Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  There was a brickyard at the top of the hill. Leading the little boy toward an outhouse at the far end of the yard, the older boy came to a halt. Johnny looked around for the man they were supposed to meet—but there was no one else in sight.

  Very suddenly, the older boy grabbed Johnny by the shirt collar, yanked him into the outhouse, and slammed the door shut.

  “If you make a sound,” he growled to the startled boy, “I will kill you.”

  A whimper rose in Johnny’s throat, but—with an effort that made his eyes tear—he swallowed it back.

  Very quickly, the older boy tore off all of Johnny’s clothes. Then—in a series of swift, practiced movements—he drew a length of rope from his pants pocket, lashed together the little boy’s wrists, tossed the opposite end of the rope over an exposed roofbeam, and hauled Johhny into the air of the stinking little outbuilding.

  “Now I will flog you!” cried the older boy, his voice quivering with a terrible excitement.

  Pulling off his belt, he began to beat the dangling boy all over the body, beginning with his back, then his chest and belly, his thighs, his buttocks. He saved the child’s genitals for last. The torture lasted for nearly ten minutes.

  All at once, the older boy let out a long, tremulous moan. His frenzy subsided. He stood in the murk of the outhouse, panting heavily, as though he had just run a great distance. Then he lowered the sobbing boy to the ground, undid the rope from his wrists, and hissed: “If you leave this place, I will come back and slit your throat.”

  Coiling up the rope, he slipped it back into his pocket, threw open the outhouse door, and vanished.

  For the next two hours, Johnny Balch—his body mottled with black-and-blue welts—lay naked on the floor of the outhouse. It wasn’t until nearly five o’clock that a passerby named Frank Kane heard his muffled cries and—after helping the half-conscious boy back into his clothes—carried him all the way to the City Marshal’s office. A physician was called, a statement taken, and an officer sent to notify Johnny’s parents, who—fearing that some terrible mishap had befallen their missing son—had begun their own frantic search of the neighborhood.

  * * *

  The story of the savage attack on little Johnny Balch was carried by newspapers throughout the area. Under the headline, “Unaccountable Depravity,” the Boston Evening Transfer of July 23, 1872, reported that “In the Common Council last night, Mr. Rogers of Ward 4, alluding to the diabolical outrage committed upon the Balch boy and to the nearly similar case of two or three months ago involving young Robert Meier, offered an order appropriating $500 as a reward for the arrest and conviction of the miscreant or miscreants. The order was unanimously adopted.”

  The so-called “Boy Torturer” now had a bounty on his head. And there were plenty of people eager to collect it. Within the week, armed vigilance committees had formed throughout Chelsea.

  As the Boston Globe reported in a July 28 story headlined “A Fiendish Boy”: “The public are considerably excited—and it is a good thing for the inhuman scamp that his identity is unknown just now.”

  5

  My mother groaned! my father wept.

  Into the dangerous world I leapt,

  Helpless, naked, piping loud;

  Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

  —William Blake, “Infant Sorrow”

  On the morning after the attack on the Balch boy, a woman named Ruth Ann Pomeroy sat at the kitchen table of the rundown little house she rented in Charlestown, reading about the incident in the local newspaper. When she looked up from the page, her face was deeply creased with concern.

  The most generous of observers would have been hard-pressed to find anything complimentary to say about that face. The features—heavy jaw, jutting brow, narrow eyes, sullen mouth—had been exceptionally coarse even in her youth. Now, at the age of thirty-three, she could have easily passed for a man. A particularly dour and evil-tempered man.

  Part of the harshness that suffused her face could have been traced to the tribulations of her life. She was a shrewd and industrious woman—but even so, she had always struggled bitterly to make ends meet. Now that she and her husband, Thomas, had split up, she would have to work even harder.

