.

Now, as Jane finished cleaning her plate, she informed Mrs. Cash that, after much consideration, she had definitely decided on
Sweet Blue Eyes
. The jailer’s kindly wife agreed that it was the best of the three titles. Having settled the matter to her satisfaction, Jane finally turned her attention to the trial.

By then, it was after 8:00
A.M.,
and she was expected in court in less than an hour.

Though her choices were extremely limited, she spent the next thirty minutes trying to decide what to
wear. She had only two dresses and three shirtwaists (all of which had been extensively altered to accommodate her expanded girth). Still, she couldn’t seem to settle on an outfit. She tried on each garment at least a dozen times. She was still having trouble making up her mind when her lawyers arrived to accompany her to the courthouse. In the end, she settled on a black dress with a white shirtwaist, a large black hat with a heavy veil and a garnish of forget-me-nots, and a white ribbon tied about her throat.