by Paul Collins
The hours passed with little to fill them but the rumors happily fanned by papers like the Herald. Was it true that some of the later witnesses claiming to have seen Parkman had retracted their testimony? Was it true that Webster and three jury members were Freemasons? The newspaper advertisers also merrily went joyriding upon the trial’s final dash to the finish; one dentist’s ad began with the words “MURDER! MURDER!” and other businesses placed newspaper items that at first glance appeared to be trial coverage:
PROFESSOR WEBSTER’S FATE. He will unquestionably be convicted of murder in the first degree, but will probably go to the penitentiary for life. Professor Webster is one of the best chemists of his day, but we doubt whether anybody else ever produced so much real good, as Mrs. Tilley, whose Vegetable Cough Syrup is now conceded to be the best article in Boston for the cure of Colds, Coughs, Hoarseness, Sore-throat, Cramp, Hosping Cough, &c., 25 cents a bottle. Sold by Reading & Co., 8 State Street.
Reporters ferried the news out of the courtroom trial for transcripts that were already being hurriedly typeset into books; all that remained now was adding the type and slathering on the ink for the final page that would reveal the verdict.
Bemis and Clifford waited patiently at their prosecution table; Merrick and Sohier, at theirs for the defense. There was nothing to do but rub their eyes, drum their fingers on the hard wooden chairs, and look up to the high ceilings. The prosecutors occupied themselves with getting the windows open, to let the cold night air into the stuffy courtroom.
It was ten-forty p.m. when the court officer approached the clerk.
“The jury have agreed,” he whispered.
A murmur promptly ran through the room; the county coroner, slipping back into the courtroom, whispered, Not guilty. The younger Professor Bigelow darted among his Medical College colleagues, spreading the word—Acquittal! Acquittal! But even as the news raced like fire around the courtroom, another ran through the crowd: “He’s convicted,” men whispered to one another.
Back in the anteroom, Dr. Webster had finished his meal when the word came in.
You’re wanted in the courtroom, Officer Jones told him—the jury have a verdict.
“Ah! Do they?” Webster stood up. “Do they?”
A hush fell as Webster was led back into the courtroom; then the judges entered through one side door, and the jury through another. The jurymen took their chairs slowly, solemnly, as if carrying the weight of duty on their shoulders. After a tense silence, the clerk turned to them.
“Gentlemen of the jury, have you agreed upon your verdict?”
“We have,” the foreman answered, bowing a little.
The clerk turned back to the prisoner.
“John W. Webster,” he announced. “Hold up your right hand!”
The professor, shaking ever so slightly, held up his arm. Within mere feet of him were all the men determining his fate: Bemis, watching him intently; Littlefield, sitting close by among the spectators; and the justices and the jury.
“Foreman,” the clerk continued. “Look upon the prisoner!”
Byram locked eyes with Webster; the professor stared back at him fixedly.
“What say you, Mr. Foreman?” the clerk called out. “Is John W. Webster, the prisoner at the bar, guilty, or not guilty?”
The locksmith’s voice rang out to break the awful silence.
“Guilty.”
22
LAW MANUFACTURED FOR THE OCCASION
GUILTY.
With that single word, Webster, an old student of his wrote, “started as if shot.” The doctor’s uplifted hand fell to the bar with a dull thud, his chin dropped upon his chest; he wavered, and slumped backward into his chair. Webster crumpled, nearly senseless, into silence broken only by the sound of weeping—in the galleries, on the floor, and even on the bench itself. Merrick grasped Webster’s hand earnestly, reassuringly, and whispered a few words to his client; the doctor finally nodded and rubbed his eyes, wiping away tears and leaving his spectacles slightly askew upon his face.
“Gentlemen of the jury, hearken to your verdict, as the Court have recorded it,” the clerk intoned. “You, upon your oaths, do say, that John W. Webster, the prisoner at the bar, is guilty; so you say, Mr. Foreman; so, Gentlemen, you all say.”
Remand the prisoner to his cell, Judge Shaw said quietly.
