by Paul Collins
Dr. Webster fell silent around reporters, though. He wasn’t willing to talk with them, or with much of anybody from outside the jail. No, he’d talk only with his family and with Franklin Dexter, the lawyer he’d requested. But for the Herald reporters showing up at the Leverett Street Jail, ready to seize the story from the Bee, Webster’s mere survival was story enough. “REPORTED SUICIDE OF WEBSTER UNTRUE!” the next edition promptly proclaimed, joining its fellow headers “DIABOLICAL DEED!” and the always reliable “STARTLING INTELLIGENCE!”
The Medical College was where the story was now, anyway. “A RIOT ANTICIPATED!” the Herald announced, perhaps a little too hopefully—and added, nonchalantly, “It is supposed the building will be torn down.” There was indeed a crowd gathering around the college, as many as a thousand people, and ready for a fight. The local Irish poor, scapegoated for so much else in the city, had been blamed for Parkman’s disappearance, too. They had long suspected—correctly—that the Medical College made off with the cadavers of their paupers. Now, it seemed, Harvard had tampered with the living as well. All those stories of an Irishman with a suspicious twenty-dollar bill to pay the bridge fare by the school—the gall of it, when Parkman’s body had been in the college all along. A rich man, killed by another rich man, who pinned it on the poor!
A local urchin, poking around a basement window, briefly tumbled in—presumably into the clutches of the dastardly Harvard professors inside—and the crowd nearly boiled over. He was quickly fished out, and a member of the crowd loudly tried intervening to placate the others.
I saw Dr. Parkman enter this college! the fellow yelled out. It was McGinnis, an Irishman who earned his keep by carting garbage from school. The building getting torn down by an angry mob would not be altogether to his benefit. I saw it myself, he yelled, and then I saw Parkman outside an hour later!
The mob was unconvinced. The mood blackened, a witness recalled, to one “scarcely less criminal than the dark deed of blood itself.” Police reported back to city hall that a riot was surely imminent, and Mayor Bigelow—“whose eyes,” a journalist noted, “were a good deal magnified for the occasion”—ordered every available officer to the scene. The local militia was called to arms. The City Guards, New England Guards, and the Artillery altogether had more than one hundred guns at the ready, and the mayor quickly visited their quarters for some rousing words. The sight of a few military uniforms might have been enough: the crowd dispersed, and the rowdies melted away.
In their place, a smaller and more peaceable group emerged that evening, fumbling for some way to recognize the gravity of what had transpired in the building before them. Someone had the idea to sing a hymn; but then they hit upon the latest Stephen Foster song, “Old Uncle Ned” (“Hang up de fiddle and de bow / No more hard work for poor Old Ned / He’s gone whar de good N———go.”) At length, though, the voices rose up and over the Medical College and the surrounding homes with a slightly more sedate number:
Old Grimes is dead; that good old man
We never shall see more
He used to wear a long, black coat,
All buttoned down before . . .
But good old Grimes is now at rest,
Nor fears misfortune’s frown;
He wore a double-breasted vest,
The stripes ran up and down.
It wasn’t quite a church hymn, but it was perhaps the best one could expect from the streets of Boston on a Saturday night.
Still, at least one Bostonian puzzled over the scene before him: Samuel Wentworth, a provisioner with a store on Lynde Street. Like so many in the neighborhood, he too had seen Dr. Parkman out on his rounds on the day of his disappearance. It didn’t occur to him to tell the police or anyone else, but he’d spotted Parkman on Court Street, just by Mrs. Kidder’s patent medicine store, a thriving business filled with humbugs like Dalley’s Magical Pain Extractor and Dr. More-head’s Improved Graduated-Magnetic Machines. It wasn’t a place one would expect to find the dour old physician lingering.
And there was another peculiar thing. Wentworth was quite sure he’d seen him there at about three p.m.—a full hour after he was supposed to be dead.
16
A LIFETIME OF UPRIGHTNESS
PROFESSOR BIGELOW STOOD BEFORE A PACKED LECTURE HALL of students that Monday, their faces expectant. The cold morning light cut across the windows and lecture stage in a building much too new to have suffered its second scandal in as many years.
