Blood & Ivy

by Paul Collins

  Other facts of the case would emerge only long after the publication of his transcript, though. Bemis’s own role became clear after his death, when his papers, left to the Massachusetts Historical Society, showed that he’d ostensibly been paid $1,000 for his trial services by the attorney general—“tho’,” his writing revealed, “really to be paid him by the Parkman family.” The Parkmans had secretly funneled their immense wealth into the best and most aggressive government prosecution money could buy—an arrangement that, if not strictly speaking illegal, was still a dismaying example of Boston’s ruling class bending the justice system to its own purposes.

  Another puzzling aspect of the case became clearer in time as well: the long-rumored refusal of both Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate, the premier attorneys of their time, to serve as John Webster’s counsel. “I talked with Daniel Webster about the matter when I was applied to on behalf of Professor Webster,” Choate later revealed in his memoirs. “He entirely coincided with me as to the proper line of defense—that it must be an admission of the homicide.” To another colleague, Choate explained that he’d have claimed justifiable homicide by self-defense or an insane “visitation of God.” Between a forthright confession of homicide and the lack of direct witnesses, he said, “It would have been impossible to convict Professor Webster of murder with that admission.” But his would-be client was either too proud or too grasping to admit to anything, even that the body was Parkman’s: “Professor Webster would not listen to any such defense as that.” Nor would the professor’s family, it seemed. And so his fate was sealed.

  “Mr. [Daniel] Webster said to me,” Choate’s law partner later recalled, “some time after he had this conversation with Mr. Choate, that he had not the least doubt of Professor Webster’s guilt.”

  What defense Webster’s subsequent lawyers, Merrick and Sohier, did manage, though roundly criticized by many outsiders at the time, makes more sense in retrospect. Those close to the case showed little doubt of their ability; Edward Sohier went on to a long-standing and successful practice in Boston, and Pliny Merrick was appointed associate justice of the state supreme court, as well as to the Board of Overseers at Harvard.

  It would not be until the posthumous opening of their papers, too, that the full extent of their professional dilemma became apparent. Webster’s complaints about their defense came from the untenable demands he made on them. In hundreds of pages of his notes, Webster strove to prove not just that he couldn’t have killed Parkman but—just as importantly—that Ephraim Littlefield likely did. For reputable attorneys like Merrick and Sohier, this posed a problem. Their profession was still grappling with the implications of the 1840 murder trial in London of François Benjamin Courvoisier—in which defense attorney Charles Phillips, even after learning of his client’s guilt, still pursued an aggressive strategy that threw suspicion on an innocent chambermaid. Humiliated and shaken, the chambermaid was eventually committed to an asylum. Phillips went public with what had happened only months before the Webster case, and the parallels were troubling. Could Sohier and Merrick in good conscience pin a murder on a humble janitor who, by every indication except Webster’s, was guilty of nothing but revealing the truth?

  Their hesitation was not misplaced. In a private family letter weeks after Webster’s execution, his sister-in-law Amelia Nye revealed that while in jail, Webster had in fact confessed the crime to a cousin, Edward C. Jones—and not out of penance, but because he needed Edward’s help.

  “He confided to him that he had done the deed,” she wrote. “He then wrote him a letter wishing Edward to come to Boston to take the staples out of the ventilator in the College to make it appear that someone had entered and placed the remains where they were found. Edward went to Boston to tell him that he would not do any such thing.” Although Mrs. Nye was not to know it, this exact claim—that the ventilation panel in a lab door was loose, and would have allowed entry by Littlefield or others into the room—was indeed a pivotal argument in Dr. Webster’s private notes to his counsel. He had even gone to the trouble of sketching the panel for them.

  Foiled in his attempt to plant evidence that would frame Littlefield, Nye’s letter goes on to reveal, Webster hatched desperate escape plans.

