You're listening to American Shadows, a production of I Heart Radio and Greyman miles from Aaron Manque. In the early eighteen hundreds, the port city of Baltimore had a problem early American industrialization, along with its prominent place on the Atlantic Ocean, had helped the city swell to a population of over 40000. Along with the overcrowding and lack of public sewers came serious health issues, yellow fever, dysentery, typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis and cholera outbreaks, just to name a few.

A third of all newborns never made it to childhood health care, wasn't widely affordable or even available. And while there were a few doctors who had studied in prestigious overseas schools, the city's growing population needed not just more doctors, they needed better trained ones. At the time, America had only four medical colleges, and none of them were in Baltimore. Recognizing this need. A small handful of doctors held classes in their homes. Becoming a doctor in the early eighteen hundreds also meant learning how to be a surgeon.

But students couldn't get a grasp on anatomy from drawings alone. That would be like learning to paint masterpieces from visiting a museum. It's a dark topic, but to become surgeons, students needed to practice, hopefully prior to operating on a live individual. And that meant working on cadavers.

As you might imagine, doctors were a bit reluctant to keep decaying bodies in their homes to solve this. Dr. John Beel Davidge had a small anatomical theater erected behind his house, which he paid for with his own money. Inside, students learned about human anatomy and practiced their budding surgical skills on the dead. Not all of their cadavers came from donations or John Doe's, though.

And while it was legal to use bodies of executed prisoners, there simply weren't enough to go around. As you might also imagine, executions didn't always happen when schools needed a new corpse.

Adding to that, we're talking about the early eighteen hundreds. They didn't have a way to keep bodies cold enough to last through semesters.

The only viable solution was to raid graveyards.

Naturally, neither surviving relatives nor the public at large, where exactly fond of having the dead unearthed and dissected, putting up bodies was viewed by many as a desecration, which is another reason why most schools used executed prisoners.

Even then, the public still cried out for decency.

So after a trip to the gallows, the executed were given a proper burial in a potter's field where body snatchers and medical students alike raided the graves under the cover of darkness. Everyone understood this and looked the other way. But schools still didn't have enough bodies to teach students. Something had to give. The poorest of graveyards were monitored for new study material. They were less likely to have night watchman, and the pine boxes used by the poor were much easier to break into than the caskets that the wealthy had their loved ones interred in, often unable to afford burial in certain graveyards.

The Irish, Native Americans and free black population suffered the most robberies, while doctors and professors teaching at medical schools didn't always partake in or encourage such activities. Like everyone from the top level lawmakers down to the funeral directors. They didn't ask too many questions but necessary for medical students or not. The poor didn't take to Dr. Davies's methods of teaching. And on November 21st of 1887, an angry mob burned the theater to the ground. Davidge and other doctors took the matter up with the state, and before long they won approval for a more secure and formal training facility.

The University of Maryland School of Medicine was built, and Davidge became the school's first dean. Soon, the school was one of the best in the country and boasted that their students had ample study material while they didn't come right out and say it, everyone in the field understood exactly what that material was. As for body snatching, the soil conditions were better in Baltimore than the Midwest or the North, even in winter disease and death rates were high and with the railroad moving bodies to other cities was easy through the years.

Baltimore has had several nicknames like Charm City and Crab Town. In the eighteen hundreds, though, it had a darker name. Resurrection City. I'm Lauren Vogl, mom. Welcome to American Chateaux. He didn't have a fancy address, it was hardly an address at all. Frank, whose last name never made it into the history books, lived in an uncomfortably small room beneath the seats at the University of Maryland School of Medicine's lecture hall. Being a janitor wasn't what landed Frank in said history books, though?

No. Aside from his custodial duties, Frank supplied the school with cadavers and he was really good at this part of his job, unlike a lot of body snatchers. He had a method. Frank paid close attention to funerals. He followed the procession and watched the services and internment. He noted the placement of everything the casket, the height of the mound, even the flowers the mourners left behind. Then he'd leave and return.

After dark. He wasted little time getting the job done, digging a hole just large enough to smash open the head of the casket. After securing a rope to a butcher's meat hook, he'd run the hook through the jaw of the deceased, then haul the corpse from the casket as casually as if he'd been fishing on a Saturday afternoon. Carefully, Frank would put everything back exactly as it had been before, stuff the body into a sack and stealthily returned to the school.

