Their favorite was Nurse Jane Toppan.
She had first vacationed there in 1896. At the time, she was living with the family of Mr. L. W. Ferdinand of Cambridge, who had rented out the cottage closest to the main house. With her plausibly warm and affable personality, Jane had quickly ingratiated herself not only with the Davises but with their neighbors as well. People enjoyed her company—her easy laughter, her funny stories, her lively conversation. They also benefited from her medical expertise. Jane was always happy to offer advice when one of her new summer friends was afflicted with some minor malady—a sick headache, case of nasal catarrh, or bout of dyspepsia. Before long, she was a popular figure around town—everyone’s favorite spinster aunt. Neighbors would leave their children in her care when they went off for the day. Years later, people still recalled the sight of “Jolly Jane” leading a troop of little ones, Pied Piper-like, down to the beach on Squiteague Bay for a midday picnic.
So fond were the Davises of their tenant—and so grateful for her help whenever one of the family took ill—that they let her have the cottage at a discount. Exactly how much they charged is unclear, though it was considerably less than the usual seasonal rent of $250. Even at that rate, however, Jane was unable to come up with the full amount when the summer ended. When she asked for an extension, the Davises were only too happy to oblige. Already, they seemed to have regarded her as a member of the family. It is a mark of their affection that they welcomed her back year after year without ever pressing her for the money. By the end of her fifth summer vacation at the cottage, Jane owed her landlords $500.
That was when Mattie Davis finally reached the limits of her generosity.
• • •
The younger of the two Davis daughters—thirty-one-year-old Genevieve—had married an upstanding young man from Lowell named Harry Gordon. The Davises were exceptionally fond of Harry. Their single complaint about him was that—having been promoted to an important position in the home office of the Equitable Life Insurance Company of Chicago—he had taken their daughter so far away from her family. Even so, Alden and Mattie saw Genevieve regularly. Every summer, she and her little girl would flee the confines of the city and return home to spend a few months by the bracing shores of Buzzards Bay.
In June of 1901, just prior to her departure from Chicago, Genevieve had written to her mother, explaining that—before proceeding to Cataumet—she intended to stop off and visit her in-laws in a suburb of Boston.
Even before receiving Genevieve’s letter, Mattie had made up her mind to travel to Cambridge and collect Jane Toppan’s long-overdue debt. She was dreading the trip, however. A diabetic, she had been feeling particularly weak for the past few days, partly as a result of the unusual heat. It would be a strain to make the journey there and back all alone.
When she learned that her daughter would be stopping in Boston, Mattie saw it as a golden opportunity. She would still have to travel to Cambridge by herself and confront Jane Toppan about the money. But once that unpleasantness was finished, she would be able to meet up with Genevieve and return to Cataumet in her daughter’s company.
And so, on the evening of Monday, June 26, she announced her plan to Alden. Concerned about her health, he tried to dissuade her. Mattie was adamant, though. With Genevieve coming to Boston, there wouldn’t be a better time to make the trip.
It was, she insisted, now or never.
• • •
The summer of 1901 was one of the most brutal on record, and in the Northeast—as elsewhere throughout the country—the heat took a heavy toll. In late June and early July, the papers in New York and Boston were full of front-page horror stories about the “hot wave” (as it was called back then). Each day brought grim new headlines: “Prostration from the Heat Ends in Death”—“One Woman Driven Insane”—“Hottest Day in Thirty Years”—“No Relief from the Fiery Sun.” By the end of one six-day span, the number of heat-related fatalities in New York City and Boston had topped 400.
When Mattie awoke early on the morning of Tuesday, June 25, the temperature was already nearing seventy degrees. The day was going to be another scorcher. Maybe Alden had been right when he’d tried talking her out of the trip. Well, if she didn’t hurry up, he’d get his wish after all. At sixty years old and in poor health, Mattie tended to move slowly. An hour after she awoke, she was still getting ready for the trip. The 6:45 to Cambridge was due to arrive any minute, and Mattie was in danger of missing the train.
When Alden saw the time, he voluntered to run over to the depot and have the conductor hold the train. Fortunately, he didn’t have far to run, the Jachin House being located only 300 feet from the station. He got there just as the train was pulling in. It was a small train, consisting of a locomotive and two cars.
