Blood & Ivy

by Paul Collins

  Keep stopped to dab his eyes and compose himself. Webster, one reporter noted, “sat as unmoved as a rock.”

  The dentist tried his best to continue. The mineral teeth, he ventured, had been put into the furnace while still inside their head. On their own, they’d have heated rapidly and exploded from the moisture contained within, he remarked: “I have known such explosions to take place in new teeth, when heated suddenly.” With that, Dr. Keep couldn’t maintain his professional distance anymore. As he recalled his first words upon seeing the dental evidence, he broke down at the stand, crying into his handkerchief.

  “When Dr. Lewis showed the teeth to me,” the dentist sobbed, “I said, ‘Dr. Parkman is gone: we shall see him no more!’”

  20

  MESMERIC REVELATION

  EPHRAIM HATED MORNINGS, BUT THIS ONE WAS DIFFERENT. In the groggy half-light of dawn that Friday, he picked as handsome an outfit as a man on a college janitor’s salary might own: a blue frock coat, a blue silk scarf, which he wore around his neck as a cravat, and a carefully pressed standing collar. He wasn’t, however, going out dancing; he had a very different sort of engagement that day.

  State your name, he was asked in the courthouse that morning.

  Ephraim Littlefield, he said, adding, “I have no middle name.”

  The packed room stretched before him, an impossible distance from where he should have been this time of the morning—at the Medical College, sweeping classrooms, stoking furnaces, and drawing water for the laboratory. Instead, just a few feet away sat Dr. Webster, busily taking notes again. Littlefield kept his gaze steadily on Webster, even when the doctor did not look up at him.

  “I am janitor of the Medical College,” he began. “I have known Dr. Webster seven years, last October, since my first connection with the College. I had known Dr. Parkman twenty years.

  “I was present at the interview between Dr. Parkman and Dr. Webster on Monday of the week of the disappearance,” he continued. “The 19th of the month, I think. I was helping Dr. Webster, who had three or four candles burning in the room. The Doctor stood at a table, looking at a chemical book; I stood by the stove, stirring some water, in which a solution was to be made. Dr. Parkman came into the back room from the door leading from the lecture room. Dr. Webster looked round and appeared surprised to see him enter so suddenly. He said, ‘Dr. Webster, are you ready for me tonight?’ Dr. Parkman spoke quick and loud. Dr. Webster made the answer, ‘No.’ Dr. Parkman accused Dr. Webster of selling something that had been mortgaged a second time, or something like that. He took some papers out of his pocket. Dr. Webster said, ‘I was not aware of it.’ Dr. Parkman said, ‘It is so, and you know it. . . . Doctor, something must be accomplished tomorrow.’”

  Littlefield calmly recited the now-famous tale of what he’d witnessed in the days that followed: Dr. Parkman entering the building but not leaving; how a sledgehammer went missing that same day from the basement; the locked lab doors and water then running night and day inside; the scorching-hot walls by the doctor’s furnace; the nerve-racking small talk with Webster before creeping downstairs to hammer through the privy wall in the basement.

  Listening from the defense table, however, what Dr. Webster really objected to was—Littlefield’s turkey story. The strange incident involving the turkey had happened before Thanksgiving in the back room behind the lecture hall, the janitor explained.

  “He stood at the side of a table, and appeared to be reading a paper, which he held in his hands—a newspaper, I mean. He asked me if I had bought my Thanksgiving turkey. I told him that I had not. He then handed me an order, saying, ‘Take that, and get a nice turkey, as I am in the habit of giving two or three away.’” Littlefield earnestly looked at the jury and the judge, then again at the prisoner. But that was just it, he explained—Dr. Webster was not in the habit of giving turkeys or anything else away. “It was,” he remarked, “the first time that Dr. Webster ever gave me anything.’”

  Nonsense, the doctor bristled to his defense team. Why, he’d given Littlefield something just last year—a used gown. This ungrateful janitor’s character, he explained, was wide open to attack. The prosecutors had been wise to not rely on, say, Francis Tukey for much of their witness testimony; the city marshal’s own distinctly criminal past—and, if the Herald was to be believed, present—would have left him open to character attacks. But was Littlefield much more reliable?

