One Eyed Joe | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

Evi Numen: He is indicted 25 times. Elana Gordon: Is that a lot? Evi Numen: That is kind of a lot for horse stealing.
I imagined him kind of a horse whisper. Phoebe Judge: John Frankford was born in
1839 and grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He was a master at stealing and selling horses.
He once joked to a warden that he was responsible for every missing horse in Eastern Pennsylvania.
Evi Numen: And he just keeps getting caught and escaping, so it's almost like a running joke.
Phoebe Judge: We're hearing about him from Evi Numen. She's an exhibitions manager at
the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. Evi Numen: In all the news articles it's implied or said outright that he's famous. He's talked about as famous or
notorious. "Notorious horse thief caught," that's one of the titles that you'll see.
Phoebe Judge: Each time he was caught, he was put in jail, but then he'd escape. He'd steal another
horse, get caught, and somehow escape again. Evi Numen: Frankford had the reputation of
just not taking prison seriously. Phoebe Judge: He mostly worked alone, but he once escaped jail with help from the so-called Buzzard Boys, a gang of six brothers,
all named Buzzard. They used what they called the bird cage trick. One brother, Ike Buzzard, who was
somehow allowed to keep a bird cage in his jail cell, asked the guard, "Could you please take this
canary cage over to my brother, Abe Buzzard?" Evi Numen: So the guard goes in to investigate,
one of the Buzzard brothers sneaks past him, takes the keys, and locks him in the cell. And then of course he proceeds and unlocks 11 other cells and frees the
inmates. One of them is Frankford. Phoebe Judge: Eventually, the Lancaster County Jail got so sick of Frankford's escapes that they built a special cell just for him.
Evi Numen: But he cut through it in November 1881. [Laughs.] He made his way into the cellar where he
dug through a stone wall and crawled to the top of the stone chimney. Keeper Wise of the prison — I
guess he wasn't very wise — heard him at work, and when he appeared to the top of the chimney,
shot him in the face, destroying one eye. Phoebe Judge: That's how we got the nickname One
Eyed Joe. In 1885, Frankford was finally caught for the last time at a horse sale in Philadelphia.
The judge gave him the maximum sentence — 19 years — and sent him to the most severe prison in the
state of Pennsylvania, if not the whole country. Evi Numen: There are several news articles that
say that Frankford was such an incredibly good escapist, or escape artist, that finally he met
his match at Eastern State Penitentiary. Phoebe Judge: It was said that no jail was
strong enough to hold him. But John Frankford never did escape from Eastern State penitentiary,
not alive anyway. For today's story, we've partnered with reporter Elana Gordon,
from WHYY's The Pulse in Philadelphia, to find out what exactly happened to John Frankford,
and to go inside a mysterious practice that changed not only the city of Philadelphia,
but the medical community as all of us know it today. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. [Music.]
Elana Gordon: Eastern State Penitentiary is where solitary confinement basically
originated in the United States. Evi Numen: Every single prisoner was in solitary
confinement at the time. So all the cells are made for that. The only light that comes in the cells
comes from the skylight. It's called 'the eye to God.' So they're supposed to get on their knees
and pray towards that skylight, upwards at where God is presumably watching over them or looking
at them. And that's his only natural light. Elana Gordon: It was a thin sliver of light.
Between Eastern State's opening in 1829 through its closing in 1971, 80,000 people served time there. Evi Numen: If you see the gates to
each cell, they have — they're iron, full iron with bolts, and they have a small window with bars on it. Elana Gordon: So not easy to escape?
Evi Numen: Not easy to escape. Elana Gordon: Guards would put hoods over prisoners when taking them out of their cells so no one could recognize them
and they wouldn't know where they were. Evi Numen: There are reports of torture.
We don't know if Frankford ever got in trouble, it doesn't seem like he did. And his daughter,
who visits him semi-often — I think maybe once a year or so — says that he never complained to her.
But when she asked him how it was in the prison, he said, "Maggie, life is not your own here."
Elana Gordon: By the 1890s, about a decade into his term, he wasn't as closely confined. He did
plumbing and other work around the prison. He also looked after the prison's fierce dogs.
Being a skilled horse thief, you'd figure he might've had a way with animals. Evi Numen: But during the time of Christmas of '95, he was standing two, the prison dogs, and
apparently they got into a fight, the dog's did, and he tried to separate them and he got bit.
Elana Gordon: The bite supposedly got really infected, and by mid-January, Frankford takes a turn for the worse. Evi Numen: He's bed-ridden, he's not very
conscious, so he's basically convalescing. Elana Gordon: He was under the care of the
prison's doctor, Dr. John Bacon. Bacon was probably as good a doctor as there was at the time. He trained under the best of the best at the University of Pennsylvania.
But Frankford didn't make it. At 58 years old, he died in the prison on January 20th, 1896.
[Music.] Frankford's daughter, Maggie, traveled with her husband to the prison right away. They wanted to have her father's body transported to Lancaster
for the funeral. But when they went to get it, the prison said at first, no, that it wasn't ready,
so they had to wait and wait. Evi Numen: When they get the body, he has bruises all over his body, he has sewn marks, and his skull is cut open.
Elana Gordon: The top of Frankford's skull appeared to have been sloppily stitched up
