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Murder Most Harvard
A brutal slaying at Harvard Medical School led to one of the world’s first applications of forensic evidence in court.
by Anthony S. Patton

On the morning of November 23, 1849, George Parkman donned a purple silk vest, a dark frock coat and trousers, and a black stovepipe hat. He strode purposefully through the West End of Boston, his lower jaw jutting forward in the characteristic way that had earned him the moniker “The Chin.” He collected rent from several tenants, purchased a head of lettuce at Quincy Market for his ailing daughter, and stopped to order butter and sugar from a local grocer. He then mounted the steps of Harvard’s medical college*, a building that had been opened, amid much pomp and circumstance, just three years earlier on land donated by Parkman himself.

Parkman regarded the medical college as something of a jewel in his real estate empire and proudly called it “a piece of the Holy Land.” During that Friday before Thanksgiving, however, the medical college was about to play host to events far removed from the sacred; George Parkman, esteemed Harvard alumnus, physician, and real estate mogul, did not leave the building alive.

In 33 years of marriage, Parkman had never before missed his two o’clock dinner. After staying up all night awaiting his return, his tearful wife at last summoned relatives, who immediately suspected foul play. Handbills were distributed and generous rewards offered. Wild rumors about Parkman’s whereabouts percolated throughout the city. For a full week, Bostonians ransacked Parkman’s West End tenements, interrogated bridge and turnpike attendants, and dragged the Charles River. Police searched the medical college and combed the marshy wooded land beyond the hospital. In the growing climate of hysteria, an Irishman was detained for questioning when he tried to pay a toll with a twenty-dollar bill; no Irishman, the thinking went, could possibly have come upon that much money by honest means.

Two days after Parkman mysteriously vanished, his wife received a visitor. John White Webster, a long-time family friend, stopped by to inform the Parkmans that he had seen George the afternoon of his disappearance, at which time he had paid the doctor his debt in full. Webster’s cold, detached demeanor took the Parkmans by surprise; Parkman, after all, had not only lent Webster considerable money over the years, but had also played an instrumental role in Webster’s faculty appointment at Harvard’s medical college. Their surprise quickly turned to a nagging suspicion that would soon help set in motion what became the most sensational trial in nineteenth-century America.

The Bitter Brahmin

At age 59, Parkman cut a distinguished, if austere, figure among Boston’s elite. Tall and almost painfully thin, with a demeanor that suggested discipline and righteousness, he had elicited the admiration of the dean of Harvard’s medical college, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who stated, “He abstained while others indulged, he walked while others rode, he worked while others slept.” Parkman had parlayed his sizable inheritance into a real estate fortune, and he exuded an air of smug self-satisfaction. Ever the frugal Yankee, he refused to keep a carriage. Every day the citizens of Boston could set their watches by the rounds he made on foot, collecting rents and conducting his business with a punctiliousness that some thought occasionally bordered on cruelty.

Although his family was rich, generous, and powerful, Parkman’s life had seen its disappointments. His daughter was sickly, and his son had not lived up to his expectations. Most irksome of all, he had not realized his dream of becoming a pioneer in the treatment of mental illness. Early in his career, after attending lectures at Harvard’s medical college and earning his medical degree in Scotland, he had spent time observing the work of physician Philippe Pinel at an insane asylum in Paris. At that time, treatment for those with chronic mental illnesses tended to be primitive and punitive. Inmates suffered under harsh conditions and were often chained to walls. Pinel instead espoused kindness for his patients. He released their chains, fed them nutritious food, and tried to create a healthy program of exercise and fresh air. The young Parkman was greatly impressed with the exciting results of this new treatment.

Parkman returned to the United States planning to help start the Massachusetts Mental Hospital—now McLean Hospital—and even provided seed money for the project. Officials at Massachusetts General Hospital had agreed to the idea, and Parkman was keen to be the new superintendent. He was crushed to learn, however, that despite his position, wealth, and qualifications, he had been passed over in favor of another physician. He took the rejection hard and turned much of his attention to managing his family’s enormous real estate holdings. Nonetheless, as the author of Remarks on Insanity and The Management of Lunatics, he was occasionally called to court to testify as to the motives and mental states of violent criminals, and so he continued to be regarded as an authority on mental illness.

Skyrocket Jack

Like Parkman, John Webster, professor of chemistry at the medical college, hailed from one of Boston’s wealthy and prestigious old families. He had earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard two years behind Parkman, then his medical degree from Harvard in 1815. He had married an ambassador’s daughter, trained at Guy’s Hospital in London, written a college chemistry textbook, and helped found the New England Journal of Medicine.

