Fatal (34 page)

The real focus of her paranoia, however, was food. She became increasingly convinced that every member of the staff, from the ward nurses to Dr. Brown himself, was out to poison her.

“No, thank you, Dr. Brown,” she wrote to him in early 1904, after refusing to eat the beefsteak she had been served for dinner. “I will stick to bean soup and keep safe aboveground. Some steak strikes some people right. This steak is sure death.”

In another letter, dated March 1904, she wrote to James Stuart Murphy (who had recently been made her guardian):

I am the victim of nerve paralysis, the result of food. I have to eat or I am fed with a tube with nerve-paralyzing food that I choose from the tray. Oh, I think that you and Mr. Bixby were criminals to put me through this. It was an awful thing to do to any human being, and I have my opinion of everybody who takes a hand in it. I think as the nerves of my body get more benumbed, my brain becomes clearer to the outrageous course that has been taken with me. I
suppose the next thing, something will be given to put me out of the way altogether. That would be a mercy to this.

Stedman himself received a number of similar letters from Jane. “I wish to inform you that I am alive in spite of the deleterious food which has been served to me,” she wrote to him in April 1904. “Many efforts have been made to poison me in this institution, of that I am very sure. I am thin and very hungry all the time. Every nerve is calling for food. Why can’t I have help? I ate a pint of ice cream and four oranges Saturday. That was all.”

Another letter to Stedman (preserved among his papers at the Harvard Medical School) offers an intensely disquieting picture not only of Jane’s deepening “delusional insanity” but of the kind of treatment that intractable patients were subjected to, even in mental hospitals as ostensibly humane as Taunton:

Doctor Stedman:

I wish to tell you that I am dead sick of the treatment I receive in your institution. I cannot eat this food. I do not dare to and in consequence I am held down by the head by a Dr. & by both hands and arms by an attendant and another attendant sits on my legs and another feeds me with a stomach tube. I was given a custard today and the whites of the eggs were wrong that is, bad. I don’t think I shall live long and I think I shall die here soon. I had some Indian mush this noon but the attendant never puts molasses on mine as he does the others.

I am full of aches and pains from my head to my toes and am in torture of body and mind day and night.

Norah Kelley

In her spiraling dementia, she attempted to draw other patients into her paranoid fantasy world, “going so far as to shout to a melancholic whom the nurse was trying to feed, not to eat the food as it was poison.”

Jane’s psychological disintegration was evident in her physical decline. The woman who had always taken such care with her dress—spending hours on the morning of her trial debating which outfit to wear—now grew utterly neglectful of her appearance, “even having to be told to wash her face.” By December 1903, Stedman writes in his paper, “her physical condition had fallen off greatly”:

She had lost fifty pounds in weight in a few months, in consequence of her refusal of food because of false belief in regard to it. Owing to her weak condition she was removed to the infirmary. There she became more disturbed, as well as destructive and dirty in habits, enraged and somewhat violent, threatening to kill her nurses, etc. By February, 1904, she was greatly emaciated, having lost over eighty pounds, or about half her normal weight, and was so weak that forced feeding with the tube was resorted to for several days, since which time she has eaten voluntarily, but just enough to avoid being fed again.

In March 1904, soon after her release from the infirmary, Stedman paid her a visit. He found her “in good spirits, talking volubly and aimlessly at the nurses.” No sooner did he ask about her health, however, than she launched into a bitter

tirade against the hospital, its officers, and all its belongings. She insisted that everything was “rotten,” that the meat was “embalmed” beef, etc. etc. Everything was filthy, she said, even the brick walls which must be “saturated with the filth of years”; the water was “polluted with sewage”; the vegetables were “rank poison.” Occasionally she would burst out unexpectedly with peculiar and piercing shrieks of laughter which would seem impossible to one in her weak condition.

Stedman left the asylum that day more convinced than ever that Jane Toppan was “weakminded” beyond cure. It seemed that Fred Bixby’s prediction had come true. Jane may or may not have been clinically insane when she was committed to Taunton. But after less than two years in the lunatic asylum, she displayed the kind of symptoms that, as Stedman wrote, were “only to be found in the imbecile.”

But they’re all after me now—thirty one of them! Some want to poison me, and some come at me with their skeleton hands as if they would choke me! See! They’re coming for me now! Help! MURDER!

—J
ANE
T
OPPAN
,
American Journal-Examiner,
A
UGUST
7, 1904

T
HE SITUATION WAS EXQUISITELY IRONIC: THE WORLD’S
greatest poisoner was dying of starvation, convinced that she was being poisoned herself. When the newspapers got wind of it, they had a field day.

The
Boston Daily Advertiser
broke the story on July 12, 1904. “TERROR-STRICKEN POISONER AFRAID OF DEATH BY POISON” ran the headline. Flatly asserting that “Jane Toppan has become an imbecile,” the paper portrayed her awful descent into persecutory madness as an object lesson in divine retribution.

Jane, according to the story, had arrived at the Taunton asylum “cool and jaunty,” convinced “that she had fooled justice.” Before long, however, she began “thinking of the many people she had put out of the way” with her “black arts.” Within less than two years,

Jane Toppan, who went to the asylum boasting of the way she had fooled the experts, fell a victim
to her fears. Today, she shudders at what she believes is a plot to put her out of the way in an asylum, where none of the outside world knows what is going on. She whispers to herself when anyone draws near. She says that she will not touch the “poisoned” food. And, if she had her own way, she would die of slow starvation, a victim to her own evil broodings.

