Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda Land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. He was hardly the only professional body snatcher or resurrection man as the press like to call him in Washington, d C. In the late nineteenth century, but he's definitely one of the most colorful and his name lives on today. Welcome to Criminalia. I'm Maria tram Marquis and I'm Holly Fry. Let's talk about it.
Man named William M. Jansen, also known as Vigo Ross, Vigo Jansen, Vigo Jansen Ross, and sometimes even James Jardine Jansen, was a Danish immigrant who became one of the most famous or infamous body snatchers along the East coast of the United States during the nineteenth century. He claimed to have had medical training in his native country, and some reports do refer to him as a talented practitioner, which
seems to back up that claim. Maybe not. It is also said, though, that his alcoholism and not really any questions about his medical training, was what kept him from practicing in the United States. But right now we're not interested in either of those things. Actually, what we do know at some point is Jansen, who was probably pronounced as Johnson in his native country, but it gets americanized, so we're going with that. But he became known here
as Jansen, the Resurrectionist and even the resurrection King. Jansen was a professional body snatcher who dug up graves in burial grounds around Washington, d c. And sold the stolen corpses to local medical colleges and universities, and because there were several medical schools in Washington, the city became a kind of hub for such activity. He's also known to have said there was no better business to be in
for making money. Courses in anatomy and dissection were prerequisites for all new medical students, and as enrollment grew, that requirement spurred the demand for bodies, and with an increase in demand came an increase in price. The city had a finite number of corpses to be disinterred, and each
corpse was a hot commodity. According to one account, a local doctor who became a professional resurrectionist claimed that it was pretty standard to receive upwards of a hundred dollars per body sold, or about half that if the market was overloaded. You should take those numbers with a grain
of salt. Though there's a different account of the profession that stated that bodies would be sold for about twenty dollars to local medical schools or hospitals for research purposes, and a completely different report says that the price for corpses typically ranged from fifteen dollars to twenty five dollars in Washington at the time, unskilled laborers could expect to make a couple of dollars a day. So you can
see how body snatching would be pretty lucrative work. Regardless of which of the aforementioned price points is the most accurate, and any of these numbers are actually pretty good money for someone plying the body trade in the late nineteenth century. Jansen's exact years in operation are a little bit fuzzy,
but he was absolutely operating in the eighteen eighties. Thomas Dwight, an American physician, anatomist, teacher, and the person known as the father of American forensic anthropology, was a critic of the resurrectionists. He spoke about the deplorable conditions of the trade and the immoral and unethical ways body snatchers made
their money. We quote, not only has the professional body snatcher flourished, but a new figure has arisen, the dealer in dead bodies, who, either by theft or by corruption, is able to distribute them at a high rate of payment to colleges throughout the country. The history of the District of Columbia is in this respect a truly disgraceful one. We have had the demoralizing spectacle of some five hundred students among several schools, almost under the shadow of the capital,
secting bodies that everyone knew had been illegally obtained. While many medical professionals commented similarly on the sheer audacity of this work, they also supplied the money to keep that supply. Chain Moving cadavers had become as indispensable to medicine as a surgeon's scalpel. Dissecting cadavers was important to understanding and learning human anatomy. But to be fair, no one found the dissection of human cadavers a pleasant undertaking. It was
a necessary one. Scottish anatomist William Hunter said about it, quote, anatomy is the basis of surgery. It informs the head, guides the hand, and familiarizes the heart to a kind
of necessary in humanity. Until the very end of the nineteenth century, the laws about grave robbing and body snatching were fairly lacks in Washington, d c. And by fairly lacks we mean there was no law against body snatching in the District of Columbia until the eighteen ninet As long as the resurrectionist left the victim's clothing and any
other items behind, they couldn't be prosecuted for larceny. As a result, police who caught a body snatcher, even in the act of snatching a body, could only charge them with violation of some obscure or vaguely relevant law that brought about nothing more than a very minor penalty. Many resurrectionists in the city, though, took everything from the grave, which was a risky proposition, although probably easier than undressing
a dead body. We are going to take a break here for a word from our sponsor, and when we're back we will talk about Jansen's first high profile job and arrest. Welcome back to Criminalia. Jansen's first big job wasn't his most famous job. Let's explain. Although he is best known for his work in the District of Columbia. William Jansen's first high profile body snatching job was in Baltimore, Maryland.
