Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

     If we are to believe the Indiana humorist George Ade, patriots can be competitive even about their countrymen's crimes. Ade tells us of the shipboard traveler from Emporia, Kansas who tartly responds to an Englishman's criticism of violence in the United States by observing that "there were fewer Murders in England because good Opportunities were being overlooked." Of course, quantity has never been synonymous with quality, and the well-behaved British may be forgiven for the belief that their murders, relatively few though they may be, include inimitable cases - from the Brides in the Bath to Ten Rillington Place. But for the most intriguing of these cases the American patriot would have a worthy rival to put forward - the Harvard Murder Case of 1849.
     The Harvard Murder Case is rightly named because most of the cast of characters were Harvard men: the defendant, the victim, the trial judges, counsel on both sides, and twenty-five of the witnesses (including Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes). The defendant, John White Webster, was a professor of chemistry at Harvard University and at the Harvard Medical College in Boston. The victim, Dr. George Parkman, was a benefactor of the medical college who drew his wealth from real estate investment and private moneylending. His generosity as a philanthropist was matched (and probably facilitated) by his relentlessness as a creditor; one of his slow-paying debtors was Webster, who had exhausted what little patience Parkman had by fraudulently selling off a mineral collection he had mortgaged as collateral for his borrowing.
     On Friday, November 23, 1849, Parkman disappeared. He had stopped off that day at a shop near the medical college to purchase "a quantity of lettuce, a rare plant at that season," for an invalid daughter to whom he was much attached, and was last seen alive entering the medical college between one-thirty and two in the afternoon. When Parkman, a man of regular habits, did not return home, his family and friends became alarmed. The next day the police were notified of his disappearance, and a wide search was undertaken. Handbills were issued offering a reward of $3,000.
     On Sunday, Webster informed Dr. Parkman's brother, Francis, that the missing man had called on him by appointment at the medical college at half past one on Friday and that Webster had settled his debt by paying him $483. The search continued during the course of the following week. Webster's rooms at the medical college were inspected, the river was dredged, and a thorough search was made of the yards, outbuildings, and houses in the western part of Boston, where Dr. Parkman had large real estate investments (and perhaps other defaulting 

debtors). The police inquiries extended as far as sixty miles through-out adjacent towns. While the police flailed about without success, an unexpected ally was at work. The janitor of the medical college, Ephraim Littlefield, whose living quarters were adjacent to Webster's laboratory on the upper basement story of the medical college building, suspected that Parkman's body must be hidden somewhere on the premises and concluded that the only place that had not been inspected was the vault under Webster's privy. On November 29 (the Thursday after the disappearance) he set to work to pierce the privy vault and on the next day completed a breach of the wall. Inside the vault, near the opening he had made, Littlefield found certain remains of a human body - a pelvis, the right thigh and the left leg from knee to ankle - and certain towels marked with Webster's initials and similar to those used by the professor in his laboratory.
     On Friday evening and Saturday morning, the police also found in an assay furnace (a furnace used to test metals) in Webster's laboratory, fused with slag and cinders, a great number of fragments of human bones and certain blocks of false teeth. Later on Saturday, they also discovered in a remote corner of the laboratory, in a place they had previously noticed but not examined, a tea-chest that contained, imbedded in tanning material and covered with minerals, the thorax of a human body, a left thigh, and Webster's hunting knife. Around the thigh bone was tied a piece of twine similar to that found in one of Webster's drawers. The various remains were examined and found to be parts of a single body that resembled the body of Parkman. Dr. Keep, Parkman's dentist, identified the false teeth found in the furnace as part of a set that he had prepared for the missing man.
     Webster was arrested and charged with the murder of Parkman. From his cell, he accused Littlefield either of committing the murder or conspiring to fix the guilt on him. Webster was represented at his trial by two well-known members of the Massachusetts Bar, Edward D. Sohier, who had been primarily a civil lawyer, and Pliny Merrick, a judge of the Court of Common Pleas. Merrick had greater criminal experience than Sohier, having served as district attorney, but Sohier took the role of lead counsel, because he had represented Webster in certain matters in the past. After an eleven-day trial, the jury deliberated for a little less than three hours and returned a verdict of guilty; Webster was sentenced to be hanged. An appeal was made in his behalf to the governor for commutation of the sentence, and in the course of that appeal, in which Webster had initially asserted his innocence, a confession of the murder was ultimately filed with the Committee on Pardons of the Massachusetts Executive Council. That confession was promptly labelled a "hoax" by much of the press, because it contained some puzzling 

