Blood & Ivy

by Paul Collins

  The general public, however, was a different matter altogether—for in selecting a jury, an attorney needed to exercise care in assessing each man’s associations and opinions.

  “John Borrowscale!” the court clerk called out, taking roll as each man answered. “Hiram Bosworth! . . . George Frothingham!”

  Of the sixty men in the jury pool, fifteen were quickly excused: ten for medical reasons, three under an exemption for militia members, one for no longer living in the county, and the last out of sheer old age. Forty-five men were left to choose from.

  “I now move, Your Honors,” the court clerk announced to the four justices, “that a jury be empanelled to try the issue.”

  Dr. Webster was called to the bar, and the jury selection—a process he’d seen many times as a medical expert, but not as the accused—was explained to him.

  “John W. Webster: you are now set to the bar to be tried, and these good men whom I shall call, are to pass between the Commonwealth and you, upon your trial. If you would object to any of them, you will do so as they are called, and before they are sworn.” Twenty jurors could be removed peremptorily, without reason; more could be challenged with reason. And those reasons, to both the judge and the legal teams, were not difficult to ascertain.

  “Prisoner, look upon the juror,” the clerk intoned. “Juror, look upon the prisoner.”

  The first juror scarcely made it past locking eyes with Webster; the second, Charles Appleton, lasted long enough to meet a pointed question from Chief Justice Shaw.

  “Mr. Appleton,” he began, “it is necessary that we know whether you are completely unprejudiced. It is immaterial which way the opinion is. Have you formed any opinion upon the subject of the prisoner’s guilt or innocence, and have you expressed such opinion?”

  “I have both formed and expressed an opinion,” Appleton admitted, drawing his short career as a Webster juror to an immediate close.

  The third juror claimed no such bias, but then found a second question waiting for him from the chief justice.

  “There are many persons in the community who believe that it is wrong to inflict capital punishment on any criminal,” Shaw explained. The old judge peered at his subject: Was he, Mr. William Barly, one of those persons? Ah! Indeed he was.

  With each succeeding juror struck down, a buzz passed through the assembled crowd. Would any Bostonian qualify? Who had not expressed an opinion on Dr. Webster? When the fourth man in the jury pool—a printer named Thomas Barrett—prevailed and was sworn in, there was visible relief. From there a jury slowly emerged; when the forty-eighth of the sixty members of the jury pool was called at ten-thirty, they had their dozen jurors. With only white male voters allowed to serve, it read like a downtown office directory: two clerks, two merchants, a wheelwright, a slater, a painter, a carpenter, a furnisher, a printer, a bookseller, and a locksmith.

  The twelve men seated themselves in the jury box, and the court clerk turned back to the prisoner.

  “John W. Webster,” the clerk announced, “hold up your right hand.”

  The doctor stood at the iron railing of the bar, his hand held aloft, and his face twitched subtly as the murder charges were read aloud: murder by knife, by hammer, by “mortal strokes” of hands and feet. His hand trembled slightly as the clerk finished.

  “To this indictment, Gentlemen of the Jury, the prisoner at the bar has pleaded Not Guilty,” the clerk continued. “You are now sworn to try the issue. If he is guilty, you will say so; if he is not guilty, you will say so, and no more.”

  And now, with the state’s age-old invocation, the trial could truly begin.

  “Good men and true!” the court clerk called out. “Stand together and hearken to your evidence!”

  ATTORNEY GENERAL John Clifford hadn’t really wanted to stand before this jury.

  His plan was simple enough: his duties as the state’s attorney general and a Whig politician already occupied him so thoroughly that he’d handed this case to a young star lawyer, George Bemis. At thirty-three, Bemis was a brilliant but unwilling legal mind: he mingled in the same circles as Longfellow and complained that his law work was a distraction from the higher life of the mind that he found when dining or praying with Emerson, Alcott, and Channing. And like all Harvard graduates his age, he’d known Dr. Webster as part of the deeply familiar campus pantheon of professors. Bemis, however, was proving difficult for Clifford to retain for a harder and more unexpected reason: he was distracted by his father, who’d been bedridden for weeks with chest pains. For that matter, Bemis himself was only just getting over a long and miserable cold. In the end, Bemis had stayed only by extracting a promise from the attorney general: he’d handle the witnesses, but Clifford would orate the opening and closing arguments.