As Alden conversed with the conductor—Charles F. Hammond of Woods Hole—Mattie emerged from the house, made her way down the long flight of front steps, and bustled toward the station. All at once, at the foot of a hill leading up to the depot, she tripped over her feet and went sprawling. Seeing her fall, Alden hurried to her aid. Before he reached her, she had picked herself up with a moan and was limping toward the platform.
Dusty, dishevelled, and badly shaken, Mattie was assisted to the nearest boarding point, at the rear of the second car, by her husband and Conductor Hammond. Hammond then helped her through the baggage compartment and into a seat. After making sure that she was comfortably settled, he went off to collect tickets.
Several men were standing around the car, smoking. One of these was George Hall, representative of a Boston meat and provision house. Through a window, Hall had observed Mrs. Davis’s accident and was surprised that her husband had allowed her to board the train. She had seemed in such a bad way when Conductor Hammond escorted her to her seat that Hall feared she might collapse before she reached it.
Turning to one of the men beside him, Hall remarked that he wouldn’t be surprised if the fall turned out to be Mrs. Davis’s “death blow.”
As the train got under way, however, Mattie seemed to improve. A neighbor named Willard Hill, who had also witnessed the mishap through the window, took the seat across from her and asked how she was feeling. Mattie assured him that she was fine.
“Nothing hurt but my dignity,” she said.
As the train moved along, they continued to chat. When Mattie explained the purpose of her journey, Mr. Hill seemed amazed to hear that “Jennie” Toppan—a woman he knew well and had always thought highly of—had been so negligent about paying her rent. Clearly she was taking advantage of her landlords’ good nature. It was time to get tough with her, Hill advised. If he were in Mrs. Davis’s shoes, he wouldn’t leave Cambridge until Nurse Toppan had made good on her debts.
• • •
Since the death of her former landlords, Israel and Lovey Dunham—whom she had murdered in 1895 and 1897, respectively—Jane had been boarding at another house in Cambridge just down the street: Number 31 Wendell Street, owned by an ex-city councilman named Melvin Beedle and his wife, Eliza. Apparently on a whim, Jane had recently poisoned the Beedles, too—though only enough to give them a violent bout of gastrointestinal illness that their physician attributed to ptomaine.
She had also drugged their housekeeper, a young woman named Mary Sullivan whom Jane wanted out of the way. After persuading Mrs. Beedle that the servant was tippling in secret, Jane had slipped the young woman just enough morphia to send her into a stupor. She had then led Mrs. Beedle up to the housekeeper’s room, where Mary lay sprawled on her bed, apparently drunk. Mrs. Beedle had not even waited for the young woman to regain her senses before firing her. She had immediately called for a carriage, loaded the half-dazed servant into the vehicle, and sent her on her way.
Since then, Jane Toppan had effectively taken charge of the household.
• • •
As soon as she disembarked from the train, Mattie Davis made her way to 31 Wendell Street, where she found Jane Toppan and the Beedles just sit
ting down to dinner. Evidently, Jane immediately guessed the reason for her friend’s unexpected visit. When the Beedles invited Mattie to join them at the table, Jane quickly repaired to the kitchen, prepared a glass of her favorite concoction—Hunyadi mineral water doctored with morphia-—and carried it back out to the dining room.
“You must be very thirsty after your trip,” she said. Her visitor took the proffered drink and sipped. By the end of the meal—much to Jane’s satisfaction—Mattie Davis had entirely drained the poisoned glass.
When dinner was over, Jane suggested that they walk to the bank, so that she could withdraw the money she owed. Mattie—who wanted to deposit some cash she had brought along—readily agreed. When she rose from the table, however, she felt strangely woozy.
“Perhaps it was that fall,” suggested Jane. Over dinner, Mattie had regaled her hosts with the story of her embarrassing accident. “Should we wait for a while?”
“No, no, I’m fine,” Mattie insisted. Now that she was so close to achieving her goal, she wanted no further delays.
No sooner were they outside, however, than Mattie let out a fluttering groan and collapsed.
