In the meantime Littlefield, the janitor, had become suspicious. It wasn't just the quarrel he had witnessed. It wasn't just the money Webster had given the janitor to buy a Thanksgiving Day turkey - something Webster had never done before. Littlefield's living quarters, at the college, were immediately adjacent to Webster's lab. Littlefield thought it odd the lab door was bolted and the furnace wall was red-hot on the day of Parkman's visit. The janitor decided to go exploring.

Since he lived inside the building, Littlefield had time to look around. He chiseled his way into a sealed-off vault under Dr. Webster's lab. When he broke through, he was astonished at what he saw.

The first thing which I saw was the pelvis of a man and two parts of a leg. The water was running down on these remains from the sink.

In addition, investigators found other body parts, but not Dr. Parkman's head. Without the head, how could anyone be certain the fragmented remains belonged to Parkman?

Initially, the police did not arrest Dr. Webster. How could a Harvard faculty member kill a colleague? Instead, police arrested an Irishman who had used a $20 bill to pay a bridge-crossing toll. No hard-working, honest Irishman would have a $20 bill, the police reasoned. The money must have come from Dr. Parkman.

The Irishman was soon released, however, and Dr. Webster was quickly charged with killing Dr. Parkman. Not just killing him - brutalizing him. Although Webster's friends raised the money needed to hire the best lawyer around, no well-known lawyer wanted the case. The trial, Boston's most sensational of the 19th century, attracted nearly 60,000 observers from all over the country. Bailiffs rotated people in and out of the courtroom every ten minutes.

The trial judge was Herman Melville's father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of Massachusetts. (Scroll down 1/4, to section II, for the story on the judge and his famous son-in-law.) The judge allowed prosecutors to make their case with expert witnesses who told the jury the evidence introduced at trial (bones, fragments of bones and related items) belonged to Dr. Parkman. Although this is common procedure today, it wasn't in 1850. The judge even allowed prosecutors to introduce a skeleton so the jury could understand how the recovered parts fit into a normal human skeleton.