factual assertions and also was viewed as a last-ditch effort by Webster to save his life. In any event, clemency was denied, and Webster was hanged on August 30, 1850.
     Obviously, the key to the case against Webster had been Littlefield's discovery of Parkman's remains, and therefore the centerpiece of the trial was "the janitor's story." Although the presiding judge, Chief Justice Shaw, suggested in his charge to the jury that "the facts and circumstances" that the janitor discovered "constitute the substance of the evidence," the judge cannot have failed to notice from Littlefield's testimony that his search for the body was oddly motivated and spasmodically performed.
     Littlefield testified that he had been employed as janitor of the medical college for seven years and had known the defendant during that period; he had been acquainted with Parkman for twenty years. He was present at an interview between Webster and Parkman on the Monday prior to the disappearance. He heard Parkman ask, "Dr. Webster, are you ready for me tonight?" Webster answered, "No, I am not ready tonight, Doctor." Parkman accused Webster of selling or remortgaging collateral, and warned him as he left that "something must be accomplished tomorrow." Littlefield also said that, on the same Monday and before Parkman called, Webster had asked him a number of questions about access to the vault under the dissecting room of the medical college. The following day Webster asked Littlefield to carry a note to Parkman.
     On Friday morning, November 23, as Littlefield set his broom behind the door to Webster's back room off the chemistry lecture room, he noticed a sledgehammer that was usually kept in the laboratory below. The sledgehammer thereafter permanently disappeared, and Littlefield's recollection of its unusual whereabouts on the fatal Friday appeared to contain a gratuitous suggestion of its possible use as the murder weapon. Other signs of hostility to the defendant are scattered through the janitor's testimony, but in view of the accusations Webster had made against him, the witness's irritation is understandable.
     The janitor further stated that on the afternoon of Friday, November 23, towards two o'clock, he saw Parkman coming toward the college, "walking very fast" (a not inappropriate gait for a persistent creditor). Later, when he went downstairs to Webster's laboratory-stairs door, which led out into the janitor's cellar, Littlefield found that door and another door to the laboratory bolted on the inside. He thought that he heard Webster walking inside the laboratory and water running. About half past five, as he was coming out of his kitchen, he heard someone coming down the back stairs that led into the janitor's cellar; it was Professor Webster, holding a lighted candle.

     On Saturday morning, Littlefield unlocked the door of Webster's lecture room and tried to get into his adjacent back room, but found it locked. Presently, Webster arrived, a small bundle under his arm, and unlocked the door to the back room. He asked the janitor to make him up a fire in the stove.
     Littlefield testified that on Sunday evening he had a conversation with Webster that aroused great misgivings in him. Webster asked him whether he had seen Parkman during the latter part of the preceding week, and the janitor told him that he had seen him coming toward the college about half past one on Friday. The professor then volunteered that this was the very time that he had paid Parkman $483 and some odd cents. The janitor was struck with Webster's unusual demeanor: "Usually, when Dr. Webster talks with me, he holds his head up and looks me in the face. At this time, he held his head down, and appeared to be confused, and a good deal agitated. I never saw him so, before; that is, look as he did: My attention was attracted to it. I saw his face, and I thought that he looked pale." On Monday, the janitor tried twice to get into Webster's room to make up his fires but found the doors bolted. On the same day Littlefield was in Webster's laboratory briefly on three occasions while visitors were calling in connection with the Parkman disappearance. The following day he was present during a police inspection of Webster's rooms; it seemed to him that when one of the police officers, Mr. Clapp, inquired about the privy, the professor "withdrew the attention of the officers from that place."
     On Wednesday morning Littlefield saw Webster arrive at the college early and soon heard him moving things around in his laboratory. The janitor went to the laboratory door, tried unsuccessfully to look through the keyhole, and began to cut a hole in the door but gave up because he thought Webster had heard him. Later that day, as he was passing by, he found that the walls near Webster's laboratory were unusually hot. He thought that the fire must be coming from the assay furnace, where he had never known a fire to be and was afraid that the building would take fire. He climbed the wall to the double window of the laboratory, found it unfastened, and went in. The first place he inspected was the assay furnace, in which he found only a small fire. He then examined two water hogsheads and found that two-thirds of the water was gone from one and that all the water had been drawn from the other. He also noticed that two-thirds of the pitch-pine kindlings in the laboratory were gone. As he went upstairs, his eye was caught by some spots on the stairs he had never seen before. Putting his finger to them, he found that they tasted like acid.