  She had finally gotten rid of the drunken brute just a few days earlier. It happened after their younger son, Jesse, ran away from home again following a savage argument with the old man. Thomas had tracked the boy down, dragged him home, then—after ordering him upstairs—stripped off all his clothes and flogged him unmercifully with a belt. It was almost as bad as the beating he had given Jesse a few years earlier, when he had horsewhipped his son in the woodshed for playing truant.

  When Ruth came home from her errands and saw her son’s back, she flew into a rage and—shrieking wildly at Thomas—went for him with a kitchen knife. Her husband had fled the house, cursing. Now she was on her own, the sole caretaker of her two young boys.

  Not that Ruth herself hadn’t punished Jesse on occasion. From his earliest childhood, he had always been . . . difficult. It wasn’t that he was dim-witted. Quite the contrary. The boy had a solid head on his shoulders and always seemed to have his nose buried in a book. Still, he was constantly getting into trouble. She remembered the time, about six years back, when he was sent home from primary school for supposedly tormenting the younger children by sneaking up on them and making scary faces. And then there was that time, after they moved to Bunker Hill Street, when he’d made his teacher at the Winthrop Grammar School so angry by tossing a firecracker into a group of little boys gathered outside during recess.

  And then, of course, there was the incident with the neighbor’s kitten.

  For the most part, Ruth had dismissed these accusations as malicious lies. Even as a toddler, Jesse had always made an easy target for people because of his unfortunate appearance. He was a natural scapegoat, that was all.

  Still, even she had to admit that he was a handful. She knew he sometimes stole small sums of money from her—money she could ill afford to spare. And he was always running away from home or playing hooky. And then there was the business with the canaries.

  Ruth would have liked to brighten up their home with a songbird. But she didn’t feel easy about bringing pets into the house. Not since she had come home that afternoon a few years earlier and found the two canaries she had recently purchased on the bottom of their cage, their heads twisted completely off their bodies.

  Still, she could not help feeling protective of Jesse. She was a ferociously loyal mother. And he was, after all, her baby boy.

  Now, as she sat at her kitchen table, she thought about the article she had just read—about the third dreadful assault committed right across the river by the juvenile reprobate that the papers had started calling the “boy torturer.” She was worried about Jesse—and not because she was afraid that he might become another victim.

  Not that she seriously believed he could be the culprit. Still . . . with Thomas gone and all of Chelsea in an uproar over the “boy torturer,” it might be a good time to move.

  One week later, on August 2, 1872, she packed up her meager belongings and, with her two sons in tow, found a new place to live—a small frame house at 312 Broadway in South Boston.

  6

  These repeated cruelties on these babyish victims created a tremendous excitement all over Chelsea and South Boston. . . . Of course, the parents were half crazed, and search was made by the most skilled detectives for the ghoul-like monster who seemed to be preying on human blood. The little victims were so terrified that they could hardly give an intelligible description of the vampire who had tortured them; and for this reason, the police had very poor clues upon which to work.

  —Anonymous, The Life of Jesse H. Pomeroy, the Boy Fiend (1875)

  On August 17, 1872, a child named George Pratt became the fifth known victim of the “boy torturer.” This time, however, the outrage did not take place in Chelsea. It happened in South Boston—not far from the neighborhood tha
t Ruth Ann Pomeroy and her two young sons had moved into a few weeks earlier.

  Shortly before ten on that sultry Saturday morning, the Pratt boy—a frail, pallid seven-year-old who had recently recovered from a bout of the German measles—was walking on the beach along South Boston bay, searching for any treasures that might have washed up onto the sand. All at once, he became aware that he was no longer alone—someone had come up beside him.

  It was an older boy, who told George that he needed help with an errand and would reward him with the impressive sum of twenty-five cents. When George agreed, the stranger led him to an abandoned boathouse. Once inside, the older boy struck George a powerful blow on the side of the head, then—after forcing a filthy handkerchief into the stunned child’s mouth—stripped him naked and tightly bound his wrists and ankles with two pieces of cord.

  “You have told three lies,” the older boy said cryptically, his voice trembling with a strange excitation. “And I am going to lick you three times.”

