by Paul Collins
The handwriting evidence was fanciful—“Mr. Gould is too much of a visionary to be relied upon by a jury”—and as for Ephraim Littlefield’s testimony, its hypocrisy was obvious. How could Littlefield accept a Thanksgiving turkey from Dr. Webster if he suspected him of murder? “I can hardly conceive how he touched that order if he believed he was taking it from the red right hand of a bloody murderer,” Merrick marveled. Come to think of it, how did Littlefield just happen to break through the right spot in the privy wall to find the body parts? “Is this accuracy of the work upon the wall consistent with an ignorance of their position within the vault?” Merrick asked pointedly.
Littlefield, sitting among the trial spectators, now heard made plain what the attorneys usually only hinted at. Perhaps his low place in society was, next to Webster’s high standing, all the more reason to suspect him.
“He lays before you the testimonials of a whole community, from the President of the University to the mechanic at his bench,” Merrick declared of his client. “When evidence is conflicted with complicating possibilities, that integrity comes as a protecting shield. It is then that the law declares that he in whom virtue has been embalmed in an upright life shall at last be saved by its power.”
This was Webster’s strongest defense of all: that a fellow like him simply couldn’t have done it. He was, after all, a Harvard man.
EVEN BOSTON’S criminals seemed to have given up on doing anything but following the trial. Either that, or the police were too absorbed in the trial to chase local malefactors. The criminal court’s lockup at one point dwindled down to a single prisoner—a hapless fellow collared for robbing a junk shop of “a quantity of old brass, an old hat, and six pigeons.” For everyone else that Saturday, Chief Justice Shaw’s courtroom was the place to be.
Attorney General Clifford stood before the jury on the eleventh day of the trial, knowing that his closing argument might indeed make it the final day.
“Gentlemen of the jury,” he asked pointedly, “how many murderers, think you, would ever be punished if a jury were required to wait for direct evidence of an eyewitness to remove all reasonable doubt from their minds? When crimes like these are committed, men take no witnesses; they avoid the sights of all eyes except that of the all-seeing one, to whom the darkness is as the light, but whose presence is then forgotten.”
The jurors had been presented with everything from body parts examined by doctors and dentists to bank statements that showed that Webster could not have paid Parkman. Yet, Clifford noted, the defense’s closing statement had barely addressed any of this, instead fixating on technicalities in the indictment. “We had the extraordinary spectacle of the counsel devoting two hours and five minutes to the discussion of the law, and ten minutes to the presentation of the facts,” he pointed out. They’d quibbled over the means of death, be it by knife, fist, or hammer, when the real question was of murder, “no matter how he did it.”
And those who thought they later saw Dr. Parkman alive—what of them?
“What was Dr. George Parkman doing on that day when witnesses think they saw him?” the prosecutor scoffed. “Now in Cambridge Street, then in Causeway Street; now in Washington Street, going towards Roxbury, then in Court Street, examining the roofs of houses; again in Cambridge Street, and afterwards in Green Street. Was there ever anything so preposterous?”
How many times had they, the men of the jury, been mistaken for someone else—or made the same mistake themselves?
Curiously, though Webster himself had claimed to have dined at Brigham’s restaurant that afternoon, and then gone out to buy cologne, nobody seemed to have seen him, not even by mistake, for most of that fateful Friday afternoon. “Where did he dine that day?” the attorney general demanded. “Did his counsel explain that?”
Then there was the evidence procured by Ephraim Littlefield, and the suspicions heaped upon him in return. The janitor, still sitting in the courtroom, had been scrutinized by the police and the public for months now, suffering patiently through the foulest rumors.
“To him,” Clifford insisted, “and to his wife and children, his reputation is as dear as that of a college professor. Those children of his must hear Dr. Webster and Dr. Webster’s friends impute to their father, if not a murder, a most foul and unrighteous conspiracy. . . . Gentlemen, are we in a Christian court-room? I do not put Mr. Littlefield upon this stand as a man of culture. I put him here as an honest man, who fills reputably his position in life—an honest, though a humble one.”
