Criminal - Dr. Parkman is Missing

Episode Date: October 9, 2020

In the mid-1800s, Harvard Medical School had a reputation for being a “den of body snatchers.” And then, in November 1849, the school’s most prominent supporter, Dr. George Parkman, went missing. He was last seen walking into the medical school building. Several days later, a janitor, named Ephraim Littlefield found something strange in the lab of faculty member Dr. John Webster. Paul Collins’ book is Blood & Ivy: The 1849 Murder That Scandalized Harvard. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. On Friday, November 23rd, 1849, a doctor named George Parkman walked into a grocery store on Fruit Street in Boston.

He was one of the richest men in town, a graduate of Harvard, and the medical school's single largest owner. He ordered 32 pounds of sugar and 6 pounds of butter to be delivered to his house. A neighbor came into the store and said something about the weather. Dr. Parkman said to his neighbor, We cannot find fault with such weather as this. And then he turned to leave. But before he left the store, he turned back to the grocer and asked if he could leave something with him behind the counter.

It was a closed paper bag. Dr. Parkman said he would come right back for it, and then he walked away. Many hours later, the grocery store clerk opened the paper bag. Inside, he found one head of lettuce. That was actually one of the first noticeable signs of his disappearance, which was that he never came back for his lettuce. We're hearing about Dr. Parkman's disappearance from Paul Collins. He's an author and professor of English at Portland State University. Initially, when Parkman didn't come home, his absence was noticed, but it wasn't particularly remarked upon. Someone not immediately coming home is not quite the same cause for alarm

that it would be today, for the simple reason that if you're out and about in the field and you get stuck somewhere, there's an issue with the roads or with a railway or whatever, it's actually quite difficult to get back in touch with your house. And so it wasn't until the following morning when he's still not showing up, that's when they knew that something was really wrong. The police were sent out. They were sent to interview people at railway stations. They began to drag the harbor and the Charles River. It was really an all-out effort to find him.

Police eventually determined that after Dr. Parkman left the grocery store, he was seen one more time, walking up the front steps of his alma mater, Harvard Medical School. And at that point, he basically seems to disappear. Witnesses had seen Dr. Parkman

walk into the medical school building, but no one had seen him come back out. One of the challenges of someone going missing and perhaps having been killed in a medical school building is that that building is literally full of cadavers. Police interviewed the janitor, a man named Ephraim Littlefield, who lived in the basement of the building with his wife and children. He is also, more quietly, the person that helps procure bodies for the dissecting room. And that's actually a touchy subject for the medical school,

because medical schools are very reliant on having cadavers for their students to work on, but there's only a few legitimate ways to get a hold of them, and they need many more of those than they can actually get. Harvard, like a lot of medical schools in the United States, had struggled to find enough cadavers for decades. In many other cities in the country, medical schools would bribe cemetery workers for bodies. But Paul Collins says that people in Boston,

many of whom were Irish Catholic, frowned on these so-called body snatchers, also known as resurrectionists. And so Harvard Medical School had to look somewhere else for their cadavers, often quietly purchasing them from New York cemeteries. And so Littlefield is also kind of responsible for that, for finding the right people to bribe, basically. Medical students had to pay a $5 fee to offset the expense of supplying the cadavers. Paul Collins says it wasn't an explicit grave-robbing fund, but it might as well have been. The illegal practice became very public in 1848 when a young woman from New Hampshire named Sarah Ferber went missing. As one New

Hampshire newspaper reported, quote, her body was carried to Boston where it has been found in a dissecting room. Sarah Ferber had traveled from New Hampshire to New York to have an abortion. She died during the procedure, and the doctor packed her body in straw and charcoal and traveled with it to Boston. He arranged a visit with the dean of Harvard Medical School. The dean told the janitor, Ephraim Littlefield, to inspect the body. And if it was in good condition, Littlefield was told to buy it. And that's what he did. But when Sarah Ferber's body was on the dissecting table, Harvard faculty members realized how the woman had died,

and how recently, and they called the police. It was a scandal. There was a trial, and as Paul Collins says, Harvard was firmly established in the public as a den of body snatchers. It was just over a year later that Dr. George Parkman was seen walking into the medical college, but was not seen walking out. Police were now confronted with trying to find one man's body

in a building full of bodies, where so-called skeleton boxes were available for checkout, and where faculty often placed their orders for pints of blood. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. What was Harvard like in the mid-1850s? Harvard was inextricably tied with the power structure of Boston and of Massachusetts more broadly. Any politician, any judge, any major business figure in the state, it was sort of the finishing school,

so to speak, for entering the elite of the state and of the city. Also, even among the undergraduates, the families that they were coming from and the fields that they were going into were becoming kind of increasingly mercantile. If you look at the estate sizes of both the students and, oddly enough, the faculty at Harvard, they start getting bigger and bigger in this era. And with the faculty, that's certainly not because of what they were being paid by Harvard. It's that the faculty were also increasingly coming from money. So it was the elite teaching the elite. That's exactly it.