The moral of the story was clear. “The collapse of the woman once noted for her indomitable nerve and relentless cruelty is in itself a remarkable instance of relentless justice,” the article concluded. “Not the justice of man, but of the invisible will of the gods.”

Following on the heels of the
Advertiser
piece were a series of even more overwrought articles, appearing in the Sunday supplements of various newspapers. In exploiting the full, titillating potential of the story, these articles pulled out all the sensationalistic stops. Each was accompanied by a lurid illustration. In one, Jane is shown hunched over a dinner table beside an untouched bowl of porridge, recoiling in horror as a horde of black-shrouded specters closes in on her. In another, she stares fearfully out from a spider’s web, as though caught in the devious strands of her own evil designs. Still a third shows her in the grasp of her ghostly victims, who are drawing her inexorably toward the grave.

Along with these drawings were before-and-after photographs, depicting Jane’s transformation from the plump, matronly figure of her pretrial days into a hollow-cheeked, haunted-eyed madwoman. As for the texts of the articles, they shared the identical tone, typical of the tabloid sensibility: a kind of prurient gloating
disguised as awestruck piety in the workings of God’s will.

Under the headline “HER AWFUL PUNISHMENT WORSE THAN DEATH,” for example, the
American Journal-Examiner
described—in language straight out of a Gothic potboiler—Jane’s “terrible punishment at Nature’s own hands—or God’s”:

She imagines that the dead victims have come from their tombs and are trying to poison her.

As the nurse brings a bowl of gruel or cup of tea to her in her narrow cell, she screams out: “It’s poisoned!”

She pushes it away and covers her face with her hands to hide the sight of the bony fingers of her dead patients clutching at her, and to shut out the visions of their death’s heads hovering over her.

It is as if the ghosts of all whom she has killed had burst loose from their coffins and come forth to torture her to death.

When Jane Toppan was committed here in June, 1902, many people thought that the electric chair had been cheated of its rightful victim. Many declared that no form of execution known to law could be torturesome enough for this tigress in human form.

But now Nature, through God, in its own way, is working a punishment more terrible than medieval torture could have devised upon this woman.

By the progress of her disease, Jane Toppan has come [to] believe that not only every article of food that is brought to her, but every cup of
tea or coffee and every glass of water, is poisoned.

She can see the specters of her victims hovering over her and dropping the poison into these things, just as she used to do to them.

Jane Toppan is paying the penalty of her crime by Nature’s or God’s own law in a way that is an appalling moral lesson—that no one can take human life, even if he escapes the punishment of human law, without suffering the most awful torture to the end of his or her own wretched existence.

The intensely satisfying notion that the infamous murderess was now suffering the torments of the damned was echoed in a story that ran the following week in the Sunday Magazine section of the
New York Post
. This article—titled “Jane Toppan, Slowly Dying, Is the Victim of the Phantasies of her Murderous Work”—was written in the kind of grim, portentous voice that, thirty years later, would be a staple of radio melodramas:

’Twould be better that Jane Toppan was dead.

’Twould have been better, after justice had rendered its decision, that soon after that, she died.

There is something more dreadful than the gallows, something more fearful than the electric chair, and that something is the human mind.

During her hellish career of freedom, Jane Toppan attained the fame of being America’s Lucretia Borgia. Now, her disordered mind sees in every hand extended a deadly draught, in every morsel of food offered a concealed drug.

Night and day and night and day again, weeks
lengthening into years, Jane Toppan glares on, distrustful of friendly hands, slowly but surely starving to death.

This dreadful, self-confessed murderess is gradually being executed by her own mind.

Clearly, this article (and others like it) was meant to gratify a primitive passion for vengeance that had little to do with the values of Christian mercy and forgiveness. Perhaps in recognition of this fact, another Sunday feature on the same subject—published in the
Boston Globe
under the title “The Poison Nemesis of Jane Toppan”—invoked pagan mythology in its description of Jane’s plight.

Prefaced with a quote from the
Eumenides
of Aeschylus (“Coming to exact blood-forfeit / We appear to work completeness”), the article imagined Jane Toppan trapped in her “caged room” at Taunton with the

same grim, brooding Fates who sat so long ago in the adytum of Apollo’s temple and chanted their song of vengeance to Queen Clytemnestra’s wretched son. Their presence in the Yankee woman’s chamber strangely reconciles ancient mythology with New England fact. To the Massachusetts poisoner, as to the Greek matricide, the terrible sisters have appeared to exact blood forfeit at compound interest and to work superb completeness in a fate woeful and inexorable beyond human power to conceive.

Whether portraying Jane’s desperate fate in terms of natural law, Old Testament retribution, or Greek mythology, however, every article dealing with the
subject agreed on one thing: the infamous poisoner wasn’t long for the world.

“Jane Toppan is today a wreck, so weak and emaciated that death is apparently not far distant,” wrote the
Boston Advertiser
in September 1904.

“Her condition is such that it is not expected she will live very long,” the
Globe
reported a few weeks later.

The
Post
offered the most unequivocal pronouncement of all. “She won’t trouble the hospital officials or herself much longer,” the paper flatly declared in its October 23 edition. “Her human destiny is nearly all in. Jane Toppan is going to die.”