  And so, rather to his own surprise, Attorney General Clifford now found himself standing up to open the most sensational case of his altogether sober career.

  “Here, Gentlemen,” he began, “in the clear, calm light of justice, we are called to investigate an issue, and endeavor to ascertain the simple truth of the accusation brought by the Grand Jury against the prisoner at the bar. That presentment involves two general propositions. The first is, that Dr. George Parkman, the person named in the indictment, has been murdered. The second is, that he was murdered by John W. Webster, the prisoner at the bar.”

  The packed courthouse listened intently as the attorney general addressed the jury, watching Webster’s face for any sign of guilt. The professor, though occasionally fiddling with his spectacles, showed scarcely a hint of concern.

  “We shall offer, then, Gentlemen, evidence to show you that Dr. George Parkman, a well-known and highly respectable citizen of Boston, was living, in good health and cheerful spirits, on Friday, the twenty-third day of November last; that he was engaged in his usual occupations on that day, up until fifteen minutes before two o’clock, which time he was last seen alive, entering the Medical Building in Grove Street. Dr. Parkman left some lettuce in a shop near the Medical College, with the intention of returning to take it, and thence to carry it home. He did not return. His friends and family became alarmed. Notices were published in the evening papers of Saturday, calling the attention of the entire public to the fact of his disappearance.”

  Chief Justice Shaw was already worried about keeping track of all these details.

  “Was Friday the day?” he asked, interrupting the attorney general.

  “Friday was the day of his disappearance, Saturday the day of the publication,” Clifford said solicitously, and turned back to the jury. “Gentlemen, the entire police of this city were brought into requisition. Handbills were issued, offering the most liberal rewards . . . $3000, one of them. Hope gave way, and the conjecture and apprehension which had possessed the minds of his friends, the police and the public, deepened into certainty, that he was not in the land of the living.”

  Clifford moved on to the physical evidence: “On the 30th of November, the Friday after his disappearance, in the vault of a privy connected with the defendant’s laboratory at the Medical College, were found parts answering to the description of Dr. Parkman. On that day, Friday, and the next day, Saturday, were found in the furnace of Dr. Webster’s laboratory, a great number of bones. On Saturday there was found a tea-chest containing, imbedded in a quantity of tan, and covered with minerals, the thorax or entire trunk of a human body. Of the bones found in the furnace, not a fragment was found which duplicates any found in the vault or the tea-chest. Unless by a miracle they agreed, the parts all constituted portions of one human body.”

  The spectator’s gallery broke out in shocked whispers and murmurs, and from the floor of the courthouse Sheriff Eveleth immediately berated the townspeople in the upper seats.

  “Silence in the gallery!” he yelled. “Silence!”

  “Gentlemen,” Clifford continued, “you will have placed for your inspection a block of mineral teeth found in that furnace, which will be testified to by two gentlemen, accomplishe
d dentists, to be the teeth of Dr. Parkman. Dr. Keep distinctly recollects, recognizing his own work, that if he had seen them in Africa, or beyond the sea, he should have known them to be the teeth he made for Dr. George Parkman. Dr. Keep has in his possession the peculiar mold of Dr. Parkman’s jaw—a peculiarity so great, that you could not find, through any caprice of nature, another precisely like it.”

  The crowd swelled up again, for this was astonishing, nearly unheard of—teeth as evidence?

  “Quiet in the gallery!” the sheriff bellowed again.

  George Bemis, sitting in the other chair of the prosecution table, quietly watched Attorney General Clifford at work. The jury selection had gone better than he’d expected, and Clifford was no slouch at oration—even if Bemis had needed to write most of the opening argument for him. Now, however, would come the real revelations to the jury and the public: not just means but the motive.

