by Paul Collins
“When we arrived, from Mr. Littlefield’s apartments, we went into the cellar, and thence down through the trap-door into the basement.” Tukey pointed out each location, and then lifted the laboratory floor up, to reveal the basement and the vault. “After descending through the trap-door, we crawled along the ground underneath the floor, some sixty feet,” the marshal explained, leading the jurors’ gaze to where the privy was located in the model, and showing them where Littlefield had smashed out the brickwork. “I looked in, and saw several pieces of human flesh. The water from the sink was running down spattering over them. I asked Dr. Bigelow, if they were from a dissecting room. He said it was not the place for them.”
Tukey produced another exhibit: an evidence box that contained bone chips from the laboratory furnace—and, he noted, “various other things, which I now produce and identify.”
From the box the marshal drew out a knife he’d found in Webster’s laboratory—not a scalpel but a Turkish yatagan, with a silver handle and long and slightly curved blade, the sort of combat knife used by soldiers in the Balkans. A jolt of electricity passed through the crowd, setting the gallery abuzz: Was this what killed George Parkman? One juror glanced for a moment from the wickedly sharp blade to the face of its alleged owner and was startled to catch the doctor’s reaction. For whether it was from incredulity at Tukey’s implication or simple bravado—Professor Webster was laughing.
AS A matter of fact, Dr. Woodbridge Strong was rather amused by the case, too.
A string of witnesses from grocers and blacksmiths to schoolboys were questioned in quick succession to establish that Dr. Parkman had been seen walking up North Grove Street and into the college at two-fifteen p.m. on November 23. The victim’s older brother, the Reverend Francis Parkman, gave a moving account of Webster telling him of the missing man’s visit to the college—and how the professor had, the reverend puzzled aloud, “no expression of surprise at the disappearance, and none of sympathy.” But these witnesses were a formality: nobody, not even Webster, contested the fact that Parkman had visited the college that day. Whether he had ever reemerged—whether he’d been murdered, and whether the body found there was his—were the real questions. And for those, the court needed Webster’s own professional peers. Dr. Jeffries Wyman, for instance, took the stand with a painstaking catalog of bones and a chart that showed just where all the recovered bone fragments could be found in a single body.
Then there was Dr. Woodbridge Strong.
“I am a practicing physician in this city, and have been since 1820,” he announced to the court, and he cast his mind happily back to his youth. He was the same age as George Parkman but as jolly in his sangfroid as his old friend George had been dour. “When I was a student with the late Dr. Nathan Smith,” Strong recalled, “I took every opportunity to practice dissection. One winter, in particular, I occupied most of my time in dissecting, sometimes from eight in the morning till twelve at night! I have had a subject at my table for three months together. In the pursuit of my anatomical studies, I have had considerable experience in burning up, or getting rid of human remains by fire.”
As it happened, Dr. Strong had seen Parkman on the day of his disappearance. Even if he hadn’t known him, how could he not notice a hatchet-chinned and bony fellow like that? Dr. Strong was a connoisseur of what he termed “out of shape” bodies—not in bad health, necessarily, just literally the wrong shape. “If I see a man with one shoulder higher than the other, I always notice it,” he explained to the jury. “If I see a woman in the street with a crook in her back, I always notice it.”
He also noticed the beauties of the body, he added drolly.
But that wasn’t why the prosecution had called him. He stood before the jury as an expert on just how to get rid of a human body; in fact, on how to do it with only an ordinary fireplace. He’d had plenty of experience in his very own offices as a physician.
“Once, in particular,” he explained enthusiastically, “I had a pirate given to me by the United States Marshal, for dissection. It being warm weather, I wanted to get rid of the flesh, and preserve only the bones. He was a muscular, stout man, and I began upon it one night with a wood fire, in a large, old-fashioned fire-place. I built a rousing fire! And sat by it all night, piling on the wood and the flesh, and had not got it consumed by morning.”
The crowd was mesmerized by the doctor’s weird enthusiasm; Dr. Strong was unfazed by the most grisly subject matter. “Sickening,” one juror wrote in his notes. But Woodbridge Strong was just getting started—warming to his subject, so to speak.
