Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  And even today, they remain uniquely appalling. As any chronicle of U.S. crime proves, there have been plenty of bad seeds scattered throughout our history. But beyond doubt, the most heinous of all was the barely pubescent child-torturer and killer who came to be known as the “Boston Boy Fiend,” and whose crimes—committed just a few years after the Civil War ended—would continue to haunt America for the next half century.

  1

  He had now entered the skirts of the village. A troop of strange children ran at his heels, hooting after him, and pointing at his gray beard. . . . The very village was altered; it was larger and more populous. There were rows of houses which he had never seen before, and those which had been his familiar haunts had disappeared. Strange names were over the doors—strange faces at the windows—everything was strange.

  —Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle”

  AUGUST 1, 1929

  Dressed in the street clothes they had given him—a shabby gray suit, its baggy pants supported by galluses; a rumpled white shirt, its collar too small to button; an old silk tie that dangled halfway down his chest; and a grotesque, checkered cap that sat on his head like an enormous mushroom—he emerged into the sun-drenched prison yard. In his right hand, he clutched a paper-wrapped bundle about the size of a shoebox. His entire fund of worldly possessions was inside: a Bible, two or three poetry books, a few legal documents, some old, dog-eared letters.

  Above him—patrolling the walls and stationed in the armored cupola of the gray, stone rotunda—the rifle-wielding guards peered down curiously at the spectacle below.

  A crowd of journalists—reporters, photographers, representatives of international wire services—had assembled in the yard. At the first glimpse of the shambling old man—his face half-hidden by the brim of his comically oversized cap—they began calling his name, snapping pictures, shouting questions.

  He pulled the brim lower over his eyes, tightened his mouth into a deep frown, and allowed the attendants to hurry him past the crowd and toward the rotunda.

  The clamor of the mob was deeply unnerving. Still, their presence was a source of some satisfaction—a confirmation of his celebrity. He had always taken pride in his status as “America’s most famous lifer,” in the awed looks he drew from new inmates when they caught their first glimpse of him. Lately, however, a whole generation of fresh fish had begun to filter inside—young punks who neither knew nor cared anything about the old man everyone called “Grandpa.” And when somebody told them who he was, they just shrugged, sneered, or looked utterly blank. His name—once so notorious that its mere mention could induce shudders in impressionable children—meant nothing to them.

  Now—sullen-tempered as ever—he cursed under his breath as he waited for the attendants to unlock the double-barred doors and usher him into the reception room. Inside, Warden Hogsett and a few other officials were waiting. Ignoring the warden, he grumbled a few words of farewell to the chaplain.

  Then—at precisely 11:35 A.M.—Hogsett nodded to the attendants, the screen door was thrown open, and—flanked by two officers, Joseph O’Brien and William Robinson—he stepped out into the world.

  * * *

  It was the first time in more than fifty years that he had breathed the air beyond the dark walls of the state prison. Everyone involved in sending him there was long gone—the judge who had tried him, the attorney general and D.A. who had prosecuted him, the governor who had spared his life and sentenced him to a living death instead. He had survived them all. That was another source of satisfaction. The thought of it nearly brought a smile to his face. If it had, the sight would almost certainly have caused his captors to take notice. No one in all the years of his incarceration had ever seen him smile.

  A small sedan was waiting in the cobblestoned square outside the main iron gate. So was an enormous crowd of curiosity-seekers—more than one thousand people in all. They had been there since daybreak. At various points throughout the morning, policemen from Station Fifteen in City Square, Charlestown, had tried to disperse them. But the milling crowd would only wander a short distance away, then gather again in front of the prison as soon as the officers had left.

  Even he was taken aback by the size of the crowd. Evidently, the public had not forgotten his name after all.

  “Get in, Jesse,” said Officer Robinson, motioning him toward the open door.