     Thursday was Thanksgiving. In the afternoon, about three o'clock, Littlefield set about digging a hole through the wall of the vault under Professor Webster's privy. He testified in explanation of his action:
     "I wanted to get under there to see if anything was there, and to satisfy myself and the public; because, whenever I went out of the College, some would say, Dr. Parkman is in the Medical College, and will be found there, if ever found anywhere.' I never could go out of the building without hearing such remarks, All other parts of the building had been searched, and, if nothing should be found in the privy, I could convince the public, that Dr. Parkman had not met with foul play in the College."
     Using a hatchet and a chisel, he worked about an hour and a half but found he could not make much progress with these tools and gave up the job for the night. He went out that night and stayed up till four o'clock the next morning at a ball given by a division of the Sons of Temperance. About noon on Friday he had a conversation with Dr. Henry Bigelow of Harvard. He asked Bigelow whether he knew if there was any suspicion of Webster and Bigelow told him there was. Littlefield informed Bigelow that he had commenced digging through the wall and understood him to encourage him to continue with the work. He testified that he received similar exhortations from Prof. John B.S. Jackson. Armed with this moral support from the Harvard faculty, he asked a foundry worker, Leonard Fuller, to lend him a crowbar, hammer, and chisel. He went back to work and made rapid progress. When he broke through the last of the five courses of brick in the privy vault, he made his grisly discovery.
     This testimony by Littlefield was a focal point of a withering attack made in the press and within the ranks of the legal profession on the conduct of the Webster trial. The criticism of the trial spared no one; Chief Justice Shaw, the prosecution, and the defense counsel all were subjected to abuse. In fact, the conviction of Webster led to a kind of regional warfare between the bars of New York City and Boston, with several New York lawyers leaping into print anonymously to savage the reputation of New England justice, and their Massachusetts colleagues rising against them in stout defense. One of the published diatribes against the Webster trial that won wide notoriety was a pamphlet entitled A Review of the Webster Case, by a Member of the New York Bar (1850). It is now known that the author was A. Oakey Hall, a colorful Harvard Law School graduate whom Tammany Hall was to elect mayor of New York in 1868. By a stroke of luck that often awaits the compulsive bookbuyer, I recently happened upon a scrapbook of Hall's memorabilia of the Webster trial containing his manually annotated copy of a trial report, a group of pamphlets (including his own Review of 

the Webster Case), law journal articles, and newspaper clippings. These materials provide a unique insight into the roots of Hall's criticism of the trial.
     A principal target of Hall's attack was the "silence and timidity of cross-examination evinced by the counsel for the defense," each of whom, to his mind, perhaps "thought more of playing the polished gentleman than discharging the duty of the enthusiastic advocate; and kept ever in mind that decorum and courtesy were more important than the acquittal of their client." Hall was particularly sharp in his criticism of deficiencies in the cross-examination of Littlefield. He complained that the defense had not adequately probed the issue of the janitor's access to the scene of the crime. Why did they not press Littlefield about the circumstance that the dissecting-room was found unbolted the morning after Parkman's disappearance when it was bolted the night before? And if Littlefield could gain entry into Webster's laboratory on the famous hot Wednesday, could he not have done so on other occasions as well? Hall also argued that Littlefield's "whole tenor of mind" should have been "almost minute by minute from Friday to Friday brought into confessional." Hall's questions pressed on each other: Why had the janitor neglected to investigate the privy earlier? how did he come to hit upon the exact spot in the privy vault where the body would be found? would he not have found it easier to fit a key to the privy room, unnail the seat and lower a lantern than knock down the wall of the vault?
     However, Hall's ultimate criticism was addressed to the failure to mount an all-out attack on Littlefield's credibility: "Why was not his life raked over from beginning to end; his ways of life investigated that his credibility might be securely known? Were the counsel fearful of a libel suit; or of an assault and battery; or a loss of popularity?"
     It is not a simple matter to determine the extent to which Hall's denunciation of defense counsel's handling of Littlefield is justified. Hall probably did not attend the trial and appears to have based his judgments on his reading of an unofficial report of the trial by Dr. James W. Stone, which is bound into his scrapbook. Stone's account does not report questions put by counsel, and generally testimony is summarized rather than reproduced verbatim. However, a fair-minded study of even this inadequate record of the Littlefield cross-examination does not fully bear out Hall's charges. The defense's questioning of the janitor, which was handled mostly by Sohier, occupied virtually an entire day of the eleven-day trial. Chief Justice Shaw, in his charge to the jury, observed that Littlefield had been "much sifted by cross-examination."
     Many of the questions Hall would have liked to see pursued seem to have been put by Sohier to the janitor. He dwelt on the apparent inconsistencies in Littlefield's narrative: that he had begun to suspect 