That was in December of eighteen eighty and Jansen was arrested for snatching the corpses of two women, and Carter and Jenny Smith from the Baltimore Cemetery. But it wasn't because he was caught in the act of stealing these bodies. In fact, he was known to be pretty meticulous when it came to covering up his tracks. He was arrested after a relative of the deceased mother and daughter, a woman who was named Elizabeth Joyner, had a dream that
their bodies had been stolen. She reported her dream to the authorities, and it turns out she was right. It's from reports of this case that we know Jansen's appearance. He was quote about five ft eight inches high, large robust frame, black hair, swarthy complexion, and with accountenance anything but open. He wore a long rubber coat, rubber boots,
and heavy gloves to work. According to this same newspaper account, he also seemed to be perpetually drunk, possibly confirming the rumor we learned about him at the top of the episode. Of note, we also have learned so far this season that this seems to have been a kind of occupational hazard among body snatchers. One famous resurrectionist and we won't name names because he's on our list of people to
talk about this season. He's quoted as saying he kept a bottle on his bedside table just in case he woke up. Resurrectionists, also called ghoules in media reports from the time, we're by nature a bold sort of person you needed to be for the kind of job you were trying to pull off every night. But Jansen was bold, all caps on that. In Washington, d c. In January three, he snatched the body of Charles Shaw, a nineteen year old black man who had been executed by hanging for
the murder of his sister. He stole that body, and he sold it, and then he stole it a second time, and it all happened within thirty six hours of Shaw's execution. According to reports by the Washington Post, Shaw had been buried in Potter's Field shortly after his death. Just in case you don't know that term. A potter's field is a public burial place for the poor, or for unknown persons, or for criminals. It was daytime when Shaw was interred, so not the typical time of day when a resurrection
man would normally work. Part of their entire success was that they worked under cover of darkness and could hide their activities and their faces. But within an hour after Shaw's burial, Jansen was on the scene exhuming the body in broad daylight. According to the post, Jansen joke quote, go and get the wagon and I will hold him. He can't get away from me now. The reporter wrote, quote, no other man on earth would have had the nerve to enter a cemetery in broad daylight and exume a corpse.
What happened next wasn't typical for Jansen. Jensen felt he was cheated out of his share of profits during the sale of the corpse, which was to have been sold for eighteen dollars. The details of what happened when Shaw's corpse was sold to Georgetown berries among local news reports, though the first was like this. Jansen sent his assistant to sell Shaw's body to Georgetown Medical School and expected
him to return with payment. But medical students at Georgetown refused to pay Jensen's asking price, and his assistant returned with only half of the agreed race. Jensen retaliated with a plan to steal the body back. The second goes like this. According to Jansen, he snatched Shaw's body in the company of a doctor Crook, who was a physician at Georgetown Medical School. Upon being received at Georgetown, the corpse was placed on a dissecting board, as was customary.
