Pretty Evil NE – Excerpt
Pretty Evil New England
Chapter 1: Unknowingly Tempting Fate
In 1887, thirty-six-year-old Amelia Phinney survived the surgery for a uterine ulcer in Cambridge Hospital, a procedure done via cauterization with nitrate of silver—only to come face-to-face with New England’s most prolific female serial killer, whose body count reached well into the double digits. Post-op the following evening, Amelia tossed and turned on the cot in her room, the abdominal pain so severe it prevented her from falling asleep.
A shadowy figure emerged through the golden smolder of a bedside oil lamp. The dark-haired, dark-eyed nurse hovered over her bed with a peculiar intensity. When Amelia met her gaze, the stranger asked how she was feeling. The surgery, although successful, left her in a state of suffering. Amelia pleaded with the portly nurse to summon her doctor.
“There is no need for that.” The nurse’s voice remained soft, caring. “I have something to make you feel better. Here.” She slid her arm under Amelia’s shoulders and raised her far enough off the pillow to sip from the glass pressed to her lips. “Drink this.”
After swallowing a foul-tasting liquid, a numbness branched throughout Amelia’s torso and limbs. Her mouth and throat grew dry and scratchy, her eyelids weighted as she faded into a semi-conscious state. Someone pulled down the bedclothes. The cot creaked and the thin mattress sagged beneath the weight of a person climbing into bed with her.
The nurse cuddled and groped Amelia, stroking her hair, tenderly kissing her cheeks, forehead, and chin; her voice was soft, whispering that soon everything would be all right. Then the stranger rose to her knees. Hovering over Amelia, the nurse flipped Amelia’s eyelids inside-out and leaned in—a determined stare, eye-to-eye.
Was this really happening?
The nurse’s breathing accelerated into a heavy pant. Hot breath pummeled the side of Amelia’s face as though her suffering excited the stranger.
“Come, dear.” The nurse pressed the glass to Amelia’s bottom lip again, urging her to swallow more of the bitter medicine. “Drink just a little more.”
Unwilling to obey, Amelia clamped her mouth closed and rolled her face to the opposite side of her pillow like a petulant toddler refusing to eat vegetables. Wooden clogs pattering down the hall outside the room startled the nurse, and she leaped off the bed and bustled out the door.
The next morning, a trainee named McCutcheon shook Amelia awake. When she opened her eyes her stomach acid sloshed in protest, a queasiness rising to her throat. For several hours she fought through a drug-induced haze. Once she’d regained her faculties, she thought it best not to share the story of the bizarre encounter from the night before. The incident was so crazy it must have been a bad dream; a nightmare brought on by the pain reliever.
Or had a mystical guardian angel saved her life?
It would take fourteen years for her to discover the truth.
* * *
Another scorching summer day, another unexplained death.
In 1901 on Cape Cod, seagulls squawked over the catch of the day in fishermen’s nets, osprey nested along marshlands and sandy beaches, waves lapping against miles and miles of shorelines on the eastern, western, and southern tips of the Massachusetts peninsula, where horse-drawn carriages kicked up sorrel dust clouds, iron-shoed hooves clomping against pressed-gravel streets. Salt scented the air for miles. But by August 15 of that year, something evil veiled the peaceful seaside community of Cataumet.
Jane Toppan vacationed in the area for the first time in 1897. As a trained nurse and Cambridge Hospital graduate, Jane looked the part in every line of her face, every curve of her ample figure, every movement and mannerism. At that time she stayed at the Davis cottage with the prominent family of L.W. Ferdinand of Cambridge, next door to a rambling seasonal hotel called Jachin House. Guests from the city would congregate on Jachin House’s wide wrap-around porches to relax, rocking away the evening hours, cooled off by crisp ocean breezes sweeping in from Buzzards Bay.
The Davis family owned both properties. Alden Davis, considered by many to be Cataumet’s most influential citizen due to his reorganization of the railroad system so the train stopped at the Cape, worked as the town’s postmaster, station agent, and had a successful marble business. He also ran the general store across from Depot Square. Some say he founded the town.
Most of the headstones in the local cemetery were engraved by Alden Davis’s hand, a fact that seems ominous in hindsight.
