Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer
By Harold Schechter

The crime:

At the end of the nineteenth century the Boston-area private nurse Jane Toppan went on a killing spree that would end up seeing her claim at least 12 victims before she was finally arrested in 1901. At trial she was convicted of murder but found not guilty by reason of insanity and so was sentenced to spend the rest of her life in an asylum.

The book:

There have been many attempts to psychologize the differences between male and female serial killers, and given the gender stereotypes at play in the story of Jane Toppan’s criminal career it’s not too surprising that Harold Schechter begins with this. But while I’ve found Schechter to be a trustworthy guide when it comes to historical true crime, I often pull back at some of his more speculative conclusions, and I did so again here with what he says about lust-murder being “a specifically male phenomenon” and the “quintessential male form of serial killing” (emphasis in the original). I think it’s worth quoting from what he has to say on the subject here at length:

Generally speaking, female serial killers differ from their male counterparts in roughly the same way that the sexual responses and behavior of women typically differ from those of men.

A useful analogy here (and one that seems particularly apt to so lurid a subject) is pornography. It is a truth universally acknowledged that – while men are aroused by extremely raw depictions of abrupt, anonymous, anatomically explicit sex – women in general prefer their pornography to involve at least a suggestion of emotional intimacy and leisurely romance. Whether these differences in taste are a function of biology or culture is a question I’ll leave to others. The indisputable fact is that the differences are real.

An analogous distinction holds true for serial killers. Female sociopaths are no less depraved than their male counterparts. As a rule, however, brutal penetration is not what turns them on. Their excitement comes not from violating the bodies of strangers with phallic objects, but from a grotesque, sadistic travesty of intimacy and love: from spooning poisoned medicine into the mouth of a trusting patient, for example, or smothering a sleeping child in its bed. In short, from tenderly turning a friend, family member, or dependent into a corpse.

To be sure, there may be other motives mixed up with the sadism – monetary gain, for example. Indeed, certain female serial killers may never admit, even to themselves, the true nature or extent of the gratification they deprive [sic] from their crimes. Their actions, however, speak for themselves. Whatever other benefits may accrue from their atrocities – a windfall of inheritance money, for example, or a release from the burdens of motherhood – there is, at bottom, only one reason why a woman would, over the span of years, kill off the people closest to her, one by one, in ways that are to guaranteed [sic] make them undergo terrible suffering: because she gets pleasure from doing it.

There is no doubt that male serial sex-murder tends to be more lurid – more gruesomely violent – than the female variety. Whether it is more evil is another matter. After all, which is worse: to dismember a streetwalker after slitting her throat, or to cuddle in bed with a close friend you’ve just poisoned, and to climax repeatedly as you feel the body beside you subside into death? Ultimately, of course, it’s an impossible question to answer.

I’m not sure how persuasive I find this. Isn’t, for example, the main reason for the different forms male and female homicide take the fact that women aren’t strong enough to strangle or bludgeon their male victims to death? Every killer has different opportunities.

But digging a bit deeper, this is the sort of analysis I see a lot of, especially online. The core issue being addressed is probability. Reality is always only probabilistic. Even the laws of physics allow for the craziest, most counterintuitive results. How much more is this the case when it comes to speaking of laws of human behaviour? All we can really speak of is the chance that some particular outcome will occur, or that some particular cause will be determinative. The long passage quoted is typical of the slippery rhetoric you get so often in such discussions. We go from what seems true “generally speaking” or “typically” to “truths universally acknowledged” and “indisputable facts.” “There is no doubt,” we are told about some matter that “tends” toward being seen a certain way. Actions “speak for themselves,” but then need to be interpreted. And finally there is the shrug at the end. Some questions, at least in the moral sphere, are impossible to answer.

Schechter has to be given some leeway here though, as what he’s trying to do is fill the gap in our understanding of Jane Toppan’s motives at a century’s distance. And since some speculation is necessary we have to go with generalizations and the perhaps questionable “confession” she made to the yellow press of the day.