  “Dr. George Hayman can say something about Littlefield’s habits and intemperance,” the doctor insisted to his lawyers. “Captain Stacy of the Custom House can tell about Littlefield’s being turned out of his temperance lodge.”

  His wife’s got a reputation too, he added significantly.

  When it came time to cross-exam Littlefield, Webster’s attorneys saw their chance.

  “Where were you,” Sohier asked the janitor, “on the Thursday night previous to Dr. Parkman’s disappearance? What time were you home?”

  “I was home at one o’clock,” Littlefield ventured.

  But where inside the college was he that night? Had he been in Webster’s lab?

  “Where were you that night?” the lawyer pressed.

  “I can’t say,” the janitor admitted.

  “Until you left home, that last night, were you there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  And then Sohier sprung his trap.

  “Had you not made use of the Doctor’s room, on that night, to play cards?”

  The genial, honest-looking janitor suddenly became curiously reticent.

  “I decline answering that question.”

  The spectators in the room burst out in laughter—and Sohier, emboldened, pressed harder upon the man trapped at the witness stand.

  “Had you not been there gambling?”

  “I decline answering that question,” the janitor insisted, to another burst of laughter from the crowd.

  “Do you know,” Sohier asked triumphantly, “that the Doctor found out you were gambling?”

  “I don’t know,” the janitor shot back. “He never said anything to me about it.”

  Cast your mind to the day the building nearly caught fire, Sohier asked him. “Did you try to get into the privy that afternoon?”

  “I did not.”

  “Did you go home that night?”

  The questions were becoming uncomfortable, and finding a theme.

  “I did not,” Littlefield finally answered.

  “Where did you go?”

  “I went to a cotillion party.”

  The courtroom burst into laughter again, and Sohier relished the moment.

  “You stated that you had suspicions about the privy, and that you did not go into it,” the lawyer asked incredulously, “but that you went to a cotillion party?”

  “Yes,” Littlefield answered stubbornly.

  Sohier picked up a handbill and brandished it before the witness: the word REWARD was emblazoned boldly upon it.

  “Did you ever see that paper?”

  “I did.”

  “What did you do when you first saw it?”

  “I went down to the college and showed it. I saw some of them stuck up round the college in all directions.”

  That reward was three thousand dollars. Wasn’t that motive enough for an immoral dancer and gambler like Littlefield to besmirch his employer and frame the man for murder?

  There was just one problem: the jury wasn’t buying it. Ephraim Littlefield seemed like a man who liked a drink and a dance, true; and yet all along, when looking at the jury and the prisoner, he’d held his gaze steady. Boston still had a puritanical streak, but among the merchants and craftsmen in the jury box, Littlefield was someone they themselves might have hired in their businesses: a plainspoken hard worker whose free time was decidedly his own.

  “Every appearance has been in his favor,” juror James Crosby wrote in his journal. “His testimony has been straightforward and consistent throughout and his manner has impressed me frequently.” T
he attempt to cast suspicion on Littlefield himself was unconvincing: “I cannot believe that he is a guilty man.”

  As to who the guilty man might really be, Crosby had some dreadful premonitions.

  SUNDAY BROUGHT blessed relief. The jury was exhausted and homesick; the case weighed so heavily upon them that when the sheriff offered two church services to go to—Reverend Huntington’s in the morning, and Reverend Beecher’s in the afternoon—many jurors went to both. Their families were allowed to attend, though kept safely apart by pews and a security detail of four men. The sequestered husbands and their wives gave wordless waves and smiles to each other, and the officers softened enough to bring the very smallest prattling children over to kiss their fathers. The other parishioners out that Sunday could hardly help stealing a glance at their famous visitors.

  “Been stared at to my heart’s content,” Crosby mused.