Webster on the Sunday after Parkman's disappearance; that on the evening of Parkman's disappearance, even before he entertained such suspicion, he had returned from a party and tried the door of Webster's laboratory; but that after he became suspicious of the professor, he had taken no affirmative steps to investigate until he started to chisel away at the privy vault on the following Thursday. Between Sunday and Thursday, Sohier emphasized, Littlefield had calmly accepted a gift of a Thanksgiving turkey from Webster even though he felt (as he implied in his testimony on direct examination) that this unusual show of generosity was intended to silence him. Moreover, in this same period, he had foregone opportunities to look around Webster's rooms during four visits there in the course of the week after the disappearance, despite the fact that on two of those occasions he was in the company of police officers and at least once thought Webster was trying to distract their attention. On the Wednesday when Littlefield entered the laboratory through a window to determine the source of the unusual heat, he did so only because he "thought the building was on fire." He noticed that the assay furnace was pretty hot, but (despite his suspicions) did not uncover the furnace because Dr. Webster had told him "never to touch articles, except placed upon a particular table." In addition to highlighting the witness's strange reluctance to investigate the premises whose barred doors had previously aroused his apprehensions, Sohier also asked whether Littlefield could not have obtained access to the privy room; and tested the odd coincidence that Littlefield breached the privy vault at the precise spot where the body lay.
     But the cross-examination, taken as a whole, still seems unsatisfactory. At least in the summary of the testimony given in the two principal reports of the trial, Sohier does not seem to have probed Littlefield's state of mind and motivation but to have focused instead on the externals of his behavior, thereby permitting the witness to restate and reinforce the chronological narrative he had given on direct examination. The principal weakness was the failure to make a straightforward attack on Littlefield's credibility.
     Littlefield's role in the events at the medical college was, of course, the heart of the problem for the defense. It was certain, as Attorney General Clifford conceded in his closing argument, "that, these remains being there, it must have been known to Littlefield or Webster." If the defense were to maintain that the body's presence was unknown to the defendant, they must attribute its deposit (if not the murder itself) to the janitor. But in the cross-examination only two faint jabs were made at the janitor's integrity. Early in his questioning, Sohier (probably attempting to establish a good reason for Webster having bolted his doors) asked Littlefield whether the professor had not caught him in his 

