Flawed Conviction, Fresh Conclusion
—a note of intent—
No one considered it could have been a trap, a set-up.
One week to the day after a Harvard Medical College patron vanished, a human torso was found in the school. Caustic potash was lodged in the scorched gray hair of its chest and back. On that same Friday in November, 1849, police swung their bulls-eye lanterns over a hairy pelvis plopped on top a privy’s muck. The genitalia were more-or-less intact. A paring of intestine still dangled. At the bottom of a furnace, they raked out a charred jaw bone and fragments of false teeth. No head.
The conclusion law enforcement reached was speculative: the missed gentleman in his purple vest must have met his demise in this building. He then was hacked and burned to hide the crime.
As for the twisted perpetrator, a spot light turned on the master of the chemistry lab, himself a member of the upper crust. This professor struggled to support a lifestyle grander than his salary. Worse, he’d borrowed from the absent man. It was claimed that notes were past due, a dishonorable manner for the gentry to handle its affairs.
His scandalized social order was mortified and turned its back. The gutter press smelled blood; the London Times sent a correspondent. A resentful working class embraced the lurid tale as if it were a sensation novel.
Massachusetts law would bar the chemist from testifying on his own behalf. Instead, day after day in his cell, his story poured out from his stubby pencil—a two-hundred-page defense his counsel never put into play.
It might not have mattered. An extra-legal decision already had been reached. The Harvard don was the killer. Everyone lined up against him, overlooking the sly snitch in the shadows who shouldn’t have fooled anyone, but fooled everyone...for a hundred and sixty years.
It’s only right that a defense finally be launched, to set the record straight. This new probe, a re-creation drawing on dusty documents, closeted depositions, and modern forensics, lays bare the deceit, conspiracy, and naïveté that a political and judicial uproar couldn’t. With fresh eyes, it seeks answers for what should’ve been addressed in 1849, but wasn’t:
How did this corpse end up at the medical college?
Where did it come from?
What could have caused the pre-mortem dark striation across its back?
And, after a century and a half, it hones in on the final lingering curiosity:
Whose body parts were so artfully secreted around the chemistry laboratory,
and who put them there?