Fatal (33 page)

In Jane’s case these dreadful circumstances were exacerbated by another factor that made her life in Taunton even more nightmarish. She was immured
within the walls of a lunatic asylum, surrounded by—and treated no differently from—the hopelessly insane. And yet, she herself appeared to be in full possession of her rational faculties. Her grim situation was vividly described by a reporter from the
Boston Globe
who traveled to Taunton a few months after Jane was committed.

It was an overcast morning in late October when the newsman made his visit. He found Jane in the sitting room at the far end of the third-floor corridor, in the section of the hospital known as the “mild patient’s ward.” The reporter did not approach her. Rather, he studied her as unobtrusively as possible from a short distance away. The superintendent had warned him that Jane was “very sensitive to curious stares.” And indeed, when Jane realized that she was being observed by the reporter, she “changed her seat to a more secluded part of the room and quietly turned her chair so that she could not be seen so easily.”

Several dozen women, perhaps forty in all, were wandering about the ward. These were the lost and shattered souls among whom Jane now spent her life—haggard beings with wild hair and unkempt robes who whispered to themselves or muttered incoherently as they moved aimlessly up and down the hallway. “Their eyes,” the newsman noted, “were not the eyes of sane people.”

Amid these piteous creatures Jane Toppan, the newsman wrote, made a “startling contrast.” She was “very neatly dressed, in a modest, dark-brown gown. Her hair is properly combed and done up. She is never excited. She never walks about restlessly.”

At one point, the ward supervisor entered the sitting
room, carrying a tray with labeled medicine glasses. Except for Jane, the patients “glared uncomprehendingly at the official or took no notice of her at all, but continued their restless walking hither and thither.” Jane alone responded. She “rose quietly from the leather bench and said simply, in the voice of a perfectly sane person, ‘I am Miss Toppan.’ ”

This small, obliging act was typical of Jane’s behavior. According to the attendants, Jane had “never given the slightest trouble. She is courtesy and consideration itself. Whatever little service they do for her now and then she acknowledges with a sweet, gracious winning smile.”

To the reporter’s eye, Jane seemed perfectly sane. It was this very fact that made her situation so nightmarish. In many ways, she was worse off than the other inmates of her ward, who were, at least, mercifully “unconscious of their own position,” and who were granted certain privileges forbidden to Jane. “Unlike the other patients,” the newsman noted, “Jane Toppan cannot go out of doors and walk about on the lawn or, under the eye of a watchful attendant, wander among the cool trees of the grove. With quiet resignation, she sits hour after hour, day after day, in the spacious sitting room, whence she may look out on the grounds of the institution. Occasionally, she rises with a sigh and sits down at the end of the leather seat which runs along the side of the big room. From this vantage point, she may look upon her muttering, disheveled sister patients who ramble restlessly up and down the corridor. This may or may not be her diversion; there can be no other.”

As he left the hospital, the reporter was struck with the sheer awfulness of her predicament. “An ordinary
prison—or even death in the electric chair—would be wonderfully preferable to her life where she is,” he wrote. For if Jane Toppan were truly as sane as she appeared, then her entombment within the walls of the sprawling lunatic asylum was nothing less than “a hell on earth.”

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

—S
HAKESPEARE
,
King Henry the Sixth, Part III

I
N POINT OF FACT (AND CONTRARY TO THE SPECULATIONS
of the man from the
Globe
), Jane did not regard her circumstances as particularly unpleasant—not, at any rate, during her first few years at the asylum. Indeed, she adjusted quite comfortably to institutional life. According to the Medical Superintendent of the hospital, Dr. J. P. Brown, “She was, as a rule, sociable, cheerful, amiable, and spasmodically helpful, and spent much of her time reading. The change from the seclusion of the jail to the more active life of a large hospital ward interested her. In this period, she grew fat and was in excellent physical condition. . . . She soon developed a fondness for the company of the patients, in preference to that of the nurses.”