It was never altogether possible to know, when disaster struck a school, just how the students would react: with scorn and audible scoffing, with visible grief, or with shocked silence and respectful murmurs as they filed in and out of the lecture hall. It depended on that year’s cohort, and it depended no less on the professor who faced them. And for this task, the faculty had chosen the young Henry Bigelow. He was their newest professor, and the one closest in age and temperament to the students themselves.
“Gentlemen,” Dr. Bigelow began, and the room fell quiet.
“It is with deep regret that I am obliged to announce to the class that in consequence of the solemn and appalling events of the last week, the lectures at the Medical College will be suspended this and the succeeding two days. This measure is rendered necessary by the existing condition of things.”
The students gazed at the hall around them, at the existing condition of things. It was a fair question as to whether they’d even be allowed back in after the two succeeding days. They’d had to get police permission to come inside the building; and that day, audible from within the depths of the structure, men could be heard prying up floorboards and planing off samples of wood from the floors and the walls.
“It is due,” the young doctor continued, “to the present excited state of public feeling—it is due to the majesty of the law, the investigations of which are not yet completed; above all, it is due to the memory of George Parkman. The melancholy forebodings of the past week, which have ripened into the painful conviction that he no longer survives, have cast a cloud over our whole city. Most of all, gentlemen, it will be felt in this school, which has been the recipient of his bounty, and which is fearfully associated with the last known hours of his existence.”
Though one could scarcely tell from the solemnity of Bigelow’s speech, the school’s alumni and faculty had already swung into action. The forensic evidence had been found, after all, in the very building of those best qualified to examine it; investigating a mutilated body in the Medical College was rather like solving a robbery perpetrated inside a police headquarters. The evidence was quickly parceled out by the coroner: Dr. Nathan Keep (’27) and Professor Jeffries Wyman (’37) would examine the bones and loose teeth found in the furnace. Drs. Winslow Lewis (’22), George Gay (’45), and James Stone (’43) would examine what they dubbed “the fleshy portions of the body” from the tea chest and the privy. The chemical evidence spattered about the offices would be examined by Drs. Martin Gay (’26) and Charles T. Jackson (’29). Handling the carved-up remains of a fellow alumnus and perhaps sending one of their professors to the gallows—all told, it was possibly the worst Harvard reunion on record.
Yet each man brought an extraordinary range of expertise to his forensic task. Dr. Keep was a physician, but he’d also been a personal dentist to both Parkman and Webster. He knew, for instance, that Dr. Parkman inserted his false teeth for socializing and popped them into his back pocket when not in use; the old man often damaged his dentures by then sitting on them. His forensics partner Dr. Wyman was newly prominent for a groundbreaking skeletal analysis announcing the discovery of the African gorilla, a species that had remained remarkably unknown to the Western world until 1847. But now, instead of analyzing a creature that no Bostonian had seen alive, Wyman faced reconstructing the skeleton of a man who, it seemed, half the city knew by sight.
These teams of Harvard alumni epitomized just how far the field of forensics had come. For years, medical jurisprudence had often occupied itself with qu
estions of abortion, miscarriage, and parentage; it was no accident that Harvard still had a single combined position referred to as “professor of obstetrics and medical jurisprudence.” But with the rise of instruction in anatomy and chemistry in the past generation, and the rapid sharing of case studies and experiments through the burgeoning availability of medical journals, forensics was advancing quickly. The primary guide to the field back in Parkman and Webster’s medical student days, Farr’s Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, had filled all of 139 generously margined pages. The standard guide by 1849, Taylor’s Medical Jurisprudence, ran to more than 800 densely typeset pages and covered everything from death by lightning to gall bladder injuries; nearly half of the chapters were on poisoning alone, be it by antimony, by nightshade, or even by vinegar.
As his colleagues wheeled into action just a few rooms away, Dr. Bigelow maintained the grave and respectful bearing expected of the medical school and its faculty.
“Let us bow,” the professor intoned to his students, “before the decrees of Providence, and wait on its wisdom and justice.”
