Criminal - One Eyed Joe

Episode Date: June 3, 2016

Not only was John Frankford a famous horse thief, he was also a notoriously good escape artist. People thought no jail was strong enough to keep him, but then in 1895 he was sentenced to Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary. At Eastern State, Frankford became the victim of a strange practice: the prison doctor, Dr. John Bacon, dissected his body and removed his brain. The Frankford case would just be one of many others in the region and would illuminate an underground cadaver network supplying medical schools across the state of Pennsylvania.  Reporter Elana Gordon from WHYY's The Pulse has today's story. 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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Is that a lot? That is kind of a lot. For horse stealing. I imagine him kind of a horse whisperer. John Frankfurt was born in 1839 and grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He was a master at stealing and selling horses. He once joked to a warden that he was responsible for every missing horse in eastern Pennsylvania. And he just keeps getting caught and escaping, so it's almost like a running joke.

We're hearing about him from Evie Newman. She's an exhibitions manager at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. In all the news articles, it's implied or set out right that he's famous. He's talked about as famous or notorious. Notorious horse thief caught. That's one of the titles that you'll see. Each time he was caught, he was put in jail, but then he'd escape. He'd steal another horse, get caught, and somehow escape again.

Frankfurt had the reputation of just not taking prison seriously. He mostly worked alone, but he once escaped jail with help from the so-called Buzzard Boys, a gang of six brothers, all named Buzzard. They used what they called the birdcage trick. One brother, Ike Buzzard, who was somehow allowed to keep a birdcage in his jail cell, asked the guard,

could you please take this canary cage over to my brother, Abe Buzzard? So the guard goes in to investigate. One of the Buzzard brothers sneaks past him, takes the keys, and locks him in the cell. And then, of course, he proceeds and unlocks 11 other cells and frees the inmates. One of them is Frankfurt. Eventually, the Lancaster County Jail got so sick of Frankfurt's escapes that they built a special cell just for him. But he cut through it in November 1881. He made his way into the cellar where he dug through a stone wall

and crawled to the top of the stone chimney. Keeper Wise of the prison, I guess he wasn't very wise, heard him at work, and when he appeared at the top of the chimney, shot him in the face, destroying One Eye. That's how he got the nickname One-Eyed Joe. In 1885, Frankfurt was finally caught for the last time, at a horse sale in Philadelphia. The judge gave him the maximum sentence, 19 years,

and sent him to the most severe prison in the state of Pennsylvania, if not the whole country. There are several news articles that say that Frankfurt was such an incredibly good escapist or escape artist that finally he met his match at Eastern State Penitentiary. It was said that no jail was strong enough to hold him, but John Frankfurt never did escape from Eastern State Penitentiary, not alive anyway. For today's story, we've partnered with reporter Alana Gordon from WHYY's The Pulse in Philadelphia to find out what exactly happened to John Frankfurt, and to go inside a mysterious practice that changed not only the city of Philadelphia, but the medical community as all of us know it today. I'm Phoebe Church. This is Criminal.

Eastern State Penitentiary is where solitary confinement basically originated in the United States. Every single prisoner was in solitary confinement at the time. So all the cells are made for that. The only light that comes in the cells comes from the skylight. It's called the eye to God. So they're supposed to get on their knees and pray towards that skylight upwards at where God is presumably watching over them or looking at them. And that's his solely natural light. It was a thin sliver of light. Between Eastern States opening in 1829 through its closing in 1971, 80,000 people served time there. If you see the gates to each cell, they have their iron, full iron with bolts, and they have a small window with bars on it.

So not easy to escape. Not easy to escape. Guards would put hoods over prisoners when taking them out of their cells so no one could recognize them and they wouldn't know where they were. There are reports of torture. We don't know if Frankfurt ever got in trouble. It doesn't seem like he did. And his daughter, who visits him semi-often, I think maybe once a year or so,

says that he never complained to her. But when she asked him how it was in the prison, he said, Maggie, life is not your own here. By the 1890s, about a decade into his term, he wasn't as closely confined. He did plumbing and other work around the prison. He also looked after the prison's fierce dogs. Being a skilled horse thief, you'd figure he might have had a way with animals.

But during the time of Christmas of 95, he was tending to the prison dogs. And apparently they got in a fight, the dogs did. And he tried to separate them and he got bit. The bite supposedly got really infected. And by mid-January, Frankfurt takes a turn for the worse. He's bedridden. He's not very conscious. So he's basically convalescing.