Among female serial killers the two most common sub-types are the Black Widow and the Angel of Mercy. Not surprisingly, these identities plug into two stereotypically feminine roles: wife and nurse. Jane was the Angel of Mercy, and occasionally made use of the killer-nurse justification for her homicidal proclivities. She would conclude that a patient would be better off dead and take it from there.

During her nursing school days, she had made that decision about at least a dozen people, who – in her estimation – were too old, sickly, or just plain bothersome to live. Telling herself that she was doing them a favor by ending their miserable existences was, of course, simply a way of rationalizing her own sadism.

As I’ve said before in one of my film reviews, a nurse is the most terrifying figure in all of modern life. “A bureaucratic guardian at the gates of life and death. A dark fetish stereotype, invasive and maternal. Helpless in our hospital beds, they have us at their mercy.” You don’t mess with these people.

Schechter is right, however, to dismiss this as only a flimsy rationalization. And I don’t think the favoured analogy reached for by the newspapers of the day was any better. Toppan was repeatedly likened to a Borgia, on the basis of that family’s supposed fondness for poisoning their enemies. But I’m not sure how historically accurate this is (a book I reviewed a while back cast doubt on the “black legend” of the Borgias), and in any event I don’t think Jane Toppan was cut from the same cloth as Lucrezia Borgia at all. This was just something to sell papers.

What would have probably sold more papers was a more honest account, but given what you could put in print at the time Toppan’s sexual drives had to be talked around. This is where the kind of analysis that Schechter meditates on in his introduction comes in to play. As far as we can tell, Toppan did find killing people to be arousing. She would climb into bed with her patients after poisoning them and (in the language used by reporters) experience “a stress of passion, a craving for the satisfaction of her strange emotions. It amounted to the strongest uncontrollable impulse.” Then, after “the climax of her paroxysm came, she became normal once more.”

So Jane Toppan was a sexual serial killer, but I don’t know if we can ascribe any gendered psychological difference to her methods. She was a poisoner because that’s what she knew and it’s what she had the best opportunity to employ, with the added benefit of the poison she used being hard to detect. If a knife or a hammer would have made more sense, she probably would have used them.

Noted in passing:

Nursing is a demanding job, especially when you’re just starting out. But at the end of the nineteenth century they really put you to it:

For the two years of their training, student nurses were subjected to a brutal regimen. They worked seven days a week, fifty weeks a year, with no Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving holidays. They slept in cramped, dimly lit, unheated cubicles, three women to a cubicle. Typically, they were roused from their cots at 5:30 A.M. by the clanging of a wake-up bell. After making their beds, dressing, and consuming a hurried breakfast (which they were required to fix for themselves), they repaired to a parlor for morning prayers. By 7:00 A.M., they were on the job. Between their shifts on the various wards and their professional instruction, they typically worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days, with about seventy-five minutes off for lunch and supper. Their meals tended to be so sparse and unpalatable that many of the women spent all their meager wages on extra food.

***

Typically, the trainee had charge of about fifty patients. Besides her medical duties – which involved everything from catheterizing patients to draining their suppurating wounds – she was responsible for keeping her ward in proper shape. Among her daily housekeeping tasks, she was expected to sweep and mop the floors, dust the furniture and windowsills, keep the furnace fed with coal, make sure the lamps were filled with kerosene. She was also required to prepare and serve the patients’ meals, change their beds, launder their clothes, roll bandages, and keep her writing quills sharply whittled so that her records would be legible to the head nurse and attending physicians.

As a young woman in her late twenties, Toppan started getting plump, reaching 170 pounds while standing 5’3”: “unattractively plump even by the generous standards of her age, when, according to one guidebook, the ‘recognized perfection for a woman’s stature’ was five-feet-five inches tall and 138 pounds (‘if she be well formed,’ advises the book, ‘she can stand another ten pounds without greatly showing it’).” Ah, they liked thick girls back in the day. And I approve. But after her arrest and a diet of “hearty meals” in jail combined with a lack of physical activity Toppan packed on another fifty pounds (!) which meant she was no longer plump but “now bordered on the obese.” That’s a pretty wide border, and I think she may have crossed it. Then, after this, when she was moved from her jail to the asylum the medical superintendent wrote that under their care she “grew fat and was in excellent physical condition.” She got even bigger? And was considered in excellent condition? Now that’s generous!

