In May of 1873, Officer Patrick Donnelly of the Boston police was conducting a routine patrol on Mount Vernon Street in Beacon Hill when he noticed an unusual number of flies gathered at a basement window of a neighbor’s home. The odor seeping from the property had grown so strong during an unseasonable heatwave that nearby residents had begun to complain. A fellow neighbor, Frederick Lowell, had also observed the home’s owner, Edward Montgomery Blackwood, struggling late the previous night to load a heavy trunk into a carriage. From one corner of the trunk, Lowell believed he saw dark liquid seeping.
Donnelly had heard about the trunk and, after knocking repeatedly without an answer, found the front door unlocked. Inside, the air was thick with incense and chemicals meant to mask another, deeper smell. In the basement, behind a foreign-made lock he was forced to break, Donnelly found a scene he later described in his official report as beyond the comprehension of any decent mind. There were tables equipped with drainage channels, jars containing preserved organs, custom cooking instruments, and a hidden chamber behind a false wall where human remains lay in various states of preparation.
Blackwood, the gentleman who had charmed Boston society for three years, was nowhere to be found. Edward Blackwood had arrived in Boston from London in late 1870, presenting himself as a wealthy private investor with connections to prominent banking institutions. At forty-two, impeccably dressed and articulate, he had quickly established himself within the city’s elite circles. He attended services regularly at King’s Chapel, donated generously to Massachusetts General Hospital, and hosted dinner parties noted for their fine cuisine.
The Boston Evening Transcript had even featured him in an article praising European investors who had chosen to make Boston their home. What his acquaintances did not know was that Blackwood frequently dismissed his staff for days at a time and made late-night visits to the waterfront, where he paid a dock worker to notify him of incoming ships from South America, particularly those carrying medical or scientific specimens. His household staff had noticed peculiar behavior. His cook, Margaret Sullivan, later testified that Blackwood insisted on preparing certain meals himself in a private pantry adjacent to his study, ordering the finest cuts of organ meat directly from the butcher and maintaining a separate set of china and silverware locked in a cabinet that no one else was permitted to touch.
A local physician who treated Blackwood for a digestive ailment in February 1873 observed laboratory equipment in his study, including a distillation apparatus and a stove designed for precise temperature control, which Blackwood explained as amateur scientific investigations. By the spring of 1873, several residents of Boston’s North End had vanished. These were not the usual cases of runaway youth or transient laborers but respected tradespeople: a watchmaker named Anton Miller, last seen closing his shop in late January after scheduling an appointment with a gentleman client from Beacon Hill; a tailor, Samuel Goldstein, who had told his wife he was meeting an English client of refined manners for a late fitting in February; and Elizabeth Murray, a bookbinder, who disappeared in March after mentioning an exciting commission from a private collector. In April, a prominent butcher named Thomas Walsh vanished after telling his apprentice he had an appointment with a distinguished client from Beacon Hill.
Only then did authorities launch a formal investigation. Detective Michael O’Malley of Boston’s newly formed Detective Division noticed patterns among the missing. All were skilled professionals. All had met with clients before disappearing.
In three cases, the clients were described as well-dressed English gentlemen. O’Malley interviewed Blackwood on April 27th, noting that the man expressed appropriate concern about the disappearances but denied any knowledge of the missing individuals. He seemed eager to end the conversation, citing pressing business correspondence. The link might have remained hidden had the May heatwave not intensified the odor from Blackwood’s home.
Donnelly’s discovery triggered an immediate investigation. Dr. William Hammond, the city’s medical examiner, determined that the remains in the hidden chamber belonged to at least four individuals who had died within the previous three to four months. Certain organs had been carefully extracted and preserved, while others had been processed in a manner suggesting consumption.
Journals found in the basement revealed methodical notes on selection criteria and preparation techniques, what Blackwood called his culinary explorations. The journals also detailed the philosophy behind the crimes. They described Blackwood’s belief that by consuming individuals he deemed to possess exceptional skills or intelligence, he could absorb their qualities. He referred to himself as an evolutionary pioneer, blending what he saw as ancient tribal wisdom with a distorted interpretation of evolutionary theory.