  After strolling back to their hotel—following days of snow and ice, the weather had turned improbably beautiful—they heard what news their sequestration allowed them. There had been another sighting of a sea serpent. Senator Calhoun was ailing, and thought to be in his final hours. Hawthorne’s new novel had landed a fine review in the Journal, while over in the Transcript, the trial coverage was abutted by a review of Judge Shaw’s son-in-law, Herman Melville, and his new novel White-Jacket—which was deemed a return to form “in the best vein of the author of Typee and Omoo.” A new installment of David Copperfield had arrived at the jurors’ quarters and was read avidly. But for sheer fiction, nothing topped the overheated stories of the trial itself. The jury was drolly informed that reporters were claiming that their fellow juror Ben Greene was violently ill. That, Crosby noted, produced “a hearty laugh,” for “he had suffered from a headache.”

  Monday and most of Tuesday passed with a new parade of witnesses—the police on Webster’s spasms after his arrest, an expert in twine to identify the string around the torso in the tea chest, a tinsmith from whom the professor had commissioned a sealable box. The latter wisely purchased an ad for his Waterman’s Patent Refrigerators that ran in a column next to the trial coverage. But when jailer Gustavus Andrews stepped up to the stand, the crowd took notice, for not only did he have a story of the doctor sweating and shivering through his arrest, he also held a document in his hand.

  “I have in my possession,” the jailer explained, “a letter of the prisoner’s, brought to my office. The turnkey called my attention to a certain clause in it, and asked me if I should let it go out. My answer was that I should keep it.”

  He handed the letter to the prosecutor, Mr. Bemis, who prepared to read it aloud to the crowd before him.

  “‘My dearest Marianne . . .’” he began.

  Dr. Webster, listening intently to the testimony, now had to hear his own private letter to his daughter declaimed to a packed courtroom. It was all there: the offhand admission that his arraignment had been timed to avoid publicity, his having bitten his tongue so badly during his arrest spasms that it had swollen. But one sentence had made Andrews save the letter: “Tell mamma, not to open the little bundle I gave her the other day, but to keep it just as she received it.”

  Nor was this note the only one the police had puzzled over. Before Webster’s arrest, they’d received at least three anonymous letters that seemed to actively misdirect their search, including the one placing Parkman on the recently departed cargo ship Herculean. On Wednesday morning, spectators arrived to find a curiously familiar elderly man being led to the stand.

  I am Nathaniel Gould, he informed the clerk, continuing: “I am a resident of this city; have been so for many years.”

  A trained violinist, Gould had tutored music and singing at Harvard for years. In his hours off-campus, he was a deacon in his church, and devoted to church music. Gould’s name was familiar to other Bostonians from his handwriting guides and patent writing paper. For many in the room, it was as if one of their old schoolbooks had begun talking to them.

  “I know the prisoner by sight, but I have had no personal acquaintance with him,” the handwriting instructor continued. His son certainly knew Webster; he was an alumnus of the medical school. And, Gould added, “I am familiar with his signature. I have seen it appended to the diplomas given by the Medical College, for twenty years, from having been employed as a penman to fill out those diplomas.”

  The prosecutor passed the anonymous notes to Gould.

  “Please look at these three letters before you,” Bemis said. “State, if you can, in whose handwriting they are.”

  Webster’s team was flabbergasted; the professor could barely conceal his incredulity. Testimony by his fellow doctors, yes—but this? “We object to this proof,” Sohier called out. “The witness has never seen the prisoner write, nor heard him admit any writing to be his.”

  Justice Shaw, having handled both Webster’s memos and Gould’s beautifully inked diplomas for years as a Harvard trustee, was unmoved.

  “He has had occasion, officially, to know his writing, for many years,” the chief justice gently reminded the defense lawyer.

  “This kind of evidence, if admissible at all, belongs to a class exceedingly liable to error,” Sohier persisted.

  “I may be permitted, perhaps, to refer to two other trials,” the attorney general interposed. “That of George Miller, where both of my learned friends were engaged, and that of Eastman, Fondey & Company. In both these cases, experts were admitted to testify to handwriting.” Clifford was perhaps too polite to point out to the defense that Gould himself had been one of the handwriting experts to testify at Miller’s 1848 forgery trial—and that Miller had been convicted.