DR. JOHN White Webster was not waiting on wisdom and justice that morning; he was, however, waiting for his breakfast. He’d largely recovered in the past two days; his hands, steadied now, no longer dashed the water glass or the fork away. Rather than let him suffer the prison fare, one of his wife’s Prescott cousins had been footing the bill for orders down the block at Parker’s Restaurant—even though, as with the Cunninghams, the Prescotts themselves were owed money by Webster. The previous night, the doctor had enjoyed some oysters; now, once again spared from the slop served to the others in lockup, he waited for another delivery.
“His numerous friends will be rejoiced to learn that he has not lost his appetite,” a visitor drily observed that morning.
His meal arrived, and he devoured it. It was peculiar to eat alone, but to be expected; here, on the lowest floor of the jail, where the least light reached the windows, was where prisoners for capital offenses were kept. The higher tiers, lighter and a little closer to heaven, held the thieves, harmless drunks, debtors, and some hapless material witnesses. Neither Webster’s wife nor his daughters had visited his cell yet; they wanted to but had been dissuaded for the sake of their own delicate constitutions. It wasn’t that his cell was so bad, really. It was a bit dim but whitewashed and clean, and Harriet had sent her husband a few baskets of books and other dainties from the house. He needed a little rug, perhaps, to keep the floor from getting so dreadfully cold.
John?
Outside his cell were Professors Benjamin Peirce and Eben Horsford, the brilliant mathematician and the young star in physics. Fancy seeing them here: Did they know this cell had once held the dread pirate Don Pedro Gilbert? The Terror of the Treasure Coast? Indeed it had. And now it held Harvard’s Erving Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy. Such was the lamentable state of Boston’s constabulary and its justice system. Well, it was good they had come, for there was much for them to plan. Eben would have to serve in John’s place for the chemistry lectures, once those began again at the school. It had to be Eben; Oliver Wendell Holmes had consulted with him, in his capacity as dean of the school, and he and Webster both agreed. Horsford’s work in translating chemical texts from the German was nearly as good as Webster’s, and there was no better man to step in while the doctor addressed these charges of, well, the charges of the present matter.
It would take a while, to be sure.
So much damage had been done already. The professor’s private financial affairs had been painfully dragged before all of Boston and, even worse, all of Cambridge. A statement in this morning’s Bee was typical: “The professor has been embarrassed for money for the past few months to an almost extreme degree.” Another paper revealed the inheritance he’d received from his late father two decades ago—a tidy $40,000—and noted that he’d squandered most of it on a grand home he’d then sold at a terrible loss. One paper portrayed him as a man of “expensive habits and a love of luxury,” while another noted that he’d recently had a nine-dollar check returned due to insufficient funds.
To many across the river in Cambridge, to gentlemen like Peirce and Horsford, the notion of their old colleague embroiled in a crime over money defied any sense at all. “A lifetime of uprightness forbids it,” scoffed the Cambridge Chronicle. As to who had really committed the crime, well, that was obvious. They scarcely even needed to name him.
“We are at perfect liberty to suppose that some individual knowing that Dr. Parkman was to have received money of Dr. Webster, might have accosted him as he came out of Dr. Webster’s lecture-room on the main floor of the building, might have asked him down into the basement, and having him in a room with no other person, and not exposed to observation, felled him with a blow,” one newspaper theorized. The writer was not very coy about who this unnamed individual would be. “In the hours of midnight, when he was the sole monarch of the College, he would naturally, at any rate, think of disposing the body in the safest way possible.” And with the reward offered for the body, of course, this individual would now triple his money or better by subsequently “discovering” the body.
“Of course we cannot believe Dr. Webster guilty, bad as some of the evidence looks,” wrote Fanny Longfellow to her sister-in-law. “Many suspect the janitor, who is known to be a bad man, and to have wished for the reward offered for Dr. Parkman’s body.”
