Pick Your Poison: Deborah Blum Talks Poisoner's Trilogy At Falmouth Forum
What do you know about female killers—specifically, poisoners? Most likely, not much—but not to worry, because that’s where Deborah Blum, longtime author and science journalist, comes in.
Poison is Ms. Blum’s metaphorical bread and butter. She is in the process of writing the third book in her trilogy about the whats, hows and whys of poison in our world, and has spent years researching, learning and writing about the topic. The auditorium at MBL’s Lillie Laboratory was nearly full on January 10, with community members waiting to hear Ms. Blum give a talk on her book series at the MBL’s Falmouth Forum, where she shared what she has dredged up from the depths of history in her journey to unearth some of the world’s most-prolific female poisoners.
“I think part of it was, I’m really interested in how you get away with murder, and no one gets away with murder better than female poisoners,” Ms. Blum said in an interview with the Enterprise prior to her talk.
One example she gave was Jane Toppan, also known as “Jolly Jane” for her delightful demeanor. Jane might have been jolly, but the horror she quietly left in her wake is staggering: the private nurse is believed to have killed somewhere between 30 and 100 people at the end of the 1800s, Ms. Blum said. Even worse: she is said to have often laid down with her victims as they died “so she could feel their breath leave their body, because it gave her such a thrill,” Ms. Blum said.
“There is almost no other female serial killer on record who does that and so when you go and look at research into psychopathy, it all says ‘women aren’t really psychopaths’ or ‘they don’t measure up to male psychopaths,’ which is not entirely true,” Ms. Blum said during her Falmouth Forum talk. “I was trying to explore some of that issue: why don’t we see this? What does it tell us about sanity and poison?”
Jolly Jane’s run as a serial killer came to an end due to her apparent failure to pay rent at a cottage in, of all places, Cataumet. She was renting from the family of Alden P. Davis and, according to the New England Historical Society, when Ms. Davis turned up in Cambridge to collect the rent from her tenant, Jolly Jane killed her with a cocktail of morphine and atropine. She was not done yet, though—she went back to Cataumet to spend time with the rest of the Davis family; that time ended upon the untimely deaths of everyone in Jane’s company within weeks of her arrival. A police inquiry was undertaken after Captain Irving Foster Gibbs, who was at sea when his wife Mary Davis Gibbs was murdered, questioned the death of his family. Jane Toppan was arrested later that same year.
Ms. Blum’s upcoming book, as she describes it, is an exploration of what we know and don’t know, why we don’t see these women and what they can tell us about ourselves.
“We know the John Wayne Gacys and the Jeffrey Dahmers and the Ted Bundys, who are just like amateurs compared to these women, they’ve never killed nearly as many,” she said. “Why aren’t these women household names?”
Those are the questions that started Ms. Blum on her journey to unearth the female serial killers of old who had been lost to time. The book, which is currently in the revisions stage, would be a true-crime-focused follow to her previous two books: “The Poisoner’s Handbook,” which is about the introduction of forensics and toxicology into 1920 police work in New York City, and “The Poison Squad,” which takes a more chemical- and health-focused look at how we got to the age of food safety as we presently know it.
What got Ms. Blum started on her upcoming book, she said, was that she wanted “to write a female empowerment book about female poisoners.” Once she got into it, though, she realized it was much more complicated than that.
“Some of these are really terrible people who do terrible things, so it’s like, [I] don’t feel entirely empowered by you. But what I did realize is that when we look at these female poisoners, each of them has a story that actually tells us something about society or ourselves, you know, women dealing with a lack of power in the 19th century.”
A self-proclaimed “failed chemistry major,” Ms. Blum has dedicated most of her career to putting the journalist’s spin on science and, specifically, chemistry. She wants to learn about how things work, she said, and chemistry essentially provides those building blocks right down to the molecule. Her book trilogy takes a historic look at how humans have historically used and interacted with poisons—in our homes, in our food and bodies, in our products, and, for some, like the women in her upcoming book, in moments of desperation.
“The 19th century is known as the arsenic century,” Ms. Blum told the crowd at the Falmouth Forum, “but I also used this to look at the states of women mostly in Britain. Women had no power in 19th century Britain and once you were married you could not [make] a will, you could not own property, you could not get divorced, you could not go to a university.”
Looking at the literature from the time, Ms. Blum said, she realized that when it comes to women and poison—meaning over-the-counter and household products containing things like arsenic, strychnine and antimony—it was really all they had. The women had poison, Ms. Blum said; they had no other choice.
In one case, Ms. Blum talked about a group of women married to factory workers who used antimony on their husbands.
“[The men] were drunk, they were abusive, they’d come home and beat them up and so this group of women got together and they would put antimony, which is quite like arsenic, in their tea,” she said.
They got caught, she continued, when one of the ladies put a little too much antimony in, and her husband died. But what was really interesting to Ms. Blum, she said, was how they described the situation after they got caught: they called antimony “the quiet”; they were trying to protect themselves from their abusive husbands.
Ms. Blum’s research for her trilogy has taken her around the globe, into the depths of the historical archives and down a winding path of tracking poisons, their uses, their users and their effects on society. At the heart of her first book in the trilogy, she said, was the message that “chemistry is cool.” That ethos still holds true years later, as the final book in the trilogy prepares to head to print.
“One of the things that’s important to me—and this probably illuminates all three of these books in some way—we live in this chemical world,” Ms. Blum told the Enterprise. “It influences and changes our lives and affects us every day. We actually have to understand that. We have to be able to apply some common sense to what’s dangerous and what’s not. We need tools for navigation.”