No one else was around on the sweltering street. Bending to the fallen woman, Jane managed to get Mattie onto her feet. Fortunately, they were still close to home. Even so, Jane found herself grunting with effort as she helped the limp old woman back to the house.
Inside, Jane and Melvin Beedle carried Mattie upstairs to the second floor. She was placed in a vacant bedroom. Assuming that she had fainted from the heat, Beedle hurried downstairs to fetch a glass of cold water. In the meantime, Jane stepped into her own room, got her hypodermic needle, and quickly returned to Mattie’s side. Low, whimpering noises were coming from the old woman’s throat.
“So I gave her another small dose of morphia,” Jane would later state, recalling the moment. “And that quieted her.”
• • •
That night, Jane sent a message to Alden Davis, informing him that his wife had taken sick. She also telegraphed Genevieve Gordon in Somerville, who had been growing increasingly anxious as the day progressed with no sign of her mother.
The following afternoon—Wednesday, June 26—Genevieve traveled to the Beedles’ home in Cambridge. She found her mother lying unconscious in a darkened room hung with iced sheets, Nurse Toppan seated by the sickbed. Though Jane insisted that she could care for Mattie by herself, Genevieve persuaded the Beedles to send for a doctor at once.
It took a while to find one who hadn’t fled the suffocating heat of the city. Only after putting in telephone calls to four different physicians did the Beedles succeed in reaching somebody.
That person turned out to be Dr. John T. G. Nichols—the very same Dr. Nichols who, fifteen years earlier, had been called to the bedside of Prince Arthur Freeman, one of the many victims of the “American Borgia,” Sarah Jane Robinson. In that earlier case, Nichols had misdiagnosed his patient’s condition as “disease of the stomach.” His failure to recognize the symptoms of arsenic poisoning in Freeman had allowed Mrs. Robinson to continue her murderous career until several more of her family members were dead.
In the succeeding decade-and-a-half, Dr. Nichols had lived down the notoriety he had reaped from the Robinson affair and had established himself as a trusted and reliable general practitioner. Now—in the kind of bizarre twist of fate no novelist would dare to invent—he had been summoned to treat the victim of another female serial killer. It was as though life were offering him a chance to redeem himself for his earlier failure.
Unfortunately—both for him and for Mattie Davis—Dr. Nichols was about to be fooled again.
Arriving at the Beedles’ home, Nichols found the patient attended by a buxom, briskly professional woman who introduced herself as Nurse Jane Toppan, an old friend of the Davis family. She informed Dr. Nichols that Mattie Davis was a diabetic, who—in defiance of Jane’s warnings—had treated herself to a slice of Mrs. Beedles’ white-frosted velvet cake at dinnertime and had collapsed shortly afterward, probably as the result of her overindulgence.
Examining the patient, Nichols found that her symptoms were consistent with a diabetic coma—a diagnosis seemingly confirmed when the sugar content of her urine was found to be abnormally high. Nurse Toppan had thoughtfully collected the urine sample before the arrival of Dr. Nichols—who, of course, had no reason to suspect that it might have been tampered with.
Jane took her time murdering Mattie Davis. For the next seven days—under the very noses of Dr. Nichols, Genevieve Gordon, and the Beedles—she played with her helpless victim, administering atropine and morphine in varying doses to produce a range of interesting effects. At times, she would inject Mattie with slightly smaller amounts of narcotic, allowing the old woman to emerge into partial consciousness and giving her loved ones a sudden glimmer of hope. On one occasion, she even raised Mattie to a state of full lucidity before plunging her back into a deep coma.
Why Jane carried out the murder in this way—prolonging it for a full week before putting Mattie Davis to sleep for good—is an interesting question. Partly, it was a matter of pure cunning, a calculated effort to make the old woman’s death seem like the result of natural causes. But along with this motive, there was almost certainly an element of sadism involved—the delicious pleasure of inducing death at a slow, exquisitely measured pace in a helpless human being. And then, of course, there was the exhilarating sense of power. Power not only over the unresisting victim but over the rest of the Davis family, who could do nothing but wait and hope and pray while Jane secretly guided their loved one to her grave. And power, too, over Dr. Nichols, who—for all the professional status he enjoyed—was nothing more than Jane’s unwitting pawn.