This presented a problem for one faculty member, Dr. John Webster. Webster had been teaching for decades at Harvard and was sort of part of the old power structure of the city and the faculty there. But he was having a difficult time keeping up financially, kind of keeping up appearances and keeping up his finances. You mean because the Harvard professors didn't really get paid much, and to keep the lifestyle up, they had to have their own money? Yes and no. So in Webster's case, he actually came from some money, but he squandered it. He basically built a very expensive house. He was fond of sort of small luxuries, but kind of having a constant flow of them and was constantly buying, you know,

the latest books, sheet music, little statues, knickknacks, going and traveling with his family. And so he managed to run through his inheritance. And once he was down to just what the actual salary was for a Harvard professor, that was indeed not enough to maintain the kind of life that people seem to expect of Harvard professors. They just, they didn't pay very well. John Webster, along with all of his colleagues at Harvard Medical School, fully cooperated with the police in their search for George Parkman. Police searched the building from top to bottom. They repeatedly searched the apartment of the janitor, Ephraim Littlefield,

looking under his bed, even looking in his bed. And then, a few days before Thanksgiving, the police officers paused their search and went home to be with their families. Most of the faculty left, too. Ephraim Littlefield was staying on campus, and John Webster gave him a gift of a turkey from the best shop in town. He could pick it up the day before Thanksgiving. That morning, Littlefield woke up early and went to work. He was trying to get into Webster's lab just to do the usual, you know, sweeping up,

cleaning the laboratory glassware, emptying out the furnace, that kind of stuff. And he couldn't get in. The door was locked, which was very unusual. And he found himself for almost the whole afternoon not able to get in and really not able to get a response from in there either. And then even after Webster left, Webster left the lab locked so that he couldn't go in to clean it up. And that was the first sign that something odd was happening

simply because he couldn't get into the room. Littlefield carried a small utility knife, which he slid into the door jamb until it cracked. He turned around to find his wife standing in the stairs behind him. She called for him to come back downstairs. They had family in town for the holiday. She wanted him to stop working. They needed to go shopping and to pick up the turkey John Webster had given them.

So that meant that Littlefield was going to have to leave the building for some time, for a couple hours, to go and get his turkey, which he did. And when he came back to the building, what he found was that the lab was still locked, but that one of the walls by the lab was very hot to the touch. He actually initially thought that the building must be on fire, boosted himself up to look through the window. No one was actually in there. It was at that point that he finally basically broke into the lab. He climbed up through a window and what he found was that all the kindling had been used up, that the furnace was extremely hot and that some barrels of water had been gone through, as if the furnace had

been stoked really too hot, and that the water had to be used to cool it down. So it was all rather mysterious. This lab was getting used, and this rather small furnace was being heated up intensely hot, and he didn't know why. So what did he decide to do? I mean, he got a sense that Webster was hiding something. Yeah. So the medical school building was actually searched a couple times by the police. And I think really by kind of a process of elimination, what Littlefield figured out was that there was one place that they absolutely hadn't looked. And that was the toilet.

There was a privy connected to Webster's lab. And it was really just a crude seat that dropped down to a basement space that was partly exposed to the river. The building was built right by the Charles River. And so the tide would actually, it was like a tidal river. So the tide would kind of come in and sort of clean out the space a bit. And Littlefield began to wonder if that was where Dr. Parkman was. And he actually quietly told a couple of the other professors in the faculty this. And they said, go look.

What he decided to do, I think very cleverly, was to try to break in on Thanksgiving. Because that was the one day you could be pretty sure there would be nobody else in the building. He's trying to burrow into a toilet, right? Yeah, there's basically a brick wall kind of around the bottom of this privy. And unfortunately for him, it turns out to be a rather well-built wall

and he didn't actually have very good tools for it. And it being Thanksgiving day, it was not a great time for him to find better tools. What he had actually was he had a hatchet and he had a chisel. He also had a hammer, but what he decided to do was to give the hammer to his wife. And so he tells his wife, if you see Webster coming, use that hammer to bang on the floor so I know to get out of there. So the only other tool he's really got at hand is a hatchet. He actually is not able to make it through the wall. He gets tired.

