On May 30, 1878, a startling telegram arrived at Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency. The message began with these words:

“The body of … my father, was stolen from his grave at North Bend last night. Have a most diligent search made of Chicago, and send me one of your best detectives to report to me at the Grand Hotel, Cincinnati, Ohio tomorrow morning. All charges will be promptly paid by me.”

Who Was John Scott Harrison?

Anything important enough to be entrusted to the world-famous Pinkerton detectives would be interesting enough. The fact that this situation involved the horrifying crime of grave robbery only adds to the intrigue. If you need anything more to pique your curiosity, you might be interested in knowing that the man whose body was missing had once been a two-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

These facts give us all the ingredients needed to cook up a thoroughly intriguing true crime mystery. There’s something else you should know, however, that takes this case to a whole new level. The individual who sent the telegram was a fellow named Benjamin Harrison. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he was the grandson of President William Henry Harrison and would go on to become the 23rd President of the United States. In other words, the body that was missing belonged to John Scott Harrison, the only man to have been both the son and father of a U.S. President.

John Scott Harrison was born in 1804 to a family that knew a thing or two about government. His grandfather, Benjamin Harrison V, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. John’s father was president for a scant 30 days before dying in office. Even so, the political bug seems to have gotten its teeth in John, prompting him to pursue the family business. He was elected to two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives before losing in an attempt at a third term.

John’s first wife, Lucretia, died in 1830. He married Elizabeth Ramsey Irwin the next year. In 1833, the Harrisons welcomed little Benjamin into the world, ensuring that the family’s name would continue to grace the halls of power for another generation.

John died on May 25, 1878, at the age of 73. Sadly, his story does not end there. Arguably, that’s when it becomes the most interesting.

The Grave Robbing Incident

Four days later, he was buried next to his grandson, Augustus Devin, who had passed away a few days earlier. When people gathered for the burial service, they were shocked to see that someone had dug up Augustus’ grave.

During the 19th century, grave robbing was a common practice. This happened because medical schools needed bodies for study, but there weren’t enough legal bodies available. The overcrowded burial grounds and lack of security made it easy for grave robbers to steal corpses. This grim reality was driven by medical demand, societal changes, and the profit motive. See “The Burke and Hare Murders: The Shocking Cadaver Scheme That Transformed 19th Century Medicine” for how this played out in Scotland.

After a grave was disturbed by body snatchers, Benjamin and his brothers, John and Carter, were determined to protect their father’s grave. They placed three large stones on top of the coffin and covered them with cement. They also hired a watchman to guard the grave for the first month after the burial.

Content that he had done everything necessary to honor his deceased father, Benjamin returned to Indianapolis on the day after the funeral. He hoped to work on completing the speech he would be giving at the Republican State Convention on June 5. All of the family except for John and cousin George Eaton departed as well. John and George had to deal with the unpleasant business of Augustus’ stolen corpse. They sought the assistance of the Cincinnati police department and obtained a search warrant to investigate the Medical College of Ohio.

The search party, aided by janitor A.Q. Marshall, combed through the labyrinth of the school in a 19th-century real-life version of Where’s Waldo. With nothing to reward their efforts, they were about to give up, when they came to the cellar. There they found a chute connected to a door in the alley, which also connected to a vertical shaft running the height of the building. Elsewhere they encountered boxes of assorted body parts, a student “chipping away” at the breast and head of a woman, and the body of a 6-month-old baby. This told them they were on the right track, but there was still no sign of Augustus Devin.

An increasingly nervous Marshall insisted that he needed to alert the faculty to the ongoing search. Detective Snelbaker decided to let him go, but not without taking precautions. He discreetly assigned a deputy to discreetly tail Marshall, ensuring that they would not lose sight of him.

Marshall rushed through the corridors and staircases of the dimly lit building, unaware that he was being tailed. As he ascended a stairway, he inadvertently led his tracker to an upstairs room. The detective pushed open the door. There in the center of the room was a contraption one would not expect in such a place. It was a windlass and rope running into a square hole in the floor. The presence of the windlass indicated that this contraption was used for lifting heavy objects to the upper levels.

The Sinister Truth Behind the Grave Robbing

The detective soon realized the sinister truth behind this setup. He remembered the shaft they had stumbled upon in the cellar. The windlass served a far more disturbing purpose than he could have ever imagined. It was used to lift cadavers to the upper stories. The detective alerted his colleagues to his discovery. Soon, they were all gathered in the upper room. One of the men took hold of the handle of the windlass and began cranking. As the yet-unknown item was slowly lifted, the investigators would have been forgiven for thinking they were on the set of a horror movie. Well, assuming horror movies weren’t still several decades into their future. After several moments of cranking, the windlass brought its bundle into view. As suspected, it was a cold, stiff, and decidedly dead cadaver. Hopeful that their search for Augustus was over, the men hurried to inspect the corpse.