  He knew all about motorcars, of course. During the past dozen years—ever since the granite door of his tiny cell had been opened and he had been allowed to emerge, Lazarus-like, from his tomb—he had seen one or two official automobiles in the prison yard. Still, he had never actually ridden in one. So unfamiliar was he with the procedure that, as he stepped onto the running board, his foot slipped, he smacked his head against the top of the doorframe, and his cap tumbled onto the cobblestones. He stooped to retrieve it, mashed it back down onto his head, and—ducking into the car—sank into the rear right seat.

  Several squealing children ran up to the sedan, pointing up at the rear window as they capered and laughed. He put his face to the glass and glared down at them. Their laughter died instantly, and they scurried away. His face always had the power to frighten little children and, if anything, it had grown even more unsettling over the years—the heavy jaw jutting grotesquely; the down-turned mouth made even more baleful-looking by the drooping walrus moustache; the left eye now filmed by a cataract; and the right one—its pupil a dead, milky white—as profoundly disconcerting as ever.

  Officer Robinson slammed the rear door closed and climbed into the passenger seat. The engine roared. An escort of three motorcycle officers cleared a path. The convoy was on its way.

  * * *

  Measured in space, the trip to his new home was relatively short—a distance of around forty miles. But the leap through time was almost inconceivably vast—every bit as staggering as Rip Van Winkle’s supernatural experience in the ghost-haunted Kaatskills, or the fantastic voyage of H. G. Wells’s imaginary time-traveler. When he had last set eyes on the outside world, Ulysses S. Grant was president and Victoria queen. The whole country was in an uproar over the Custer massacre. The telephone hadn’t been invented. And the neighborhoods of Charlestown, as one commentator described them, offered unbroken vistas of “muddy streets, horse-cars, oil-lamps, and two-story frame shacks.”

  Now, fifty-three years and one global war later, he was traveling through a world of telecommunication and transatlantic flight, neon signs and subways, radio stars and racing cars, motion pictures and jazz music, Cubist painting and quantum physics. For the nearly two hours of his trip, he gazed wordlessly at the marvels of modern civilization. He saw steam shovels, airplanes, elevated trains, and thoroughfares clogged with motorized traffic.

  The whole world had changed. Except for one thing. The sidewalks were still full of frolicking children. And as the car came to a halt in front of a drugstore—where Jesse would be treated to his first-ever taste of ginger ale and vanilla ice cream in a sugary cone—it was hard for him not to remember those days, more than fifty years back, when he roamed this world freely. A time when the streets were his stalking-ground, and the little children his prey.

  2

  Pity is not natural to man. Children always are cruel. Savages are always cruel.

  —James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson

  Everything about the two men has been lost to history: who they were, where they lived, what they were doing upon that lonely hill. The newspapers report that a bitter wind was blowing on that frigid afternoon in 1871, the day after Christmas. So it is possible that, at first, they could not distinguish the sound—or that, hearing it, they mistook it for the wailing of the wind. Only gradually would they have recognized the noise for what it was: the thin, keening cry of a very young child.

  It was coming from the only structure in the vicinity: a tumbledown privy perched atop Powder Horn Hill, lying on the outskirts of Chelsea. Exchanging a look, the men hurried toward the little outbuilding
and threw open the door. The sight that struck them caused them to gape in confusion.

  It was the half-naked body of a very young boy—three, maybe four years old—dangling limply from a roof beam by a rope lashed around his wrists. His eyes were closed and he might have been dead, except for the piteous sounds that issued from his lips. The frigid air that whistled through the cracks in the deserted outhouse had turned his mouth a ghastly purple-blue. His exposed torso was equally discolored and covered with gooseflesh. As the suspended body spun slowly in the air, one of the thunderstruck men let out a gasp at the huge, ugly welts that covered the child’s back.

  Pulling out a pocket knife, he rushed toward the little victim and cut him down from the beam, while his companion stripped off his coat and wrapped it around the brutalized, half-frozen child. Gradually, the boy’s quaking subsided and he opened his eyes. But the terror he had suffered had left him too traumatized to speak. All the information they could get from him was his name—Billy Paine. By evening, his rescuers had located his home and returned the little boy to his overwrought parents, who wasted no time in alerting the Chelsea police.