  “He then wrote a very long letter to Edward wishing to know when a Whaler would sail and there were in the letter about 40 plans for escape,” she wrote. “One was for him to dress in Harriet’s clothes, leave her in his place and escape to New Bedford, so poor [cousin] Emma was in a constant state of alarm fearing the Dr. would make his appearance at her house.”

  Even without the revelations within the family’s own papers, the likelihood of Webster’s guilt was increasingly taken for granted among the denizens of Cambridge, who allowed that even a reputable Harvard professor might indeed commit a murder. His station in life only proved, as Judge Shaw reflected, that “at such times the glaze of civilization and culture shows very thin in spots.” Professor Webster has remained only the second and last Harvard alumnus to be executed in America; the other, George Burroughs, was condemned in 1692 under the altogether less convincing charge of witchcraft.

  Attorney General John Clifford’s successful conviction of a son of Harvard certainly proved to be no political impediment: just three years after the trial, he was elected governor. By the time Clifford took over George Briggs’s old job, though, the governor’s duty of considering pardons was evolving; it now occurred amid an increasing unease over the death penalty itself. The one-year-delay law inspired by Webster’s case finally passed the legislature in 1852, and the category of second-degree murder was adopted in 1858. But more than a century would pass before the death penalty would be abolished in the state.

  At least one person close to Webster, though, remained profoundly untroubled by the doctor’s harsh punishment: novelist George Thompson, the doctor’s fellow prisoner and erstwhile friendly neighbor in the next jail cell over.

  “Probably, in the annals of criminal jurisprudence, there never was seen a more striking instance of equal and exact justice, than was afforded by the trial, conviction and execution of John W. Webster,” Thompson later wrote. “Money, influential friends, able counsel, prayers, petitions, the prestige of a scientific reputation failed to save him from that fate which he merited as well as if he had been the most obscure individual in existence.”

  PERHAPS IT was only a matter of time before Drs. Parkman and Webster were memorialized as wax figures, counterpoised in perpetual enmity, on display at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in Manhattan. In the end, Ephraim Littlefield did appear in person at one of the wax figure exhibitions, along with a wooden model of the Medical College—and he was met with immediate and vociferous criticism. Littlefield, one newspaper sneered, “is a pure specimen of the money-worshipping hang-dog.” Another newspaper deemed the show to have “terribly reduced our general estimate of humanity.” Littlefield instantly forswore any involvement with the promoter, explaining that it hadn’t been his idea and that he hadn’t even done it for pay, but merely for the public’s edification. Depending on which newspaper one believed in the years afterward, the much-abused janitor then either retired to a farm in Vermont, ventured to California and “cleared $25,000,” or went insane.

  The mannequins of Parkman and Webster proved scarcely any less peripatetic. They were perhaps none too realistic in appearance; Webster’s sister-in-law later noted that the professor was buried in an unmarked grave, as “it was feared someone would desecrate his tomb for the sake of taking his impression of his features to have a wax figure made.” Yet improvised statues of the two were nonetheless spotted in Connecticut, in Maine, and at a cattle show and fair in western Massachusetts, where one reporter found them haphazardly thrust in among the other statues and agricultural exhibits, so that “Dr. Parkman was looking hard at Gen. Taylor, while Professor Webster appeared as if lecturing to a class on the subject of manures.” In an inspired poke at an Ivy League rival, the waxen Parkman and Webster al
so attended Commencement Day festivities at Dartmouth College.

  Other jabs at Harvard were not so easily dismissed. A withering committee report in the Massachusetts legislature, issued on the heels of Webster’s execution, upbraided the university for an impractical and outdated curriculum. Though the college quickly parried the criticism, this merely delayed reform for another generation. The school was an increasingly elite and moneyed bastion—so that, as Henry Adams later put it, “parents went on, generation after generation, sending their children to Harvard College for the sake of its social privileges.” When Oliver Wendell Holmes later described these Boston elite as Brahmins in his novel Elsie Venner, the term immediately and permanently stuck. The Brahmins had effectively become a caste—and it was, perhaps, no accident that the onetime dean made his story’s protagonist a student from a scarcely disguised Harvard.

