Fatal by Schechter Harold

Author:Schechter, Harold [Schechter, Harold]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2012-11-13T07:00:00+00:00

17

Everything seemed favorable for my marrying Mr. Brigham. I had put the three women to death who had stood in my way.

—FROM THE CONFESSION OF JANE TOPPAN

ON HER WAY BACK TO LOWELL, JANE STOPPED OFF AT Cambridge to pay a brief visit to Harry Gordon’s seventy-one-year-old father, Henry Sr. Inevitably, they spoke of little else besides the terrible events at Cataumet. When Jane asked him how he accounted for the shocking sequence of death, the senior Mr. Gordon gave a sad, philosophical shrug. The most likely explanation, he opined, was that “as the family was an old one, it was dying out.”

It quickly became clear to Jane that the possibility of murder had never crossed the old man’s mind. As far as he believed, the deaths were all due to natural causes. Certainly, he hadn’t heard or read anything to make him think otherwise.

After a few hours in the old man’s company, Jane took her leave and boarded a train to Lowell—satisfied (as one of her alienists would later report) “that her guilt had escaped discovery, and that it would be safe for her to go on killing.”

• • •

Since murdering her foster sister, Elizabeth Brigham, exactly two summers before, Jane had continued to harbor connubial fantasies about Elizabeth’s stodgy, sixty-year-old widower, Oramel. She had, in fact, taken active steps to eliminate any potential competition for his affections. The previous January, during a holiday visit to her old family home, she had poisoned Oramel’s longtime housekeeper, a middle-aged widow named Florence Calkins, because (as Jane later put it) “I was jealous of her . . . I knew she wanted to become Mr. Brigham’s wife.”

When Jane arrived in Lowell on Saturday, August 24, therefore, she expected to have Oramel all to herself. Much to her dismay, she found another female in the house—Oramel’s older sister, Edna F. Bannister.

A seventy-seven-year-old widow who lived with her married daughter in Turnbridge, Vermont, Mrs. Bannister had been hoping to visit the great Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo since it opened in May. Because of her recurrent heart trouble, however, she hadn’t felt strong enough to undertake the journey until mid-August. It had been nearly a year since Edna had last seen her younger brother, so she decided to combine her trip to the exposition with a family visit. During the last week of August, she bid farewell to her daughter, Mrs. Annie Ordway, and took the train down to Lowell, arriving at the Brigham house at 182 Third Street just a few days before Jane showed up.

Early in the afternoon of Monday, August 26—shortly after Oramel, his sister, and Jane finished lunch—Mrs. Bannister began to complain of dizziness. She immediately went to lie down in her room. By late afternoon, she was feeling much better. Jane, however, insisted that she continue to rest, and brought her a tumbler of mineral water.

Sometime during the night, while Jane kept watch over the patient, Mrs. Bannister slipped into a coma. Early the next morning, Dr. William Bass—the same

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