with some sort of twine. His stomach was cut open, and the intestines were spilling out.
Evi Numen: So they get the body and they see this mangled corpse with bruises, so they suspect foul play. Elana Gordon: Dr. Bacon said that Frankford's
official cause of death was a strangulated hernia, which is an intestinal blockage. He
had been suffering from that for a while, and he did have that bad dog bite, but neither of
those things explained why his head and his body had been cut up like that. And then a man named
Alexander Leipsner contacted Maggie and said he had some information about what had happened to
her father. Leipsner was also an inmate at Eastern State. He was in for second degree murder.
Evi Numen: They're friends, and he seems to think very highly of Frankford. Elana Gordon: Leipsner told Maggie that he'd been out of his cell working on a construction
project and decided to sneak over to the hospital wing to visit Frankford. This was
January of 1896. It was cold and snowing. Evi Numen: And he looks all over the place
and then he sees, across the yard, a body. He sees a table with his friend's naked body on it.
And the doctor — the prison physician — is working on him. He goes near, but he tries not to be seen,
he doesn't want to be discovered. And then he sees Dr. Bacon remove Frankford's heart,
and he puts that on the snow, presumably to keep it fresh. He's working on his skull,
and he opens up the skull and takes out the brain, and he sets that on the snow too.
[Music.] Elana Gordon: Leipsner said that two other inmates also witnessed this, and he told Maggie he'd
be willing to testify to what he'd seen. Evi Numen: The average layperson wouldn't
know what autopsy incisions look like. It's typically a Y incision, where you draw an incision from, kind of, the midway part down the chest and
shoulder area to the sternum, that's where the Y spreads out, and then down the abdomen in
the middle. So that way you can open the ribs, you can take the heart out, and you can take the entrails out, too. Elana Gordon: During an investigation into
the conditions at Eastern State, a legislative committee sought testimony from inmates,
wardens, and even newspaper reporters about what had happened to Frankford. Alexander Leipsner took the stand. Evi Numen: I can read it a little bit of this,
because it's really fantastic. He said he saw Dr. Bacon go by with the entrails in a bucket,
and avowed that he had been told that all convicts who'd died in the prison were treated that way.
That's a big one. That's what he claims. Elana Gordon: So Leipsner claimed that
every inmate who died at Eastern State risked becoming the doctor's guinea pig.
And when it was Dr. Bacon's turned to take the stand, he testified that he had performed
emergency surgery for Frankford's hernia right before he died, a last-ditch attempt to save
him. That's why his stomach was cut up. Then the legislative committee asked him to explain what
had happened to Frankford's body after he died. Evi Numen: This is good. [Laughs.] Concerning the
postmortem examination, Dr. Bacon said a prisoner, whose first name was Arthur, had assisted him and
had removed the skull and taken out the brain. The prison record of the case and its treatment
was then submitted to the committee. "Why did you take out the brain?" Dr. Bacon was asked.
Because John Frankford was a typical criminal, and they wanted the brain for scientific purposes.
Dr. Bacon said that he had taken the brains out of two other bodies, and he added that
this was frequently done. He denied that he had taken out the heart and the bowels,
and admitted that he might have carried the brains in a bucket, as Leipsner had stated.
Elana Gordon: Wow. Evi Numen: Yeah. It's fantastic stuff. [Laughs.] Sorry for the enthusiasm, but it's just so fascinating to me that this was done
so casually. And when I pictured this trial, I kind of pictured Dr. Bacon being kind of defensive
about it, saying, "Of course we did this." Elana Gordon: He wasn't the only doctor stealing
people's organs. It was a strange time in American history. To become great at healing the body,
you first had to scavenge for one to study, to figure out how it worked. The medical industry as
we know it today was just establishing itself. Evi Numen: So after the Civil War, you have,
first of all, a lot of medical innovations, like the idea of the ambulance and the ambulance as
a service gets implemented. Then you have embalming and surgery. And there are all
these veterans that have medical conditions from amputations, nervous conditions, to other
complications from being in the battlefield. And that creates a market — the market for
physicians to be trained in Philadelphia. So you have all these medical schools sprouting
that are attracting new students. Elana Gordon: And all of these students needed bodies to dissect, to learn and become good doctors. The most ambitious attended
extracurricular dissection courses and even took anatomy a second time, but there was a problem:
the math didn't add up. Evi Numen: So in 1882, a few years before Frankford's death, the state of Pennsylvania has 1,493 medical students in
need of bodies to dissect. Ideally they would need 746 to make that possible, because each student gets half a body. But there are only 406 lawfully available.
Elana Gordon: So that's like, they're short by like half? Evi Numen: They're short by half. Elana Gordon: And there just wasn't a legal
way to meet that demand. But a medical school's reputation depended on whether it could provide
students with "abundant anatomical material." Evi Numen: So they have to figure out other
ways to get bodies, and that's where body snatchers come in or, as they're called at the time, resurrectionists. Michael Sappol: The body snatcher term is mainly
associated with medical grave robbery. Elana Gordon: Michael Sappol is a medical
historian who's written a book about this. He says that digging up cemeteries and selling the bodies