Once inside, he'd park the cadaver through secret passageways to holding area. Frank's methods worked so well that he went undetected. Even had he been caught, Maryland merely imposed fines for body snatching. Other states had stricter laws, including imprisonment. Still, most judges tended to look the other way and the public knew it. 17 riots erupted over body snatching in America in the 70 years between 1785 and 1855. And that's not even counting smaller incidents. Increasingly, states tried to appease the public by imposing more laws against stealing bodies.

But with such a need for properly trained doctors, body snatching continued to rise. A conflict was brewing. A growing population continue to demand more and better trained doctors, but with fewer cadavers, competition among schools became fierce and prices of available cadavers rose. Not many students had the funds and the schools turned out fewer qualified doctors. It was a vicious circle. So bodysnatchers, the better ones like Frank, had to be careful.

Between Baltimore's high death rate and Franck's methods, the university found they had a different issue than most schools in the city had a surplus of cadavers and began selling the excess to other medical schools, shipping via the railroad. Not in coffins, though, because body snatching was illegal. So their shipping methods were a bit unusual. Bodies were stuffed into barrels of cheap whiskey. The going price was fifty dollars for the bodies and thirty five cents a gallon for the whiskey.

And the alcohol not only helped well pickle the cadavers, but it also supplied seedy bars and other lesser establishments with liquor bearing an appropriate name rotgut.

Frank, the janitor, was effective and prolific, but he was hardly the city's best, that title, The Resurrection King of Baltimore, went to William Jannsen and like many of his colleagues across the country, Jimson seemed constantly intoxicated.

Though Janssen used many aliases, everyone knew who he was when he rolled into town and not because of his drinking problem. It wasn't even his rather robust build on his five foot eight frame, nor the shock of black hair in the leather dark skin that everyone knew upon sight. It was his attire. The see, he dressed the part as the most ghoulish of body snatchers in a duster like rubber coat, rubber boots and thick gloves, all speckled with cemetery clay.

But knowing who he was didn't mean he was arrested on sight. There was still a need for cadavers in medical schools throughout the East Coast, after all, and there was also the matter of catching Jannsen in the act.

While he didn't exactly look the part of a king in stature or attire, the press found him to be just as interesting as royalty.

Often writing about his exploits, Jansen was said to have raw instincts for his line of work and was happiest in the company of corpses during one newspaper interview. He boldly told the reporter of his plans to snatch a body on Christmas Eve and deposit the corpse of the chief of police. His doorstep, all in the name of professional courtesy William Janson, was a braggart. But he also proved an unreliable narrator, telling the press had been a medical student in Berlin.

Or maybe it was Denmark. The facts always seemed a bit fluid. Little more was known about where he came from, though he did claim had immigrated from Denmark in 1877. Liar and body snatcher aside, the press remained enamored. They often presented him as calculating and ghoulish, but also rather likeable.

He appeared calm and cool, even under the riskiest and most difficult of circumstances. Often cheerful, Janssen was the ghastly villain that the press and the public loved to hate. Frank, the janitor and the William Jansen had similar methods. Did just the right sized hole bash open the casket and fish the cadaver out with a meat hook?

Just like Frank, Jansen was very careful about scoping out the intended target and always made sure to clean up the area behind him. So what made Jannsen the body snatching king in Resurrection City? The difference between the two was that Jansen didn't bother with Potter's fields or lower status cemeteries. By his own admission, he preferred what he called the high octane cemeteries of the wealthy. And a lot of ways, stealing corpses from the rich was like a jewel heist to him.

And that got Jannsen plenty of press. And so it was one cold winter night that Jannsen set out with spade and hook in hand and the target on his mind. As it turned out, though, he wasn't the only one thinking about the recently departed Jane Smith. And Snow wasn't the only thing about to fall. Elizabeth Joyner tossed and turned, unable to stop the men in her nightmare from unearthing her niece's body and carrying her away, when she awoke, she was certain it hadn't been just a dream.

The wealthy and affluent federal Hill family had buried her niece, Jane Smith, that very day, unable to shake her feeling of unease. She dressed and hurried to the prominent Baltimore cemetery at the corner of North Avenue and K Street. Everything looked as it had the day before the Earth, still fresh atop the gravesite. Relief must have flooded her for that brief second, before the sun sparkled brightly on something in the dirt catching her eye, she knelt to retrieve the item, and the realization that followed had to be overwhelming in her hands.