Boston and Cambridge were swiftly separating, observed one reporter, into the “the anti-Webster and the anti-Littlefield parties.” The janitor was already known to have handled the college’s dark trade in cadavers; who knew what else he was capable of? Three students from the Medical College had recently gone to the district attorney, charging that Littlefield had offered one of them seventy dollars for a gold watch; this, they charged, was surely evidence of his ill-gotten gains. But there was a comically simple explanation: Littlefield had made the comment in jest, weeks earlier. And what need had he of a watch from a student, in the middle of a city full of pawnbrokers and jewelers? To the anti-Websterians, this was simply one more attempt, an editorial inveighed, “to throw a deed of blood from a man in high society upon the head of a poor man.”
High society did have its uses for Webster. He’d requested a private arraignment, or as close to one as the city could manage, and because he was a respectable citizen, it had been granted. But would he miss lunch through this special arraignment? Ah, well, he might.
Professor Peirce was bewildered by his old colleague. Webster was strangely calm and, during their conversation, kept endlessly circling back to his meals. “His whole mind seems to be running upon his food,” Peirce later reported, “and upon the delicacies with which he may pamper his appetite.”
It was mystifying. Did the fellow not understand that he was in mortal danger from these charges?
JUSTICE IN Boston never slept, but it did take lunch breaks. The jailhouse carriage arrived at a courthouse that would normally have been abandoned for the more genial chambers of Parker’s and the Union Oyster House. The sergeant at arms was discombobulated, so little did he expect court business at this hour, and no sooner had he opened the large oaken doors to allow Webster and a phalanx of officers inside than he’d shut it to the press. Two lucky reporters made it in—one from the Courier, the other from the abolitionist paper the Daily Chronotype. They’d never seen the public shut out like this. Just the year before, when a black sailor named Washington Goode had been charged in a sensational murder, there’d been no secrecy at all—quite the opposite. And yet here was a white Harvard man, his case the talk of the town, whisked into the courthouse with scarcely a murmur to the press.
“The color of a man’s skin makes a mighty difference with some folks,” the Chronotype reporter observed acidly.
Webster situated himself at the docket while the arraigning judge pored over the papers. Some interesting cases for the court today: the notorious counterfeiter Madame O’Connor, as well as a miscrea
nt who’d tried extorting $500 from a Bostonian through anonymous letters threatening to burn his house down. But none topped this case. Had he, Professor Webster, read the charges?
No, Webster answered, smiling politely, he had not.
It would take a few minutes to prepare them for the prisoner to read; Webster occupied his wait with a newspaper. It was not altogether comforting reading, as his own case was the biggest story. “ASTOUNDING DISCLOSURES!” the Bee blared, adding, “THE EVIDENCE ACCUMULATES!” Even with the Medical College cordoned off by police, the rumor was that certain penny papers had been offering bounties of up to fifty dollars for a good scoop. If so, the Herald had certainly got its money’s worth: that afternoon it was topping all competitors with a shockingly grisly, and disconcertingly accurate, illustration of George Parkman’s remains as illicitly viewed inside the Medical College. It was an unheard-of picture to run in a Boston newspaper—a body visibly laid out for public view in the news columns, right alongside the “Receipts of California Gold Dust” and stock quotes for the Connecticut River Railroad. Yet nothing about the case seemed normal anymore. Newspapers had suddenly become so valuable that urchins were stealing them off subscribers’ doorsteps to resell in the street. Thanks to the new telegraph lines into the city, soon the story would go national as well; what little reprieve Webster had so far had from that was due to a weekend storm knocking out Boston’s lines to New York City.
The Herald had also commissioned an artist to draw Webster’s portrait; haste was its most notable artistic feature. The result, one commentator scoffed, “looks no more like that gentleman than it looks like Queen Victoria.”
At length the complaint was brought over to the docket and handed to the doctor. The first sentence alone was more than two hundred words long, sported four semicolons, and bore that curious mixture of the formal and the visceral that characterized a murder arraignment: “upon search of said Medical College certain portions of a human frame and body, freshly dead, have been found.” But it terminated in a sharp point: “John W. Webster, at said Boston, on said 23d, &c., of his malice afterthought, in and upon said George Parkman feloniously did make an assault, and him the said Parkman then and there of his malice afterthought feloniously did kill and murder him in some way and some manner and some weapon to said complainant unknown.” The complaint was signed “Charles M. Kingsley”; Parkman’s trusty agent had not failed his old employer.