UBC: Amrhein & Bachorski, Bread & Butter

[truepenny]

Bread & Butter: The Murders of Polly Frisch by Cindy Amrhein

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the only book "HistorySleuth Publications" has produced, and it has all the hallmarks of a self-published book, including the crying lack of a copy-editor. Discreet/discrete, affect/effect, aisle/isle, grammatical errors, punctuation errors. The writing is amateurish, although--to give credit where it's due--they generally achieve goal #1, which is clarity.

Where they really fall down is their pop psychology. They decide that Polly Frisch was "deranged" and "mentally ill" and apparently have never heard of personality disorders, or even their more pop-psych names, "sociopathy" and "psychopathy."

It's pretty clear to me (armchair psychiatry warning) from the evidence they present, that Polly Frisch had a personality disorder, probably antisocial personality disorder. It wasn't that she didn't know the difference between right and wrong, it was that she didn't care. She murdered her husband and two, or three, or possibly six of her eight children. (One child, Rosalie, survived only because she only ate half of her piece of arsenic laced bread and butter. Her sister Frances ate the remaining half along with her own piece and died horribly.) It took five trials to convict her, 1 for her husband Henry Hoag (acquittal), 1 for two-year-old Eliza Jane (acquittal), and 3 for six-year-old Frances (2 mistrials and a conviction). At the last second the defense grabbed at not guilty by reason of insanity and Polly was diagnosed as epileptic (which of course in the 1850s was a useful catch-all, and Polly apparently had "fits," although I honestly can't tell from Amrhein & Bachorski whether she really did have fits all along and nobody mentioned them, or whether she obediently started shamming fits when her lawyers told her to). So instead of being hanged, she was sent to Sing Sing . . . and, no, that makes no sense to me, either. If she was insane, why wasn't she sent to the insane asylum at Utica? And if she wasn't insane, hence being sent to Sing Sing, why wasn't she hanged?

(Of course, we all know why she wasn't hanged. She would have been the first woman in Genesee County to be hanged, and neither the judge nor the jury had the stomach for it. As the LeRoy Gazette tartly recommended: "Either abolish the laws or enforce them" (199).)

But it's obvious Polly wasn't insane. Like most sociopaths, she was a model prisoner (which Amrhein & Bachorski do not recognize as evidence of sanity), ending up working as a nurse in the prison infirmary and apparently completely reformed. She was released in 1892 and quietly disappeared.

I'm interested in female serial killers like Mary Ann Cotton and Polly Frisch because they can be documented much farther back than the male (sexual) serial killers who grabbed the headlines in the 20th century and because the model of why and how they commit homicide is so different. (I like poking at things that explode the myth of the 19th century as a more "innocent" time and oh woe is us the evils of the 20th century have destroyed us.) Female serial killers (except for the outlier Aileen Wuornos) don't commit stranger murders and they don't kill violently. They poison their husbands and their children, and for no real reason that anyone can discern, except that they're tired of having them around.

On that basis, this was a very interesting book, and Amrhein & Bachorski definitely did their primary research. But this is definitely a book for the, um, enthusiast. Three stars.



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