Takeaways:

Nurses are great, but they’re scary.

True Crime Files

When the Moon Turns to Blood: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and a Story of Murder, Wild Faith, and End Times
By Leah Sottile

The crime:

Lori Vallow, her lover (and soon-to-be fifth husband) Chad Daybell, and Lori’s brother Alex Cox conspired to kill Lori’s then-husband Charles, Chad’s then-wife Tammy, and Lori’s two children, Tylee and J.J. Alex later died of natural causes, while Chad was sentenced to be executed and Lori to life in prison.

The book:

I’ve already gone over a lot of the facts in this case in my notes on John Glatt’s The Doomsday Mother. Both books came out before either Lori or Chad went to trial, but I don’t think they miss a lot. There are pros and cons with being timely. All too often true crime books spend far too much time on trial coverage, but trials do add information previously unknown to the public and it would have been nice to read an account of this case that took us to closure. In any event, I don’t expect more books about these events anytime soon so it looks like Glatt and Sottile are the last word. Public attention has moved on.

What makes this book different from Glatt’s is the focus Sottile places on the religious and cultural milieu that Lori and Chad were a part of. Here’s how she sets it up:

In one interview with a podcast about the Vallow/Daybell case, the managing editor at East Idaho News said people had made the case out to be a story of religion, when it in fact had everything to do with sex and greed. And to an extent, that became an early theory of the case, the reason two children were found dead in the yard of Chad Daybell was actually quite simple: two people wanted to be together and killed the people in their way. Even Lori’s own father seemed to imply that was his theory in his email to me.

But the more I sunk into the world of Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell, the more clear it became that their story could only have happened inside a culture that festers in the LDS Church: a cancer that even men of God cannot seem to cut out.

Does Sottile make good on this claim? Well, she does her best. Personally, I think this was, mainly, a case of sex and greed. But those motives were mixed with religious views that take some time to unpack.

While they were both part of the LDS (Mormon) Church, Chad and Lori’s personal belief system was more a kind of pop-culture amalgam of stuff ranging from the Bible and the Book of Mormon to the Left Behind and Harry Potter series of novels. I don’t know if Chad wanted to be the head of an end-times cult or a bestselling author, or if there’s a distinction to be made there. There’s really no sorting any of it out, what with the possession by light and dark spirits, people being transformed into zombies, and a magic crystal on a pendant used to do readings.

Two things stand out however as key ingredients in Chad and Lori’s peculiar personal religion, and both are pretty familiar to cult watchers. In the first place there’s the idea that the members of the cult are among the saved. Chad took his lead from the Book of Revelation in figuring that only 144,000 individuals were going to be counted among the elect, which in a global population now of 8 billion is around 0.01 percent of us. Considering that all the immediate members of Chad’s circle were among this elite, that’s a serious sense of exceptionalism.

That exceptionalism is also seen in the way that in their past lives cult members enjoyed a lot of upward social mobility. Throughout all of human history, the vast majority of humanity have been peasant farmers or labourers who have left behind no material or historical record of their ever having existed. But if you’ve ever listened to anyone talk about their past lives all you’ll hear is of how they were Napoleon or Cleopatra. And so Chad, according to his own testimony, had previously lived as James the Just (the brother of Jesus), while Lori had been James’s wife Elena. Nor did it end there. “Almost everyone but Chad and Lori was a granddaughter or a spouse of a saint – some peripheral biblical character. But Chad and Lori were special, more important. Lori, in yet another life, had been married to Moroni, the Nephite warrior who appeared as an angel in a blinding holy light at the bedside of Joseph Smith.” That’s Mormon royalty for the rest of us.

As always when reading about the operation of a cult one is left wondering just how much of this anyone really believed. Tragically, I think in this case they believed a lot. But one can understand a lot of the psychological and cultural factors at play. Everyone has the need to feel they’re special, if not one of the elect. Having been a king or a saint in a previous life fills the same need to think that we’re somehow destined for greater things, that we have some biological marker that makes us better than the herd.

