Benson Munyan was born in Leeds, Massachusetts, in 1837, the son of Orrin Munyan, a Methodist lay preacher, and his wife Susanna (Bardwell) Munyan. As a young man, Munyan worked in the cotton and brass mills of Haydenville, a village in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. He married Hattie Lathrop in 1858, with whom he had four children.

A musician, Munyan was a member of the 27th Massachusetts Regiment’s band during the early years of the Civil War. He was a well-known local figure, active in the local Masonic lodge and in local politics, serving as selectman in the 1870s and deputy sheriff in the years before being appointed to the Massachusetts District Police.

After nearly two decades on the force, Munyan suffered a paralytic shock in 1896, and this, coupled with the loss of his wife in 1897, caused a steady decline in his health, leading to his retirement in February 1899. He died at the asylum in Northampton, Massachusetts, four months later and is buried at High Street Cemetery in Haydenville along with his wife and two children who died young.

The Massachusetts District Police and the “Rogues Gallery”

In 1865, Governor John A. Andrew established the State Constabulary Force, comprising 20 constables with state-wide authority—thus creating the first state police force in the nation. This in turn was replaced in 1875 by the State Detective Force—30 detectives and a chief—responsible for criminal cases and suppressing riots. In 1879, responding to criticisms of the State Detectives, Governor Thomas Talbot established the Massachusetts District Police. Each of the officers was appointed by the governor for a three-year term and was paid an annual salary of $1200 plus expenses. In the first year of their existence, the 16 detectives made 461 arrests for a wide range of crimes ranging from horse theft to safe cracking to murder and arson. The photographs in Munyan’s collection run the gamut of criminals and crimes and in addition to names, aliases, and crimes charged, the cards often include physical characteristics, nativity, literacy, employment status, and other identifying information about the perpetrator.

Who was Dr. Harvey T. Stanley?

Like a lot of the perpetrators memorialized in this Rogues Gallery, the photograph of Dr. Harvey Stanley betrays no outward trace of criminality—he looks every bit the successful professional man. Indeed, the same portrait of him was used in 1894 for a woodcut in an advertisement in for his services as a clairvoyant and magnetic physician in Milwaukee. In Professional Criminals of America, a detective notes that “rascals … resemble the best people in the country. … thieves must dress up to their business … they attire themselves so as to attract the least attention from the class of people among whom they wish to operate.” As someone selling fraudulent mortgages, then, Stanley had to look the part of a self-confident businessman, a persona that was also necessary for his “real” work. Of all the photographs in this Rogues Gallery, Stanley’s stands out given the arresting officer’s use of quotes around the term “Dr.” on the back of his photograph. Detective Hayter of Worcester apparently put little stock in Stanley’s profession of Clairvoyant Physician—perhaps thinking it was all a con, like the one that got him arrested and sentenced to eight months in the House of Corrections.

Although concrete information about Stanley is hard to pin down, in the years after his release, he turns up in places as far flung as Grand Rapids, Omaha, Chicago, and Milwaukee, plying the trade of clairvoyant and magnetic physician, spiritualist lecturer, and medium as Dr. H.T. Stanley (never Harvey, and variously “of Boston,” New York, or Chicago). An advertisement in the Galveston Daily Times in 1891 described him as “among the leading mediums of this country … His lectures are of the highest order of eloquence and beauty of language.” By 1894, Stanley had set up shop in Milwaukee where a reporter for the American School Board Journal interviewed him about his remarkable ability to diagnose and cure illnesses without a word passing between doctor and patient. Numerous advertisements placed in the Milwaukee Journal in November and December of 1894 state that he has located permanently in the city and tout his abilities as a healer of “Rheumatism, Nervous Diseases, Lost Memory etc.,” but after that, the trail goes cold. Was he run out of town? Did he change his name? One can only speculate.