  Yet even as Harvard continued to ossify, its Class of ’53 went on to the achievements expected of Boston’s favored sons. Edward King, a teenager who had rucksacked through Europe’s 1848 revolutions before lodging in Professor Agassiz’s home, went on to head the New York Stock Exchange. William Dorsheimer—the uncanny mimic of respectable elders—grew into one himself, and became a congressman. Justin Winsor, who had written a volume of town history in his teens, would preside over a great many more books as head of the Boston Public Library. And Francis McGuire, an unlikely escapee from the Irish potato famine, turned from theology to attend what in that year seemed an even more unlikely destination: the Medical College.

  Harvard’s year on the front pages had, for better or worse, helped shape the Class of ’53. A number went on to notable newspaper careers: Dorsheimer, in his later years, ran the New York Star, while the fervently abolitionist Albert Gallatin Browne Jr. would become a New York Tribune correspondent and then a New York Herald editor. Their classmate Adams Sherman Hill spent years as a D.C. bureau chief before returning to Harvard to create what became the standard for American college writing courses for the next century—a course founded in part, ironically, on Hill’s conviction that newspapers were degrading the English language. The man who hired Hill, Charles William Eliot, was himself a ’53 classmate, and all too familiar with Webster’s story: he trained to become a chemistry professor under Josiah Cooke, the doctor’s own student and successor. In his forty years as Harvard’s president—still the longest term in the school’s history—Eliot would at last usher in a more diverse student body and a new curriculum that came to epitomize the modern American university.

  Sometimes, though, the Harvard of old could unexpectedly reappear. When, many years later, the belfry of Harvard Hall revealed boxes of mineral samples and a dusty piece of discarded apparatus, Professor Cooke immediately recognized the equipment. “That,” he mused, “was Webster’s volcano”—the pyrotechnic prop that used to nearly set the old doctor’s lecture hall on fire.

  For generations, Webster’s case was recalled whenever a great murder scandal arose, be it Lizzie Borden or Leopold and Loeb. Dr. John Webster and Dr. George Parkman were murderous archetypes, a pair perfectly matched in fatal greed: Webster in his lavish expenditures, and Parkman in his miserly acquisitions. Curiously, while many still remembered Webster with some fondness, if also bafflement at his crime, it was a singular rarity to find anyone who described Parkman as a friend. In a memorial speech at the Medical College, Oliver Wendell Holmes struggled mightily to find something warm to say of their biggest donor. After recalling how Parkman had had “a sententious style of his communications,” he added wanly, “Dr. Parkman was a man of strict and stern principles.”

  In private, Harvard colleagues like mathematician Benjamin Peirce were more blunt. “Dr. Parkman was so harsh and cruel a man with his debtors,” Peirce wrote, “that his murder seems almost to have been a retribution of Providence designed to teach us an appalling lesson.”

  THE DEATHS of Dr. Parkman and Dr. Webster were a cautionary tale for some, and for others an important precedent in the use of forensic evidence. Yet their most lasting legacy may have been a literary one. Charles Dickens met Dr. Webster briefly on his first visit to America in 1842, and his crime haunted the author’s return trip in 1867–68. During his second trip to Boston, Dickens wrote to his fellow novelist Wilkie Collins, “Longfellow told me a terrific story. He dined with Webster within a year of the murder, one of a party of 10 or 12. As they sat at their wine Webster suddenly ordered the lights to be turned out, and a bowl of some burning mineral to be placed on the table, that the guests might see how ghostly it made them look. As each man stared at all the rest in the weird light, all were horrified to see Webster with a rope round his neck, holding it up, over the bowl, with his head jerked on one side, and his tongue lolled out, representing a man being hanged!”