One entry recorded what he believed was Mueller’s precision manifesting in his own work, Goldstein’s aesthetic sensibilities absorbed, and the bookbinder’s attention to detail enhancing his observational capacities. The investigation expanded rapidly. Telegrams were sent to police departments across the country and to Scotland Yard in London, where authorities responded with information about unsolved disappearances in the Mayfair and Whitechapel areas between 1868 and 1870 that matched Blackwood’s methodology. Detective Inspector James Michaels, the officer named in Blackwood’s journal, arrived in Boston in June.
He recounted having investigated Blackwood in London for patterns involving victims with specialized skills, placing him under surveillance in August 1870. Blackwood had fled London within a day of learning of that surveillance, just as he now had fled Boston. A citywide manhunt produced no confirmed sightings. In August, a groundskeeper at Mount Auburn Cemetery reported signs of recent digging at several graves.
Police found evidence of seven disturbed burial sites where small openings had been cut into coffins and specific organs, primarily the brain and liver, had been removed. A custom surgical instrument dropped at one of the sites matched tools found in Blackwood’s Boston laboratory. But the perpetrator was never apprehended. By autumn, the case had grown cold.
For decades, the case faded into a macabre footnote. That changed in 1957, when construction workers renovating an abandoned townhouse in Charleston, South Carolina, discovered a hidden room containing journals, correspondence, and newspaper clippings related to the Boston murders. The materials belonged to a man known locally as Professor Edwin Montague, who had operated a small private college for adult students from 1874 until his death in 1886. His neighbors in Charleston knew him as reclusive, particular about his privacy, a man of extensive knowledge and refined manners.
He died of what was described as complications from a digestive disorder. Photographs from the hidden room compared with those published in Boston newspapers in 1873 confirmed that Professor Montague was Edward Blackwood. The final journals found in Charleston suggested Blackwood had continued his practices on a more selective basis, developing methods to extract what he called the essence without the need for extensive preparation, thus avoiding detection while satisfying his particular hunger. His targets in Charleston shifted toward academics and medical professionals, reflecting his evolved belief that intellectual capacity itself could be absorbed.
In 1962, during renovations of the building that had housed his college, workers discovered a subbasement laboratory sealed behind a false wall, containing surgical tables with restraints, custom extraction tools, and a chemical laboratory that had remained undisturbed since his death. Forensic and psychological studies conducted in the 1960s attempted to explain Blackwood’s condition. Dr. Elias Steinberg suggested he may have suffered from a rare metabolic disorder combined with severe psychiatric delusions, possibly porphyria and an acquired prion disease similar to kuru, associated with the consumption of human neural tissue.
This combination, he proposed, may have created a self-perpetuating cycle in which an initial psychiatric disturbance led to cannibalistic practices, and the resulting physiological changes reinforced his delusions. Dr. Jonathan Waverly of Harvard Medical School noted that the progression of Blackwood’s symptoms, from digestive disturbances to tremors, psychiatric manifestations, disorientation, and paranoia, was consistent with the development of a prion disease. Whether his initial mental disturbance led to practices that then caused disease, or an underlying condition predisposed him to his delusions, remains an open question.
The true extent of Blackwood’s crimes was never known. Authorities estimated, based on the recovered journals, that he may have been responsible for as many as seventeen disappearances, though only seven could be attributed to him with certainty. The remains found in his Boston residence were too degraded for specific identification, and the families of the missing never received closure. The final journal, discovered in 1966 in Alabama and authenticated by the Smithsonian Institution, covered the period from his escape from Boston until two months before his death.
In his final entry, written about a month before he died, Blackwood wrote that he had become a composite being containing multitudes, and that the essence of what he had created continued, dispersed but undying. He described himself as having tasted immortality, one precious morsel at a time. The brownstone on Mount Vernon Street remained vacant and was eventually seized by the city for back taxes. It was demolished in 1890 to make way for a small park that exists to this day, bearing no official marker acknowledging its history.
The city has consistently refused requests to install a plaque. Officer Donnelly, who discovered what lay beneath Blackwood’s polished exterior, later wrote in his personal diary that what troubled him most was not what he found in that house but the knowledge that he had nodded politely to its owner on the street dozens of times and had thought him a credit to the neighborhood.