She held her niece's cross, the very one that had been fastened around her neck. When they laid to rest. The horror didn't stop there. Elizabeth noticed fresh dirt on her sister's grave nearby, and that just couldn't be. She had died six months ago. It seems the Body Snatchers had mistaken her sister's grave for her nieces and the now taken both mother and daughter. Naturally, the well-to-do family complained and loudly the medical school assured the authorities that to the best of their knowledge, they did not have either of the two women's bodies in their possession satisfied.

The police left it at that until a mysterious postcard emerged with information about the crime. The note was simple. Two black men had taken Jane's body to the University of Maryland's Davidge Hall, where she had already been dissected. There was more to the story than the note stated, but the last part was true for their dissection class. The students couldn't believe the condition of the cadaver who lay naked before them, her hair shorn from her scalp. The freckle faced young woman didn't resemble any corpse that had come from Potter's field or the poorer class cemeteries.

Later, one of the students remarked to the local paper that Jane's corpse exuded refinement. Jane's mother, who had been too far decayed for dissection, had been stripped of her flesh so her skeleton could be used for instruction. The thieves had indeed taken her by mistake and after discovering their error, realized that reburying her would be too time consuming. The two men the postcard mentioned hadn't acted alone, though there had actually been four people involved and one of them had reportedly been a professor.

The word at the school was that a Professor Jensen said to be around 45 years old, had sold corpses to schools as far away as Atlanta and St. Louis. It's often taking advance orders for the winter. When shipping them, he would even label the bodies as pork or other food goods to avoid detection. Now, if you're thinking that Professor Jensen sounds a lot like the notorious body snatcher Jannsen, you'd be right. The two men were one and the same, although he wasn't a professor at all.

A records show him enlisted as a mere medical student. Police soon arrested Jansen, who oddly or perhaps brazenly hadn't tried to skip town. Remember, in the state of Maryland, body snatching was usually only punishable by a fine. That is, until the bodies from one of Baltimore's most prominent families had been stolen. Jannsen and a white janitor named Amell run along with two black dissection room helpers, William Warren and Ezekial Williams, were indicted by a grand jury.

The school, though, stood by them. The current dean, Dr. L. McClain.

Tiphanie not only bailed them out, but the university hired the state's best attorney for their defense, a man named John Pippo. And Poe wasn't just any lawyer. He was on his way to becoming the district attorney. Oh, and for anyone curious about his last name, it does indeed seem that he was a distant cousin to the famous writer Edgar Allan Poe. It's not clear what defense TPO used for his new clients, but Judge Campbell Pinkney soon called them into court without a jury.

He declared all the men innocent, adding that the only evidence against them had been a guess, not hard fact, which wasn't enough to render a guilty verdict. It seems that even the Joiner and Smith families, as well off as they were, didn't have pockets deep enough to make a difference with pop city officials. William Jansen, now a free man, quickly left Baltimore. He would return, though, with an even bolder theft than the last.

As well known as his last body snatching heist had been impaled to his next. William Jannsen returned to Baltimore in the second week of January in 1883, he made no attempt to disguise himself, though, so everyone knew he had returned. Jansen hadn't been in the city a week before the Post alerted the public to his latest bearing that on January 20th, the paper wrote The Johnson had been arrested. It started with the body of Charles Shaw, a 19 year old black youth found guilty and hanged for murdering his sister.

Like everyone the state executed, Shaw was buried in a pine box in a potter's field. Young, healthy and easily accessible. No one was surprised the child's body was on every body snatchers list. Surprised came in how fast and by whom. The grave diggers had barely thrown the last shovel of dirt on DeShazo grave. When Jannsen, who preferred to call what he did resurrecting, arrived at the graveyard.

With the sun still shining, Jannsen cleared a hole near the marker, cracked open the coffin and hauled Shaw's body out of the grave in its usual fashion. Less than an hour later, Shaw's body lay in a sack headed toward the university's doorstep. One Post reporter wrote that no other man on earth would have had the nerve to steal a body with the sun shining. Of course, just as before, Jackson hadn't acted alone. Accompanying him that day had been a Georgetown University physician, appropriately named Dr.

Crook. Together, the two men carted Shaw's body to the university, where it was promptly auctioned off to several schools. It seems that Shaw was parceled out to a number of buyers, which wasn't entirely uncommon. As gruesome as that may sound, his head is sold for six dollars while his arms and legs went for three dollars apiece uphold. Jackson's fee for services rendered in acquiring Shaw amounted to eighteen dollars, which Dr. Crêpe, living up to his surname, refused to pay.

