Fatal
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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.”
34
In the pleasure and excitement of crime, Jane Toppan seemed to find the criminal’s excitement of doing artistic work, to which danger appeared to add zest.
—Boston Daily Globe, AUGUST 18, 1938
THE POST WAS RIGHT, OF COURSE—JANE TOPPAN WAS going to die. But not for another thirty-four years.
She fell ill on July 1, 1938, and remained bedridden for more than a month. At 7:00 P.M. on Wednesday, August 17, she died at the age of eighty-one years. Her death certificate, signed by Dr. Jack Oakman of the State Hospital at Taunton, cites broncho-pneumonia as the primary cause of death, with chronic myocarditis as a contributory factor.
It had been many years since the public had heard of Jane Toppan, and it is safe to say that the once-notorious killer—“America’s Lucretia Borgia”—had been largely, if not utterly, forgotten by the world. Still, her passing was big news, accorded front-page treatment in the major Boston dailies and noted with a prominent, if not wholly accurate, obituary in the New York Times, which misstated both her age (eighty-four, according to the Times) and number of victims (“at least 100 persons”).
Exactly what Jane’s life was like during the three-and-a-half decades of her confinement at Taunton will never be known. The hospital is still in operation, and Jane’s medical and psychiatric records have been preserved. But they are inaccessible to researchers, kept under wraps by the state’s strict confidentiality laws.
According to her obituaries, Jane grew increasingly violent in the period following the onset of her delusions and “for several years was kept in a straitjacket.” Eventually, however, her paranoia subsided. She regained her weight and became a generally docile patient.
Still, there were violent episodes from time to time. According to one resident of the city of Taunton, whose father was a fireman in the 1920s and ’30s, Jane possessed a nearly “superhuman strength when aroused. On several occasions, she became upset over something, and several policemen had to be called to help subdue her.”
In later years, however, she became—in the words of one hospital official—a “quiet old lady, just another patient who caused no trouble.”
There was one story about Jane that sprang up after her death and continued to be reported by crime writers who kept her story alive in the years following her death. Given her history, it seems plausible. Perhaps it is even true.
According to the anecdote, Jane spent most of her time on the ward reading romances and writing love stories of her own. Every once in a while, however, she would beckon to one of the nurses.
“Get the morphine, dearie, and we’ll go out into the ward,” Jane would tell the nurse with a grin. “You and I will have a lot of fun seeing them die.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My sincerest thanks to the following people for the help they provided while I was researching Jane Toppan’s story:
Karen Adler Abramson,
State Library of Massachusetts
David Bates
Elizabeth Bouvier,
State Library of Massachusetts
Mary Bricknell,
State Library of Massachusetts
Mark Brown,
John Hay Library, Brown University
Marilyn Budd,
Brookline Hospita
l
Robyn Christensen,
Bostonian Society
Marianne Conti,
Paul Klapper Library, Queens College
Phyllis Day,
Superior Court, Barnstable
Jack Eckert,
Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard
Tim Engels,
John Hay Library, Brown University
Brian Harkins,
Social Law Library
Stephen Jerome,
Brookline Historical Society
Virginia Johnson,
Taunton Public Library
James Krasnoo
Jo Ann Latimer,
Sturgis Library, Barnstable
William Milhomme,
Massachusetts State Archives
Elizabeth Mock,
Healey Library, University of Massachusetts
Karin O’Connor,
Bostonian Society
Catherine Ostlind
Ellery Sedgwick
Evelyn Silverman,
Paul Klapper Library, Queens College
Patterson Smith
Virginia Smith,
Massachusetts Historical Society
Doug Southard,
Boston Historical Society
Nancy Weir,
Superior Court, Barnstable
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Evan Albright for his generous support and assistance. Anyone interested in learning more about the rich criminal history of Jane Toppan’s favorite summer resort area should consult Evan’s website, www.capecodconfidential.com.
Jane as a young woman, circa 1880.
Jane shortly before her arrest, circa 1900.
Oramel Brigham.
Elizabeth Brigham, Jane’s foster sister.
The Jachin House, where the Davis family lived.
Captain Paul Gibbs.
Newspaper clipping, showing Myra Conners, one of Jane’s victims, and James Stuart Murphy, Jane’s friend and counsel.
Jane at her hearing, November 8, 1901.
Jane leaves the Barnstable courthouse on the arm of James Stuart Murphy following her arraignment.
Spectators swarm to the Barnstable courthouse on the morning of Jane’s trial, June 23, 1902.
Attorney General Herbert Parker.
Jane reacts to the verdict.
Pocket Books by Harold Schechter
NON-FICTION
The A-Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
(with David Everitt)
Deranged
Depraved
Deviant
Fiend
Bestial
Fatal
FICTION
Nevermore
The Hum Bug
Outcry
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