Yet Webster sported a frivolous side. In sharp contrast to Parkman, the shrewd and sober Yankee, Webster had a reputation as something of a self-indulgent dandy; he enjoyed eating, drinking, and playing cards, and he had earned the nickname “Skyrocket Jack” for his insistence on a flashy display of fireworks to mark the inauguration of Harvard’s president.

For all his genteel manners and associations, the professor harbored an explosive temper, and trouble always seemed to be brewing in his life. As an undergraduate, he had been subject to disciplinary action for rude and unruly behavior. During one spirited discussion, Webster struck a fellow student with his cane, a blow that could have been fatal had it landed on its target’s head. On another occasion, Webster attacked a colleague in a barbershop for an uncomplimentary remark meant as a joke. Even family members questioned exactly what happened at Guy’s Hospital when he was forced to leave abruptly.

There were whispers of violence, even assault and rape. Disturbing questions about Webster’s behavior trailed him into adulthood. When a chemistry experiment he performed caused an explosion, nearly injuring a student, Webster trivialized the episode in an unpleasantly cavalier fashion. On another occasion, he cruelly beat a stray dog to demonstrate head injuries. And then there was the destitute cousin whose meager inheritance Webster was rumored to have stolen. It did not help that his students disliked him and laughed at him during lectures.

For the most part, however, Webster seemed to fit in well with the other professors. He lived in fine fashion not far from Harvard Square, in a series of large houses with all the amenities, including servants. The Websters hosted many parties, and their daughters always had the finest tutoring and music lessons. Their friends included the intelligentsia and social elite of the time.

Unfortunately, Webster’s extravagant tastes exceeded his means. He had frittered away a family inheritance, spending lavishly to amass a fine mineral collection and squandering $3,000 on the purchase of the skeleton of a woolly mammoth. His lectures, which were supported by student subscriptions, did poorly, and his $1,200-a-year stipend from the medical college was soon to be cut by almost one-fifth. His family had already been forced to move once and, as their resources dwindled, he became concerned about losing their house again. In desperation, he began to borrow heavily from friends. Finally, he had no choice but to offer up his mineral collection as collateral for a loan from George Parkman. When, purely by chance, Parkman discovered that Webster had put up his collection as collateral for another loan, he felt that he had been swindled and became enraged.

Parkman, who had known Webster for decades, was well aware that Webster lived beyond his means and was only a mediocre professor. Despite his sour disapproval of what he regarded as Webster’s excesses and deficiencies, Parkman had agreed to lend him money partly out of sympathy for Webster’s family. When he became convinced that Webster had defrauded him, however, Parkman began to hound the professor, publicly accosting him about the debt. He would haunt Webster’s Harvard lectures, waiting in the back of the hall to confront the professor after class, speaking loudly so others could hear. He threatened exposure and intimated that Webster’s professorship was at stake. He was relentless in demanding satisfaction. On the morning of the disappearance, Webster went to Parkman’s house to schedule an appointment for that afternoon.

Pieces of the Puzzle

In its fifth and penultimate location since its creation in 1782, Harvard’s medical college squatted on the tidal flats of the Charles River facing Massachusetts General Hospital. The red brick building served as the main location for lectures. Classes were held on the top two floors, and the basement housed Webster’s chemistry laboratory, the dissecting room, and the living quarters of the janitor’s family. Below the basement was a large pit surrounded by brick for the disposal of cadavers; a similar yet smaller structure encased the hole beneath Webster’s private privy.

Several witnesses had observed Parkman enter the door of the medical college on the day of his disappearance, but no one had seen him exit. The police knew that Parkman had been at the school, so they initiated a search that included the chemistry laboratory. As it turned out, their initial exploration proved not thorough enough.

It was not the authorities, but Ephraim Littlefield, the janitor, who most doggedly suspected the professor. He noted that Webster began to lock his laboratory door at all times. He also realized that the furnace in Webster’s laboratory was being stoked with a great deal of wood; its heat could even be felt through the wall. Behind the locked door, Littlefield could hear the sound of constantly running water. Most telling of all, since Parkman’s disappearance, Webster had turned uncharacteristically genial. When Webster gave the janitor a Thanksgiving turkey, the first gift he had offered in seven years, the gesture only heightened Littlefield’s suspicions. It occurred to him that the police had yet to search the professor’s private privy.

