What an 1887 murder and dismemberment tells us about race relations today

On the freezing-cold morning of Feb. 17, 1887, a Bensalem carpenter walking by an ice pond noticed a parcel wrapped in brown paper and marked "handle with care." Inside, he found a male torso of indeterminate race. The limbs and head were nowhere in sight.

So begins Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso, the new book by historian and African studies scholar Kali Nicole Gross.

It's the type of tale you don't often hear during Black History Month: the biography of an antiheroine who made her way in the world through violence, deception, and adultery. It's also a true-crime story told nearly 130 years after the fact - culminating in the century-late exoneration of a man who, Gross argues, was framed for murder.

Most of all, the story of Tabbs, the Philadelphia woman who left the torso by the pond in the first place - and of Wakefield Gaines, her victim and much-younger lover, and George Wilson, the "weak-minded" 18-year-old she accused of the crime - is an encapsulation of issues that resonate today, of racial bias in policing, coerced confessions, and unreliable eyewitnesses.

"Tabbs' story sheds this unprecedented light," Gross said, "into just how long these issues around urban crime and police brutality have been around in our society."

Gross, 43, a professor at the University of Texas-Austin, began the work eight years ago, while she was living in Philadelphia. (She attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania and taught at Drexel University.)

She had been researching black female entrepreneurs, but a semester teaching at Muncy state prison, which houses Pennsylvania's female inmates, set her on a different path.

"When I got there, I was just astonished at how overrepresented black women were in that population. Up until that time, I understood mass incarceration as an issue that predominantly impacted black men," she said. "Add to that the fact that the institution itself looked strangely old. I started wondering: How long have black women just sort of been here?"

She began tracing that history and, in 2006, published Colored Amazons, stories of black women in the Philadelphia criminal-justice system around the turn of the 20th century.

But the Tabbs case, she decided, deserved its own monograph.

"I've always wanted to see different kinds of black women in history: women who could be flawed and problematic and ultimately human," she said.

She got it. As she said, "Tabbs is messy."

Gross began untangling Tabbs' story by wading through marriage records, bills of indictment, and trial transcripts at the city archives, and a scrapbook of news clippings that Eastern State Penitentiary administrators maintained on the most sensational cases.

There were breathless news accounts of the crime, investigation, and trial. Gross even gave herself a "macabre walking tour" of the crime scene - near 16th Street and what's now Addison Street - trying to imagine Tabbs (who was sentenced to two years in prison) hauling the head and limbs to the Schuylkill (they were never found), and the torso to the train bound for Bucks County.

Tabbs' personal history was more elusive: Had she been enslaved? Who were her parents?

As Gross tried to trace Tabbs' roots, she discovered the woman often used aliases and falsified records, even claiming her daughter was actually her niece.

"I was spinning my wheels in Richmond, Va., looking for someone with a completely different name," Gross said. Finally, she came across paperwork suggesting the answer might lie elsewhere. She eventually placed Tabbs' birth in the 1850s, and found her given name was Hannah Ann Smith.

"I got as close as Anne Arundel County, Md.," Gross said, "and I have accepted that there's a lot about this woman that will remain a mystery."

In uncovering the story, she shed light on the tense race relations of the time: Tabbs' vulnerable place under the law as a black woman, and Wilson's still-more-tenuous status as a light-skinned interracial man.

"People were very concerned about black people infiltrating white society. Wilson is really the sum of all fears," Gross said. "Police home in on him despite the fact he had no real motive."

Wilson, known to be "dim" and impressionable, was beaten in custody - until, Gross concludes, he made a false confession. (He was sentenced to 12 years in solitary confinement.)

Ed Baptist, a Cornell University historian and author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, was an early reader of the book. He was struck, he said, by how little has changed.

"It's really a mirror for our own time. It's interesting to think about [Wilson's confession] in the context of something like Making a Murderer," he said, referencing the Netflix documentary that depicts what appears to be a false confession by an accused teen killer.

Likewise, he said, Tabbs' story - that of a perpetrator who was likely a victim first - rings familiar.

"It suggests that there are certain people in the United States in the late 19th century, and again maybe in the early 21st century, whose options are so narrowed by these constraints of wealth and class and race that it starts to look like violence is one of the only ways they can reclaim their own circumstances and get any kind of autonomy."

And that, in the end, is Gross' point.

"I think that's an important lesson for us to think about. Populations in our society that are deemed the most dangerous and criminalized are the most vulnerable," Gross said. "We need to find better ways to deal with that."

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