Wretched Recommendation: Fatal
A Wretched Recommendation
Fatal : The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer
by Harold Schechter
Harold Schechter is my favorite historic true crime writer. He seeks out the most interesting cases, researches them thoroughly, and then pens fascinating tomes that accomplish that rare goal of keeping me interested from the first page to the last. Fatal is about “Jolly” Jane Tappan, a spinster nurse who poisoned at least 31 people – probably more – between 1891 and 1901, becoming one of America’s most prolific serial killers in the process.
Jane is a fascinating character. Her mother died when she was young, leaving her and her sister to be raised by their neglectful and abusive drunken father who turned them over to an orphanage. Back in those days, orphanages lent out their charges to be indentured servants to the families who housed and fed them. Jane grew up as an outwardly smiling, joking, and “jolly” girl – while internally seething in bitter jealousy at her foster sister who had everything that Jane wanted: a well-off family who cared for her, a boyfriend, a high social standing.
In her early 20′s, she embarked to nursing school, where her dysfunctional upbringing began to express itself in a desire to make other people sick so that she could care for them and then bring them back from the brink of death, thus making herself feel powerful and needed. Or sometimes she might just let them die… a process that she found even more exhilarating (as she later admitted, even sexually so). And so her career of murder – first in hospitals and later in private houses – began.
Luckily for Jane, medical science in the late 19th century was still in the Dark Ages, so a series of doctors failed to recognize that her victims had been poisoned, and ascribed laughably inaccurate causes of death ranging from “cerebral hemorrhage” to “fever”. It wasn’t until her mania to kill grew so great that she was taking out entire families in a matter of weeks that suspicion began to fester and autopsies were finally performed on her victims… and then her true monstrous nature was revealed for all to see.
Unlike the average morbid book (which peters out after the crime spree or tragedy has ended), I found the last few chapters of Fatal even more fascinating than the earlier ones. Jane’s jailhouse confession (given to the court appointed alienist who analyzed her) is jaw-dropping for its frankness. (I mean what woman in 1901 would admit to experiencing sexual satisfaction through laying in bed with a dying woman?) And the final couple of chapters depicting the final few years of her life in an asylum I found the most interesting of all. Throughout the book I found myself feeling both sympathy and derision for this complex, confounding woman. Highly recommended. (5/5)
More books about bad, bad people like Jane Tappan can be found in the Maniacal Monsters aisle of The Library Eclectica.
I love Harold Schechter’s books too. I read a couple of them last summer when Bookshare put several of them online. He’s an excellent writer, gives tons of detail, goes off on tangents, explains everything.
Jane could really have made something of herself with her nursing training. She was certainly bright enough. That could have been her ticket to the kind of life she wanted, but no, she couldn’t achieve success and enjoy it in the normal way.
Oooooo!!
Must get this!
I used to read True Crime all the time but have slacked off these past few years.
I’ve never read Harold Schechter.
I have noticed in many different things that i have read that women when asked a frank question by a person actually seeking understanding in a way that may help them or others were always quite frank and mainly open about such things. While it may not have been a topic they discussed with their friends or maybe even their partners they feel because someone is a doctor and perhaps doing research they’d drop their inhabitions of talking about sex and for just a few moments let themselves really open up about the topic. i vaguely remember of reading about some women who did a sex survey among female patients long before kinsey did his research that you’ll never hear the end of it just wasn’t published or even known about. thats my 11 & a half cents.
Then again, what did Jane have to lose? And anyway, she obviously didn’t play by the rule that says you don’t kill your patients on purpose, so why would she be bound by some rule that says you don’t talk about your sexual feelings?