Immediately, their hopes were dashed. Instead of a young man in his 20s, they saw a relatively older man. Wondering whose body they might have discovered, they pulled away the cloth that covered the corpse’s face. John took a moment to make sure his eyes were not deceiving him before exclaiming, “My God, that’s my father!”

That’s right. What started off as a search for Augustus Devin had only served to uncover the sad truth that the efforts to preserve John Scott Harrison’s body were all for naught. It was his body that had been procured by the medical school, despite all the safeguards that had been placed at his grave.

Clearly there was a conspiracy and mystery that was far deeper than any of the men suspected. George sent news of the macabre discovery to Benjamin, prompting the telegram to the Pinkerton Detective Agency that started this story.

After firing off his telegram to the world-class detectives, Benjamin hopped on the first train to Cincinnati. Meanwhile, word of the grim developments spread throughout the country. Upon his arrival, Benjamin called for the immediate arrest of A.Q. Marshall. The authorities immediately took the suspicious janitor into custody on charges of receiving and concealing the body of John Scott Harrison. The medical college posted the $5,000 bond to release their employee. The citizenry of Cincinnati, however, was outraged that such a heinous crime could occur in their midst. Calls for mob violence against the school raised the real possibility that violence would occur. It was Benjamin who quashed this sentiment. He issued a public message on June 1 that said, in part:

“We have been offered through the press the sympathy of the distinguished men who constitute the faculty of the Ohio Medical College. I have no satisfactory evidence that any of them knew whose body they had, but I have the most convincing evidence that they are covering the guilty scoundrel… The bodies brought there are purchased and paid for by an office of the College. The body-snatcher stands before him and takes from his hand the fee for his hellish work. He is not an occasional visitant…”

Although the mob mentality subsided, the medical college faced severe criticism in the media. In the face of the outcry, the faculty remained defiant and unapologetic. Although they expressed regret for the presence of a highly esteemed individual in their dissection rooms, they insisted that acquiring corpses was part of providing quality medical education. On June 1, Dr. Robert Bartholow, the College’s Dean (known for his controversial experiment that resulted in the death of a patient named Mary Rafferty), issued a statement in the Cincinnati Times refuting any knowledge or responsibility for the theft committed by an anonymous resurrectionist who sought financial gain. In response to this, Benjamin Harrison published an impassioned and furious open letter.

“Your janitor denied that it laid upon your tables, but the clean incision into the carotid artery, the thread with which it was ligatured, the injected veins, prove him a liar. Who made that incision and injected that body, gentlemen of the Faculty? The surgeons who examined his work say that he was no bungler. While he lay upon your table, the long white beard, which the hands of infant grandchildren had often stroked in love, was rudely shorn from his face. Have you so little care of your college that an unseen and an unknown man may do all this? Who took him from that table and hung him by the neck in the pit?”

While public sentiment digested the disturbing details, the Harrison family went about the sad business of reinterring Benjamin’s father. The body of John Scott Harrison was again committed to the earth in a family friend’s vault at Spring Grove Cemetery just outside of Cincinnati.

The efforts to locate Augustus’ corpse came to an end when it was found preserved in a vat of brine at the University of Michigan medical college. Read the Pinkerton report on the ghastly saga here, compliments of the Benjamin Harrison Site of the Indianapolis University Digital Collections.

Public Outrage and Legislative Response

The public outrage was sufficient to trigger legislative responses. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan passed amended Anatomy Acts that increased the penalties for grave-robbing and allowed medical schools to use unclaimed bodies of people who died in the care of the state (paupers, orphans, the insane, prisoners) for anatomical dissection.

By granting access to unclaimed bodies, the Ohio Anatomy Law effectively eliminated the primary market for grave robbers, thus significantly curbing their activities. This crucial development not only protected the sanctity of graves but also ensured a legal and ethical source of bodies for medical institutions.

In addition to the larger implications of the law, legal consequences followed for those involved. Lawsuits were filed against the Ohio Medical College, one of the key institutions implicated in the incident. Simultaneously, the Harrison estate brought a separate lawsuit, claiming damages amounting to the substantial sum of $10,000. Sadly, outcomes of the civil case and any findings of the criminal investigations were lost when the Hamilton County Court House burned down in 1884.

Enforcement of the new laws was lax, and body snatching would continue to be a lucrative business criminal business well into the 20th century. The biggest hurdle — the fight for public sentiment — had been overcome, however. After the horror of the Harrison grave-robbing debacle, it would eventually become possible for the bodies of the dearly departed to truly rest in peace.

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Read the Pinkerton report on the ghastly saga here, compliments of the Benjamin Harrison Site of the Indianapolis University Digital Collections.