“I was afraid of a visit by the police,” he blithely continued. “By eleven o’clock, they gave me a call, to know what made such a smell in the street.” What made such a smell was the damnably hard task he been given. “I look upon it as no small operation to burn up a body,” he lectured. “It needs the right sort of fuel. Wood is better than coal, and the lighter the wood, the better. Pine kindlings would be good for the purpose.” The little furnace in Webster’s laboratory? Amateur stuff, and perfectly dreadful for burning up bodies. “That appeared to me the most inconvenient place for such a purpose.”
As one of the doctors who had gathered in Webster’s laboratory after the discovery of the body, Dr. Strong had taken particular interest in the hole poked into the limbless thorax. It was a clean cut straight through, under the sixth rib, through the membrane. That meant it had been made when the flesh was tense—when, the doctor deduced, the victim was alive.
“After death, the elasticity of a body is gone, and it would be very difficult to make a good clean cut like this,” he explained. “I have tried it.”
The courtroom had become so packed that the air was suffocating, so the windows were thrown open to let the cold March wind inside. Delivery trucks and other loud passersby could be heard outside, their clatter interrupting the terrible silence of the courtroom, as Woodbridge Strong thought out loud about just what, he reckoned, would hint at a cause of death.
“These remains were unusually bloodless,” he mused. They were like cuts from a butcher—“as much so as meat that is sold. My inference from this would be that the person bled to death from violence.”
THE PAPERS could scarcely keep up. The Daily Mail’s editor watched a mountain of extra newsprint he’d ordered in the morning—“a monstrous size, a perfect barricade to the press”—diminish by noon, so that “like the unsubstantial fabric of a vision, there was not a wreck of it left behind.” Over at the Herald, the steam presses boiled with a triple-sized run of 37,880 copies—in a city of about 130,000, the equivalent of a Herald for every Boston household.
But there was one courtroom writer Bostonians couldn’t read: Dr. Webster himself. With a neat little correspondence book and a pencil, he was earnestly taking notes, his expression largely inscrutable as a third day of prosecution witnesses were brought to the stand. One of the first was a Medical College protégé, Charles T. Jackson. Twelve years younger than Webster, Dr. Jackson was his professional doppelgänger, a man who’d made a name for himself more through his work in chemistry and geology than his expertise in medicine. He was connected through marriage to the prominent families of Boston; in his case, as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brother-in-law. And like Webster, Jackson was also a frustrated inventor, but had seen much larger prizes slip from his grasp: after pursuing a claim against Samuel Morse for the invention of the telegraph, he’d also unsuccessfully claimed invention of anesthetic ether.
Court testimony was second nature to Jackson. But against his old Harvard professor? Yet even he had to admit that he immediately recognized the yatagan knife as one from Webster’s lab, and, what was more, he was familiar with its presumed victim.
“I knew the late Dr. George Parkman, very well,” Dr. Jackson testified. “He was frequently at my office. He was a tall, slender man, of somewhat peculiar figure; rather flat in the chest, and broad across the pelvis. I saw nothing in the remains dissimilar from what I should suppose was Dr
. Parkman’s formation.”
Joining the police in the search of Webster’s laboratory, Jackson had observed strange green spots on the floors and in the stairwell. Chemist that he was, he’d grabbed some filter paper and absorbed the fluid into the quarter-sized pieces. His analysis: nitrate of copper. Whether it had been used to cover up or destroy bloodstains, Jackson wasn’t sure. But he could answer another question—one about a seemingly exonerating circumstance the newspapers had puzzled over in the aftermath of Webster’s arrest. Why, with a laboratory at his disposal, didn’t the chemistry professor simply dissolve all the evidence?
