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.

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