Dr. John Webster—Dr. George Parkman

Dr. George Parkman, a respected professor at Harvard University, failed to
return from dinner on November 23, 1849. Dr. Parkman was a physician, but
also a real estate speculator and moneylender. He was sixty-four years of age and
a man of very regular habits. When he failed to appear as expected, suspicion
of foul play fell on his colleague, John White Webster, a professor of chemistry
at the same university. Dr. Webster had been behaving somewhat irregularly
of late, and it was known that he owed Dr. Parkman a considerable sum of
money.
 His laboratory was searched and, in a tea chest, human remains were
found. In a nearby assay furnace fragments of a lower jawbone, three blocks of
artificial teeth in porcelain, and melted gold were also found. At Webster’s trial
for murder, Dr. Nathan Cooley Keep, a dentist, identified the teeth as part of
an upper and lower denture he had made for Dr. Parkman three years earlier.
He recalled the circumstances of the denture’s construction in exact detail, as
Parkman had been anxious about having the dentures ready for the opening
of a new medical college at which he was to give a speech. The day before the
event, when some of the bottom teeth collapsed during the baking process,
Dr. Keep and his assistant worked through the night and fitted the denture
some thirty minutes before the ceremony. Dr. Parkman returned in a short
time and complained that the lower cramped his tongue. An adjustment was
made by grinding away portions of the inside of the lower denture. Dr. Keep
fit portions of the lower denture to models he had retained in the production
of it and showed the court where he had done the grinding adjustment of
the lower denture. The dental evidence was overwhelming and Webster was
found guilty and hanged. The Parkman–Webster case represents the first case
of a dentist giving expert testimony in courts in the United States.13