The confession begins with a startling claim—that Jane wanted to be judged insane by the panel of alienists sent to examine her. Her professions of sanity were merely a ploy. She had completely outsmarted Stedman and his colleagues, cleverly manipulating them with reverse psychology:
I was advised to confess and plead guilty to the murder of the thirty-one persons whom I have sent out of the world by poisoning. But I thought of a better way than that.
When the famous insanity experts of Boston, Dr. Henry R. Stedman, Dr. George F. Jelly, and Dr. Hosea N. Quinby, came down to the Barnstable jail to see if I was insane, I knew how to fool them.
I have been a trained nurse for fifteen years and know doctors and just how to manage them. I know that people who are really insane will always deny it. So I said to the alienists: “I am not insane.”
I knew I could fool them all if I wanted to, and make myself out insane. Dr. Jelly and the others raked me hard with questions.
They tried to play on my woman’s sympathy and asked me if I didn’t think it was a terrible thing to take those mothers, Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Gordon, away from their young children. But I knew their game and said that I just up and killed them and didn’t know why.
When I said that I killed four people in fifty-one days and set three fires, they said: “Why, Jane Toppan, you must have been insane to have done such a thing.” But I still insisted that I was not insane, and did not want them to make me out insane.
Then they went away and gave their verdict that I was insane, which was just what I wanted.
I was too smart for the whole of them. I have the most spunk and grit of any person living.
Having established its author as a person of diabolical cunning—capable of tricking the country’s foremost “insanity experts”—the confession proceeds to recount the murders of Mary and Alden Davis and their younger daughter, Genevieve Gordon. In a tone of “hideous glee” (as the paper described it) Jane recalls how she “made it lively for the undertakers that summer—three graves in a little over three weeks in one lot in the cemetery.”
Before completing her account of her annihilation of the Davis clan, Jane pauses to explain her modus operandi. Here, too, she gloats over her ability to fool the “great” and “famous” experts:
But I haven’t told exactly how I poisoned these people. It was with morphia mostly, and sometimes with atropia.
Morphia and atropia weaken the heart’s action and leave very little trace behind for a doctor or a chemist to detect. They are vegetable poisons and very unlike arsenic and other mineral poisons, which are easily detected.
My using morphia and atropia on Minnie Gibbs was what so puzzled Professor Wood, the famous chemist of Harvard University. He could find some traces of morphia in the parts of the body he was examining, but there [were] some complications that he was utterly at a loss to explain. It was not until I confessed that I used atropia that Professor Wood was able to apply the test for that drug and make sure of his analysis.
If my poisons could so fool a great physician and chemist like Dr. Wood you can see how much easier it was to deceive general practitioners. That is how it happens that physicians have given certificates for heart disease, diabetes, fatty degeneration of the heart, prostration, anaemia, etc. in the case of the people I have killed. Almost any person in middle life, when dosed with Hunyadi water and drugged with morphia and atropia, will show symptoms of those diseases.
After reverting to the subject of the Davises and describing the murder of Minnie Gibbs—“the crime for which I was finally arrested”—the confession travels backward in time to discuss Jane’s earliest killings:
Soon after I became a nurse, fifteen years ago, when I was about thirty years old, it came into my head, I don’t know how, that I could kill people just as easy as not with the very medicine that the doctors gave their patients, morphia and atropia.
After I had tried it in a few cases and it had worked well, and they didn’t suspect me, I thought how easily I could put people out of the way that I wanted to.
My first victims were hospital patients. I experimented on them with what the doctors would call a “scientific interest.”
I can’t repeat the names of those cases—because I never knew them. They just went by numbers in the hospital ward anyway. That was when I was at the Cambridge Hospital. Perhaps it was a dozen people I experimented on in this way.
But you mustn’t think I killed all the patients under my care in the hospital. I nursed back to health some very bad cases of typhoid fever.
One of the physicians at the hospital suspected me. But he dared not accuse me of poisoning. So I was simply discharged. I didn’t care about that, because I had made up my mind that I could make more money and have an easier time by going out by the day in families.
The confession then returns to the recent past, briefly recounting the murders of the Dunhams, Myra Conners, Elizabeth Brigham, Florence Calkins, and Edna Bannister. “I might have killed George Nichols and his sister, too,” Jane adds, “if I had stayed long enough at their home in Amherst, New Hampshire.”