That asylum life agreed with Jane was confirmed in a letter she wrote to an old friend in Lowell on the first anniversary of her commitment: “Just think, I’ve been here a year and find myself fond of the people and warmly attached to the place in some ways. Yes, we are well cared for, kindly and considerately.”

Of course, there were certain details she withheld from her correspondent. It was not merely the “kind and considerate” treatment she received from the staff that made life in Taunton so appealing to Jane. The
hospital had also proved congenial to her perverse sexual needs. In an early psychiatric report on Jane, Dr. Brown noted that she had developed a “particular fondness” for a “demented” female patient who was given to public masturbation—“open self-abuse,” in Brown’s Victorian terminology. On several occasions, nurses making their nightly rounds had caught Jane in bed with this patient.

In her earliest interviews with Brown, Jane seemed frank and cooperative, exhibiting a genuine curiosity about her own mental condition. She was willing to concede that she was insane, but seemed sincerely perplexed as to what her insanity consisted of. “I don’t appear like these other patients,” she told Roberts. “I can read a book intelligently. I don’t have bad thoughts, so I don’t see where moral degeneracy comes in.”

If Jane seemed puzzled by the nature of her illness, Brown himself had little doubt. In a report entered into the hospital records in April 1903, he provided a ringing affirmation of the diagnosis initially given by Dr. Stedman and his colleagues. In his description of Jane’s mentality and behavior, Brown sketches a portrait of a classic criminal psychopath, a serial killer who derived open pleasure from the suffering of others, and who—far from feeling any remorse for her enormities—took positive pride in her reputation as the most heinous poisoner in the annals of crime:

My study of and observation of Jane Toppan since she has been in the hospital gives me the opinion that her mental disease should be classified as moral or affective insanity. She seems to me wholly devoid of moral sense, or a clear apprehension of what is right or wrong as to her
relations to other people or to society. In all my conversations with her respecting the homicides, which she freely admits, she has exhibited no remorse, regret or sorrow for any of them, but rather a sense of pride and satisfaction that the number was so large as to give her distinction above all other poisoners whose histories are known.

This lack of pity and sorrow for others in trouble or distress has been evident whenever any difficulty has occurred on the ward between patients, or between a nurse and patients. At such times, she has manifested a good deal of glee, and laughed like a silly child, but never expressed any sympathy or pity for the patient or person in distress or trouble. Trouble or pain for others seems to excite in her merriment and joy instead of sorrow.

In speaking of her homicides, she says that at the time she committed them she was not conscious of any crime or doing any wrong for which she should be punished; that the thought of doing wrong did not enter her mind and gave her no concern whatsoever; and at the present time she has apparently no comprehension that the decree of the court was right and just.

Though Brown classifies Jane’s condition as a disease of her moral faculties, it wasn’t long before she started to show symptoms of far more extensive mental degeneration. Indeed, even at the time of his report, she had begun to manifest increasingly erratic behavior. “During the past three or four months,” Brown noted, “she has seemed more moody and emotional,
either depressed or exhilarated at short intervals, and has exhibited less self-control, and with it she gives one the impression that her mind is weakening, and that she has less mental grasp of past and present events, and of her relation to the surroundings. Of this she seems to be painfully conscious herself. She has been observed to be laughing immoderately to herself, and when it is noticed by others, she blushes as though she would conceal it, and seems confused.”

Her increasingly tenuous hold on reality was illustrated in a series of letters she wrote to her Lowell correspondent between May and October 1903. In the first, she strikes a note of bizarre joviality as she describes how much fun she has been having lately: “I’ve had a real good time in the sewing room for the past two days. I never can say that I like to [do] a thing until I get some fun out of it, and I really had quite a lot of fun. . . . Truly, I had a great, good time at the Barnstable jail after the first ten days, even then I did not have a bad time.”

