A murder that scandalised Harvard and the world

Blood & Ivy: The 1849 Murder That Scandalised Harvard. By Paul Collins. W.W. Norton & Company; 320 pages; $26.95 and £21.99.

VISITING Boston in 1868, Charles Dickens was asked what he wanted to see most. The room where it happened, Dickens said—by which he meant the scene of a grisly murder that had scandalised the city nearly two decades earlier. The crime had all the ghoulish ingredients of a potboiler: the sudden disappearance of a wealthy landowner and Harvard graduate, George Parkman (pictured); another Harvard man—John Webster, a professor of chemistry and mineralogy—as prime suspect; a dismembered body presumed to be the victim’s; a sullen janitor who supplied the anatomy laboratory with cadavers; and a trial reported in screaming headlines.

In “Blood & Ivy”, Paul Collins ushers readers into that fabled room—and the incestuously tight world of Brahmin Boston. That term refers to a nexus of privileged clans that included the Adams, Cabot and Lodge families. The Brahmins invariably went to Harvard, and in the foggy milieu that Mr Collins entertainingly evokes, suspect, victim, lawyers and many of the witnesses all came from that social subset.

Parkman vanished on the afternoon of November 23rd 1849. Despite a city-wide dragnet, the case hit a dead end until Ephraim Littlefield, a medical-school janitor who lived next to Webster’s college study, hacked his way into the vault under the professor’s rooms and unearthed a pelvis, thigh and lower leg—presumed to be the missing man’s. Webster was arrested and locked up to await trial. The mantle of privilege remained intact, however. While his cellmates dined on slop, the suspect had oysters and cream cakes delivered from Parker’s Restaurant.

The capital trial of a Harvard fellow was a sensation. Only one had ever been executed—George Burroughs, hanged for witchcraft in the 17th century. Though seating was sorely limited, some 7,000 spectators moved in shifts through the courtroom on the first day alone. The event spawned betting pools and merchandising (cough-syrup adverts played on Webster’s background in chemistry). Along with the theatrics, Mr Collins explains, the case was a landmark in the use of forensic science, and for the judge’s elaboration of the notion of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt”. If, Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of Massachusetts, told the jurors, they “cannot say they feel an abiding conviction, to a moral certainty of the truth of the charge…the accused is entitled to…an acquittal.”

Although the United States Supreme Court re-examined that definition in 1994, the “Webster charge” remained the classic instruction for juries in Massachusetts until 2015. It is not a spoiler to say that the verdict was more controversial. After all, not only Webster’s life but Harvard’s reputation was at stake. Ivy, it appeared, was not immune to blight. “At such times,” Judge Shaw observed, “the glaze of civilisation and culture shows very thin in spots.”