  “Well, Gentlemen,” his partner continued, “if Dr. Parkman was murdered, then comes the other great question. Was it by the prisoner at the bar? We shall offer evidence to show the connection between the deceased and the prisoner since the year 1842, when there was a loan of money made by Dr. Parkman to Dr. Webster. Dr. Webster had been embarrassed, even reduced to great straits, for money. At the time when this death of Dr. Parkman occurred, all the personal property which Dr. Webster had in the world was under mortgage to Dr. George Parkman.”

  It was this revelation that Webster, almost more than any accusation of murder, had tried so hard to avoid fully revealing, even to his own family: that though he was both the inheritor of a small fortune and an established faculty member of Harvard, the very basis of his gentility had been a sham for years.

  “This was the relation of those parties on that fatal 23rd of November,” Clifford announced decisively to the crowd. “The improvident debtor evading payment of his debt! The creditor resolutely pursuing!”

  AMONG THE first witnesses to be called was one who understood Parkman’s financial dealings well: his brother-in-law and business partner, Robert Shaw.

  “The last time I saw Dr. Parkman was on the day of his disappearance,” he stated. “He called at my house between nine and ten o’clock in the morning of that day, and we walked down State Street together. We parted about ten o’clock, at the Merchant’s Bank.”

  When the doctor went missing, it was Shaw who had gone to the city marshal, dictated the missing notices in the newspapers, and guaranteed the $3,000 reward. And it was Shaw, too, who then took custody of the doctor’s body and arranged his funeral.

  Do you believe those remains were Parkman? Bemis asked.

  Sohier hastily objected. Without a positive identification, surely the question was a leading one? Bemis, unimpressed with Sohier, turned back to the witness and duly rephrased his question.

  “What appearances,” he asked Shaw drily, “if any, did you observe, showing a resemblance to any person?”

  “I saw appearances about these remains, which induced me to believe them to belong to the body of Dr. George Parkman,” Shaw explained. “The hair on the breast and leg, the color of which exactly corresponded with what I had seen. The hair on his leg I had seen in an early part of November . . .” The patrician Shaw paused delicately; he was speaking before hundreds of people, after all—and, as one observer noted, a number of “well dressed females” were among the crowds trying to get in.

  “Shall I relate the circumstance?” he finally asked.

  “Yes.”

  “He came to my house early one morning,” Shaw continued. “A cold morning—and to my remark that he wasn’t dressed warm enough, he replied that he had not on even drawers, and pulled up his pantaloons to show it.”

  It was a fine bit of entertainment for the gallery: Silence! But what Shaw had to reveal next would strike much deeper into real scandal. What, he was asked, was his financial relation to the prisoner in the dock?

  “On the 18th of April, 1848, I received a note from Dr. Webster, asking to have a private interview with me,” Shaw recalled. “He came the next day, and expressed to me his great embarrassment, and great want of money. He said that he expected the sheriff would be at his house to take away his furniture if he could not raise a certain sum of money.”

  Webster offered to sell his last possession of real value—his mineral cabinet—for a mere $1,200. Shaw didn’t really want the cabinet, but he loaned the doctor $600 toward a possible eventual purchase, with the condition that Webster could keep the cabinet if he paid the interest. The professor never did pay the interest, and Shaw, with larger and less awkward business interests to tend to, quietly let the debt remain unspoken.

  “Subsequently to this,” Shaw revealed, “I was walking with Dr. Parkman one day in Mount Vernon Street, when we met Dr. Webster. I asked Dr. Parkman, after we passed, what salary Dr. Webster was receiving at Cambridge—”

  Objection! Sohier countered. Surely this was both hearsay and immaterial.

  But it was not, and not least to the chief justice, who sat on Harvard’s board. Webster’s salary, and everyone else’s on the faculty, was public knowledge from Harvard’s annual report, and money mattered a great deal in Webster’s relations to those around him.

  Go ahead, the judge said.

  “He replied $1,200,” the witness continued. “I then said, ‘That is not half enough to support his family,’ and went on to speak of his sale to me of his minerals. Dr. Parkman said, ‘They are not his to sell. I have a mortgage on them, and if you will come to my house, I will show it to you.’”