While the gift of Webster’s Thanksgiving turkey cooked in his quarters above, and with his wife standing guard, Littlefield undertook the hard,
cold, wet climb to reach the crawl space in the lower basement of the medical college. On his own hunch at first, then with the approval of two of the medical college professors, he began to chisel his way through five layers of bricks to reach the privy vault. When he finally broke through, after several hours of cramped, odorous, and unpleasant labor, an appalling sight awaited him. Upon glimpsing three fresh body parts—a pelvis, a complete thigh from hip to knee, and the lower part of a leg—Littlefield bolted for help.

That night, the police transported the shocked Webster from his home to the Leverett Street Jail and charged him with Parkman’s murder. When they dragged him to his laboratory to bear witness to their discoveries, Webster became increasingly distraught. He proclaimed his innocence, demanded to see his family, and blurted, “Did they find all the body?” He began to twitch uncontrollably and sweat profusely. It was later discovered that when Webster arrived at the jail, he had surreptitiously swallowed a strychnine pill, which almost killed him.

The next day, police officers, coroners, and other experts swarmed the medical college. While Webster sobbed in jail, the authorities were making a series of gruesome discoveries in his laboratory. Guided by an unpleasant odor, they were horrified to unearth from the depths of a wooden tea chest a large, half-burnt headless torso, with curling gray hair thickly covering its back. The victim’s head had apparently been sawed off rather crudely. When the investigators loosened a cord encircling the torso, they realized that it had been eviscerated to make room for a thigh. More grisly bits of evidence emerged from the ashes in Webster’s furnace: pieces of burnt bone, viscera, and—although officials didn’t realize it at the time—the clue that would seal Webster’s fate: a dental plate with two teeth still attached.

A Well-Appointed Jail Cell

Within several days of his arrest, Webster had recovered from his strychnine poisoning and had begun to develop a defense. Even so, he did not seem to understand the gravity of his situation. It was clear from the beginning that Webster was not about to confess, and no lawyer would take the case. Finally, the court had to appoint two lawyers.

Webster, in the meantime, dedicated himself to making his cell comfortable, and he had family and friends send in all sorts of delicacies: fruit from the Azores, fine cheeses, Madeira tea, imported cigars. His fellow professors and even the president of Harvard visited him to express their support. Many of his Harvard Square cronies took up the theory that Webster’s plight stemmed from the inability of Bostonians to understand a Cambridge gentleman. They found it impossible to believe that he could be connected with such a heinous crime. He was, after all, a Harvard professor.

While his lawyers scrambled to confront the mass of damning evidence against him, Webster continued to make the most of his time in jail, transforming his stay there into a sort of college reunion. All of his friends from Boston’s genteel circles—the Lowells, Treadwells, Cunninghams, Bigelows, and Feltons—descended upon the jail to pay a visit to its celebrity inmate. Webster held court every day, filling up on wine, fine food, and repartee. His lawyers pleaded with him to be more realistic, but Webster never wavered. He continued to deny the overwhelming evidence against him, just as he had denied his strangling debt.

Webster stubbornly clung to his alibi: on that fateful Friday, he said, he had asked Parkman to visit his laboratory. He gave Parkman the $483.64 owed him, and Parkman took the note, signed it as paid, and left. Webster stated that he had no knowledge of whose remains were in his laboratory; if they were Parkman’s, Webster certainly had nothing to do with his demise.

No matter how often his attorneys inquired, Webster insisted that he had no idea how the dismembered body ended up in his laboratory. He even hinted at dark conspiracies by others to claim the reward money. Webster would not permit discussion of any alternative version of his story, and he seemed to think that his lofty social position would answer any case the prosecutors might create.

The Trial of the Century

Webster’s trial, which lasted 11 days in March 1850, was considered to be the most sensational legal proceeding of the nineteenth century. The press swarmed everywhere, and the crowds milling around the courthouse were always large and noisy. More than 60,000 people came to witness the spectacle; to accommodate the crowd, the Boston police rotated people in and out of the courthouse gallery every ten minutes. If they expected to see a gaunt, evil phantom in the dock, they were disappointed, for the already portly Webster had gained 20 pounds while in prison.

The prosecutors began with the motive: Webster was being hounded by Parkman for an unpaid debt. Littlefield then testified about Webster’s odd behavior, the constantly stoked furnace and running water, and his discovery of body parts beneath the privy. The prosecutors went on to describe the professor’s behavior on the night he was arrested, and to point out that Webster had been found carrying not only the note canceling his debt, but also a second note involving other creditors that Parkman would never have surrendered to Webster. They then presented a series of letters that had been sent to authorities anonymously. In different scrawls, these letters named other possible suspects and provided fictitious reasons for Parkman’s disappearance. Handwriting experts verified that Webster not only had penned those letters himself, but had also forged Parkman’s signature on the paid note.