For a long moment, nobody moved; nobody knew quite what to say.
“What do you want to keep me here for?” Webster said heavily. “I don’t want to stay here to be gazed at.”
As the doctor was led off in manacles, a Daily Atlas reporter turned to see Ephraim Littlefield; tears were running down the janitor’s cheeks. He had told the truth, Littlefield explained, even though that truth had condemned another man. “If I was conscious of having uttered one single word that I had any doubt about,” he said, fumbling for words, “I would never forgive myself.”
Webster sat through the short ride down the darkened Boston streets and back to the Leverett Street Jail. He hadn’t planned on still being in jail tomorrow morning, and hadn’t put in an order at Parker’s Restaurant; as they passed through the jail office, he turned to jail keeper Gustavus Andrews. “I suppose I shall have meals from Parker’s, as usual?” he asked. But as they wended their way back to his cell, he saw the guards making a different series of preparations for the night; they were, without a word, quietly removing the cutlery and a razor from among his possessions.
“There’s no need of that,” Webster protested gloomily. “I’m too much of a Christian to think of committing suicide.”
Dr. Webster was locked into his cell, and he lit a small alcohol lamp, warmed a cup of tea over its flame, and sat alone with his thoughts. His family hadn’t been waiting for him here; they’d been home, visiting with their old friend Judge Fay, who’d been reassuring them that the trial was going fine. Now, as Saturday night crawled over into Sunday, Webster sat with the lonely knowledge that his slumbering family would wake in the morning unaware of what all their neighbors would already surely know.
His wife’s sister was chosen to deliver the verdict. Her carriage approached Webster’s Cambridge home slowly that Sunday morning; the news was carried up the stairs to his wife. Mrs. Webster had largely stayed in bed for weeks, ailing and anxious; and when she received the word—guilty—her response was mute, stricken silence. But in this, Marianne, Catherine, and Hattie were not like their mother.
“The daughters uttered the most heartrending screams, which were heard by passersby going to church,” wrote a Harvard librarian in his journal that day.
Sentencing the following day proved no better. The professor was rousted early from his cell, and he was bustled over to the courthouse in the hope of arriving before the crowds gathered. But it was altogether too late for such modesty. The courthouse had seen some sixty thousand visitors during the trial, and that day’s concourse of onlookers seemed the greatest of all. Men and boys jockeyed for position, frustrated by a wall of gentlemen’s stovepipes.
“Hats off in the front!” the crowd yelled.
Inside it was as drowsy as the outside was boisterous. As the galleries filled, and the lawyers for the defense and the prosecution took their accustomed seats, Dr. Webster sat in his armchair, waiting for the clock to inch toward nine. His eyelids grew heavy, and his head nodded.
“There’s the court,” came the whisper, and the professor opened his eyes and straightened himself in chair. It was the court indeed. The formalities took scarcely five minutes, with Chief Justice Shaw pausing to note the law of the state.
“Every person who shall commit the crime of murder shall suffer the punishment of death for the same. The manifest object of this law is the protection and security of human life, the most important object of a just and paternal government,” he explained gravely. “God grant that your example may afford a solemn warning to all, especially the young.”
The example Dr. Webster would provide would be a chillingly stark one—sim
pler than any first fall lecture, and more final than any spring examination.
Professor John W. Webster was to “be hung by the neck,” the judge told him, “until you are dead.”
COME IN, come in, Officer Spurr showed the stream of visitors down the stairs in the laboratory. Down these steps, this way.
It was all still there: the acid splashes on the wooden steps, the assay furnace where Parkman’s teeth had been found, even the tea chest with bloodstains still visible inside it. The Medical College faculty, rather than make a hopeless attempt to hush up the case, had succumbed to inevitability and voted to invite the public in to view the building. Crowds came gushing in, as if Webster’s basement were a hole below the city’s moral waterline. Even as Officer Spurr lectured visitors, women could be spotted quietly slipping splinters and scraps from the laboratory into their purses as souvenirs.