As you might imagine, Janssen wasn't too happy about that, having tied one on Saturday night, a still inebriated William Jansen decided to return to the university to claim what he was owed, having found no one there and the building locked. It was Sunday, after all. Jansen proceeded to break down the door, cursing loudly. All the while a policeman on his beat noticed the commotion and arrested Jensen not for attempted robbery, but for the profanity.

Jannsen spent that night in a jail cell to sleep off the alcohol and was later released. But during his time in the cell, he'd gotten an idea. If Georgetown wouldn't pay him, he'd steal the body back and sell it to a more appreciative school. And so on Monday night, he traveled not to the university, but to The Washington Post. There he found two reporters, both of whom looked up from their desks when Jansen said, come and I'll show you where Sean's body is.

The reporters, eager for such a newsworthy story, quickly followed Jansen to Georgetown's dissection room. This time, Jannsen fished a key from his pocket and let them all inside. At least that was the reporter's account of the events. Without a key, they'd be guilty of breaking and entering after all. But regardless of how they entered, the three men step into the room and there before them on a table, they found Shaw still intact. Whether it was the act of standing in a dissection room in the dead of night with a notorious body snatcher or the way Jannsen tenderly stroked Shaw's arm, both men were driven by fear, running from the room now alone.

Stole Shaw's body for the second time. Though he had walked to the university, he couldn't lug Shaw's body all the way to the next hospital, so he hailed a carriage for hire. The driver, a man named Mack, charged Jannsen five dollars and some whiskey to take the Resurrectionists and his quiet friend to freedom in the hospital known today as Howard University. Highly intoxicated, though, Max stopped at Columbia University instead. So Johnson took the reins. The sun was just beginning to rise.

When they finally reached Friedemann Hospital, Janssen left back with the carriage while he searched for someone willing to buy Shaw's cadaver. Things couldn't have gone more wrong, though. Mack, now a bit more sober, developed cold feet at the thought of carting a cadaver around town. Abandoning Jannsen, he promptly headed to the second precinct, where he dropped off shore. It was one thing to take the body of an executed prisoner from Potter's field, but Johnson's crime was a bit different.

You see, there was a law against transporting bodies without a permit. When the police showed up at Jansen's doorstep, he welcomed them in, simply stating, I've been expecting you. After a search of the premises, the police found a lancet and syringe filled with arsenic, a well-known tool of the trade for Resurrectionists, looking to preserve bodies as long as possible. But although he was arrested once more, Jensen somehow wasn't charged with the initial crime of illegally transporting a corpse.

No, he was charged with malicious trespass for entering the dissection room after finding him guilty. Three days later, Johnson went to prison, where he served a little less than a year for his crime. By the mid 80s, Janssen had moved on to another career stand up comedy, not finding his corpse routine. Very funny. He sought out other employment then, this time finding work as an attendant at an asylum. But although his career as the Resurrection King was over, the press still loved him.

On November 6th of 1887, they reported on him again. The King of Ghoul's is dead. The headline for the Post read. And with all the sincerity of a eulogy, they added, Johnson, who had loved his work in supplying medical schools with much needed cadavers, had done so with an enthusiasm usually reserved for men and more honorable professions. It was a long and fitting sendoff, tastefully and respectfully written. As it turns out, though, Jensen made the paper one last time.

Today, downtown Baltimore is a busy place. It ranks 30th in America for the most populated city. Navigating downtown can be challenging with its bustling traffic and crowded One-Way streets, as one would hope with old historic cities. The buildings there are mostly older. In fact, over a third of them are listed with the National Register for Historic Districts. And like in any, well, storied city, it can be easy to overlook any given detail. For example, on a tree lined stretch of West Lombard Street, people at a bus stop awaiting their connection are probably unaware of went on inside three story building behind them, even though it's been there since 1812.

Today, the sign says University of Maryland School of Medicine. But the building was a key part of William Jansen's story. It's Davidge Hall. The small article published on the Valentine's Day following Johnson's death was another easy to miss bit of history. It was really nothing more than a blurb published by the police department advertising a sale of items that accumulated over the years, the advertisement read to Spade's and a hook used by Janssen, the body snatcher. The item sold quickly, fetching 65 cents for the lot.