room at night playing cards. Littlefield made a lame attempt to evade the inquiry. "I decline answering that question; but I will say that I have not played any cards, in his rooms, this winter." The only other direct attack on the witness's character was made by co-counsel Merrick, who established at the end of the cross-examination that Littlefield had seen reward advertisements a few days prior to beginning his assault on the privy wall. However, it has been recently revealed by Judge Robert Sullivan, in his The Disappearance of Dr. Parkman (1971) that defense counsel rejected a more dramatic avenue of attack suggested by Webster in his voluminous trial notes addressed to Sohier. Webster asserted that Littlefield had for years been moonlighting as a "resurrectionist" (grave-robber) and had been supplying dead bodies to the Medical College. The professor theorized that Littlefield had bought Parkman's body in a sack (a la Rigoletto) and attempted to obliterate its identity after he discovered to his horror who it was. Perhaps Sohier and Merrick thought that this suggestion smacked more of melodrama than of evidence. In any event, they let the janitor leave the stand with his story essentially unshaken and without any strong indication as to why he would have murdered Parkman, deposited his body, or attempted to implicate Webster falsely in his death.
     Merrick later attempted to plug this gap in the defense - by a lengthy attack on Littlefield in his closing argument. When the bluntness and the biting satire of the argument are compared with the apparent restraint of the cross-examination of Littlefield, it is tempting to speculate as to whether there may not have been a disagreement between Sohier and Merrick on the approach to this key prosecution witness. The possibility of a divergence of views is enhanced by the fact that it was Merrick who intervened towards the end of Sohier's cross-examination to confront Littlefield with the reward handbills and to suggest that they might have motivated his tardy attack on the privy vault. In Oakey Hall's copy of the trial report there are many handwritten marks and angry marginal comments on the Sohier cross-examination, but he made no annotations on the portions of Merrick's closing argument dealing with the janitor's story. Hall's charges of timidity are certainly not borne out by Merrick's onslaught against Littlefield, for Merrick stopped only slightly short of imputing the crime to the janitor:
     "I regret Gentlemen, that my duty compels me to allude to the testimony of [Mr. Littlefield]. I regret that I am obliged to do so, because I am confident whatever is said about this has a tendency to point a suspicion toward him as the perpetrator of this crime. Now, Gentlemen of the Jury, you must not misunderstand me. I will not take upon myself the fearful responsibility, in defending one man, to charge another with the same crime. Far be it from me to say that I will charge Ephraim 

Littlefield with this crime! Far be it, whatever may be the tendency of my comments, if the effect should be to fix it upon him -- far be it from my intention to connect him with this crime! But, Gentlemen of the Jury, it is my duty to examine, and it is your duty to weigh, the testimony of this witness; and if there be anything which tends to affect the testimony of that witness, you must give it weight, whatever the consequences may be."
     In addition to making this strong suggestion of Littlefield's guilt, Merrick also attempted to cast a raking light on Littlefield's obscure and conflicting attitudes towards Webster. He noted that, although Littlefield claimed that his suspicions were first aroused by his conversation with Webster on the Sunday after the disappearance, "you will find that his vigilance anticipated his suspicions, while they were followed by an unaccountable apathy and indifference." In discussing Littlefield's search of the privy vault, Merrick followed the lines of Sohier's cross-examination by noting how odd it was that Littlefield had not first made any effort to gain access to the privy room itself and how it was even stranger that the remains were found exactly in front of the breach he had made but a few feet from a perpendicular line dropped from the hole in the privy seat. He cast doubt on the prosecution's theory that the remains had been dropped from above: "Could they possibly have been placed there, in that particular spot, by any efforts through the hole in the privy?" But his most effective weapon in treating Littlefield's discovery of the remains was the irony with which he recalled Littlefield's inappropriate moods in the course of his grim search. On the first night of his labors the janitor broke off his work "to join in the amusements of the festival of the season; and, after actually dancing eighteen out of the twenty cotillons that occupied the night, returned to sleep quietly in his bed, in an apartment beneath which, he professes to have believed, were lying the bones of a murdered human being. . . ." On the following Friday morning, Merrick noted, Littlefield did not rise early to resume his work but chatted pleasantly with Dr. Webster who came into his room at nine o'clock while the janitor was still at breakfast. Merrick pointed out that, when Littlefield decided to obtain from Mr. Fuller more effective tools to finish the job, he said in jest that he wanted a crowbar to dig a hole in the wall to let in a water-pipe. Finally, Merrick suggested that Littlefield appeared to take special pains to dismiss all possible witnesses from the scene just before he completed his breach of the privy wall. The defense counsel raised dark suggestions about the significance of this conduct:
     "Did not Littlefield too well foreknow the information which he should soon have to communicate? Why else did he rid himself of the presence of all spectators? Why else would he have it that no human eye 