  In spite of the stifling air inside the little building, the seven-year-old was shivering with terror. But his fear only seemed to make his attacker more aroused. In the dimness, George could not make out the older boy’s features. But he could hear him panting with excitement.

  Very suddenly, the older boy tore off his leather belt and—dancing about in a kind of frenzy—began flogging George with the buckle. After a while, he started to kick the boy savagely—in the head, in the stomach, between the legs. He dug his dirt-caked fingernails into the boy’s upper body and raked deep, ragged furrows across his abdomen and chest. At one point, he bent his head to the seven-year-old’s face and—like a scavenger battening on fresh kill—bit a chunk of flesh from his cheek.

  When the little boy began to lose consciousness, his tormentor slapped him awake. The child’s eyes fluttered open and—through his tears—he saw the big boy’s hand only inches away, holding something slender and shiny.

  “Know what I’m going to do now?” the big boy said.

  George made a high-pitched, imploring sound deep in his throat. The thing in the big boy’s hand was a long sewing needle.

  “Little bastard,” the big boy hissed and jabbed George in the arm with the needle. The seven-year-old shrieked, but his cry was muffled by the gag.

  The big boy jabbed George in the chest. Then in his wounded cheek. Then he pulled the writhing boy’s legs apart and thrust the needle into his groin.

  George’s eyes were squeezed tight with the pain. The older boy started fumbling with George’s right eyelids, trying to pry them apart. Finally, he managed to expose the white of the eyeball. But the little boy’s face was so slippery—with tears, blood, and perspiration—that his tormentor’s fingers lost their purchase on his skin, and George was able to clamp his lids shut again. He twisted his head and pressed his face against the floor of the outhouse so that his tormentor couldn’t get at his eyes.

  Suddenly he felt a sharp, tearing pain in the right cheek of his buttocks and realized that the other boy had bitten off another piece of his flesh.

  * * *

  The outrage committed against little George Pratt (who was discovered several hours after the attack by a local fisherman and immediately rushed to the City Marshal’s office) caused a panic among the parents of Boston and its environs. “The public began to lose patience with the upholders of law and order,” wrote one contemporary journalist. “There were many grumblings. People favored the creation of a vigilance committee in Boston. Mothers hardly allowed their children off their door-steps. An atmosphere of terrified suspense settled down over the neighborhoods.”

  Assuming that only a child suffering from a severe mental deficiency could commit such dreadful crimes, the police rounded up “every half-witted boy in Greater Boston” (in the words of one newspaper story) and brought him in for questioning. But the actual perpetrator was far from “half-witted.” On the contrary, he had an unusually cunning mind. It was precisely this quality that made him so dangerous—that and the deeply malevolent passions which, at the age of twelve, already had possession of his soul.

  7

  My prayer is,

  “UTINAM DEUS AUX ILIRIAT BOSTONIAM.”

  Oh that God would come to the rescue of Boston!

  —Rev. Henry Morgan, Boston Turned Inside Out! (1880)

  Three months had elapsed between the assault on Tracy Hayden and the attack on Robert Maier. Between the latter incident and the torture of Johnny Balch less than two months had gone by. And it was only three weeks later that the “boy torturer” brutalized George Pratt.

  This kind of pattern is characteristic of sociopathic behavior. For example, a hiatus of several months separated the first two killings committed by Earle Leonard Nelson—the so-called “Gorilla Murderer” who strangled more than two dozen women during a cross-country spree in the mid-1920s. By contrast, his last two victims were killed within twenty-four hours of each other. The same was true of Ted Bundy, who began his unspeakable career by murdering four young women in the course of four months, and ended it by savagely attacking a quartet of coeds in the span of a few hours.

