True Crime Historian presents Pulp-Nan

Presents Pulp Nonfiction, a reading from the pioneers of true crime. True

crime history is not just about reviving the stories of America's scandals, scoundrels,

scourges, but also about exploring the history of true crime as a genre. Edmund Pearson was a librarian by trade, but also one of the early writers of American

true crime, who first came to prominence in his articles about the Lizzie Borden trials in

the 1890s.

In 1928, he wrote a series of eight true crime articles for the St. Louis Post Dispatch about some of America's classic murders.

This one takes place in 1849, a week before Thanksgiving, and a laboratory at the Harvard Medical College,

while the famed physician and author Oliver

Wendell Holmes was lecturing in the room directly above.

The victim was one of Boston's wealthy elite on a mission to collect a debt from a geology

professor.

The Parker-Webster murder case, as it came to be known, was notable because it was one of the first murder cases where circumstantial forensic evidence was used in a trial.

In this case, it was the false teeth of the victim.

I'm true crime historian Richard O. Jones, and I give you the disappearance of Dr. Parkman by Edmund Pearson.

Dr. Parkman was walking, rapidly as usual, through the streets of Boston on his way to keep an appointment.

He wore a black frock coat and trousers, a purple silk vest, black stock and high hat,

and his lean figure would have made him noticeable,

even if his peculiar countenance had not attracted detention by itself.

Boys pointed him out to other boys.

There goes Dr. Parkman.

Women who passed him on the street went home and told their families that they had seen

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