  Shaw conferred with his fellow justices, then turned back to the attorneys.

  “We do not see that the precise point presented gives rise to the objection. There are other cases; one is in the prosecution of threatening letters, or arson.” Just a few months earlier, even as Webster was being arraigned, the city had witnessed the arrest of the “Charlestown Incendiaries,” extortionists whose notes threatened their victims with arson.

  “The evidence,” Chief Justice Shaw added, “has always been considered admissible in those instances.”

  Bemis returned to his witness.

  “Please state, then, whether you recognize the handwriting of this letter,” he asked, handing over a note sent to the police and signed “Civis.”

  “I think it is Dr. Webster’s handwriting,” Gould said plainly. “When one undertakes to forge a hand, there are only two ways in which he can do it. Either by carelessly letting his hand play entirely loose, or by carefully guarding every stroke. In this latter mode, it is next to impossible for any person to continue any great length of time without making some of those letters which are peculiar to himself. Now, in this letter, I find three letters which are entirely different from Professor Webster’s common mode of writing—the small letter a, the small letter r, and the character &. In all other letters, there is nothing dissimilar from his usual style of writing. Of those the most similar, the capital I can hardly be mistaken. The capital P’s are similar. So are the capital D’s. More than one-half of the capitals are made on the same mark. That is, the pen is carried up again on the same stroke. The figures 1, 3, 4, and 9 are all exactly alike. The f’s are all exactly similar—never made with a loop at the top, but at the bottom.”

  As for the other two notes—though bearing different signatures, different ink, and different paper—Gould also deemed them to be Webster’s.

  Nor was he to be the only handwriting expert. George Smith, an established local engraver and calligrapher who published a popular map of Boston, was also called up to the stand. “I am acquainted with the defendant’s signature,” he explained. “I have also received notes from him in former years.” Though unsure of two of the letters, he stopped cold at one of them.

  “In regard to the ‘Civis’ letter, I am compelled to say that it is in Professor Webster’s handwriting,” he testified. The sadn
ess in Smith’s testimony weighed heavily in the air. “I am very sorry to say,” the engraver added, “that I feel quite confident of this.”

  THE DEFENSE lawyers had their opening arguments ready; now all they needed was for Webster to not get killed first.

  Heavily manacled, the professor trudged into the prison carriage the next morning for the brief journey over to the courthouse. They had scarcely got under way when a sudden crack sent jailer, prisoner, and driver lurching and falling forward. The carriage’s front axle had snapped, forcing it to hurtle into the ground. A crowd massed, jostling the shaken prisoner as he was extricated, and it was only by good fortune that the jailer was able to load his clanking, bewildered ward into another carriage before the crowd’s curiosity turned ugly.

  What awaited Webster in the courtroom was scarcely more reassuring. He had been fortunate to retain Ned Sohier and Pliny Merrick, but they hadn’t been his first choice of counsel. Franklin Dexter had turned him down, and his second choice, the renowned Rufus Choate, had also declined. Choate had the gall to attend the trial anyway—as a spectator. But then, so had prominent lawyers for miles around. Sohier and Merrick, both Harvard graduates who’d passed under Webster’s eye as students, were an odd team to watch in action. The gregarious Merrick was a former DA and a judge of the court of common pleas. The reserved and drably dressed Sohier, in contrast, was one of the city’s top finance lawyers, and hardly the obvious choice for a criminal trial. Sohier’s quiet manner hid a droll sense of humor; he amused himself with Latin puns, and after buying a horse that refused to cross any bridge, he advertised it for sale because “the owner wished to leave town.”

  Today, though, he would have to speak in all earnestness.

  “May it please Your Honor, and gentlemen of the jury,” Sohier began, “I am aware that it is usual for counsel to call the attention of the jury to the situation of their client. I might see nothing but the man—who, for more than a quarter of a century, has been a respected professor in that university, which is the pride of our state, and a respected lecturer in that college, which is one of the boasts of our city. The man, under whose instructions, numbers now present—myself, among the rest—were educated. I might think of these things, gentlemen, and I might forget the case.”