to medical schools was a gold mine. The easiest bodies to snatch were those of the poor and
vulnerable who didn't have money for a watchman or a secure grave. These were African Americans,
immigrants, those who died in asylums and prisons... There was also an urgency to getting
bodies. They would decompose fast. That's why dissection classes mostly happened in the winter.
So in the early days, even medical students got directly involved in stealing them.
Michael Sappol: They go in the dead of night and they might bribe a watchman, or maybe
get a watchman drunk, or maybe they just look for the moment when the watchman falls asleep.
And they bring in their wagon with their horse and dig and unearth the body and then... away.
Elana Gordon: That sounds horrific to me, and I would imagine to a med student today. What was different then? Michael Sappol: Well, part of it was,
this is a rite of passage. First of all, imagine, the medical students back then tend to be younger.
It's a culture of camaraderie and bravado. You want to curry favor with the professor?
Bring the professor a body, bring the professor an interesting body. You want curry favor with
your fellow classmates? "I got a body." They are impressed with you, you're a brave strong lad.
Elana Gordon: And unlike today, when a lot of us really want to donate our bodies to science,
there was a huge stigma to being dissected back then, or even being autopsied. Nobody wanted
this to happen to them or their loved ones. Michael Sappol: How you die really matters to
people. And if you're a poor person and you're saving money, the money you might be saving
would be dedicated to your death. Elana Gordon: So when the public caught wind of what doctors and students were doing, riots broke
out. Some schools were even burned down. Michael Sappol: There are a few notorious
examples of times when it became so lucrative that body snatchers actually murdered people
in order to supply the anatomy department. Elana Gordon: Murdering people and selling
them to science? Clearly a crime. Just like digging someone up from their plot in a cemetery or opening up someone's head to steal their brain is a crime, right?
You'd think so, but the laws to deal with this were a mess. And not just in Pennsylvania.
Michael Sappol: So there's this increasing demand for bodies, this system of looting and bribery and corruption is unruly and unseemly, it attracts attention in
the newspapers, it's politically embarrassing. Elana Gordon: Lawmakers tried to look the other
way, but the public was terrified and angry. And more and more med schools kept opening,
increasing the demand for bodies. Michael Sappol: Every medical school in the United States has a body snatching scandal, and there's a
lore of body snatching in every medical school. Elana Gordon: And then in 1882, just before that
famous horse thief John Frankford was captured for the last time, Philadelphia's biggest scandal
breaks, and one of the most revered doctors in America is accused of body snatching.
Michael Angelo: I knew you would be asking us about Dr. Forbes. [Laughs.] It's a pretty amazing story. Elana Gordon: This is Michael Angelo. He's
the archivist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Michael Angelo: In 1882, Dr. William Forbes, the foremost anatomist in the country,
here at Jefferson Medical College, had a relationship with some people who supplied cadavers for the students. Elana Gordon: Dr. William Forbes had actually
tried to be on the right side of the law. He wrote the first anatomy legislation in Pennsylvania,
that legally directed unclaimed bodies to med schools. But it was weak, and the bodies weren't coming in. Michael Angelo: The local Philadelphia papers
knew that something was fishy, so they basically set up a sting. Elana Gordon: Some journalists suspected foul play at an African-American burial ground.
So one cold night in the middle of winter, they camped out, armed with guns, ready to catch the body snatchers in action. Michael Angelo: And so you could call them
muckraking journalists, no offense. [Laughs.] But they actually got to the bottom of this because
there were bodies being stolen every winter from these cemeteries. And so when they arrested these
individuals, they squealed and said Dr. Forbes was the man who asked them to bring the bodies.
Elana Gordon: He was arrested on charges of conspiring to steal bodies and violate graves.
There were a lot of protests against him, and some thought it would be the end of Jefferson Medical
College. Forbes denied any involvement. Michael Angelo: But the damning evidence
was that there were keys to the dead house — or the place where the corpses are kept at the college — in the possession of those men. And we
actually have the keys in the archives today, so it's kind of a grisly reminder
of where America was 130 years ago. Elana Gordon: Forbes was acquitted and, amazingly, he was able to use his own scandal to pressure legislators. He wrote a new and improved
law that would compel every state institution — prisons, morgues, hospitals — to give unclaimed
bodies to medical schools. And it worked. The state finally said, "OK, we get it. Let's help
you figure this out without breaking the law." Michael Angelo: He was the champion to rewrite the
anatomy acts in Pennsylvania, which provided for a more rational distribution of human cadavers.
So as Philadelphia went, so did the rest of the country. The Anatomy Act of 1883 was a really
important landmark for the entire country. Elana Gordon: It marked a huge step in
legitimizing dissection in the state, and basically helped transform a profession seen
as a bunch of monsters and ghouls in the public's eye into one that was really legit and respected.
But the Anatomy Act didn't lift the curtain on everything. Sure, it protected doctors,
but what about protecting those at the bottom of the ladder, like prisoners? Doctors still