According to the Post, the physicians and students divvied up and auctioned off parts of the cadaver. This sounds horrifying as leeve, but it was apparently pretty common practice upon receiving a new corpse at a medical school, different classes would be studying different parts of anatomy, so it makes sense that they could use one corpse for multiple purposes. Shaw's arms and legs, for instance, are reported to have
been sold for three dollars each. When it came to the financial piece, Crook, it seemed to Jansen ended up pocketing most, if not all, of the money, and Jansen, angry, actually told a Post reporter quote, I will take that body out tonight if I am arrested in the attempt. It belongs to me. I got it and I have not been treated right. Whichever details you prefer, one thing is sure. Jansen was upset over the treatment of the body and the treatment of himself, and he did return
to Georgetown Medical to take it back. The story diverges a bit here again. According to The Washington Post, Jansen needed another person to help him transport the body and hired him and named John Mack for the job. Mac was a local hack or hack Man that was a taxi driver at the time. For two dollars according to Mac, or five dollars according to Jansen, and a fresh bottle
of whiskey. According to both accounts, Mac transported Jansen along with the cadaver to Freedman Hospital, which was very close to where you'll find present day Howard University. Unfortunately, though, that bottle of whiskey was their downfall. Apparently they traded
and drank it at the same time. Because Mac was unable to complete the mission, he mistakenly took them to Colombian University's National Medical College, which is now George Washington Medical School, and that was about three miles away from the correct destination. By the time Jansen got them to Freedman, the sun was rising and Mac had a change of heart.
He left the scene as soon as they arrived and reported Jansen at the second Precinct station on U Street, where he also turned Shaw's corpse over to the authorities. Jensen was arrested that same day and reportedly told the arresting officer quote, I've been expecting you. I knew he would come. He was arrested and charged with transporting a human corpse through the streets without a permit, but he
was convicted of malicious trespass three days later. He was sentenced to eleven months and twenty nine days in jail. During his time in jail, Jansen spoke openly to the press about his career, claiming to have stolen and sold more than two hundred bodies in Washington, d c. And along the East Coast. It seems to have been a bit of a symbiotic relationship. The media loved a good story, and Jansen loved to talk to the media. He was friendly with several reporters at the Washington Post, and he
really enjoyed giving interviews. We have already quoted him from a few that he gave, and he gave interviews as often as he could, it seems, boasting to the press about his exploits. Sometimes he tipped them off to a good body snatching story, but it was and just for ego. Jensen also spoke at length defending his profession, explaining how important it was to not only the medical community, but
also to the health of the community at large. When you learn about him, it becomes clear pretty quickly that Jensen liked the money and the media attention that he afforded as a body snatcher. But by all accounts, Jansen also seemed to truly believe that the work he did as a resurrectionist was an important contribution to the advancement
of medical science. We're going to take a break for a word from our sponsor, and when we return, we will talk about Jansen's retirement from body snatching and what he was doing on stage at the Theater Comique. Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's talk about William Jensen's change of career after his release from jail. So, after he got out of jail, and perhaps it's speculated inspired by the increasing legislation regarding body snatching, Jansen retired from his resurrectionist career.
There's also some speculation that maybe he just lost interest, but there is also speculation that he could no longer do the work because he had become too well known. In eighty four, Jansen reportedly borrowed funds from Judge Henry Hilton, American jurist and businessman, and attempted to reinvent his career. He would become a lecturer about himself and it would
be a series about his legendary career. On May eighteenth that year, he made his dramatic debut at the Theater Comique, which is a popular vaudeville theater in northwest Washington, d c. Less than a mile from the White House. The theater's motto was a feast awaits you fit for royalty at Plebeian prices, and they welcomed the Resurrection King to their stage. The show is described as half lecture and half demonstration
of the life of a body snatcher. Jensen set the tone with his audience by saying, quote, no one respects a dead person more than I do, but some respect is due to the living. He suffered from stage fright and attendance was sparse. In fact, we think he may have performed for just one night, but accounts vary on
that the show went like this. Jensen spoke about the scientific and medical benefits of his work, and he closed with a bit of a re enactment or kind of a pantomime of his work, which included an assistant to act as a stand in for a corpse and several piles of soil on the stage. But Jensen's assistant was ticklish and burst into laughter every time he was picked up. No one wants a laughing corpse. The Washington Posts theater critic reported Jensen spoke inaudibly and his thick Danish accent
was difficult to understand. He also suggested Jensen sneaked nips of alcohol throughout his act among jeers and cat calls from the audience, who yelled things like, what kind of show is this? Anyway? It was a flop, is what it was. Local Washington residents, it's reported in historical records, actually raised funds to get Jansen to leave their city, and we don't hear much about him over the next
three years of his life. He does surface outside of Washington, though, according to the New York Times, he worked as an attendant at what was known as the Wards Island Lunatic Asylum, located in the northern end of the East River between Manhattan and Queens In October of eight seven, according to a brief published in The Washington Post, Jansen died with quote starvation staring him in the face in a quote fifteen cent lodging house on Pearl Street in New York City.