Jane Toppan fell in love with Cape Cod. So much so, she returned to Jachin House year after year to spend the summer, thereby avoiding the hustle and bustle of city life. During one such summer, in late August of 1889, Jane’s foster sister, Elizabeth Brigham, decided to come down from Lowell to visit Jane—a little “girl time” for the two women to reconnect.
Jane had something else planned for their reunion.
Over the years Jane had maintained a cordial relationship with Elizabeth, but deep down she harbored resentment. Twenty years her senior, Elizabeth represented everything Jane wasn’t. Not only was Elizabeth pampered by her biological mother, Ann Toppan, while Jane was treated as the family slave, Elizabeth was also wealthy, attractive, and married to Oramel A. Brigham (known as “O. A.”), a well-liked, highly regarded deacon of the First Trinitarian Congregational Church in Lowell and depot master for the Boston & Maine Railroad.
When Ann Toppan, Jane’s foster mother, died she excluded Jane from the will. And Jane touched on this in her confession:
I felt rather bitter against Mrs. [Elizabeth] Brigham after Mother Toppan’s death, because I always thought she destroyed the will that left me some of the old lady’s property. Mrs. [Elizabeth] Brigham came down to visit me at Cataumet on Buzzards Bay, where I was spending the Summer of 1899 in one of the Davis cottages. That gave me a good chance to have my revenge on her.
On August 26, the day after Elizabeth arrived on the Cape, Jane suggested a picnic on the beach might lift her foster sister’s spirits. For several weeks Elizabeth had been suffering with a mild but persistent case of melancholia (known today as depression).
Weaved picnic basket in hand, Jane escorted Elizabeth down to Scotch House Cove, where the two women spent several hours chatting away the day while munching on cold corned beef and taffy. Salted ocean breezes swept its fingers through their hair as they basked in the summer sun. But deep within Jane a volcano of resentment was about to erupt.
She was really the first of my victims that I actually hated and poisoned with a vindictive purpose. So I let her die slowly, with griping tortures. I fixed mineral water so it would do that and then added the morphia to it.
All that sun drained Elizabeth of energy, so she retired early to her upstairs bedroom. The following morning, Jane called Elizabeth down for breakfast. When she didn’t respond, Jane rushed to the home of her landlord, Alden Davis, and asked if he could summon the doctor because “her sister had taken sick.” Jane then telegrammed O. A. in Lowell, informing him that his wife was in grave condition.
Alarmed, O. A. took the first available train to Cape Cod. By the time he arrived the next morning, Monday, August 28, Elizabeth had fallen into a coma. She died in the early morning hours of August 29. The doctor said Elizabeth had suffered a stroke of apoplexy (cerebral hemorrhage or stroke).
But Jane knew better.
I held her in my arms and watched with delight as she gasped her life out.
As O. A. packed up his wife’s belongings, he only found five dollars in her pocketbook, which was odd since he and Elizabeth agreed that she should take “no less than fifty dollars” for her trip. When he asked Jane about the missing money, she feigned innocence. As far as she knew, Elizabeth arrived with only a few dollars. If money went missing, Jane assured him, she didn’t know anything about it.
Taking Jane at her word, O. A. continued to pack Elizabeth’s belongings when Jane rested a soothing hand on his forearm. Just before slipping into a coma, she said, Elizabeth expressed the desire to leave Jane her gold watch and chain. Touched by his wife’s kind gesture, O. A. fulfilled Elizabeth’s final wish.
* * *
As the years rolled by, the folks in Cataumet village witnessed a different side of Jane, who was often spotted in a white dress and pinstriped sailor cap, hand-in-hand with a human chain of children, skipping down to the beach at Scotch House Cove or below the bluffs on Squiteague Bay. The kids carried picnic baskets stuffed with food for yet another fun-filled day with “Jolly Jane.”
No one could figure out how she afforded these outings. Did it matter? Everyone adored Jane, with her kind, jovial, fun-loving personality, and her uncanny ability of winning her way into the hearts of everyone she met.
During those summers, however, Jane signed several notes for unpaid rent and personal loans totaling thousands, five hundred dollars of which remained outstanding. The Davis family was so fond of Jane that no one pressured her for the money, until June 25, 1901, when Mattie Davis’s generosity had run out.