but his own should look into the vault, until he had first seen these remains there in safe deposit? Were not all things yet ready there for the inspection of others? These are fearful questions, of pregnant suggestion, of momentous import. I leave the answer to your own reflections."
     I am left with the impression that Merrick's closing argument was sufficiently effective in its treatment of the janitor that Hall was unjust in passing over it in silence. However, a closing argument can do little to shake the credibility of an opposition witness who has not been successfully discredited on cross-examination. The question then remains why Sohier and Merrick did not make a stronger effort, while Littlefield was on the stand, to raise a substantial question in the jury's mind as to the witness's involvement in the crime or at least in the deposit of the body. By one of the strange quirks of legal history, it is possible that the answer to that riddle is to be found in the influence of another murder case that was tried a decade before in England, the famous Courvoisier case.
     A Swiss valet, Francois Bernard Courvoisier, was charged in 1840 with murdering his master Lord William Russell in his bed in the fashionable Park Lane district of London. On the first day of the trial Courvoisier's counsel, Charles Phillips, sharply cross-examined a housemaid, Sarah Mancer, who had testified against her fellow-servant, Courvoisier. The next morning, prior to the resumption of the trial, Phillips had one of the most chastening experiences a criminal lawyer can have in the midst of a trial: Courvoisier confessed to him that he had committed the murder but in the same breath insisted that Phillips continue the defense. Phillips had a temporary failure of nerve and informed Baron Parke, one of the judges sitting in the case, of his client's confession and requested his advice. Parke was understandably annoyed with Phillips for breaching his client's confidence and prejudicing the judge's position but according to Phillips, told him that he was bound to continue the defense "and to use all fair arguments arising on the evidence."
     On the third day Phillips rose to deliver his closing argument to the jury. The precise words he used on this occasion have been the subject of dispute to this day. It was charged by some, after the news of Courvoisier's confession became public, that Phillips had improperly expressed a belief in his client's innocence. But perhaps a more serious charge was that, despite his knowledge of his client's guilt, Phillips had reinforced his cross-examination of Sarah Mancer by casting a suspicion on her in the closing argument. The latter complaint was to some extent just, although, in his closing speech, Phillips purported to disown his accusations even as he made them:

     "I must beg that you will not suppose that I am, in the least degree, seeking to cast the crime upon either of the female servants of the deceased nobleman. It is not at all necessary to my case to do so. I wish not to asperse them. God forbid that any breath of mine should send, tainted into the world, persons perhaps depending for their subsistence upon their character. It is not my duty, nor my interest, nor my policy, to do so."
     By chance the controversy over Phillips's conduct, which raged fiercely immediately after the trial, was rekindled in 1849 when Phillips published a belated justification of his actions. A whole range of ancient questions of professional ethics were faced anew in their most intractable form: Is it appropriate for a trial lawyer to express to a jury his belief in the merits of his client's cause? To what extent should a client's confession, or his counsel's knowledge of or belief in his guilt, restrict the scope of cross-examination or argument? How and where does defense counsel strike a balance between his duty to his client and his obligation not to cause wilful harm to witnesses or third parties?
     The revived debate over the ethical issues of the Courvoisier case raised strong echoes in America, and Phillips's courtroom conduct and his subsequent disgrace were very much on the minds of the lawyers in the Webster case and of their critics. It is a reasonable hypothesis that the reluctance of Sohier and Merrick to attack Littlefield more zealously in cross-examination and to brand him in the witness box as grave-robber or murderer was influenced by a desire to avoid Phillips's pitfall. In fact, the controversy over Phillips's professional ethics was explicitly referred to by Attorney General Clifford in his closing argument: he alluded to "the great case of Courvoisier, for the murder of his master, Lord William Russell - that case which has made all Europe ring with strictures upon the conduct of the Counsel, whether just or unjust." Lawyers who deplored the performance of Webster's defense counsel cited the example of Phillips's aggressiveness amid extreme difficulties as a standard by which Sohier and Merrick must be found wanting. Hall's approval of Phillips's tactics is evidenced by his inclusion in his scrapbook of an article favorable to Phillips. But voices from the Massachusetts bar were heard on the other side of the question. Hall also placed in his scrapbook an article on the Webster case from a Massachusetts journal, Monthly Law Reporter, which, after referring to the renewed uproar over Phillips in the English press, commented:
     "Had Dr. Webster's counsel adopted the tactics of the English barrister, they might have saved their client; nor do we believe that the world would have regarded them with less favor on that account. So wanton and unreasonable is that fickle despot, public opinion! For the 