As for the complete tally of her victims, the confession is tantalizingly vague, suggesting that Jane murdered an even greater number than the shocking total disclosed by Fred Bixby. “I have poisoned thirty-one people as far as I can count them up and recall them. But there are more that I can’t name, just hospital patients.”
The confession sheds little light on her motivations. Her murders were committed “for various reasons.” She makes no mention of her depraved sexual appetites, other than to say that killing “always gave me the most exquisite pleasure.”
Jane admits that she is a mystery even to herself. She marvels at her own lack of remorse for the terrible things she has done. “Isn’t it strange that I don’t feel bad? But I can’t help it. I can’t cry.”
Still, she insists that she is not utterly without feelings, an assertion that leads her to reminisce about the lover who jilted her in girlhood. It was this tragic event, she suggests, that was at the root of all her problems.
People say I have no heart, but I have. While I have been in jail, a friend in Lowell sent me some forget-me-nots, and I cried. They were the flowers that my first lover used to send me when I was a schoolgirl. And a forget-me-not was engraved on that precious engagement ring.
I will never tell my girlhood lover’s name that is still sacred to me, even though he went back on me, and it seemed that my whole lighthearted nature changed after that. I still laughed and was jolly, but I learned how to hate, too.
If I had been a married woman, I probably would not have killed all these people. I would have had my husband, my children, and my home to take up my mind.
The confession does not dwell on Jane’s life behind bars. It does, however, mention some of the books she enjoyed while in jail. Her favorites, she declares, were Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities—“especially those descriptions of the guillotine in the French Revolution and heads being chopped off by the score”—and the novels of Charles Reade, a popular Victorian writer of sensational fiction. One of Reade’s titles had a particular relevance to this profoundly disturbed woman, whose genial facade concealed such a malevolent soul. The novel was called Singleheart and Doubleface.
Like all psychopaths, Jane was capable of feeling sorry only for herself. Toward the end of the confession, she voices a single regret: that her murderous career was cut short by the destruction of the Davises. “I could have worked for years longer at poisoning if I hadn’t killed four people in one family almost all at once. That was the greatest mistake of my life.”
In the end, Jane accepts that she “deserves to be punished for all these murders.” She concludes, however, by expressing the same hope she conveyed to reporters before boarding the train to Taunton: “I’ve made up my mind to being sent to an insane asylum. But I have hopes of getting out in ten or fifteen years—when doctors will say I am cured of insanity.”
31
—J. G. ROGERS, The American Journal of Insanity
SITUATED ON A LOW, BARREN, SANDY HILL surrounded by a 140-acre wasteland of brush, bogs, and boulders, the State Lunatic Hospital at Taunton (as it was originally called) was opened in 1854. The central building—three stories high and surmounted by a seventy-foot dome—was large enough to accommodate 250 patients. In the early years of the institution, these inmates provided a convenient supply of labor. Under the direction of Dr. George C. S. Choate, the first superintendent, they were made to clear the brush, drain the swamps, and drag away the boulders, which were then used to build an imposing wall around the entire property.
As originally constructed, the hospital contained forty-two so-called “strong rooms,” designed to hold the most unmanageable inmates—“violent and filthy patients,” as they were described in the First Annual Trustees Report. Built of stone, brick, and iron, these cells featured all the amenities of a medieval dungeon. The walls were sixteen inches thick. Small iron-barred slits served as windows. The iron doors were barely wide enough to squeeze through and were secured with massive locks. In the wall beside each door was a small aperture, just big enough to permit a bowl of gruel to be passed into the cell. Since the intended inmates were raving madmen (and women) who refused to wear clothes and wallowed in their own filth, the “strong rooms” had stone floors that sloped toward the front of the cell and terminated in a gutter, “for the convenience of washing them out” (as the Trustees Report put it).
So ghastly were these tomblike cells that hospital administrators were reluctant to use them, even for the confinement of the “furiously insane.” Within a few years of their construction, the strong rooms were demolished and other, less inhumane quarters built in their place.