* * *
When Mattie woke on the morning of June 25, the temperature had already risen to a balmy seventy degrees by early dawn. The summer day promised to be another scorcher, but nothing could persuade her to forego her trip to Cambridge to confront Jane. Good friend or not, she and Alden had been patient long enough. Besides, her daughter, Genevieve Gordon, was visiting in-laws in Somerville, Massachusetts, all the way from her home in Chicago. Mattie could kill two birds, so to speak, and visit with Genevieve once Jane paid the past-due notes. She also needed to find out if Jane wanted to reserve a room at Jachin House that summer or rent the Davis cottage again.
In poor health from diabetes, exacerbated by the heat and humidity, Mattie didn’t move fast enough that morning. The 6:45 a.m. train to Boston was due any minute. To help his wife, Alden volunteered to run over to the depot and ask the conductor to hold the train. The hotel stood only three hundred feet from the station. He made it just in time to catch the locomotive and two passenger cars as they squealed across the tracks to the platform.
While Alden chatted with the conductor, Charles F. Hammond, Mattie clambered down the long flight of stairs from the Davis cottage. Hustling down the hill to the depot, she tripped and sailed through the air, landing face-first on the ground in front of all the passengers.
Through the train window Alden spotted his wife sprawled out on the grass and rushed to her aid. But by the time he reached her, Mattie was already back on her feet, moaning and limping toward the platform.
Disheveled, badly shaken, her face flushed from embarrassment, Mattie clung to her husband’s arm as he assisted her to the rear of the second car. Hammond then took over, guiding her through the baggage compartment and into her seat before collecting tickets from the other passengers. One of Mattie’s fellow passengers was a man named George Hall, a representative of a Boston meat and provision house, who witnessed the accident. Leaning aside to his friend in the next seat, he said he wouldn’t be surprised if the fall turned out to be Mrs. Mattie Davis’s “death blow.”
If only that were true. Dying of complications from a fall would’ve been a blessing compared to the agony Mattie would soon endure.
By the time the train left the station, Mattie had more or less steadied her nerves. Another passenger, Willard Hill, who’d also witnessed the fall, sat in the seat across from Mattie and asked if she was okay.
“Nothing hurt but my dignity,” she said.
They continued to chitchat during the train ride, Mattie sharing the reason for her trip to Cambridge. Mr. Hill acted appalled when he learned Nurse Toppan had been so lax in paying her overdue notes. Knowing “Jennie” (as close friends and family called Jane) as well as he did, he’d always thought so highly of her. But clearly, she’d taken advantage of the Davis family. He told Mattie it was time to get tough with her. If he were in Mattie’s position, he wouldn’t leave Cambridge until Jane Toppan paid her debts.
Disembarking from the train in Cambridge, Mattie made her way to 31 Wendell Street, the home of ex-city councilman Melvin Beedle and his wife, Eliza, with whom Jane was boarding. Mattie hoped her good friend “Jennie” would understand the urgency to get the notes squared away. Or would Jane view Mattie’s visit as confrontational?
What Mattie Davis failed to realize was that even the most patient and gentle animals might attack when cornered. For someone like Jolly Jane, Mattie showing up on her doorstep, unannounced, likened to slandering her good name in front of the town crier.
Hope you enjoyed this sneak peek of Pretty Evil New England! I did something a little different for the book trailer…
“Chilling. Coletta draws on a wide range of original sources to bring her subjects to life.” Publishers Weekly
“When one thinks of serial killers, one might think of Ted Bundy, or the Green River Killer, or even Jack the Ripper. It is not likely, though, that one will think of any women. But there are several female serial killers among the American pantheon of criminals, and Sue Coletta, an absolute master of the true-crime genre, brings to bear her brilliant writing and stellar research in this marvelous treatise by taking a hard look at female serial killers in New England during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
She tells the stories of Jane Toppan, Lydia Sherman, Nellie Webb, Harriet E Nason, and Sarah Jane Robinson, even using their own words at times to really give readers the whole story. She has accessed interviews, newspaper articles, court transcripts, and more to bring readers into the times and places about which she is writing. Her writing is accessible and focused, appropriate for the topic, and the stories of these women are very compelling. She has chosen great subject matter for fans of true crime writing. Readers will still be left with questions unanswered, but they will be fully satisfied with these fascinating stories. Don’t miss this one.” Portland Book Review
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