Webster had become, his friend Longfellow mused dejectedly, “another Eugene Aram”—the English schoolmaster hanged for murder a century before, betrayed at the height of his scholarly powers by the discovery of buried bones from a disappearance fourteen years earlier. He’d eventually confessed, and the Boston newspapers were just as sure that Webster’s death would prove equally warranted.
The trial, wrote the Courier, presented “an unbroken chain of indubitable proof.” The guilty verdict was, the Mail agreed, the inevitable conclusion of anyone who had actually followed the trial in person. In the view of the Evening Transcript, Webster had hurt himself even more through a statement to the court that expressed no sympathy to the Parkman family and that quibbled over minutiae instead of passionately denying the charge. Nevertheless, all the papers expressed a curious sense of loss and tragedy in Webster’s guilt; all, that is, except for the Boston Daily Bee. “EXTRA,” it announced in large type the following Saturday, touting an issue whose entire front page covered nothing but the foulness of “the murderer and mangler” John White Webster.
The case presented, the paper charged, “a new problem in human nature—a cool, deliberate, cruel, atrocious murder, perpetrated by one of the oldest professors in a University devoted to ‘Christ and the Church.’ . . . A man in one of the most distinguished and honorable positions in all of Christendom—a scientific sage, a philosopher and Christian, to be brought out in a vulgar fraud!”
The Bee spewed forth accusations: Webster was a mediocre chemist; he was a hack whose books simply restated the work of others. Worse still, the paper repeated a rumor that Webster had killed his mother through “a prank” that knocked her down a flight of stairs. The charges of mediocrity were familiar ones for any scholar, but subjective enough; the latter was wild speculation. More uncomfortably, the Bee had searched through the public records of Redford Webster’s will, and reminded readers that Dr. Webster had squandered an inheritance of some $40,000 or $50,000, depending on how it was calculated—more than some readers could hope to earn in their entire lives—and that trusts made out the Webster children hinted that even Webster’s own father didn’t believe that he could be relied upon to safeguard that money. The doctor, the paper charged, had likely squandered those funds as well. Webster’s reputation for gluttony did not help matters. Perhaps, the Bee scoffed, he had spent his estate “in studying conchology and chemistry at Brigham’s”—in buying oysters and alcohol.
Rising to Webster’s defense against the Bee was, improbably, the Boston Herald, which rather resembled being defended from one angry drunk by another even angrier drunk. “We have never seen an example of such baseness and malignity,” the Herald piously declared. “The writer of that article deserves hanging more than Dr. Webster.” The Herald, though, still merrily joined in with other newspapers in repeating a cacophony of rumors. Webster had confessed to taking strychnine in a suicide attempt after his arrest; a medical student saw Webster’s crime and fled to Vermont; a witness had recanted her testimony about seeing Parkman in the street; Webster had abandoned a woman in Edinburgh when he was a medical student; Webster had tried triple-selling his mineral cabinet by proposing a sale to a Medical College student from Baltimore.
It was the last rumor that really nettled Dr. Webster.
Passing along a letter in secret—the trial had taught him that guards were liable to intercept and keep mail—Webster had a sealed letter smuggled out to his old physician colleague Winslow Lewis. “This is an utter falsehood,” he wrote. “By reference to the catalogue you will see there was no student from Baltimore.” Webster wrote a suggested “Letter to the Editor”—to come from Lewis, not Webster—that would run in the Boston Courier to debunk the story. The letter duly ran soon afterward. But if Webster was able to quietly influence the public, he was still hobbled by the simplest of barriers: the guard outside his cell. “You must not let it be known that you have rec’d a letter from me, as I am not allowed to send sealed letters,” Webster pleaded in his note to Lewis. “If it should be discovered that I did, all means of communicating with friends would be cut off.”
