LITMIR.BIZ

      EPILOGUE THE STAFF TAUNTON ASYLUM, 1938

      Acknowledgements

      Bibliography

      About the Author

Many Things Can Be True

      A Note from the Author

      Dear reader,

      Here’s the truth: I learned Jane Toppan’s story for the first time when I was trying to make myself clean my apartment on Atlanta’s west side, across from the vacant lot that still had “crime scene” tape, across its roadside entrance from the day before. I’d come home from an ex’s house early that morning, and I had spent all day trying not to think about why that tape was up and why so many blue-lit cars were parked on my street at 6:00 a.m.

      But naturally, I found myself twenty minutes later standing in my kitchen with a dripping mop, listening to My Favorite Murder. They told the story of Jane Toppan. I remember pursing my lips, dropping my mop, crossing my arms, and thinking, Okay though, America, any single one of these absolutely shit experiences would have made me strangle someone with a piano wire. I took to the internet before the episode ended. Everywhere I looked turned up the same logistical story, a list of facts barely stringing together a plot with any causality. The more facts I learned about Jane, the less I knew her. In the true spirit of the plus-one who seeks out the weirdest person at the cocktail party, Jane was the guest that I wanted to know.

      I kept reading for her, but I found different iterations of the same facts, and that frustrated me. She was not given a fraction of the attention her male counterparts were, particularly if they were white or English or American. It’s true that there are fewer female serial killers, but among Americans Jane is the first on record. The only nonfiction book I could find on her was Harold Schechter’s Fatal, which is amazing, but not what I wanted to read. The facts were there, but the story was missing.

      I just didn’t get it: why wouldn’t her contemporaries have studied her? They studied Jack the Ripper. They studied Lizzie Borden. Why wouldn’t they want to learn from her behaviors to try to prevent others?

      I have a theory. People like Jane—poor, Irish (at the time considered a lesser race), smart, hardworking—were basically ignored during the Victorian era. As an ethnic minority who worked in hospitality in front of house, I could identify with that somewhat: it sucks to have a job that is not only thankless, but if you do it well, then

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