He was under the care of the prison's doctor, Dr. John Bacon. Bacon was probably as good a doctor as there was at the time. He trained under the best of the best at the University of Pennsylvania. But Frankfurt didn't make it. At 58 years old, he died in the prison on January 20, 1896. Frankfurt's daughter, Maggie, traveled with her husband to the prison right away. They wanted to have her father's body transported to Lancaster for the funeral. But when they went to get it, the prison said at first, no, that it wasn't ready.

So they had to wait. And wait. When they get the body, he has bruises all over his body. He has sewn marks and his skull is cut open. The top of Frankfurt's skull appeared to have been sloppily stitched up with some sort of twine. His stomach was cut open and the intestines were spilling out. So they get the body and they see this, you know, mangled corpse with bruises, so they suspect foul play. Dr. Bacon said that Frankfurt's official cause of death was a strangulated hernia, which is an intestinal blockage. He had been suffering from that for a while, and he did have that bad dog bite.

But neither of those things explained why his head and his body had been cut up like that. And then a man named Alexander Leipsner contacted Maggie and said he had some information about what had happened to her father. Leipsner was also an inmate at Eastern State. He was in for second-degree murder. They're friends, like he seems to think very highly of Frankfurt. Leipsner told Maggie that he'd been out of his cell, working on a construction project, and decided to sneak over to the hospital wing to visit Frankfurt. This was January of 1896. It was cold and snowing.

And he looks all over the place, and then he sees across the yard a body. He sees a table with his friend's naked body on it. And the doctor, the prison physician, is working on him. He goes near, but he tries not to be seen. He doesn't want to be discovered. And then he sees Dr. Bacon remove Frank's heart. And he puts that on the snow, presumably to keep it fresh. He's working on his skull. And he opens up the skull and takes out the brain, and he sets that on the snow, too. Leibsner said that two other inmates also witnessed this, and he told Maggie he'd be willing to testify to what he'd seen. The average layperson wouldn't know what autopsy incisions look like. It's typically a Y incision where you draw

an incision from kind of the midway part down the chest and shoulder area to the sternum. That's where the Y spreads out and then down the abdomen in the middle. So that way you can open the ribs, you can take the heart out, and you can take the entrails out too. During an investigation into the conditions at Eastern State, a legislative committee sought testimony from inmates, wardens, and even newspaper reporters about what had happened to Frankfurt. Alexander Leibsner took the stand. I can read a little bit of this

because it's really fantastic. He said he saw Dr. Bacon go by with the entrails in a bucket and avowed that he had been told that all convicts who died in the prison were treated that way. That's a big one. That's what he claims. So Leipsner claimed that every inmate who died at Eastern State

risked becoming the doctor's guinea pig. And when it was Dr. Bacon's turn to take the stand, he testified that he had performed emergency surgery for Frankfurt's hernia right before he died, a last-ditch attempt to save him. That's why his stomach was cut up. Then the legislative committee asked him to explain what had happened to Frankfurt's body after he died. This is good.

Concerning the post-mortem examination, Dr. Bacon said a prisoner, whose first name is Arthur, had assisted him and had removed the skull and taken out the brain. The prison record of the case and its treatment was then submitted to the committee. Why did you take out the brain, Dr. Bacon was asked. Because John Frankfurt was a typical criminal and I wanted the brain for scientific purposes. Dr. Bacon said that he had taken the brains out of two other bodies and he added that this was frequently done. He denied that he had taken out the heart and the bowels and admitted that he might have carried the brains in a bucket,

as Leibniz had stated. Wow. Yeah, it's fantastic stuff. Sorry for the enthusiasm, but it's just so fascinating to me that this was done so casually. And when I pictured this trial, I kind of pictured Dr. Begin being kind of defensive about it, saying, of course we did this. He wasn't the only doctor stealing people's organs.

It was a strange time in American history. To become great at healing the body, you first had to scavenge for one to study, to figure out how it worked. The medical industry as we know it today was just establishing itself. So after the Civil War, you have, first of all, a lot of medical innovations, like the idea of the ambulance and the ambulance as a service gets implemented and then you have embalming and surgery. And there are all these veterans that have medical conditions from, you know, amputations, nervous conditions to other complications from being in the battlefield. And that creates a market and the market for physicians to be trained in Philadelphia. So you have all these medical schools sprouting that are attracting new students. And all of these

students needed bodies to dissect to learn and become good doctors. The most ambitious attended extracurricular dissection courses and even took anatomy a second time. But there was a problem. The math didn't add up. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, 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. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick,

completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on

how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. So in 8082, a few years before Frankfurt's death, the state of Pennsylvania has 1493 medical students in need of bodies to dissect. Ideally, they would need 746 to make that possible because each student gets half a body. But there are only 406 lawfully available. So that's like, they're short by like half. They're short by half. And there just wasn't a legal way to meet that demand. But a medical school's reputation depended on whether it could provide students with,

quote, abundant anatomical material. So they have to figure out other ways to get bodies, and that's where body snatchers come in, or as they called at the time, resurrectionists. The body snatcher term is mainly associated with medical grave robbery. Michael Sapol is a medical historian who's written a book about this. He says that digging up cemeteries and selling the bodies to medical schools was a gold mine. The easiest bodies to snatch

were those of the poor and vulnerable who didn't have money for a watchman or a secure grave. These were African Americans, immigrants, those who died in asylums and prisons. There was also an urgency to getting bodies. They would decompose fast. That's why dissection classes mostly happened in the winter.

So in the early days, even medical students got directly involved in stealing them. They go in the dead of night, and they might bribe a watchman or maybe get a watchman drunk or maybe they just look for the moment when the watchman falls asleep and they bring in their wagon with their horse and dig and unearth the body and then away. That sounds horrific to me and I would imagine to a med student today. What was different then? Well, part of it was this is a rite of passage. First of all, imagine the medical students back then tend to be younger. It's a culture of camaraderie and bravado. You want to curry favor with the professor, bring the professor a body.

Bring the professor an interesting body. You want to curry favor with the professor? Bring the professor a body. Bring the professor an interesting body. You want to curry favor with your fellow classmates? I got a body. They're impressed with you. You're a brave, strong lad. And unlike today, when a lot of us really want to donate our bodies to science, there was a huge stigma to being dissected back then, or even being autopsied. Nobody wanted this to happen to them or their loved ones. How you die really matters to people. And if you're a poor person and you're saving money, the money you might be saving would be dedicated to your death.

So when the public caught wind of what doctors and students were doing, riots broke out. Some schools were even burned down. There are a few notorious examples of times when it became so lucrative that body snatchers actually murdered people in order to supply the anatomy department. Murdering people and selling them to science, clearly a crime. Just like digging someone up from their plot in a cemetery or opening up someone's head to steal their brain is a crime.

Right? You'd think so, but the laws to deal with this were a mess, and not just in Pennsylvania. So there's this increasing demand for bodies. This system of looting and bribery and corruption is unruly and unseemly. It attracts attention in the newspapers. It's politically embarrassing. Lawmakers tried to look the other way.

But the public was terrified and angry. And more and more med schools kept opening, increasing the demand for bodies. Every medical school in the United States has a body snatching scandal. And there's a lore of body snatching in every medical school. And then in 1882, just before that famous horse thief John Frankfurt was captured for the last time, Philadelphia's biggest scandal breaks, and one of the most revered doctors in America is accused of body snatching. I knew you would be asking us about Dr. Forbes. Yeah, it's a pretty amazing story.

This is Michael Angelo. He's the archivist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. In 1882, Dr. William Forbes, the foremost anatomist in the country here at Jefferson Medical College, had a relationship with some people who supplied cadavers for the students. Dr. William Forbes had actually tried to be on the right side of the law. He wrote the first anatomy legislation in Pennsylvania that legally directed unclaimed bodies to med schools. But it was weak, and the bodies weren't coming in. The local Philadelphia papers knew that something was fishy, so they basically set up a sting. Some journalists suspected foul play at an African-American burial ground.

So one cold night in the middle of winter, they camped out, armed with guns, ready to catch the body snatchers in action. And so you could call them muckraking journalists. No offense. But they actually got to the bottom of this because there were bodies being stolen every winter from these cemeteries. And so when they arrested these individuals, they squealed and said Dr. Forbes was the man who asked them to bring the bodies. He was arrested on charges of conspiring to steal bodies and violate graves. There were a lot of protests against him, and some thought it would be the end of Jefferson Medical College. Forbes denied any involvement.

But the damning evidence was that there were keys to the dead house, or the place where the corpses are kept at the college, in the possession of those men. And we actually have the keys in the archives today, so it's kind of a grisly reminder of where America was 130 years ago. Forbes was acquitted. And amazingly, he was able to use his own scandal to pressure legislators. He wrote a new and improved law that would compel every state institution—prisons, morgues, hospitals—to give unclaimed bodies to medical schools. And it worked.