His cause of death was a self inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Depending on which rough estimate you choose to believe, Jansen was probably between forty and fifty years old when he died. If it seems like we've talked a lot about Jansen and the Washington Post reporters, we have at that's because he loved talking to them about himself. True or not, most of the stories were likely produced or at least inflated by a sensationalistic press, local cops
looking to be quoted, or of course, Jansen himself. The Post printed many articles covering his career as a resurrectionist in Washington, d c. As well as his brief appearance on stage, and the paper published a long obituary eulogizing him upon his death. Some have come to view their farewell to him as a farewell to resurrectionists in general and their business of providing medical schools with teaching tools. From it, we quote, the King of Ghouls is dead.
He was born to be a grave robber and followed his trade by instinct. He was proud, strange to say, of his work, and gloried in doing it in a systematic, scientific way. He did not belong to that class of grave robbers steal bodies for ransom that simply sought to supply medical colleges with subjects for dissection. It continues that he was quote most happy in the companionship of corpses, and that he quote grimly lamented his inability to rob his own grave, because no one could do such things
as well. Jansen's death, which happened around the same time as new legislation regarding body snatching for medical purposes and enforcement of that legislation, is often considered the end of traditional body snatching in the United States. In nineteen o two, the Anatomical Board of the District of Columbia was established by Act of Congress, fifteen years after Jansen's death. That board was made up of members from each medical school in the city, plus a public health officer, and medical
representatives from the Army and Navy. The board's business was to see that unclaimed dead bodies were distributed for medical purposes among medical and dental schools on the basis of each school's enrollment each year, and with that, the Professional Resurrectionist was closed for business in Washington, d C. So Holly, yes, I've prepared some embalming fluid. Yes, tell me about this. The second I started looking at this story, there was only one thing that I wanted to call my dream,
and it is the tinglish assistant. I loved detail about his stage. It's fantastic, and so I thought about what would work in that way. And the mention of whiskey, so I knew whiskey had to be in it. And I wanted something with bubbles, but I didn't want to do a champagne cocktail because I've done a few of those lately. I came up with something that chairs DNA with a few different cocktails, and I accidentally made something glorious. It has a lot of ingredients, but they're pretty basic.
Nothing is too crazy. You're off the beaten path. You're gonna start by putting a sprig of fresh rosemary into your cocktail shaker and just give it a press with your muddler. You don't have to like muddle muddle it. You're just breaking the surface of those fronds so that the flavor and the oils can join the party that's about to happen, because then you're going to add to that three quarters of an ounce of lemon cello, So your lemon liqueur, three quarters of an ounce of whiskey.
I'm gonna leave this to the drinker. I used Irish whiskey that tends to be my favorite, and then three quarters of an ounce of gin. So it's a heavy hitter. You can scale it up if you really want a Mama Jamma of a drink, you could do one ounce, one ounce, one ounce, but like keep in mind, this is a lot of alcohol. And then as an optional, you can add a splash of simple syrup or vanilla syrup.