“If the bones were taken out, and the flesh cut into fine pieces,” Dr. Jackson hypothesized, “I think that with the proper quantity of acid, it might be entirely dissolved in half a day, so as to become a dense, yellow liquid. The quantity of acid, I should fix at the weight of the body.” But Webster didn’t have 140 pints of acid sitting in his laboratory; that was an amount fit for a rendering factory. Nor did he have a large vat to place 140 pounds of human matter into. “The largest kettle which I saw,” Jackson noted, “was a tin-boiler with a copper bottom, such as is used for washing clothes—some twelve or fifteen inches square. That would not admit a thorax—or even a thigh.”
Even as slender as he was, the sheer bulk of George Parkman—or any adult, really—would quickly overwhelm all the caustic bottles on Webster’s shelves, just as his little assay stove had been outmatched. Dr. Jackson had taken special note of the cinders in that stove, too; he’d recovered and weighed the gold teeth found in there, and placed the metal at nearly 174 grains, or $6.94 worth. But as to why gold teeth were in there in the first place, that question best went to another witness: the victim’s dentist.
LIKE NEARLY everyone taking the stand this day, Nathan Cooley Keep was himself a Harvard-trained physician—just two classes before Dr. Jackson in the medical school, in fact—and his general practitioner work included a pioneering use of ether during Fanny Longfellow’s most recent pregnancy. Dr. Keep had also turned a youthful apprenticeship with a Newark jeweler to use in his medical practice. Thanks to his skill with metalwork and porcelain, he’d developed a specialty in the emerging field of modern dentistry, hawking “artificial teeth of the most approved materials, arranged with the least possible inconvenience.”
Testifying in a trial was another matter, though. Dental evidence had never before been used in an American capital case. In fact, when dental records had been used by prosecutors in a Scottish grave-robbing case in 1814, it had backfired and resulted in an acquittal. The closest precedent in America was almost entirely out of living memory: after the Battle of Bunker Hill, Paul Revere had used his metalworking sideline in crafting false teeth to identify a patient of his from among the dead. But Revere’s judgment had risked, at worse, placing the wrong marker on a grave. Were Clifford and Bemis seriously contemplating determining a living man’s guilt, in a capital murder case, on such a wildly untested form of evidence?
I call Dr. Nathan Keep, the attorney general calmly announced.
Taking the stand, Dr. Keep was handed the jaw fragments and blocks of dentures recovered from the assay furnace. He’d seen them before, back in December. Professor Webster watched as his old student turned them over in his hands again, carefully examining them one more time.
“These blocks, now shown before me, are the same which I made for Dr. Parkman,” Dr. Keep confirmed. The old tycoon’s famously jutting chin had particular meaning for his dentist. “Parkman’s mouth,” he testified, “was a very peculiar one: so marked, in respect to its shape, and the relation of the upper and lower jaws, that the impression of it on my mind was very distinct.”
Dr. Keep had been Parkman’s dentist for twenty-four years, but he best remembered crafting the doctor’s last set of dentures, because the old man had asked on short notice for a new set in time for the opening of the Medical College building. “He wished,” Keep recalled, “to have the set finished by that time, or he did not wish to have them at all.” It was no small challenge. All of Parkman’s upper teeth were gone, though he had a few lower ones; and rather than having them pulled to more easily allow a full set of dentures, the old man had insisted on keeping them, which demanded a triptych of plates for his lower mouth alone. That meant taking beeswax molds of the interior of Parkman’s mouth, creating plaster molds, then tin test plates, and then permanent gold plates. Into that, porcelain teeth were fitted, and the roof and gums painted a natural-looking pink—an unusual artistic touch that Keep prided himself on.
“The two sets were connected together by spiral springs, which enabled the wearer to open and shut his mouth. The teeth were fastened in with platinum pins,” the dentist explained, passing some molds to the jury. “I have another model, showing the length of the lower teeth.”
It was just about then, as noon approached, that somebody outside the courthouse yelled, Fire!
CITY HALL wildly rang its bell in alarm, and those rushing to the open windows in the courtroom and around the neighborhood soon saw why: the upper stories of the Tremont House hotel were in flames. Attorney General Clifford stood up—he was staying at the Tremont. Chief Justice Shaw quickly granted a recess, and Clifford departed to save his papers and his baggage with as much haste as the dignity of his office allowed.