The next letter, written a month later, is even more manic. Referring to an unspecified incident that occurred in the sewing room, she writes: “It has left me rolling on the floor with laughter. I begin to feel like rolling on the floor now. I like to feel that way. I am having a big time, big in the sewing room.”

A few weeks later, however, her tone had become far more somber: “Don’t ever ask me in your letters what I mean by what I write, I don’t know myself. I am talking through my hat. . . . I don’t like the locality I live in, either.”

Shortly after the composition of this letter, in July 1903, Jane had a wild outburst in the night, waking the entire ward with such a “violent fit of screaming
for no obvious cause” (in Brown’s words) that she had to be physically restrained by attendants. In the next letter written to her Lowell friend, her sense of identity has undergone a dramatic shift. She no longer refers to herself as Jane Toppan—reared since girlhood among the Unitarians of her adoptive home—but as the Boston-born Irish Catholic Honora Kelley: “I meditate and praise and pray all the time, and shall be ready at the end to take vows and become Mother Honora of the Seven Wounds.”

Had it not been composed by a “moral monster” undeserving of sympathy, there would be something positively poignant about the last letter in this series, written during one of Jane’s increasingly rare periods of lucidity: “I do grieve to be in this state, I do, when I have thought-force to think it out. When I am discontented, I ask myself what I want, and I don’t know. A change of any kind seems torture to me even to think of, and why I want to live this way I don’t know.”

•   •   •

The process of Jane’s mental deterioration was closely charted not only by the hospital’s medical superintendent but by Dr. Stedman, a trustee of the asylum who visited on frequent occasions. For the eminent alienist, Jane’s case offered a unique opportunity to shed light on the “intricate disorder” of moral insanity.

Stedman, along with others, had a theory about this phenomenon. It was his belief that there was “no such thing as a mental disease affecting the
moral
sphere alone.” “Intellectual involvement in some form,” he insisted, was an “essential feature of the disease.” Those who suffered from moral insanity, he felt, frequently developed “definite delusions, especially of suspicion
and persecution.” In most cases, “their mental impairment advanced to noticeable dementia.” In the progress of Jane’s disease, Stedman found a striking confirmation of his thesis, which he eventually set forth in a published paper, “A Case of Moral Insanity with Repeated Homicides and Incendiarism, and Late Development of Delusions.”

As Stedman documents in this paper, within a few years of her commitment Jane had plunged into a state of active paranoia. By early 1904, she “had become generally antagonistic towards all about her, as well as highly suspicious and irritable.” In contrast to her earlier letters, praising the asylum and proclaiming how “warmly attached” she was to the place, she now “wrote voluminous tirades against the hospital and its management, treatment of patients, etc., making wholesale and absurd accusations and denunciations, some of them of an entirely delusional nature.”

In one letter—addressed to her old friend from Lowell—she wrote: “Do you know, the supervisor put some poison in my tea. A patient saw her and told me and I didn’t touch it. The lady heard the supervisor say she had fixed Jane Toppan this time.”

In her increasingly psychotic view, it was not just the hospital staff that had it in for her. Everyone was part of the conspiracy—even her devoted correspondent from Lowell. “Sometimes it strikes me you are one of the gang,” Jane wrote to this person in early 1904. “If you have fooled me also, I shall say damn you. Oh, damn you, anyway.” She made a similar accusation against her lawyer and childhood friend, James Stuart Murphy, denouncing him as one of the “gang” out to “fix” her.

The sewing-room staff—for whom she had professed such affection in her earlier letters—also came
in for attack. “I don’t wish to associate with the low and vulgar people employed in the sewing room,” she announced to Dr. Brown. “They talked about me before the other patients in a low and vulgar manner.” She then proceeded to describe (as Brown told Stedman) “a revolting scene, impossible on the face of it, enacted by the two employees in charge—self-respecting, modest women—and gave an account of talk and actions on their part of the vilest kind, in a manner highly suggestive of delusions, of persecution, and hallucinations of hearing.”