Oh, and one more thing, at the time of his death, Jannsen was apparently penniless and alone. There's no record of a proper burial and there had been no one to claim his body since he'd been broke. The state had had no funds for his burial either as a pauper. It stands to reason that he might have been buried in a potter's field. Jansen had once said that if he could resurrect his own body for dissection, he would.

Of course, despite the term Resurrectionists Jannsen couldn't rise from his grave and find his way to the nearest teaching hospital. But in a twist of fate, I can't help but wonder if the undisputed resurrection king had found a way to do the next best thing. There's more to this story. Stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. People passing by, the woman begging for change, would never have known she'd come from a wealthy and respected family in Easton, Maryland, while not much is written about her parents or the family dynamics.

We do know that when Emily Brown sister became a widow, Emily took a job as a dressmaker to help support the children. Later, after her brother died. Emily found relief from her sorrows in whiskey and opium. But it didn't work. And thanks to her addictions, she lost her job and resorted to begging to keep a roof over her head and food in her stomach. Her share of the rent was two dollars and fifty cents for a room in a cheap boarding house at number three Pig Alley.

And sadly, when her addiction called, Emily spent her money on the fix instead of paying rent. After just six weeks, she owed fifteen dollars. Her landlady, Mary Luxon, also lived at the boarding house, along with Mary's 28 year old son from a previous marriage, John Thomas Ross and Mary's fiancee, Anderson Perry. Perry, who was partially paralyzed, worked as an assistant janitor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine while at work. One day, Perry brought up his fiancee's delinquent border to another janitor, Albert Hawkins.

Hawkins offered a solution. He'd earned a bit of extra cash selling cadavers to the school, and maybe Emily Brown could help them earn more. Perry went home and ran the idea past Ross. And on December 10th, just five days before the wedding, the three men put the plan into action. Hawkins stood outside, acting as a lookout for Mary. She'd been soft hearted enough continuing to let Emily stay without paying, but they felt it best to keep her in the dark.

It was a Friday night and Emily had been out begging that day. She arrived home and suspecting nothing, went inside. There, Perry struck her in the head with a large brick, he left her bleeding on the floor and went outside to stand watch while Hawkins went in to finish the job after stabbing Emily to ensure she was dead. The two men dragged her body into the backyard and tossed a mattress over it to conceal it. They waited until dark, then stuffed Emily's body into a bag.

Hawkins went back to the university, telling the night janitor that a man outside wanted to borrow a wheelbarrow when the request was refused. The men borrowed one from a place selling coal nearby. Ross returned to the university wheeling in Emily's body. When asked how he'd come across the body, Ross claimed he'd gotten it from a potter's field.

Now, the night shift janitor who had taken part in a few graveyard excursions of his own, may not have had a problem with the profession, but he was picky about how those bodies were acquired. Obviously, a fully clothed body that was still warm and more than a little blurry raised a few flags, suspecting foul play. He notified Hyrum Woods, the assistant anatomy professor who in turn called upon Dr. Herbert Harlen to examine the body, confirming that the woman had indeed been murdered.

Dr. Harlen contacted the police when the authorities showed up at the boarding house. Perry confessed to the plan, but implicated Ross as the murderer. Ross, though, told the police that Perry and Hawkins had killed Emily Brown and that his only involvement had been to sell her corpse for 15 dollars. The coroner determined that not only had her skull been crushed, but that she had been repeatedly stabbed and that her ribs had been broken with the coroner's evidence and the testimony of the suspects.

The jury took less than 20 minutes to find all three men guilty, although university employees Hawkins and Perry were set free while awaiting his death sentence.

The following September, Ross sent a poem he'd written to the Baltimore Sun. In it, he readily admitted to his part in the plot to kill Emily Brown and sell her corpse, but questioned the court and its verdict. Ross contended that in the land of liberty, how was it just that he alone paid the price for such a crime while the real killers walked free? As was so often the case, the university employees were not held accountable.

And that night shift janitor, you might recognize his name from earlier in our story. He, too, had stood trial and was also found innocent. And he had been one of the men there that night with William Johnson during the theft of Jane Smith and her mother's bodies. None other than Amole wrong. American Chateaux is hosted by Lauren Vogel Bomb. This episode was written by Michelle Muto with researcher Robin Midnighter and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Trevor Young with executive producers Aaron Manque, Alex Williams and Matt Frederich.

To learn more about the show, visit Greyman Mile Dotcom for more podcast from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.