Though if Dr. Webster hoped to control the story or save his reputation, it was already far too late. Six competing editions of trial transcripts had been rushed to press in Boston, New York, and even London—with the Herald crowing that its twelve-and-a-half-cent edition featured “superior Engravings” of crime scenes and body parts, and the Boston Daily Mail boasting within days of the trial that it already had thirty thousand copies printed. Towering over these slender and hastily produced copies, though, was the prospect of a complete transcription by Dr. James Stone, stenographer extraordinaire. Stone was a physician himself—he’d even served as a minor witness in the trial—and also one of the city’s leading proselytizers of shorthand, teaching it to roomfuls of children and corresponding with educational reformers like Horace Mann. His knowledge of both medicine and shorthand promised an ideal edition; but when Sohier visited the State Street publisher Phillips, Sampson & Company to see the manuscript, he found that “most of our unhappy arguments had already been cast in stereotype,” the pages riddled with “errors so numerous that I should decline trying to do anything about it.” The prosecution’s arguments did not look much better. Worried letters flew back and forth between the defense counsel and the prosecutor; Sohier considered the edition to contain “the vilest caricatures which can be possibly imagined,” and Attorney General Clifford pleaded with Phillips & Sampson. Let both legal teams correct the text, he suggested, and it could be sold as a definitive edition—the company, he pointed out, “will have a monopoly of the market!” But there was too much money to be made, and too fast; the publisher offered only a paltry errata page to be crammed into the back of the book.
When the bound volumes of Report of the Trial of Prof. John W. Webster arrived in bookstores just two weeks after the verdict, it was to angry newspaper notices by the lawyers disowning the edition. It flew off the shelves anyway.
VISITORS WANDERING under the grand front steps of the medical school—the tours ran through a service entryway, not the front lobby—now found themselves confronted by a new sign on the door:
NO ADMITTENCE
“They probably do not give lessons in spelling at the Medical College,” one visitor ventured.
Multitudes had already filed through the crime scene—fifty thousand, by one estimate, almost as many as had visited the trial—and souvenir hunters had begun turning on Littlefield himself and snipping off locks of his hair. Now the put-upon janitor was getting his reward; he’d pulled the door to the lab shut and had gone to collect the $3,000 promised to him by Parkman’s family.
For others around the country, though, the show had only just begun. New Yorkers strolling along Broadway found handbills promising two lifelike wax statues of the fatal enemies, as well as thrilling financial action: “Dr. Parkman stands in the attitude of a creditor! Importuning a debtor, in his hand, and on the table, are seen the papers!” Those who climbed the stairs up to the exhibition found two statues, “clothed by actual measurements from their wardrobes,” and a ma
n said to be Dr. Parkman’s old barber on hand to attest to their veracity. The waxen tycoon, one reporter drolly noted, “bore his head down, as if calculating an indefinite amount of rent: while the professor—with the jet black hair always, we believe, assigned to desperate villains on the stage and in wax exhibitions—carried his head aloft, and seemed to be calculating when to strike.”
But many Americans weren’t so sure that Webster was guilty. Editorials in other cities tore into Boston’s most famous trial, claiming that it had had a timid defense, a biased judge, and suspect testimony. New Yorkers immediately began circulating a petition to Governor George Briggs of Massachusetts requesting that in Webster’s case, “the mercy of the Executive may be extended.” Within days, more petitions were circulating in Philadelphia, Dayton, Richmond, Louisville, and Augusta. Southern editors were especially vociferous in their criticism, with one Richmond paper appalled that any man could hang on the testimony “of that most disgusting of all bipeds, Ephraim Littlefield.” Taunted by years of criticism by Boston abolitionists, southern writers now saw their chance to pounce on Yankee injustice.
It didn’t help that one of the jurors, Albert Day, now revealed that the jury had entered deliberations with an already crushing sense of Webster’s guilt—that “so fully had the evidence pointed to the prisoner as the guilty man—and to NO ONE ELSE” that they had spent a half hour in silence and despair, with the incriminating evidence spread out on the table before them. At length, Day recalled, the foreman had suggested “that we seek for Divine wisdom and guidance”—and after a prayer, they methodically set about looking at the evidence. None doubted that Webster had killed Parkman, but a sole juror voted against the crime being premeditated. After another long silence, which the jurymen spent praying, reading, or simply staring into space, the holdout changed his vote.