As the stunned crowd milled around the courtroom during the impromptu recess, whispered speculations could be heard: Was it arson? Had someone set it deliberately to derail the trial? Dr. Webster, with the attention on him momentarily loosened, leaned across the bar to chat amicably with his colleagues in the ranks of the medical witnesses. He was improbably impressed with the wooden model of their college the prosecutors had brought in.
“Wyman,” he said, “we ought to have that model for the college! It would be a capital thing.”
Sometimes the gravity of the situation sank back in, though.
I fear some could misinterpret your testimony, he gently chided his colleague Dr. Jackson. The doctor was surprised at this, and he worried that he’d hurt his old teacher.
I can testify again, if you like—for the defense, Dr. Jackson hastily assured him.
Well, they’d have to see what the coming days would bring. Today’s testimony had been so peculiar that it was hard to say what would need clarifying next—not least because of the current witness. Even before the trial, news that dental remains were being examined by Dr. Keep had occasioned some skepticism. “It would be very difficult to make a man’s life turn on such a recognition,” the Chronotype had opined after Webster’s arrest. “If there is a considerable chance of a witness being mistaken with an entire corpse before him, how much more with a few teeth of one!”
Webster wasn’t so sure about Dr. Keep’s vaunted reputation as a dentist, either.
“I employed Keep in my family, and his work all failed,” he scoffed to his defense team. “When I paid Keep I told him my mind. The children can testify the teeth he filled for them gave out.”
Attorney General Clifford returned a half hour later, his papers and bags moved to a new hotel. He’d been lucky to escape both fire and water; the city’s new water supply had such terrific pressure that, as the fireman ran their fire hose through the Tremont’s entrance and down hallways, it burst inside the building with as much damage as the fire itself. But there’d been nothing more nefarious behind the fire, it seemed, than a sooty chimney; the only people arrested were half a dozen pickpockets who’d taken the opportunity to work the crowd of gawkers outside the hotel.
Those idlers, it seemed, now shifted their attention back to the courthouse. Afraid to lose their places, spectators refused to move along during the recess, and a crowd was building outside the courtroom doors. A long line snaked up the stairs and into the gallery, with men and boys pushing and shoving anyone who didn’t let them forward or who didn’t, at least, have news to bring back from the gallery. “They hung along the stairs and lobbies like bees,” a Mail reporter wrote, “and as one a
fter another left the gallery and was endeavoring to extricate himself from the jam, he furnished the ‘latest news’ to the excited mass, and by this means saved himself from many a severe punch in the ribs or the ‘bread basket.’”
The crowd surged forward, and a door splintered; the shouting outside the courtroom became unhinged, even dangerous. Get the police over here, the chief justice demanded. After a final surge that knocked two officers off their feet, the roiling tide began to recede under the yells and billy clubs of Tukey’s men.
And then, for the first time that day, the courthouse was almost quiet. Dr. Keep resumed his testimony.
“He called on me the day before his disappearance, and stayed some fifteen minutes, inquiring about a servant that had lived with me,” Keep continued. Dr. Parkman had also visited some two weeks earlier, late at night, and had woken him to get the springs on his dentures fixed. “This was my last professional intercourse with him,” Keep stated.
It was not, however, the last time he’d seen Dr. Parkman’s teeth. Upon returning from a Thanksgiving in the country, he’d heard the terrible news.
“On my return, Dr. Winslow Lewis Jr. presented to me these three portions of mineral-teeth. On looking at them, I recognized them to be the same teeth I had made for Dr. Parkman.” Keep began handling the various pieces before the jury, and fitting them into the molds of Parkman’s jaw, which he had stored at his office. The match was exact. “The most perfect piece that remained, was that block, that belonged to the lower left jaw. I recognized the shape and outline, as being identical with the impressions on my mind, of those that I labored so long.” He held up the matched block, his voice choked, and tears began to well up. “The resemblance was so striking, that I could no longer have any doubt that they were his.”