Dear Reader,

I suspect you wonder what in the world is true about Josephine’s tale. While Gloughton and Ainsley are fictional towns, there are several factual threads that make up such a yarn. The true crime of body snatching was more rampant than rare throughout history, and as I dug into research, I discovered how common this practice was amidst the 19^th century medical community.

Because of the lack of medical advancement, doctors sometimes mistook a person as being truly dead, ending in the alarming outcome of “live” burials. These types of horrific mistakes, along with the desire for finding cures, led many doctors to hire body snatchers, or “resurrection men,” to obtain corpses for research purposes. I was surprised to come across a case where several stolen bodies supplied an entire medical society, but more disturbing was the fact that some body snatchers would even murder for the chance of payment.

Outraged relatives of the deceased pressured officials for justice, and by 1815 in Boston, an act to protect the “Sepulchres of the Dead” passed, declaring body snatching illegal (see www.truecolorscrime.com for the actual act). Several snatchers ventured to New York to continue supplying doctors around Boston.

As precautions were made to protect gravesites, body snatchers would hire women to pose as mourners and keep watch for any obstacles that might thwart a quick retrieval. It is a very real fact that body snatching was not always a lonely business, but one that depended on a type of network.

Many other factual tidbits are laced in Josephine’s tale. If you’d like to contact me or learn more about my books, sign up for my newsletter at www.angiedicken.com.

Thanks for reading!
Angie Dicken