He gets sick of it. But then the next day, he gets back to work again. And then he's able to get through the wall. And what does he see? What he sees is flesh. To be continued... and they call these series essentials. This month they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family.

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into the private toilet of faculty member John Webster, and he found evidence of a human body. And he knows that for whatever reason, and whoever it is, and whyever it is in there, it's not supposed to be in there. That is not where that stuff is supposed to go. They literally have a dissecting vault where body parts are supposed to go.

So there's no good reason to see that in a privy. And so that's when he knows something has gone terribly wrong. What he does is he actually goes to one of the professors who lives nearby, Professor Bigelow, and is terribly shaken up when he arrives there, to the point where the professor, Bigelow, apparently kind of grabbed him by the collar and just started shaking him and saying, what have you done? How are you involved in this? And at that point, Bigelow then also goes to get the city marshal and the police swarm in. And what do they find? What they find in the privy is basically a thigh and other parts of the body.

They don't find a head. They don't find a torso. But they're finding various other extremities, but primarily a human thigh. And one of the first things that the marshal asks one of the professors, who is also at the scene, is this a place where human remains should be? Is this how Harvard disposes of its cadavers? And he is told in that building. And particularly without a head or without any clothing or anything like that there, they really don't know who it is. But what they do know is that it's not supposed to be there and that this was the last place the Parkman was seen. So they are immediately suspicious that they have in in fact, found Parkman. And what did they do?

Well, it was a little tricky. They had found this body in Boston, but Webster lived in Cambridge. And so what they did was they had some police go to visit him at his house in Cambridge that evening. They didn't arrest him off the bat. What they said was, you know, we're doing another search of the medical school. Could you come and assist us so that we could get into some of the rooms and, you know, you could point out stuff? And he said, sure. And so he got in a carriage with them. They crossed the bridge into Boston and took what seemed to be a wrong turn so that they were not going in the right direction for the medical school.

At that point, the officer told him, oh, you know what? I have to stop off and run a quick shore before we go over there. Let's quick go in this building. So they basically tricked him into their jurisdiction and literally into, I mean, almost into the jail itself. What was Webster's reaction when he was told that he was being arrested and charged with murder? It was shock and indignation. And then he became violently ill. He started sweating. He became weak. He wasn't able to pick himself up. When they tried to give him some water, it kind of just dribbled down his face. He. They kind of had to pick him up, basically. And I think that the arresting officers, there was some discussion of whether they should actually take him to a doctor. And they decided not to.

I think they just thought he was in this state of utter panic. What emerged later was that he was aware enough of the possibility of getting arrested that he had put a little bit of strychnine in his vest. And he had taken it at the station. He had attempted to kill himself, but he didn't give himself the right dose. And so he just got incredibly ill instead. And it was actually in that state that they actually took him over to the medical school and carried out the body parts and put them in front of him, I think in the hope

of extracting a confession just by the shock of seeing the evidence in front of him that he would confess. You know, ironically, he was in such bad shape that he was barely able to speak anyway. So he didn't make any confession. And they just had to kind of drag him back to the jail at that point. I would imagine that a Harvard professor being charged with murder would be pretty big news. It was absolutely shocking to people. And one of the curious things about the case is the way that the reaction to that news broke down geographically, which was that in Cambridge, this was treated as simply unthinkable, that it couldn't be true, and that there had to be some kind of mistake. And in particular, the blame immediately started to land on Littlefield. That's who was suspected

of having somehow framed Webster. And in Boston, the assumption was, by and large, that Webster had done it. So there was a bit of town-and-gown tension, I think, around the case and around how they interpreted the case. The mayor of Cambridge, who had attended Harvard, taught at Harvard, and whose father was the former president of Harvard, felt that it was impossible that anyone affiliated with the school could ever commit a crime. And although police believed they'd located the body of Parkman and they'd already arrested Webster, they still didn't know exactly when or how the murder had occurred or why.

They opened every box in every closet of Webster's lab, trying to find some evidence of murder. And in one box, hidden beneath some tree bark and minerals, they eventually found a human torso. The torso had been hollowed out, and inside was the missing left thigh. The poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was a professor at Harvard, and also John Webster's neighbor, wrote that the whole town is in the greatest excitement. His wife, Fanny Longfellow, wrote in a letter to her sister-in-law that many people, quote, suspect the janitor, who is known to be a bad man.