The state finally said, OK, we get it. Let's help you figure this out without breaking the law. He was the champion to rewrite the anatomy acts in Pennsylvania, which provided for a more rational distribution of human cadavers. So as Philadelphia went, so did the rest of the country. The Anatomy Act of 1883 was a really important landmark for the entire country. It marked a huge step in legitimizing

dissection in the state and basically helped transform a profession seen as a bunch of monsters and ghouls in the public's eye into one that was really legit and respected. But the Anatomy Act didn't lift the curtain on everything. Sure, it protected doctors, but what about protecting those at the bottom of the ladder, like prisoners? Doctors still took liberties when no one was looking. So this is an interesting detail. There is nowhere, there is no clause of the Anatomy Act that talks about organs. That's never mentioned. Again, Evie Newman. She doesn't get why, if the Anatomy Act had already passed when John Frankfurt died, why Dr. Bacon would so casually admit to removing Frankfurt's

brain and not fear the consequences. It appears that if you can get away with taking organs, you can. Dr. Bacon says that he took out the organs for scientific purposes, and he says that he didn't know that was illegal or that he had to ask to do this because his predecessors did it too. A lot of doctors were studying body parts on the side, and there were networks of doctors helping each other find them. So even if Dr. Bacon himself wasn't personally interested in John Frankfurt's brain, he may have been trying to hook up a friend. These were the days when people still believed in phrenology, and the brain of a clever criminal was especially desirable.

My guess is that they had their eye on him. This is a famous horse thief. At the time, the idea of criminal physiology and phrenology is fairly alive and well in the United States. So if something was peculiar about your head, you could tell what that would correspond to and what your character would be like. And there is also the idea that a brain of a criminal would be different.

So maybe his brain was taken for scientific study. Or maybe someone just wanted it on their shelf, like a trophy. Frankfurt was a high-profile criminal and seemingly uncatchable. Think about all those sheriffs he managed to outwit, all those people he ripped off. Lots of people might have wanted his brain in a jar.

Either way, it wasn't all that unusual to look at and even admire body parts in jars, kind of like the way we look at art in a museum. And there's one place in particular where that's still true today. This gallery is organized by body part, so we start with brains and go into hearts, lungs, and around the room to limbs. The Muner Museum in Philadelphia, where Evie Newman works, is an old but still really busy anatomical museum. When I went to visit her, she showed me around the skulls, tumors, and all sorts of other stuff on display in jars of

alcohol or formaldehyde. I'm gonna take you to the wet specimen room. So if you're squimmish, just be prepared. There are a lot of things in jars. Okay. Her nickname here is the wet specimen hound. Newman leads me to the basement, where they store the stuff that's not on display. They keep it cold in here. So the age of them kind of varies. The oldest ones we have are the ones that are covered by pig's bladder. They could go back to, you know, 1870s, 1860s even. She points out the brains in all sorts of different shaped jars. So some of these older brains could have been acquired

through somebody taking or stealing a person's body. I can't say that for sure. But there's a possibility. There's always a possibility. She told me she still believes that maybe one day she'll find the brain of John Frankfurt, that one-eyed horse thief. I hope that it's out there. There is no real footnote about where it ended up. We don't know if it was sold by Dr. Bacon, if Dr. Bacon kept it, if it was returned to the family. There's no mention of what actually happens to his organs. So my hope is

that Dr. Bacon sold it to one of his colleagues and it ended up in a collection and it's still somewhere out there in Philadelphia, hopefully. How would you know? It would probably be marked as the brain of a horse thief. Why do you want to find this brain? Just to complete the story, to get some sort of resolution. What's there to resolve? That's a good question. I always believed that seeing like an open casket funeral or the remains of your loved one brings a sense of closure.

And this horse thief from basically the turn of the century has become a fixture in my life for the last two years, so I want to follow the story to the end. After I left, Newman discovered a funeral notice for John Frankfurt. It says he was buried in Lancaster Cemetery. She went out and looked, but she never did find his grave. The one image she does have is a sketch of Frankfurt from an obit. I've seen this picture. Frankfurt looks so melancholy. But when I look closer at that one

eyelid of his, slightly drooped over the eye, he lost. It sort of looks to me like he could be winking. Like maybe, even in death, he's managed to sneak away one more time. His last great escape. That was reporter Alana Gordon from WHYY's The Pulse in Philadelphia. To learn more about what's changed in the regulation and distribution of bodies for medicine, check out their podcast this week. You can find it on iTunes. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers.

Special thanks to Alice Wilder and Freddie Jenkins. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia, a collective of the very best podcasts around. Shows like Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. In his new episode, he tries to make sense of America's craft beer scene and learns that the best brewers aren't looking to cash out. They're just trying to keep their heads above water.

My exit strategy is death. Go listen. Radiotopia is supported by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. 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.

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