  When Dickens asked Oliver Wendell Holmes to take him to Webster’s old rooms at the Medical College, he found them much as they had been two decades earlier: “They were horribly grim, private, cold, and quiet; the identical furnace smelling fearfully (some anatomical broth in it I suppose) as if the body were still there.” Indeed, the rooms were hauntingly changeless. When the building was torn down in 1911, a local newspaper noted that “Professor Webster’s laboratory still remains in the old college building and the vault where the portions of the body were found is still intact.”

  Dickens promptly commissioned an account of Webster’s case for his magazine, All the Year Round, but his interest did not end there. After returning to England, he undertook The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a novel of a disappearance in which the unlikely perpetrator, a respectable choirmaster, seeks to frame another man. The plot, Dickens told a friend, would pivot on an unidentifiable body in a church vault, nearly destroyed with quicklime—“but all discovery of the murderer was to be baffled till towards the close, when, by means of a gold ring which had resisted the corrosive effects of the lime into which he had thrown the body, not only the person murdered was to be identified but the locality of the crime and the man who committed it.” The crucial evidence of Parkman’s false teeth, transmuted by literary imagination, at last became the gold ring of Edwin Drood.

  Or, that is, it nearly did. Edwin Drood is famous not just as Dickens’s first mystery novel but also as his last, for he died suddenly of a stroke in June 1870, at the end of a full day of working on his story. “I hope his book is finished,” Longfellow remarked upon hearing the news. But it was not to be. His readers, who had been following each chapter of Edwin Drood in serial form, were left waiting forever for its ending. Like the case that inspired it, some of its secrets will remain a mystery indeed.

  Acknowledgments

  MUCH OF WHAT YOU’VE READ HERE—AND, JUST AS IMPORTANTLY, the knotted and tangled sentences you didn’t read, because they were crossed out in the early drafts—is thanks to the love and guidance of my wife, Jennifer, who is the first reader of all my work.

  My son Bramwell’s humor and curiosity reminds me of just why I write, though I probably won’t let Bram read this one just yet. Readers of my previous book about my older son, Morgan, may be startled to realize that he’s gone from a boy to a strapping young man; I owe no small thanks to his tireless caregiver, Marc Thomas.

  My many thanks also go to my agent, Michelle Tessler, and my editor, John Glusman, for getting this project rolling, and for their tremendous patience in seeing it through, even when the manuscript was as confoundingly missing as any Boston miser.

  All of my work depends on libraries, and I’m indebted to the Boston Public Library, Harvard University, the Library of Congress, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the University of Washington. I’m especially grateful to Portland State University, which over the years has endured interlibrary queries from me for everything from 1960s vehicle safety manuals to the transcripts of Victorian chess-by-telegraph competitions, all without asking what exactly it is that I do for a living.

  In fact, shortly after undertaking this work on an academic murder, I began serving as an English
department chair, which perhaps provided an unintentionally useful perspective on the subject. For my colleagues who so solicitously inquired over the years about how the book was coming along, I can finally tell you: It’s in your department mailbox! Also: Can you turn in your office hours for next quarter?

  Notes

  Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

  Abbreviations Used

  BA Boston Daily Atlas

  BB Boston Daily Bee

  BC Boston Daily Chronotype

  BH Boston Herald

  BJ Boston Daily Journal

  BM Boston Daily Mail

  BT Boston Daily Evening Transcript

  CC Cambridge Chronicle

  DJW Defense notes of John Webster (John White Webster Papers, 1837–50, Massachusetts Historical Society)*

  JGB Journal of George Bemis (Massachusetts Historical Society)

  JHL Journal of Henry Longfellow (Houghton Library manuscript)

  LAN Letters of Amelia Nye (Massachusetts Historical Society)

  TBH Trial of Professor John W. Webster (Boston Herald / John A. French trial transcript)

  TBJ The Trial of Prof. John W. Webster (Boston Journal transcript)

  TDM The Parkman Murder (Boston Daily Mail trial transcript)

  TGB Bemis, Report of the Case of John W. Webster