This struck at the heart of the case. If Littlefield had been the debtor in whose rooms Parkman had vanished—if Dr. Webster had suspected him, and found a body in his quarters—wouldn’t that janitor have been convicted already? So why was evidence that convicted a humble servant any less true when found against a man of higher class?
“He held a Professorship in Harvard College. And it is honorable that we hold education in such high respect that, when an educated man holding such high social position is charged with a crime, our people—not the educated alone, but the humble, the illiterate—repel at once the probability of its truth,” Clifford admitted. Yet many a man had been driven to murder by less than what Webster faced. “What can he do? To what is he exposed? The disclosure to the world of his false reputation? The exposure of his fraud? The loss of caste! The loss of reputation! No poor, illiterate outcast, from the dregs of social life, who prowls out from his hiding-place to steal bread for his starving wife and children, ever had a motive with more force.”
But most damning was Dr. Webster’s seeming lack of concern. The letter sent to his wife after his arrest had a mysterious request not to open a package—but what else did it have? “A paltry enumeration of his physical wants!” Clifford charged. “A little pepper! And a little tea! And so on! This is not a letter from an innocent father.” And to the families affected, who had seen their father’s reputation attacked in public, or remains buried in pieces, Webster had evinced even less care.
“Gentlemen,” Clifford added, “appeals have been made in behalf of the prisoner’s family. God forbid that we should forget them, though the prisoner did! We will remember them better than he remembered the family of Littlefield. We will think of them more than he thought of the family of Dr. Parkman, when he was endeavoring to impress by a great audacious falsehood that Dr. Parkman was insane.”
The line was a nasty shock for Webster, not least because it was true. He had quietly put about the possibility that Dr. Parkman was insane, including to his own lawyers. “Dr. Bell’s Lunatic Asylum perhaps knows something,” he’d suggested. But the prosecutors hadn’t let on until now that they knew of his rumors.
What of Parkman’s wife? Clifford demanded. Or his ailing daughter, or his son returned from Europe to a family overtaken by horror? Didn’t they deserve justice?
“Gentlemen,” the prosecutor concluded, “there is resting upon you a higher responsibility than ever before rested upon twelve men in Massachusetts.”
OF THE many murders, frauds, and acts of infamy perpetrated in the state of Massachusetts, there was indeed something different about this one.
“John W. Webster,” Chief Justice Shaw began, and his voice broke. He was an overseer of Webster’s school; the victim was an old acquaintance. The strain of taking on a case perhaps better left to another justice had now become audible. Yet the chief justice pressed onward: “Before committing this cause to the jury, if you have anything to add to the arguments that have been urged on your behalf by your counsel, anything which you deem material, you are at liberty now to address it to the jury.”
The defendant had been constrained to silence for the entire trial; this was the one time available to him to speak on his own behalf—“a privilege,” the judge added, “of which you may avail yourself or not, at your own discretion.”
Dr. Webster stood up, trembling; he most certainly did intend to avail himself.
“I am much obliged to Your Honors,” the professor began,
nervously addressing the chief justice and the associate justices. “I will not enter into any explanation—though I have desired to do so—of the complicated network of circumstances which the Government has thrown around me, and which for many months has been crushing me. Testimony had been placed in the hands of my counsel; and my innocence would have been fully established had they produced it. They were highly recommended to me . . .” His voice turned scornful. “But in their superior wisdom, they have not seen fit to bring forward the evidence prepared by me and which would have exonerated me.”
The courtroom fell dead silent, half aghast as Sohier and Merrick bore a fifteen-minute-long attack by their client, dismissing points large and small by the prosecution. The letter to his daughter was about a common household package of citric acid, Webster scoffed. The inability to reconcile his accounts with having paid Parkman was because he hid cash in a trunk; it wasn’t visible in bank statements. The spots of nitrate of copper found on his lab floor, imagined to hide bloodstains—nonsense! They were just splashes from ordinary lab accidents. The contention that he hadn’t habitually locked his lab door before that Friday disappearance? All wrong—“perversions,” he snapped.