Webster, who was awaiting trial and jail, said that he had no idea how the body parts ended up in his lab. That is no more Dr. Parkman's body than it is mine, he said. The Boston Herald printed a graphic illustration of Dr. Parkman's remains, something that had never been done before.

As Paul Collins puts it, nothing about the case seemed normal anymore. The illustration made copies of the newspaper so valuable that people were stealing them off other people's doorsteps to resell them. The trial began four months after Parkman disappeared, in March of 1850. But the police still hadn't been able to prove that the body they'd found was actually the body of the man who was missing. They still had not found his head. What they found were some teeth and jaw fragments and some bits and pieces of dentures, basically, in a furnace in the lab.

And the prosecution decided on the, in some ways, risky and kind of novel approach of basing part of their case on an identification of Parkman from his jaw, his teeth, and his dentures. Typically, at that time, if you had a lot of bad teeth, eventually you just get them all pulled and you'd get a full set of dentures. But Parkman, you know, his identification in some ways hinges on just a little bit of vanity on his part. He has a few good teeth left in his head. And rather than get those pulled and get a complete set of dentures, he orders from his dentist a very kind of elaborate sort of triptych structure of dentures to fit around his few remaining teeth. And when pieces of that are found in the furnace, they're so distinct compared to an ordinary set of dentures that that's one of the things that really helps clinch the identification. There were four judges, with Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw presiding.

Lemuel Shaw had gone to Harvard and was on Harvard's Board of Overseers. He was also Herman Melville's father-in-law. An astounding number of people in that courtroom were from Harvard. Both the victim and the accused were Harvard alum. Both of Webster's attorneys were Harvard alum. The assistant to the prosecutor was from Harvard. Many of the witnesses on the forensics were from, not only from Harvard, they were from Harvard Medical School. They were Webster's own colleagues

actually coming up to testify about forensics because they were also the best experts around. And just the fact alone, I think that the victim was one of the biggest donors to Harvard, and that the judge was on the board of Harvard in any modern trial, I think would have guaranteed that you would have to get a different judge. But that's not how it worked. That's not how it worked in Boston at that time. During the trial, Parkman's brother-in-law testified that he and Parkman had been out walking one day and had bumped into John Webster. They both recognized him.

Parkman had, in the course of a conversation with his brother-in-law, discovered that they had both lent large sums of money to Webster on the same security. Webster had a mineral cabinet that he had pledged as security, among other things. And so basically, Webster was engaged in loan fraud. And he had actually taken out loans from other people on top of that, using the same cabinet for security over and over again. So he was really in a spiral. He was borrowing from one person to pay another. And Parkman was livid when he found out about this. The prosecution argued that Parkman went to the medical school to confront Webster about the debt,

and that Webster had killed Parkman. The jury was taken to the medical school to see Webster's lab for themselves and also to see the bathroom. Webster's defense attorneys argued basically that a Harvard doctor wasn't capable of a crime like this. And what good would it do Webster to kill his own employer's largest donor? One thing I found actually in looking at the defense and looking through the notes that Webster wrote to his team, which they preserved, he was very critical of his defense attorneys. He really wanted them to push a lot harder

at blaming Littlefield. And it turns out there was a very good reason for that, which was that he had quietly tried to enlist a relative of his to go into the lab, to go into the building and to loosen a ventilation panel in the door to his lab. And then he went to his lawyers and said, oh, you should have someone check that door, because I think maybe Littlefield could have unlocked it by going through the ventilation panel. So he tried to frame Littlefield. He actually tried to tamper with the crime scene to make it look like Littlefield could have actually had access all along to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average U.S. company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be

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Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. So what was the verdict? You know, what was interesting about the verdict is that I think many people thought initially when the trial started that he couldn't be guilty, that he wouldn't be found guilty. And that even if he was found guilty, they would surely not give the death penalty to a Harvard professor. And that assumption turned out to be completely wrong. The jury came back. They pronounced him guilty, and he was sentenced by the judge, Lemuel Shaw, to death. And so at that point, I think to the great shock of many people, that July of 1850, he confessed.