As the attending nurse, Jane was in sole charge of the patient during the night, sitting up at Mattie’s bedside while the rest of the household slept. The arrangement was ideal for her purposes, allowing her to do whatever she wished to the comatose woman. Sometime in the early-morning hours of Tuesday, July 2—one week after she first poisoned Mattie with the drugged glass of mineral water—Jane injected her with a final, fatal dose of morphine, then watched intently while the old woman stopped breathing. Whether—as she’d done so many times before—she climbed into the deathbed and trembled with pleasure as she felt the life drain from her victim is something Jane never revealed.
From her later confessions, however, we do know what was going through her mind at the time of Mattie Davis’s burial. That somber event took place on the morning of Friday, July 5, 1901—one day after Mattie’s mortal remains arrived home by train from Cambridge. Jane and Melvin Beedle had accompanied the coffin on its final journey, Genevieve Gordon having hurried back to Cataumet immediately after her mother’s death to be with her grief-stricken father.
So many of Mattie’s friends and neighbors showed up for the services that the parlor of the Jachin House couldn’t accommodate them all. Afterward, at the grave site, Jane stood beside the sorrowing members of the Davis family—Alden, Genevieve, and the older daughter, Mrs. Minnie Gibbs, who lived in the neighboring village of Pocasset with her husband, Paul, a coastal schooner skipper away on a voyage.
Though the “hot wave” had broken, the day was uncomfortably warm. Gathered in the little cemetery, the mourners—the men in their black Sunday suits, the women in their long dresses and whalebone corsets—sweltered in the sun. As soon as the funeral was over, they began to disperse. Several relatives from Cambridge began to make their way to the railroad station. Jane watched as they headed for the depot and, smiling inwardly, thought: You had better wait a little while and I will have another funeral for you. If you wait, it will save you going back and forth.
Already, she was imagining the horrors to come; for, in her spiraling madness, Jane Toppan had decided to wipe out the remaining members of the Davis family, one by one.
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Bloch, in his endeavor to explain the pyromaniac tendency, has recourse to the assumptio
n of a sadistic impulse and of a sexually toned destructive tendency. He points out that red is a color which plays a tremendous role in our vita sexualis. The thought or sight of the dark red flames exerts a sexually exhilarating influence, similar to the sight of the reddened bodily parts during flagellation, or of the flowing blood in sadistic indulgences.
—WILHELM STEKEL, Peculiarities of Behavior
GIVEN THEIR LUST FOR DESTRUCTION—THE JOY THEY take in doing harm—it’s no surprise that, among their other twisted pleasures, many serial killers love to set fires, a practice they often begin at an early age. Indeed, along with animal torture and abnormally prolonged bed-wetting, childhood pyromania is one of the classic warning signs of budding sociopathology. Some of the most notorious serial killers of modern times, like David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, were juvenile arsonists. And their incendiary habits didn’t always end at adolescence.
Ottis Toole, for example—Henry Lee Lucas’s loathsome accomplice (whose alleged atrocities included the abduction and beheading of little Adam Walsh)—never lost his taste for torching buildings. And Carl Panzram—arguably the most unrepentant killer in the annals of American crime—took positive pride in the havoc he could wreak with a matchstick. Besides serial murder and forced sodomy, arson was Panzram’s favorite pastime, and in his remarkable jailhouse memoirs, he provides a running tally not only of the people he slaughtered and raped, but of the property he incinerated during his lifelong vendetta against the world.
But it’s more than sheer malice that underlies the incendiary crimes of serial killers. According to specialists in the psychology of perversion, there is always an erotic motive at the root of pyromania. “There is but one instinct which generates the impulse to incendiarism,” writes Wilhelm Stekel in his classic work on aberrant behavior. “That is the sexual instinct, and arson clearly shows its connecting points with sex.” True, there are often “secondary motives” behind a pyromaniac’s acts—anger, frustration, revenge. But above all (as Stekel writes), “the incendiary is sexually excited by the flames; he likes to watch them burn.” In short, serial murderers who enjoy starting fires do so for the same reason that they love to torture and kill.
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