  With no solid information to go on, however, the authorities were helpless. They could only hope that the abduction and torture of little Billy Paine was an isolated incident.

  They had no way of knowing that it was only the first, and by no means the worst, of a whole series of related atrocities—that a reign of terror had just begun.

  3

  Some months ago, a big boy decoyed a smaller one to an old house in the rear of Powder Horn Hill, where he stripped and tied and beat him in a most cruel manner without any provocation or apparent motive whatever. This fiendish brute has appeared again, for it can hardly be possible that the same villain should have an imitator.

  —Chelsea Pioneer and Telegraph, February 22, 1872

  Two months later, on February 21, 1872, officers from the same Chelsea station were summoned to a weatherbeaten little house occupied by a family named Hayden. In spite of the cold, a small group of neighbors—their faces taut with dismay—had gathered out front. They parted in silence as the two policemen strode up to the door.

  The officers found Mr. Hayden inside the dimly lit parlor, surrounded by five of his six children, none older than twelve. Except for the sobbing infant cradled in its older sister’s arms, all the children had the same half-frightened, half-bewildered expression on their pale faces. Hayden himself—a stoop-shouldered, twenty-eight-year-old workingman with a sallow face and thin, yellow moustache—wore a look in which anxiety and rage seemed equally commingled.

  At his first sight of the officers, he began pouring out a story about his little son, Tracy, who had been lured to an abandoned outhouse by an older boy and savagely attacked.

  “Where is he now?” asked one of the policemen, an officer named McNeil.

  Hayden nodded toward the rear of the house. “My wife is tending to him until the doctor arrives,” he said grimly. “The boy is in a bad way. Come. See for yourself.” Leading the way, he ushered them toward the bedroom he shared with his wife.

  The officers could hear the sounds even before they crossed the threshold: the ragged whimpering of the child, the soothing words of the mother. Her gaunt, prematurely aged face illuminated by an oil lamp, Mrs. Hayden stood by the bedside, applying compresses to the back of the brutalized boy, who lay face downward on the mattress. After welcoming the officers with a nod, she removed the damp cloths, revealing a row of ugly raised welts across the child’s back.

  “Let the policemen see what the bad boy did to your face,” she said softly, helping little Tracy to sit up on the edge of the mattress.

  The sight of the seven-year-old’s face made the two officers wince. He looked like a fighter who had just suffered a terrible beating in the ring: eyes swollen and badly discolored, nose broken, upper lip split. Two of his front teeth had been knocked out.

  It took a while for the officers to extract a coherent statement from the terrorized boy—and even then, important details were lacking, most crucially a precise description of the assailant. According to Tracy, he had been playing in the street when he was approached by a “big boy with brown hair” who had asked if he “wanted to go to Powder Horn Hill to see the soldiers.” When Tracy agreed, the big boy had led him to an abandoned outhouse on top of the hill and set upon him.

  Officer McNeil asked him to describe exactly what the other boy had done.

  “He stripped me and put a handkerchief in my mouth,” Tracy answered in a tremulous voice. “Then he tied up my feet and hands and tied me to a beam. Then he whipped me with a hard stick and said”—here, the boy’s voice dropped so low that his listeners couldn’t make out the rest of the sentence.

  “What did he say, lad?” McNeil coaxed.

  Tracy cleared his throat and, lisping through his missing front teeth, replied:

  “He said he would cut my penis off.”

  * * *

  Like Tracy Hayden, Robert Maier was enticed from the safety of his Chelsea neighborhood by an offer that no eight-year-old boy could possibly resist. On May 20, 1872—three months after the Hayden incident—Maier was approached by an older, brown-haired boy, who—after striking up a conversation with Robert—asked if he would like to go to see Barnum’s circus.

  When Maier eagerly agreed, the older boy led him toward Powder Horn Hill. On the way, they passed a pond, its surface clotted with scum. All of a sudden, the stranger grabbed Robert by the arm and tried to push him into the pond. Struggling wildy, the little boy managed to break free of the stranger’s grasp.

  “Why’d you do that?” Robert cried.

  In response, the big boy cuffed him on the side of the head, then dragged the stunned and sobbing victim to an isolated outhouse, where he stripped off Maier’s clothing, shoved a milk cork in his mouth, and tied him to a post with a length of clothesline. Laughing and jumping, he whipped the helpless boy with a stick. Then he pulled the cork from his mouth and forced him to say bad things—“prick,” “shit,” “kiss my ass.”

  Hearing these profanities seemed to make the boy even more excited. He began to breathe very hard and fiddle with himself through his coveralls. After a few minutes he gave a great shuddering moan and leaned against the privy wall, eyes tightly closed, mouth agape.

  He seemed to be calmer after that. Freeing Robert from his bonds, he told the terrified boy to put on his clothes. Then he let him go.

  * * *

  By the following morning, word of the most recent assault had spread throughout Chelsea. Over the next few weeks, hundreds of boys were questioned by the police. At some point, a rumor sprang up that the attacker was a young man with fiery red hair, pale skin, arched eyebrows, and a pointy chin adorned with a wispy, red beard. Parents began to warn their children to watch out for this red-haired stranger—never realizing that this Mephistophelean figure was a figment of communal fears: a description, not of the actual perpetrator, but of a devil.

  4

  Fathers began to tell their boys to be careful of a man with red hair and beard, and mothers were anxious if their boys were out of sight for half-a-day.

  —Boston Globe, September 21, 1872

  It had been, for the seven-year-old boy, a fine summer day: his favorite pancake breakfast, followed by several intensely gratifying hours playing street games—shinny, old cat, kick-the-can—with his friends. Now, he was wending his way home. The weather was perfect—cloudless and balmy. In spite of the tempting dinner that awaited him—the roast joint of mutton with mashed potatoes and flour gravy that his mother fixed every weekend—he was in no particular hurry as he ambled along the empty streets on that sleepy afternoon, July 22, 1872.

  Though there were shorter ways home, he chose the route that led past Polley’s Toy Shop on Park Street. Arrived at the store, he cupped his hands on either side of his eyes and put his face close to the display window. He knew its contents by heart—the tin soldiers, clockwork acrobats, cast-iro
n locomotives, wooden circus animals, repeating cap pistols, Crandall building blocks, kaleidoscopes, mechanical banks, and soap-bubble blowers.

  But as he surveyed these treasures, his gaze fell on something he had never seen before—a miniature wooden castle, complete with moat, drawbridge, a crew of wooden pirates, and a working toy cannon that fired marble-sized balls. Directly beneath the battlement of the colorfully painted façade were the stenciled words: “Kaptain Kidd’s Kastle.” It was a plaything guaranteed to produce a covetous pang in the breast of any seven-year-old boy. But its price—two dollars—placed it completely beyond his reach.

  Suddenly, he gave a start. Someone had tapped him roughly on the shoulder. He turned and squinted up at the person, whose face—backlit by the bright midday sun—was hard for him to see.

  “What’s your name?” the stranger said gruffly.

  “Johnny,” the boy replied. “Johnny Balch.”

  “How’d you like to make two bits, Johnny?”

  Ever since the spring, Johnny’s parents had warned him to beware of a bearded, redheaded stranger. But this person didn’t have red hair or a beard. He wasn’t even a grown-up man, but an older boy—maybe fifteen or sixteen.

  “I guess I would,” said Johnny.

  “Then come with me,” said the strange boy. “I will take you to the man.”

  “What man?” Johnny asked.

  “The one with the money. He wants you to do an errand—to carry a small bundle.”

  Johnny hesitated—but only for a moment. Twenty-five cents wouldn’t buy him the toy castle that had just become his heart’s most avid desire. But it would purchase a plentiful supply of penny candy.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Without another word, the older boy turned and began to walk toward Powder Horn Hill, Johnny following a few paces behind.