Even with this extra space, however, the hospital soon became desperately overcrowded. By 1860, its population had swelled to close to 400. It wasn’t until 1874, however, that two additional wings were added to the main building. A brief, official history of the Taunton Lunatic Hospital, published a few years later, offered a rosy picture of the recently renovated hospital:
The new wards are very light, airy, and pleasant, with beautiful water and landscape views from the windows and veranda. Since the new wings were completed, very material changes have been made in the older portions of the hospital; some wards have been almost entirely rebuilt, which have rendered them more cheerful and pleasant, more light having been introduced and the ventilation much improved.
There are nine wards for each sex, the patients being classified into families according to their mental condition. Each ward consists of a long corridor with rooms opening from it on either side, which are occupied by the patients as sleeping rooms, the corridor having a bay-window on one side to admit light and afford a pleasant sitting room. Connected with each ward is a dining-room, a wash-room, with set wash basins, a bath-room and water-closet. The food is cooked in a large central kitchen and carried on cars through the basement, and taken to the general dining-rooms by elevators.
The hospital underwent further expansion in the 1890s. Between 1892 and 1893, two infirmary buildings were constructed, one for men, one for women, each big enough to accommodate seventy-five patients. Five years later, a 150-acre farm was purchased in the adjoining town of Raynham and made into a farming colony, where seventy-two patients lived and worked the land. By the time of Jane’s arrival, there were nearly 1,000 inmates at Taunton.
From the very start (as the trustees reported), “useful employment” was regarded as “a remedial agent in the treatment of mental diseases.” Besides farm work, patients were assigned various kinds of manual labor. The Superintendent’s Report for 1902—the year of Jane’s incarceration—described the range of jobs performed by the inmates:
About 800 patients have been employed during the year in the various departments of the hospital: upon the farm, at the barn, in the piggery, in the garden, at the greenhouse, on the lawns, at the laundry and boiler house, in the kitchen and basement, in the sewing room, at the shoe shop and brush shop, and on the wards assisting the nurses in the ward work; and the women not otherwise employed have done sewing and knitting on the wards, which is carried to them by a person who has special charge of it. The new buildings in the process of construction the present year have furnished extra work for the men. All of the grading and excavating for the buildings, the digging of the trenches for the soil pipes, water pipes, steam and gas pipes have been done by the patients, with a single attendant to direct them.
The report also includes itemized lists detailing the work accomplished in the various parts of the hospital—the Industrial Building, Upholstering Department, Sewing Room, and wards. Among the thousands of products made or repaired were 3,244 pairs of men’s slippers; 1,522 bath towels; 635 mattresses; 136 gingham skirts; 82 table napkins; 74 doormats; 70 blankets; 24 overcoats; and 3 baseball mitts.
There were other, less onerous activities. On special occasions, inmates were treated to assorted entertainments. Christmas, as the trustees were pleased to report, was celebrated “by a Christmas tree in the chapel, with Christmas music and a present for each patient in the hospital.” During the summer months, four picnics were held on the grounds, “enlivened with music by the home orchestra, games of ball and other athletic exercises.”
Regular social dances were conducted in the chapel, “music being furnished by the hospital orchestra.” There were also educational lectures “descriptive of foreign and domestic scenery of special interest” and “illustrated by the stereopticon.” As a special treat, about 350 of the most trustworthy patients were taken on a trip to the Bristol County Fair, “free admission having been given to all inmates of the hospital.” As the Trustees proudly reported, “Several paroled patients were allowed to go unattended, and all safely returned with clean records, much to their credit.”
In spite of the idealized depiction of asylum life contained in these authorized histories and annual reports, Taunton was, without doubt, as grim and dehumanizing as every other American mental institution of the day—places where (as Erving Goffman puts it in his classic study Asylums) inmates were subjected to “a series of abasements, humiliations, and profanations of self—processes by which a person’s self is systematically mortified.” For all the claims of enlightenment, the treatment of patients was appallingly benighted. As historian Ruth Caplan documents in her book Psychiatry and Community in Nineteenth-Century America, mental patients were commonly brutalized by attendants; subjected to constant purges, enemas, and primitive surgical procedures; force-fed dangerous drugs; exploited as a source of unpaid labor; immobilized with “mechanical restraints”; and in general treated as less than human—“objects to be manipulated rather than individuals to be motivated and led.”
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 s
o 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.”
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