  The “boy torturer” who terrorized Chelsea and South Boston in 1872 was not a serial killer—not yet, at any rate. But he was already a budding sexual psychopath with the sadistic drives (if not yet the physical capabilities) of a classic lust-murderer. Criminals of this ilk typically possess an appetite that (to paraphrase Hamlet) grows by what it feeds on, becoming more urgent—even frenzied—with each new atrocity. And this would prove to be the case with the Boston “boy torturer,” whose attacks on little children would grow increasingly frequent—and increasingly savage.

  It was during his next attack—committed on Thursday, September 5, 1872—that the “boy torturer” first used a knife.

  His victim was a six-year-old child named Harry Austin, who was taken to a spot beneath a railroad bridge in South Boston. There, his tormentor stripped off his clothes, beat him black-and-blue, then pulled out a pocket knife and stabbed the shrieking child under each arm and between the shoulder blades. Raising the bloody knife high in the air, the older boy capered about his victim, laughing and cursing.

  Then, squatting on his haunches, he forced the Austin boy’s legs apart, took hold of his penis, and tried to cut it off.

  * * *

  The seventh attack occured less than one week later, on Wednesday, September 11. This time, the “boy torturer” lured a seven-year-old named Joseph Kennedy to a vacant boathouse near the salt marshes of South Boston bay. Once inside the building, he slammed his victim’s head against the wall, stripped him naked, and administered a ferocious beating, breaking the little’s boy’s nose and knocking out several of his teeth. Then, pulling out his pocketknife, he forced the seven-year-old to kneel and ordered him to recite a profane travesty of the Lord’s Prayer, in which obscenities were substituted for Scripture.

  When young Joseph refused to commit this blasphemy, his tormentor slashed him on his face, his back, his thighs. Then he dragged the bleeding child down to the marsh and—laughing delightedly at the little boy’s suffering—doused his wounds with salt water.

  * * *

  Just six days later, on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 17, three railroad workers, walking along a remote stretch of the Hartford and Erie line in South Boston, found the limp and naked body of a five-year-old boy, lashed to a telegraph pole beside the tracks. The boy’s scalp had been slashed and his face was drenched in blood. He was carried to Police Station Six, where a physician was called. Eventually, the boy—whose name was Robert Gould—was able to give a coherent account of what had befallen him.

  He had been playing near his house when a bigger boy approached and asked Robert if he wanted to go see some soldiers marching in a parade. Robert, who had never seen a parade before, eagerly agreed.

  Leading Robert to the railroad line, the bigger boy had marched him along the tracks a considerable distance. Eventually, Robert began to grow tired an
d confused. He couldn’t see any soldiers. In fact, he couldn’t see anybody else at all; he seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. He was just about to ask his companion how much farther they had to go, when—with a startling cry—the big boy set upon Robert, stripping off all his clothes and tying him to a pole.

  Pulling out two knives, one much larger than the other, the older boy had danced gleefully around the boy, spouting filthy words and slashing his victim on the head, under the eyes, and behind each ear. Then he had placed the blade of the bigger knife against Robert’s throat and said, “You will never see your mother and father anymore, you stinking little bastard, for I am going to kill you.”

  Robert could feel the sharp edge of the blade pressing against his windpipe. All at once, however, his tormentor cursed, dropped his knife, and ran—evidently scared away by the approaching railroad workers, who came upon the bound and bleeding child just a few moments later.

  That Robert Gould had become the eighth victim of the diabolical “boy torturer” seemed indisputable. Everything about the crime paralleled the previous outrages. There was, however, a single and very significant difference between this case and the others. Unlike all the preceding victims—who had been too terrorized, traumatized, or simply unobservant to recall any distinguishing features of the culprit—Robert had noticed a peculiar physical detail. Questioned by an officer named Bragdon, the five-year-old described his assailant as a “big bad boy with a funny eye.”

  “Funny in what way?” Officer Bragdon asked gently.

  Robert—who, like other children, loved to play marbles—explained that his attacker had an eye like a “milkie.”

  “A milkie?” asked Bragdon.

  A marble that was all white, the little boy explained, like the color of milk.