PULP NONFICTIONA reading from True Crime Edmund Pearson

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True crime history is not just about reviving the stories of America's scandals, scoundrels and scourges, but also about exploring the history of true crime as a genre.

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Edmund Pearson was a librarian by trade, but also one of the early writers of 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.

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This one takes place in 1849, a week before Thanksgiving, in 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.

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The Parkman-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.

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Please visit www.truecrimehistorian.com/1849webster for more information on this story, including a clipping describing John White Webster's execution and a link to the complete trial transcript. On the website, you can also find additional stories about America's famous and forgotten scandals, scoundrels and scourges as well as information about how to purchase my true crime books and Two-Dollar Terror novellas.

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Musical direction and theme music by Chuck Wiggins.