Authors' Eye
continued
Once we reached the decision to pick apart the facts wearing a fresh pair of gloves, we were faced with other, equally formidable, choices. This story is true and the truth is never tidy.
The corpus of material associated with this 160-year old case and the fact that the Parkman murder and the groundbreaking Webster trial that followed were major events seemed to add less clarity, not more.2 We forensic historians bent our heads over a largesse of contemporaneous published material and time and again set dates for our research efforts to end and the writing to begin. Those deadlines were never met; we still pore over a just-discovered memoir, clipping, diary. But, no matter how thoroughly we dig, inevitably, some particulars cannot be pinned down—those that were intimated but were never recorded, were not proven, or did not survive. This was problematic. When we found such conflicting data, we relied upon our joint instincts and intuitions.There are loose ends we've been unable to tie. If unavailable information was essential to the linkage of our narrative, we turned to our general research and primary descriptive sources on the lifestyles, politics and religious beliefs of mid nineteenth century Boston. Seamus Callahan, the Irish immigrant, is an example. In our writings, this illusive character must emerge as the amalgamate of the hundreds of thousands of Irish fleeing their Native country and finally settling in a city unprepared physically—and certainly mentally—for the onslaught.
Seamus Callahan was not the only piece of the tale that kept slipping through our fingers. Included in the literature of the Parkman-Webster affair are numerous trial reports—the first examples of true crime literature—based upon a phonographic shorthand, including one published by John Gilbert in London for the overseas market.3
continue 1 | 2 | 3
- 2
- Thomas McDade compiled a numbered bibliography of 1126 crime-publications; he says this was one of the “most widely reported cases on record.”
- 3
- Pitman expert Pierre Savoie says stereotypist relay-teams used Sir Isaac Pitman’s shorthand. Their phonographic notes used phonemes—no connection to the 1879 Edison Speaking Phonograph Company. Voice recognition software also uses phonemes. Gregg shorthand superseded the Pitman system in the 1950s.