Then there was the overwhelming physical evidence collected from the scene of the crime. Police had found Webster’s overalls and carpet slippers spattered with blood. They had recovered his jackknife and butcher’s saw, which had apparently been used to dismember the body. And Parkman’s grieving widow had identified distinctive marks on what was left of the corpse’s back and genitalia.

From the beginning, Webster’s defense team faced an uphill battle, yet they made a valiant effort. His lawyers produced several people who swore that they had seen Parkman hours after he was supposed to have been killed. Others testified to Webster’s concern about Parkman’s disappearance, as well as Webster’s fine character and cheerful demeanor around the time that he was alleged to have committed the brutal murder. The evening of the fateful day, in fact, Webster had played whist, recited poetry aloud to his daughters, and deliberated with friends the best method of preserving wedding cake.

Moreover, Webster’s attorneys argued, the case was circumstantial. Who knew if the remains were even those of Parkman? Perhaps someone else’s body had been stuffed in the privy. In the end, however, Webster’s defense team could not overcome the powerful evidence that the prosecutors had already methodically set forth.

The piece of evidence that eclipsed all doubt also set an important precedent in medical jurisprudence. In one of the first successful applications of forensic medicine in a court of law, authorities made a positive identification of Parkman’s corpse using the jaw and set of teeth that they had recovered from the furnace in Webster’s laboratory. Investigators had sent this evidence to Parkman’s dentist, Nathan Keep (later appointed the first dean of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine), who identified the false teeth as being those of Parkman.

On the stand, Keep—a close friend of both the murder victim and the accused—demonstrated how the original mold he had cast for Parkman perfectly matched the jaw found in the furnace. He wept as he recounted how he had finished filing down the teeth just in time for a special occasion for Parkman—the 1846 dedication of Harvard’s medical college building on Parkman’s “piece of the Holy Land.”

Murder Will Out

The jury delivered a guilty verdict in just three hours. The jurors seem to have felt pity for Webster, for they spent all but five minutes of the deliberation period in prayer, eager “to put off the sorrowful duty.” Two days later, Webster was sentenced to death by hanging. When the sentence was read, he began sobbing, and his forehead fell abruptly against the bar of the prisoner’s dock.

Webster tried two appeals, one that stated his innocence, then a second one in which he confessed to the crime, at the urging of a local minister. His confession portrayed him as the victim of Parkman’s vindictiveness. When they met in the chemistry laboratory that Friday afternoon, Webster recounted, Parkman had thundered at him, “I got you into your position, and now I will get you out of it!”

“While he was speaking and gesturing in the most violent and menacing manner,” Webster stated, “I seized whatever thing was nearest me, a stick of wood, and dealt him a blow with all the force that passion could summon. I did not know, nor think, nor care where I should hit him, nor how hard, nor what the effects should be. He fell to the floor instantly. He did not move.”

Webster claimed that he then panicked, carved up Parkman’s body, burned the parts that fit in the furnace, and stuffed the pieces that were too big into the privy hole and the tea chest. “All I could see was the need to conceal Dr. Parkman’s body,” Webster explained, “in order to avoid the blackest disgrace.”

But there was too much to excuse, and too many inconsistencies to resolve. Webster had invited Parkman to come to his laboratory even though he had no means of paying off the debt. He had not summoned help after Parkman fell, and he had dismembered Parkman’s body in a most horrible fashion.

Webster’s confession came too late. Despite the outcries against capital punishment that sounded throughout New England, his appeal was refused.

John Webster was hanged on August 30, 1850. He had requested that his wife and daughters not be told in advance the date of his execution. The jail, however, had many leaks of information, and a crowd gathered to witness the hanging. The night of the execution, under cover of darkness, a crew led by one of his lawyers spirited Webster’s body away and buried him in an unmarked grave, perhaps on Copp’s Hill. His family never knew his burial place.

After Webster’s death, many of the Brahmin rallied to raise money for his impoverished widow and daughters. It is said that the first contribution—a check for $500—came from Mrs. George Parkman of Boston.

*At the time of Parkman’s murder, Harvard Medical School was called Massachusetts Medical College.

Anthony S. Patton ’58 is a retired thoracic and vascular surgeon whose career was centered at Salem Hospital. Patton attended HMS despite his mother’s concern that medicine was a poor choice for a profession, for she believed it would always be tainted by John Webster’s terrible act.

This article appeared in the Spring 2000 issue of the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin.

Photo captions: John Webster’s chemistry laboratory was located in the basement of Harvard’s medical college (right), which faced Massachusetts General Hospital (left); the victim: Dr. George Parkman; the accused: Dr. John White Webster

Photos: Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine; Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine