It is not known whether or not he was able to fulfill his promise.
However, it is known from the announcement in the local daily press that
Old Cunny met his demise on November 2, 1871, at the age of 64.[5]
According to Juettner that was not the end, however, of his earthly
remains; for on authority of this author, prior to Cunningham’s death,
he had sold his body to the Medical College of Ohio, and when he died it
was turned over to that institution by his “bereaved widow” who managed
to get an additional $5.00 bill for his giant carcass. This author also
made the claim that, at the time when he wrote the statement, “the
skeleton of Old Cunny is to this day the _pièce de résistance_ in the
museum of the Medical College of Ohio.”[6]
Juettner’s claim as to the eventual fate of Old Cunny’s skeleton has
been verified by a statement received recently from the Department of
Anatomy, University of Cincinnati, College of Medicine, where the
skeleton is now housed.
This is not the last we hear of Old Cunny’s widow, who has been
described as being “a bony, brawny-jawed Irish woman, with a mouth like
an alligator.” She had evidently taken up Old Cunny’s business where he
left off, judging from a news item that appeared in the OHIO STATE
JOURNAL of December 6, 1878, under the date line Cincinnati, December 5.
According to this news report, a gang of resurrectionists consisting of
five persons was arrested in that city, included among which were two
women, one of whom was “the widow of Cunningham, of former notoriety in
this business.”
Upon such depraved characters as the Cunninghams did the anatomists of
the nineteenth century have to rely for the procurement of their
anatomical subjects prior to the passage of anatomy laws, which made it
unnecessary to resort to the nefarious and odious practice of body
snatching. Inasmuch as the identities of the procurers and of the bodies
which they delivered to the medical colleges were unknown to the anatomy
professors, all business transactions having been carried on through an
intermediary person—usually the janitor—the professors were consequently
absolved of being a principal or accessory to the crime of body
snatching. Granted that anyone who would be so wanton as to make his
livelihood by desecrating places of human sepulture was deserving of all
the villifying names hurled at him; nevertheless we should not lose
sight of the fact that the sins of commission of the ghoulish
resurrectionists were made possible by sins of omission of the public
and of their representatives in the legislative halls, who refused for
so many years to support an anatomy law, which, as time has proved,
abolished the need for resurrectionists.