took liberties when no one was looking. Evi Numen: So this is an interesting detail:
there is no clause of the Anatomy Act that talks about organs. That's never mentioned.
Elana Gordon: Again, Evi Numen. She doesn't get why, if the Anatomy Act had already
passed when John Frankford died, why Dr. Bacon would so casually admit to removing
Frankford's brain and not fear the consequences. Evi Numen: It appears that if you could get away
with taking organs, you can. Dr. Bacon says that he took out the organs for scientific purposes,
and he says that he didn't know that was illegal or that he had to ask to do this,
because his predecessors did it too. Elana Gordon: A lot of doctors were studying
body parts on the side, and there were networks of doctors helping each other find them. So even if
Dr. Bacon himself wasn't personally interested in John Frankford's brain, he may have been trying to
hook up a friend. These were the days when people still believed in phrenology, and the brain of a
clever criminal was especially desirable. Evi Numen: My guess is that they had their
eye on him. This is a famous horse thief at the time the idea of criminal physiology and
phonology is fairly alive and well and the United States. So if something was peculiar about your head, you could tell what that would correspond to and what
your character would be like. And there is also the idea that a brain of a criminal would be
different. Elana Gordon: So maybe his brain was taken for scientific study, or maybe someone just wanted it on their shelf, like a trophy.
Frankford was a high profile criminal and seemingly uncatchable. Think about all those sheriffs he managed to outwit, all those people he ripped off.
Lots of people might've wanted his brain in a jar. Either way, it wasn't all that unusual
to look at and even admire body parts in jars, kind of like the way we look at art in a museum.
And there's one place in particular where that's still true today. Evi Numen: This gallery is organized by body part, so we start with brains and go into
hearts, lungs, and around the room to limbs Elana Gordon: The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia,
where Evi Numen works, is an old but still really busy anatomical museum. When I went to visit her, she showed me around the skulls, tumors, and all sorts of other stuff on
display in jars of alcohol or formaldehyde. Evi Numen: I'm going to take you to the wet
specimen room. So if you're squeamish, just be prepared. There are a lot of things in jars. Elana Gordon: OK.
[Sound of a door opening.] Her nickname here is the 'Wet Specimen Hound.' Numen leads me to the basement, where they store the stuff that's not on display.
They keep it cold in here. [Sound of a door closing.] Evi Numen: So the age of them kind of varies. The oldest ones we have are the
ones that are covered by pig's bladder, and it could go back to 1870, 1860s even.
Elana Gordon: She points out the brains in all sorts of different shaped jars. So some of these older brains could have been acquired through somebody
taking or stealing a person's body? Evi Numen: I can't say that for sure. Elana Gordon: But there's a possibility? Evi Numen: There's always a possibility.
Elana Gordon: She told me she still believes that maybe one day she'll find the brain of
John Frankford, that one-eyed horse thief. Evi Numen: I hope that it's out there. There is no
real footnote about where it ended up. We don't know if it was sold by Dr. Bacon,
if Dr. Bacon kept it, if it was returned to the family. There is no mention of what actually happens to his organs. So my hope is
that Dr. Bacon sold it to one of his colleagues, and it ended up in a collection, and it's still
somewhere out there in Philadelphia, hopefully. Elana Gordon: How would you know?
Evi Numen: It would probably be marked as the brain of a horse thief. [Laughs.] Elana Gordon:
Why do you want to find this brain? Evi Numen: Just to complete the story, to get some sort of resolution. Elana Gordon: What's there to resolve?
Evi Numen: That's a good question. I always believe that seeing, like, an open-casket funeral or the remains of your loved one brings a sense of closure.
And this horse thief from, basically, the turn of the century has become a fixture
in my life for the last two years, so I want to follow the story to the end. Elana Gordon: After I left, Numen discovered a funeral notice for John Frankford. It says he
was buried in Lancaster Cemetery. She went out and looked, but she never did find his grave.
The one image she does have is a sketch of Frankford from an obit. I've seen this
picture. Frankford looks so melancholy. But when I look closer at that one eyelid of his,
slightly drooped over the eye he lost, it sort of looks to me like he could be winking, like maybe,
even in death, he's managed to sneak away one more time, his last great escape.
[Hopeful piano music.] Phoebe Judge: That was reporter Elana Gordon from WHYY's The Pulse in Philadelphia. To learn more
about what's changed in the regulation and distribution of bodies for medicine,
check out their podcast this week. You can find it on iTunes. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohrer and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Special thanks
to Alice Wilder and Freddie Jenkins. Julienne Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.
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Not only was John Frankford a famous horse thief, he was also a notoriously good escape artist. People thought no jail was strong enough to keep him, but then in 1895 he was sentenced to Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary. At Eastern State, Frankford became the victim of a strange practice: the prison doctor, Dr. John Bacon, dissected his body and removed his brain. The Frankford case would just be one of many other in the region and would illuminate an underground cadaver network supplying medical schools across the state of Pennsylvania.

