Parkman–Webster murder case

The Parkman–Webster murder case was a Boston, Massachusetts, crime, investigation, and trial that was highly publicized due to the crime's gruesome nature and the high social status of the victim and the alleged murderer. The case concerned the disappearance in November 1849, of Boston businessman Dr. George Parkman. The Webster-Parkman Murder is noteworthy as one of the earliest uses of forensic evidence to identify a body. As the remains of Dr. Parkman had been partially cremated, dental evidence and bone fragments were used to verify the remains.

Dr. George Parkman (February 19, 1790–November 23, 1849), a Boston Brahmin, belonged to one of the moneyed city’s richest families. He was a well-known figure in the streets of Boston, which he walked daily, collecting his rents (a thrifty man, he did not own a horse). He was tall, lean, had a protruding chin, and wore a top hat. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., said that "he abstained while others indulged, he walked while others rode, he worked while others slept." Fanny Longfellow, wife of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, called him "the lean doctor . . . the good-natured Don-Quixote." He was worth some half a million dollars in 1849.

John White Webster (May 20, 1793–August 30, 1850) was a lecturer at Harvard Medical College. Webster was described by Oliver Wendell Holmes as "pleasant in the lecture room, rather nervous and excitable." Many of Webster's class-room demonstrations involved some of the latest chemical discoveries. George F. Hoar mentioned that Webster's lectures were "tedious", at least for a non-chemistry major, but that: "[Webster] was known to the students by the sobriquet of sky-rocket jack, owing to his great interest in having some fireworks at the illumination when President Everett, his former classmate, was inaugurated. There was no person less likely to commit such a bloody and cruel crime as that for which he was accused." Many anecdotes suggest his class-room demonstrations were livened by pyrotechnic drama, although on one occasion the President of Harvard warned that some of them were dangerous if an accident occurred.

Webster had financial problems. The family had been forced to give up a mansion he had built in Cambridge, although they were leasing a respectable but not grand house in 1849. He was in debt to a number of friends, as his salary and meager lecture earnings could not cover his expenses. Noted mineralogist and Harvard Professor Clifford Frondel appraised Webster's books as "creditable" and had praise for them.

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