“I placed some evidence in the hands of my counsel about where I was at different times on Friday, which they have not used,” he continued. His trembling stopped; his voice hardened with anger. “I left the College about three o’clock that afternoon. As I walked towards the omnibus-office, I came to the place at the corner of Hanover Street, called Concert Hall, or Brigham’s, and got a mutton-chop. I waited there some time, then went to Mr. Kidder’s, and afterwards took the omnibus.” His counsel had left this out, he said, adding, “I might mention a great many other matters. But I will not detain the court by detailing them.”
The doctor sat back down, brimming with indignation, then leapt back up.
“Will the court allow me to say one thing more?” Webster demanded. “I have felt more distressed by the production of these various anonymous letters than, I had almost said, by anything else that has occurred during the trial. And I call God to my witness—and if it should be the last word that I should ever be allowed to speak—I positively declare that I never wrote those letters. My counsel has received a letter from this very ‘Civis.’ A notice has been inserted in the newspapers, I believe, calling upon him to come forth; but he has not yet shown himself.”
Professor Webster looked about the courtroom—searchingly, almost wildly, into the eyes of his spectators, his accusers, his judges.
“If he is present here in this court-room,” the doctor cried, “and has a spark of humanity in his breast, I call upon him to come forward and declare himself!”
For an electric moment, his words hung in the air of the courtroom. There was no response. Webster sank back down into his chair.
Chief Justice Shaw turned to his two fellow supreme court justices, and there was some nodding and thoughtful murmuring. It was just past five o’clock on a Saturday; everyone surely wanted to go home, but they couldn’t allow it. Shaw stood and turned wearily to the jury.
“Gentlemen of the jury, we feel unwilling, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour, to postpone this duty to another day, which must necessarily extend the trial into another week,” he explained. “And therefore, painful, responsible, and laborious as this duty is, we think, upon some deliberation, that it is best now to proceed.”
Shaw laid out the task before them: they were to decide on a charge of murder. Massachusetts did not yet recognize degrees of this crime. Murder, he reminded them, simply meant with malice aforethought, which didn’t mean deliberation—just intent. A person who kills another by slowly poisoning them to death is certainly a murderer; but so is a suddenly enraged man who levels his gun at another’s head. A fatal punch might indeed have not been meant to kill; that was manslaughter. And the suspected crime scene made the means particularly mysterious: What if, for instance, such new inventions as chloroform had been used in committing the crime?
The jurors had seen much evidence of the most complex sort; they had heard alibis, testimony about conflicting time lines, reports on medical and financial evidence. They’d grappled with the legal concept of corpus delicti—whether a body found in a medical college, of all places, meant that any crime had occurred at all—and pondered circumstantial evidence to infer the guilt of an act that nobody had seen. But not all the circumstantial evidence was equally pertinent. Littlefield was not on trial, Shaw reminded them; nor, for that matter, were anonymous letters necessarily material to the case, even if the jurors believed that Webster wrote them. After all, even an innocent person, afraid of being charged, could try to throw off an investigation.
So how sure did the men on the jury need to be that Professor Webster had murdered Dr. Parkman? Their determination needed to be beyond a reasonable doubt, which was a relatively modern standard in courtrooms, having largely gained credence in Shaw’s own lifetime. But reasonable doubt drew in part on the Enlightenment philosophy epitomized by John Locke’s 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding. There were absolute and objective physical and mathematical certainties: that ice is cold and fire is hot, and that two plus two equals four. But then there was indirect knowledge from the testimony of others—what some called moral certainties of the existence of particular facts. As Locke’s contemporary John Wilkins had put it, only “a fantastical incredulous fool” would doubt these. “I am sufficiently assured,” Wilkins noted, “that there was such a person as Queen Elizabeth; that there is such a place as Spain.”