Reporter Elana Gordon from WHYY’s The Pulse has today’s story. https://whyy.org/episodes/the-body/

Music in the episode: “Waltz Dream” by Dave Depper “Bizzare Waltz” by David Szesztay “Cascet” by David Szesztay “Capilla” by Blue Dot Sessions “Plashes” by David Szesztay “Romance” by David Szesztay “Sepia” by Podington Bear “Crystal Island” by Kevin Bryce “April” by Kai Engel

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Episode 44 originally published 6/03/16 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-44-one-eyed-joe-6-3-2016

Brief Summary

John Frankford, a notorious horse thief, died under suspicious circumstances at Eastern State Penitentiary, raising questions about medical ethics and body snatching.

Key points

The Notorious Horse Thief. John Frankford, a master horse thief, was caught 25 times but kept escaping.
The Buzzard Boys' Escape. Frankford escaped jail with the help of the Buzzard Boys using a clever trick.
The Anatomy Act of 1883. Dr. William Forbes helped legitimize dissection practices in Pennsylvania after a scandal.
The Search for Closure. Evi Numen seeks resolution by finding the brain of a horse thief, a story that has haunted her for two years.
A Melancholy Sketch. Evi Numen describes a sketch of John Frankford, interpreting it as a wink from beyond.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

It's almost like a running joke.

Evi Numen on Frankford's repeated escapes.

0:29WatchNov 18, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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