It depends on whether or not you want sweet. That lemon cello is already going to add some sweetness to it. And then you add a drop of liquid smoke. One drop, that's all you need to give it an interesting flavor and and kind of expansive smoky edges. And then one egg white. God, it's an egg white drink. It's an egg white drink. You don't have to include the egg white,
but I highly recommend it. So then you have your egg white, and then you're just going to shake this thing like hell, like a minimum of fifteen seconds because you really want that egg white to get nice and frothy. You can shake it with ice if you want, but it won't get as frothy. I like to shake it without ice. That's just me. And then you will strain it over ice. This is different from some other eggy drinks because you don't always strain. You're gonna lose some
egg white in the process. That is okay, that's by design, because what we want to create and what we will create is a very delicate and airy froth that's on top of this thing. So when you pour it in, you may not even see that it has a whole lot of that frothy hen to it. But then you're gonna pour a couple ounces of ginger ale onto it, and that egg white kind of blooms into this beautiful cloud that is very airy. It's almost meringue lights in how airy it is, and there's a little bit of
stiffness to it, but not too much. And then just garnish that biz with a sprig of rosemary and you're off to the races. Oh no, it's so good, and it doesn't taste like any of the alcohol a little dangerous in that regard. It's three different kinds of alcohol going together. If you scale it up, please be careful, drink responsibly always. But um, yeah, it's one of those things that, like some of the other drinks that exist in the world, where there's a lot of alcohol, but
they somehow all mask one another. And you were like, oh, this doesn't taste like alcohol, and you have a couple while you're sitting and talking and then you get up and you go, oh, it has that effect, So just be careful. The mock tail is all so delicious, but of course a good bit different because we're not including three kinds of it's a little change. So you will, once again in a shaker, press your rosemary sprig as
you did above. You have an option here. You can either go with two ounces of cold coffee, or if you want to do a little bit of a combo, you can do like an ounce of cold coffee and an ounce of cold herbal tea. Of you're choosing, this is where I feel like a chrysanthemum tea might be really lovely. And then you're going to add an ounce of lemon juice and to this. You do want to sweeten it because you're not doing a liqueur that has sugar.
So add like a half an ounce a quarter to a half an ounce of simple or vanilla syrup, that same drop of liquid, smoke that same egg white, shake it and pour it and top it and garnish it like you would the cocktail, and once again it gets that beautiful, frothy top to it. It's so pretty, it's so delicious. This is like one that I was like, this is not gonna work, and then it did and I felt like a magician. And that's the ticklish assistant.
So it has some bubbles which I associate with ticklishness, and it will tickle your palette in a way that might surprise you because it really you're like, I can't taste gin or whiskey, I get lemon and I get the ginger ale. No, you feel it like picky and ticklish. That was a really fun one to make. I was so pleasantly delighted with how it came out. We hope that if you try this you also enjoy it. Like I said, I tried not to put anything to kuki or unexpected or hard to find on it, just all
the alcohol. Just use those scraps of whiskey and gin you have lying around. This is a good thing. I used to sometimes do this because often, like you know, if we'll have a party or something, people will bring alcoholic gift. And sometimes it's not always like your spirit of choice, right I I don't really drink that much whiskey. Gin is hit or miss. But if you have one that you're not in love with, this is a good way to use it in a really delicious way and
make something wonderful with it. Try new things. I'm a big fan of always trying new things. You should always play with your food and drink in the best way. This one sounds delicious, even with the egg white. You know I will do it. You can leave the egg white off. You'll just get the bubbles from the ginger ale and not that beautiful foamy, bubbly top to it, and of course egg white. Like you always want to
be careful. Eggs are raw food at that point, and particularly anyone who is pregnant needs to be very careful with that. Anyone with any other immunity issues, you want to be very careful. But if you're into the egg I love an eggie cock. You have beautiful egg yolk that you can use to make really wonderful dressings or something for a meal later. Listen, use all the parts of the whale um. You hope that if you make
this one, you have fun doing it. And we also want to make sure we thank you once again for spending this time with us. This week. Their resurrectionist party going on over here. There will be more evolving fluid next week, and another resurrectionist right here on Criminalia. Criminalia is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,