  The mortgage was a terrifyingly thorough document. Nearly every item in Webster’s possession—every mineral, every book, every stick of furniture, everything down to his house linens—had already been pledged to Parkman as security on a $2,400 loan. For Dr. Parkman, it was just business; for Dr. Webster, it was ruin. The man had become so desperate that he’d pledged the same mineral cabinet to two business partners scarcely a block apart from each other. It was also rumored that at least two other creditors, the brothers Abbot and Amos Lawrence, had also made a $1,500 loan on the very same cabinet. They’d been either too discreet or too chagrined to collect on it; and to that delicacy, perhaps, they now owed their lives.

  But George Parkman, a relentless creditor at the best of times, was furious when he learned of the professor’s deception.

  “He said that he would see Dr. Webster, and give him a piece of his mind,” Shaw testified, each word building a fatal motive. “That it was a downright fraud, and that he ought to be punished.”

  19

  THE CATALOG OF BONES

  AS DR. WEBSTER WAS MANACLED AND LED OUT TO THE waiting prison carriage at eight o’clock the next morning, hundreds watched from the sidewalks and windows of Leverett Street, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Some had to work harder for their view: in the barred windows of the jail, the hands of prisoners could be seen holding out small mirrors and slivers of silvered glass, tilting them just right to provide a view of the jail’s most famous resident, while the men blindly called out questions and mocking replies to each other.

  “So much for one nob murdering another,” yelled one inmate.

  “D’you believe he settled that feller?” another called back.

  “Yes—just as much as though I’d been there.”

  Among sporting types in the city, betting pools were already forming over the verdict. What wasn’t in dispute, though, was the likely sentence for someone in the upper crust. “Public opinion is divided as to the conviction of Webster,” the Boston Daily Mail noted, “but none seem to think for a moment that he will ever be publicly doomed to an ignominious death of your common murderers.”

  Even as Webster’s carriage was readying to go to the courthouse, a few streets away another was taking on jurors. They’d spent the night sequestered in an inn with a constable watching over them; and though he missed home, juror James Crosby admitted that his comrades “seem like a pleasant set of men.” Even the food and drink
being provided were surprisingly passable. That morning they were taken to the Medical College to view Webster’s lecture hall, his laboratory, and, finally, his privy.

  The murder scene was the most peaceful place they’d see that day. When the jury arrived at the courthouse at nine-thirty, they were let in past a mob scene of men trying to barge in. I’m a lawyer, a member of the bar, one would-be spectator claimed to a policeman standing guard at the entrance, though it was apparent that the only bar he belonged to sold ale for a nickel a pint. Another, shoving his ticket at a constable as he breezed past, was promptly grabbed; his ticket was a forgery. “If tickets were ever at a premium,” a reporter marveled, “they were on this occasion.”

  Down on the courtroom floor, the judges seated themselves and the clerk called roll for the jury—“Frederick Henderson!” Here. “Stephen Stackpole!”—and then launched into the second day by calling to the stand the famed Francis Tukey.

  “I am the City Marshal,” Tukey explained, “and as such, have partially the superintendence and direction of the police.” Though Mrs. Parkman hadn’t subjected her nerves to the trial, the victim’s brother Francis and son George Jr. sat nearby and heard the marshal assure Boston—and not least them—that no effort had been spared to find Dr. Parkman.

  “It would have been impossible to make a more extensive search,” the marshal explained. “Messengers were sent in all direction, for fifty or sixty miles. We searched over land and water. We published and circulated, among other things, 28,000 handbills of four difference notices. They were published as advertisements in all the Boston papers. The search for the deceased was prosecuted till the remains were found.”

  With the morning visit to the crime scene fresh in the jurors’ minds, they now had an extraordinary exhibit placed before them: a wooden model of the college, commissioned from local carver James Hobbs. Usually hired for fine woodwork in ship salons and state houses, Hobbs had rendered a beautifully detailed miniature of the North Grove Street building. Each floor lifted out, so that the marshal could point to the locations and how they stood in relation to one another.