Take the matter of Chad’s “zombies.” These were imagined to be people whose souls were dead and who were inhabited by evil demons. But zombies are a big part of contemporary media culture (books, movies, videogames), fitting especially well with our sense of living at or near the end times. As I’ve argued at greater length elsewhere (see my review of Glenn Kay’s book Zombie Movies), what the zombie represents is simply other people, the apocalypse is only the revelation that all these creatures that look like human beings that we encounter every day aren’t even truly alive, or at least not as alive as we are. And so it’s no surprise that in addition to Chad’s theory of evil possession, Lori’s father also argued that anyone who paid taxes was a zombie. “Like hypnotized zombies the general population systematically and begrudgingly allow the IRS operations to steal their hard-earned money,” he wrote in a book. General population = zombies. Which means the elect, those 0.01 percent, are like the gang of survivors in The Walking Dead. And from here, how big a step is it to just getting rid of (that is, killing) other people? I mean, they’re already dead anyway.

The impression I had is that Lori was a hot mess from the get-go. Her family was likened to a psychological “hornet’s nest” that may have involved some form of sexual abuse. As early as 2007, more than ten years before the killing started, a court-appointed mental health examiner assessed her during custody proceedings as being someone whose “belief system is riddled with ghosts and seemingly fanatical religious dogma.” Once she fell in with Chad’s end-times cult she was casting witchy hexes and curses on her enemies by way of texts and seeing all kinds of bizarre spiritual phenomena operating in her daily life. It should go without saying that none of this had anything to do with Mormonism. I’m no apologist for the LDS, but you can find wingnuts in every religion, and at the end of the day I was left unconvinced by Sottile’s argument that there was something peculiar to the Mormon Church that gave rise to a case like this. Lori and Chad “had grown up with some elements of the far-right fringes of Mormon culture in their lives.” But while she mentions the Rafferty brothers (whose story was told by Jon Krakauer in Under the Banner of Heaven) and Warren Jeffs, and it’s true they based their crimes on what they took to be divine direction, there have always been people of every faith you can think of who have justified bad behaviour in such a way.

At first, the story of Chad and Lori and their missing children looked like a complicated version of a stock true-crime trope: a love affair gone wrong, a story of sexual desire so intense it drove two people to kill. They collected the insurance money from former loved ones and ran away together. But the story is so much more complicated than that. This is a story of faith, and of all the things we allow ourselves to believe.

I just can’t get totally on board with this. Yes, faith played a role in what happened, but it wasn’t “so much more complicated” than the stock true-crime trope. This was a case, primarily, of sex and greed. And failure. Lori and Chad were a pair of not very bright losers who wanted more out of life but felt they’d come to the end of the line. I found it most telling that neither of them invited any friends or family to attend their beach wedding in Hawaii. That just seemed sad. Then, recognizing that they’d come to their own, personal end of the line they projected this onto the rest of the world, seeing this as the end times. It’s the narcissistic apocalypse, and speaks very much to the spirit of the age.

Noted in passing:

It’s not clear what happened the morning Charles Vallow was shot and killed by Alex Cox (Lori’s brother). Charles and Alex are both now dead, as is Tylee, who may also have been present. And the only other possible witness is Lori, who says she wasn’t there. The story that Lori and Alex came up with, and that Tylee went along with when questioned by the police, is that Tylee had grabbed a baseball bat and tried to come between Charles and Lori when Charles was threatening his wife. Charles then wrenched the bat away from her and she ran out of the house. Alex then shot Charles after, he said, Charles started swinging the bat at him.

I don’t think this is what happened. It doesn’t seem to fit at all the kind of guy Charles was, or the frame of mind he was in. But Sottile takes it as established that Tylee “hadn’t flinched to stand between Lori and Charles Vallow with a baseball bat, ready to protect her mother.”

I was really surprised to read this. As I’ve said, I don’t think there’s any way now we can be sure of exactly what happened, but I really doubt it went down like this. I think it more likely Lori coached Tylee what to say, and even then their stories didn’t agree with each other anyway. There were plenty of reasons to be sceptical about it then, which is something Sottile should have registered.

Takeaways:

If you think everyone else is a zombie, perhaps you are the zombie.

True Crime Files