He confessed to a fellow named George Putnam. Putnam was a very respected clergyman. He had actually been considered for the board of Harvard, and they'd offered him the Hollis Chair of Theology there. So he was a very well-regarded figure. And Webster made a full confession to him. What he told him was, Parkman went to Webster after a lecture, and he would have gone through kind of a small lobby. There was a lecture hall that Webster used for his chemistry lectures. The hall had probably taken a bit of damage because Webster was fond of pyrotechnic exhibitions that didn't always work out very well. And so he occasionally caused a bit of damage

to the room that way. There was a small set of stairs by that lecture room. And that kind of led into a little back area where he would prepare his notes right before a lecture. And he had a coat hanging up there. And then down into a lab where he would do his notes right before a lecture, and he had a coat hanging up there, and then down into a lab where he would do his research work. So Parkman actually comes to confront him in his lab that Webster owes him money, that he's been defrauding other creditors. And what Parkman did, and this seems to have been his fatal error, was he said, I'm going to,ster to get his job at Harvard.

And he essentially told him, I helped you get your job, I can get your job taken away too. And so he was threatening to reveal Webster as insolvent and make him lose everything. Because at that time at Harvard, if you were revealed to be a debtor, to be revealed as bankrupt, you could in fact lose your job. As Webster confessed, quote, Soon my own temper was up. I forgot everything. In my fury, I seized whatever thing was handiest. It was a stick of wood, and dealt him an instantaneous blow with all the force that passion could give it.

Webster said he grabbed some ammonia and tried to revive Parkman by putting it under his nose. When that didn't work, he panicked and decided to dispose of the body. And that what might have been perhaps a manslaughter case, by virtue of his trying to hide it, really then became a murder case. And he was killed. Yes. So there was actually quite a bit of opposition already in Massachusetts to the death penalty. People were very upset about the prospect of the sentence being carried out. One really striking thing from all this is that George Parkman had a brother, Reverend Francis Parkman. He was a very prominent figure in that time.

And he was also prominent as an opponent to the death penalty. He was part of a death penalty group. And he fell mysteriously silent during this period. Among all the uproar over the death penalty being given to Webster, Francis Parkman was conspicuously absent. So it was a very surprising fate for Webster, and it met a lot of opposition in some quarters, but it was indeed carried out. Before his execution, Webster asked to see the janitor, Ephraim Littlefield. Littlefield arrived to Webster's cell, and Webster said to him, Mr. Littlefield, I have done you a great injustice. Littlefield said, I forgive you, and I pity and sympathize with you.

The novelist George Thompson wrote that the conviction and execution of John Webster was shockingly fair. Money, influential friends, able counsel, petitions, and prestige failed to save him from that fate which he merited as if he had been the most obscure individual in existence. Really with any murder case, and particularly one that has a very lengthy and kind of contested trial, it gives you kind of a cross-section of society. You know, there's a whole set of kind of literary and philosophical figures in Boston at this time that are at the center of the intellectual life of the country in some ways. You know, what gets described in literature sometimes as the American Renaissance. You have Emerson there, you have Thoreau, you have Longfellow, you have Melville, you have Emily Dickinson.

And they also knew the people involved in the case. Longfellow actually visited Webster in jail. One of my favorite moments was actually looking through Longfellow's journals, where on one page he's describing visiting Webster in jail. And then on another, he's describing being at a meeting with Emerson and a bunch of other people at like a dinner or something, and that they start passing around the hat for Hawthorne because Hawthorne is short of money. And he notes in passing that Hawthorne has a book about to come out. That book is the Scarlet Letter. And these kind of details just pop up in passing. So to have this case landing in the middle of all that was really, it was just sort of fascinating for me.

Did you go to Harvard? You mean as a student? As a student? No. No. Makes you wonder if you'd want to go to Harvard? You mean as a student? As a student? No. Makes you wonder if you'd want to go to Harvard. I mean, I didn't go to Harvard either, but I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.

Our producers are Susanna Robertson and Aaron Wade. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where you can learn more about the case and find out more about Paul Collins' book. It's called Blood and Ivy. We'll have a link in the show notes. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best shows around. And Radiotopia has a brand new show. It's called Appearances.

This is Appearances. You know, journey. Life has a journey. I don't know why the f*** you're calling me. And everybody's journey is different. What kind of husband are you? Can you please call your freaking wife? I am busy. I am so lonely. Like, at what point does your life get to be yours? I don't know. Maybe never.

Episodes drop starting Tuesday, September 29th. Go listen. And before we go, just a heads up that the fifth season of our other show, This Is Love, will be back very soon. We can't wait for you to hear these stories. Make sure you're subscribed to This Is Love so you don't miss a thing. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia from PRX. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults.

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