This meant, one legal guide of the time explained, that while wild arguments might be made to persuade a juror to doubt testimony and its obvious interpretation, the jury’s job was to indulge in only reasonable doubts: “To acquit upon light, trivial and fanciful suppositions and remote conjectures, is a virtual violation of the juror’s oath.” But if there was a reasonable doubt, then a presumption of innocence meant that a verdict of not guilty was the just result.
Yet neither the state of Massachusetts nor the federal courts had a standard definition or instruction of “reasonable doubt” for judges to give to jurors. Chief Justice Shaw’s remarkably clear explanation of the concept would instantly become one of the most influential innovations of the trial.
“This is to be proved beyond reasonable doubt,” Shaw explained. “Then, what is reasonable doubt? It is a term often used, probably pretty well understood, but not easily defined. It is not mere possible doubt; because everything relating to human affairs and depending upon moral evidence is open to some possible or imaginary doubts. It is that state of the case, which, after the entire comparison and consideration of all the evidence, leaves the minds of jurors in that condition that they cannot say they feel an abiding conviction, to a moral certainty, of the truth of the charge. The burden of proof is upon the prosecutor. All the presumptions of law independent of evidence are in favor of innocence; and every person is presumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty. If upon such proof there is reasonable doubt remaining, the accused is entitled to the benefit of it by an acquittal. For it is not sufficient to establish a probability, though a strong one . . . the evidence must establish the truth of the fact to a reasonable and moral certainty. . . . This we take to be reasonable doubt; because if the law should go further than this, and require absolute certainty, it would exclude circumstantial evidence altogether.”
As the hour approached eight in the evening, Shaw gave the jurors one last reassurance before setting them off to their lonely task.
“Gentlemen,” he concluded, “when it is said we may err, it is true. But it is nothing more than to say that we are human. Take sufficient time; weigh the evidence; and give such a verdict as will satisfy your own judgments and your own enlightened consciences, and we can have no doubt that it will be a true one.”
Writing in his journal, juror Crosby already felt the awful gravity of what lay before them.
“All I can say,” he conclu
ded, “is God help us to judge aright.”
OFFICER JONES led Dr. Webster to an anteroom, and there the two considered the extraordinary events that had just transpired before their eyes.
So? Jones asked. What do you think of the case?
“Don’t know.” Dr. Webster breathed out, then added drily, “Trust in God.”
Actually, Dr. Webster had been thinking that his odds were rather good. It was whispered that his family had already bought tickets to the island of Fayal, on a ship sailing in three weeks—just enough time to pack up and leave. He had a daughter, a son-in-law, and a grandson waiting there for him; they could go back to the island home Mrs. Webster had left so many years ago, far from the stain that even a verdict of not guilty would leave. The revelations of the family’s debt had been humiliating, and a quiet dismissal lurked in his future; Dr. Webster knew that his old friend Bachi had been dismissed from Harvard for far less. In Fayal the Websters could begin again, far from Boston, far from Cambridge—and far from their creditors.
Officer Jones had more practical concerns in mind.
Do you want some tea? he asked. Something to eat?
Dr. Webster was not a man to turn down the offer of a good meal.
Might as well have a proper supper, the professor replied.
As Webster ate, the crowd in the courtroom waited. The spectators nearest the defense and prosecution tables were a veritable reunion of Harvard Law School, and knots of attorneys now formed on the floor of the courtroom, earnestly discussing points of the case with their old classmates. Had the defense dithered too much on technicalities in the indictment and failed to protest their client’s innocence enough? What about the scarcely established alibi or the contradictory sightings of Parkman? And what of—as one observer on the floor delicately put it—the “definite character of the judge’s charge” to the jury? Had he been sufficiently impartial?
Any reporter attempting to sneak toward the jury room would have found no answer there; from outside its door, there was only dead silence within.