honor of our bar, we are glad that they did no such thing, and all the lampooners of New York and Philadelphia cannot harm them."
     Significantly, Hall underlined only the words that are italicized, the words suggesting a lost opportunity to save Webster from the gallows.
     There is something to be said for Hall's selective reading of this passage. The ethical problem faced by Webster's counsel was far different from the dilemma that confronted Charles Phillips when he delivered his final argument for Courvoisier. In weighing their duty to provide a vigorous defense of Webster against their responsibility not to inflict unnecessary harm on a possibly innocent prosecution witness, Sohier and Merrick did not have their consciences burdened with a client's confession. On the contrary, Webster had himself publicly and privately suggested Littlefield's responsibility for the crime. Moreover, the Webster murder case, unlike the Courvoisier case and perhaps most other criminal trials where guilt has been imputed by the defense to third parties, involved a crime whose physical setting made it reasonably certain that either the defendant or a specific third party (Littlefield) was responsible for the victim's murder or the deposit of his remains: Under these circumstances, the failure of Sohier and Merrick to make an all-out attack on Littlefield in cross-examination could well have been interpreted by the jury as a show of embarrassment with their defense. No evidence of guilt can be more devastating in the eyes of a jury than the uneasiness of defense counsel with their client's cause. In this respect, Sohier and Merrick, while doubtless undeserving of the full measure of Hall's abuse, may have failed to serve Webster adequately.
     The witnesses who faced the cross-examination of Charles Phillips and Webster's lawyers were heard of again after the trials in which they had figured passed into history. Sarah Mancer paid a terrible price for her innocent involvement in the Courvoisier case. The Examiner of London reported of her: "The cloud was heavy over her, and it passed so slowly that her life never more escaped from it. She died in a madhouse, driven mad by the sufferings and terrors, . . . the persecutions . . . the harassing interrogations to which she was subjected preceding the providential discovery of the guilt of Courvoisier. . . ." But Littlefield was clearly made of sterner stuff. A press clipping included in Hall's scrapbook discloses that when an exhibition of waxwork figures of Parkman and Webster opened at Clinton Hall in New York City, "together with a perfect Model of the Medical College, Boston, in which the lamentable tragedy occurred," the celebrated janitor appeared as hired lecturer "to explain to the audience the particulars of the whole affair."
     The New York newspaper commentary was scathing. But one report spared Littlefield so that points could be scored against the arch-enemy 

Boston. Littlefield, readers were told, was "not quite so shameless a fellow as we deemed him to be." After reading the comments of the Sunday press on his announced exhibition, he "had the grace to pack up his disgusting traps' and make himself scarce as quickly as possible." The newspaper gave him credit for a sense of shame and wished him better profit from his regular profession at the Harvard Medical College. With a salvo of local pride that echoed the line of defense Webster had wished his counsel to take, the writer concluded, "There is a greater demand for dissecting subjects in the Massachusetts medical colleges than for disgusting subjects in New York."

     The two principal contemporary accounts of the Harvard Murder case are found in George Bemis, Report of the Case of John W. Webster (Boston: C.C. Little and J. Brown, 1850) and James W. Stone, Report of the Trial of Prof. John W. Webster (Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Co., 1850).
     I thank my friend, Cleveland antiquarian bookseller, Peter Keisogloff, for bringing to my attention the trial scrapbook of A. Oakey Hall, which is now in my collection.
     Modern works on the case include: George Dilnot, The Trial of Professor John White Webster (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1928); Robert Sullivan, The Disappearance of Dr. Parkman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Helen Thomson, Murder at Harvard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971).
     The political career of A. Oakey Hall is recounted in Croswell Bowen's The Elegant Oakey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).
     For a study of the ethical issues faced by the defense in the Courvoisier case, see David Mellinkoff, The Conscience of a Lawyer (St. Paul, Minnesota: West Pub. Co., 1973).

* This article was previously published in 66 ABAJ 1540-45 (1980), A Gallery of Sinister Perspectives 74-88, and in Jonathan Goodman (ed.), Medical Murders 231-252 (London: Piatkus, 1991).