The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (54 page)

Jane Toppan

They call
Nurses
“angels of mercy”—and to all appearances, Jane Toppan fit that description. Besides her obvious competence, she seemed to be a sensitive, sympathetic woman who had worked for some of Boston’s best families. Of course, none of her employers knew anything about Jane’s early years. They did not know about her mother’s tragic death when Jane was just an infant—or about her father’s subsequent insanity, which impelled him to stitch his eyelids together one day in his Boston tailor shop. They weren’t aware of Jane’s own suicide attempts after being jilted by her fiancé. Or the morbid obsessions she displayed during her student nursing years at a Cambridge hospital, where her bizarre fascination with autopsies became a source of dismay to her supervisors.

It wasn’t until members of the Davis family began dropping like flies in the summer of 1901 that the terrible truth about the skilled, seemingly compassionate nurse finally came to light. Far from being an “angel of mercy,” Jane Toppan turned out to be one of America’s most bloodthirsty “angels of death.”

Mrs. Mattie Davis was the first to go, presumably of heart failure. She died while visiting her old friend Jane Toppan. The elder Davis daughter, Mrs. Annie Gordon, was so grief-stricken that she turned to Nurse Toppan for relief. Toppan obliged by administering some injections. Shortly thereafter, Annie Gordon followed her mother to the grave. A few days later, the patriarch of the family, Captain Alden Davis, was felled, supposedly by a massive stroke. He, too, had been receiving medication from Nurse Toppan. That left just one surviving member of the family, another married daughter, Mrs. Mary Gibbs. Several days after her father’s funeral—after placing herself under the care of kindly Nurse Toppan—Mary Gibbs dropped dead, too.

With his wife’s entire family wiped out in less than six weeks, Mary Gibbs’s husband demanded an autopsy. Toppan did her best to prevent it, but Gibbs—suspecting foul play—called in the Massachusetts State Police. The autopsy on Mary Gibbs’s body confirmed her husband’s darkest fears. His wife had been killed with a lethal injection of morphine and atropine, obviously administered by Jane Toppan.

By then, Toppan had fled Boston. She was finally arrested in Amherst, New Hampshire, on October 29, 1901—though not before she had knocked off her own foster sister.

At first, Toppan insisted on her innocence, though she admitted to the
police that she “was frequently troubled with her head.” As investigators dug into her past, they discovered a string of former patients who had suffered sudden, mysterious deaths. Questioned by psychiatrists (or “alienists” in the lingo of the day), Toppan finally confessed to poisoning not only the four members of the Davis family but also seven other people as well—eleven victims altogether. Later, she would tell her own attorney that the true total was thirty-one.

At her 1902 trial, doctors testified that Toppan had been “born with a weak and nervous mental condition” and suffered “from a lack of moral sense and defective self-control.” There was reason to believe that her condition was hereditary: not only her father but her sister, too, had ended up in an insane asylum. Toppan’s own testimony helped persuade the jury of her madness. “That is my ambition,” she declared, “to have killed more people—more helpless people—than any man or woman who has ever lived.” Declared insane, she was confined to a state asylum, where she died in 1938 at the age of eighty-four.

“That is my ambition, to have killed more people—more helpless people—than any man or woman who has ever lived.”

J
ANE
T
OPPAN

T
OURIST
A
TTRACTIONS

Ever since the summer of 1994, one of the most popular sightseeing spots in Los Angeles has been the Brentwood condo where the late Mrs. O. J. Simpson and her waiter-friend, Ron Goldman, met their brutal ends. What are we to make of this phenomenon? Are the tourists who come to gape at this celebrated crime scene little more than morbid voyeurs satisfying their prurient fascination? Well . . . yes. And does such fascination reflect something alarming about the decline of moral values in our violence-obsessed society? Absolutely not. The fact is that for better or worse, intense public
fascination with sensational crimes has always been a feature of human society—and enterprising hucksters have always found ways to exploit it.

One hundred years ago, our nation was riveted by the case of the Chicago “multi-murderer” H. H.
Holmes
, who knocked off an indeterminate number of victims in the labyrinthine depths of his so-called Murder Castle. Much like today’s O.J.-crazed public, Americans couldn’t get enough of the Holmes story. Perceiving the commercial potential of this mania, an aspiring showman named A. M. Clark leased the “multi-murderer’s” notorious residence and announced his plans to turn it into a “murder museum,” complete with guided tours by a Chicago homicide detective. The Castle, however, was gutted by a mysterious blaze before Clark could cash in on its gruesome reputation.

Sixty years later, another suspicious fire razed the ramshackle farmhouse of the Wisconsin ghoul, Ed
Gein
, shortly before the property was scheduled to be auctioned. For months, the place had drawn hordes of curiosity seekers. The torching of the house (apparently by outraged townspeople) scotched any plans to turn it into a permanent tourist site. A sideshow exhibitor named Bunny Gibbons, however, came up with another way to capitalize on “Crazy Ed’s” notoriety. Successfully bidding on Gein’s beat-up Ford sedan, Gibbons equipped the car with a pair of wax dummies—one in the driver’s seat, simulating Ed, the other representing a mutilated female corpse. Then he displayed “Ed Gein’s Death Car” in county fairs all around the Midwest, charging gawkers two bits apiece for a peek at THE CAR THAT HAULED THE DEAD FROM THEIR GRAVES!

This ghoulish sideshow, however, paled before the carnival atmosphere that prevailed at the property of the infamous
Black Widow
killer Belle Gunness, in the weeks following the discovery of her crimes. Traveling by wagon, automobile, and special excursion train, thousands of Midwesterners flocked to the farmstead where a dozen murder victims had been unearthed. Once there, they could gape at the open graves and peer at the decaying remains on display in the carriage house. After viewing the decomposed body parts, they could settle down for a family picnic, then treat themselves to candy and ice cream peddled by local hawkers. And for those desiring a souvenir of the occasion, there were handsome picture postcards of one of Gunness’s dismembered victims.

As the local sheriff cheerfully proclaimed, “I never saw folks have a better time!”

T
RANSVESTISM

Homicidal transvestites have been a feature of horror films ever since Anthony Perkins’s Norman Bates put on his mother’s clothes and carved up Janet Leigh in the shower. In real life, of course, there is no correlation at all between cross-dressing and violence. On the contrary, guys who enjoy wearing angora sweaters and high heels tend to be perfect gentlemen. There
are
several cases, however, where transvestism has been a factor in the backgrounds of serial killers.

Early in their childhoods, both Charles
Manson
and Henry Lee
Lucas
were compelled to dress as girls. Manson, who endured the kind of brutalized
Upbringing
that seems guaranteed to produce extreme psychopathology, was constantly being shuttled between relatives while his wayward mother was off whoring or doing jail time. At six, he was shipped off to Virginia to live with an aunt and uncle. The latter proved to be a sadistic bully who was constantly deriding his little charge as a “sissy.” To drive home the point, he imposed a vicious punishment, forcing young Charlie to attend the first day of school in a dress.

Lucas was subjected to the identical cruelty, only this time the perpetrator was his own hard-bitten mother, an insanely vicious woman who—among her countless other forms of abuse—curled her little boy’s stringy blond hair into ringlets and sent him off to school in girl’s clothes.

Clearly, neither Manson nor Lucas enjoyed being a girl. One legendary serial killer who
did
was Edward
Gein
, but he was less a transvestite than a thwarted transsexual. In his deranged efforts to turn himself into a woman, Gein attempted to fashion a suit made of skin flayed from the torsos of disinterred female corpses. Arrayed in this ghastly costume—a “mammary vest” and human-skin leggings, with a vulva affixed to his crotch—he would caper around his decaying farmhouse, pretending to be his own mother. Gein, of course, served as the real-life model for the cross-dressing Norman Bates, as well as for Buffalo Bill, the malevolent female-wannabe of Thomas Harris’s
The Silence of the Lambs.

Dressed to Kill

Michael Caine plays a New York City psychiatrist who turns out to be (surprise!) nuttier than a twelve-ounce jar of Jif in this 1980 Hitchcockian homage, directed with typical flair by Brian De Palma. Its most memorable scene—in which Angie Dickinson gets sliced to shreds in an elevator car by a cross-dressing killer—carries a real wallop (though it doesn’t match the brilliance of its source, the renowned shower scene in
Psycho).
All in all,
Dressed to Kill
is an outstanding cinematic example of the transvestite serial-killer genre.