Ephraim Littlefield, still full from his Thanksgiving dinner the previous day, attacked the vault again with his hammer and cold chisel. He desperately wanted to know what was inside there.

Finally, he broke through the five layers of brick from the outside, and the sunlight rushed inside. It illuminated the ghastly contents of a furnace.

Littlefield, a janitor at Harvard Medical School, had found what were later identified as a human thigh, pelvis and shin. His suspicious now confirmed, he hurriedly summoned the police. Officers responded quickly and found an even greater variety of human remains.

The body parts formed the basis of the case against Dr. John W. Webster, Class of 1811, a prominent chemistry professor at the Medical School.

Littlefield was suspicious of Webster because of the professor's recent behavior. The professor had asked about the construction of the vault and had been unusually nice to the janitor, going so far as to order him a Thanksgiving turkey.

According to Robert Sullivan's 1971 book, The Disappearance of Dr. Parkman, the police identified the remains "to be those of a man about fifty or sixty years old with strong muscular development and a tall frame."

Based largely on one dentist's identification of the victims's false teeth, police identified him as Harvard professor George Parkman, Class of 1809.

Speculation about the murder was intense, and the case quickly became a national story. It was the O.J. Simpson case of the 19th century.

"Excluding the three presidential assassinations, the tragic Lindbergh kidnap-murder, and probably, but not certainly, the Sacco-Vanzetti case, few, if any, American crime stories so completely engrossed the public press, so totally grasped the attention of the American people as did the trial...of Harvard Professor John White Webster at the halfway mark of the 19th century," Sullivan wrote.

The press and public immediately suspect- ed that Webster had dismembered his colleague, and the police agreed. One hundred forty-five years ago this week, on November 30, 1849, police officers came to Webster's Cambridge home and took him into custody, according to the Boston Daily Bee.

He was charged with murder.

Two Celebrities

Webster was an unusual murder suspect. He was a prominent member of Harvard's academic and social community, and he and his wife were known for their lavish and well-attended parties.

The victim was even more famous. Parkman had donated the land where Harvard Medical College was located. A well-known Boston socialite, Parkman was also well-loved by the public for his benevolent demeanor.

In his definitive history Three Centuries of Harvard, Samuel Eliot Morrison wrote that "the poorest people knew that they could call on Parkman in the middle of the night for some medical emergency and not fear of being rebuked."

Parkman had been missing since the week before Webster's arrest. He was last seen entering the Medical College at 1 p.m., reportedly for a meeting with Webster.