Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  Robert Gould’s observation would prove to be a breakthrough. For the first time, the authorities possessed a critical clue to the identity of the bloodthirsty juvenile who had been terrorizing Boston for the better part of a year. By the following day, some newspapers were already referring to this shadowy figure by a new and unsettling nickname. He was no longer the “boy torturer. He was the “boy with the marble eye.”

  8

  If thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.

  —Matthew 6:23

  The precise cause of Jesse Pomeroy’s disfigurement is hard to determine, since contemporary accounts differ. According to one source, he developed cataracts soon after his birth. Another states that he suffered from a severe childhood illness that left him with corneal scars. A third insists that his eye became ulcerated from a virulent facial infection. And several claim that a violent reaction to a smallpox vaccination left him half-blind.

  All that can be said with certainty is that, from a very young age, his right pupil was covered with a pale, lustreless film, as though (in the words of one boyhood acquaintance) there was “a white lace curtain” pulled over it. It is also the case that this albino eye rarely failed to have a powerful effect on others. Many people (including, according to certain accounts, his own father) could barely look at it without a shudder. To others—primarily the bigger, crueler boys in the neighborhood—his “marble eye” made him an object of ridicule and contempt.

  Of course, it was not only Jesse’s unsettling appearance that made him seem so peculiar to his peers. It was his eccentric behavior, too. Years later—after Jesse had achieved such notoriety that the newspapers never tired of running stories about his life and crimes—one of his former schoolmates would recall the days, shortly after the Pomeroy family moved to South Boston, when the neighborhood boys would gather to play. The schoolmate’s name was George Thompson, and his reminiscences appeared in a Boston Globe article headlined “Pomeroy’s Evil Eye.”

  “He would never kick football with the other boys,” Thompson wrote. “When it came to ‘choosing up sides’ for a game of baseball, Jesse would never consent to be on either side—nor would he consent to umpire.” Instead he would sit on the grass “with his eyes cast down, sticking his knife into the sod, absently.”

  He was equally indifferent to the other kinds of recreation available to young boys growing up around South Boston bay. “When it came to swimming and jumping off cross-trees of schooners and coal stagings into the bay,” Thompson went on, “Jesse wasn’t interested. He would sit on the wharf, or on the side of the schooner, legs dangling over, quiet and furtive. . . . Sometimes, we wouldn’t see him for days and days. Then, suddenly, he would slope onto our playground and get away by himself to resume his old occupation of sticking his knife into the greensward.”

  The only time Jesse came alive “was when we played ‘Scouts and Indians.’ ” Of course, there was nothing unusual about that—all the boys loved to run around the neighborhood, engaging in raucous games of frontier make-believe. What distinguished Jesse from the others was his preference for villainous roles. While the rest of the boys pretended to be Western heroes, Jesse liked to imagine he was the infamous eighteenth-century renegade, Simon Girty, leading Shawnee Indians on the warpath against white settlers. What seemed especially appealing to him was all “the fun he’d have with the prisoners of war. The running of the gauntlet, and the different modes of putting captives to death”—skinning them alive, roasting them at the stake, slicing off bits of their flesh and making them eat their own bodies.

  Not that the other boys were uninterested in bloodshed and gore (Thompson’s own personal favorite was Wild Bill Hickock “because he had killed thirty-nine men”). Still, all Jesse’s talk about Indian torture seemed slightly excessive, even by the violence-crazed standards of preadolescent boys. Even so, no one imagined that Jesse Pomeroy had any connection to the series of outrages that had churned all of Boston into “a sea of excitement.”

  Thompson recalled one occasion in September 1872 when he and his chums were talking excitedly about the latest atrocity committed by the “boy torturer,” who had already assumed the status of a local bogeyman, a being of almost supernatural evil. Supposed sightings of this diabolical figure had grown so common that, according to Thompson, “the number of boys who had been chased and escaped by the enamel of their teeth at this time was legion.”

  One of the boys in their group, a strapping fifteen-year-old named Ollie Whitman, claimed that, a few days earlier, he had fallen into the clutches of the fiend and managed to escape only because he had “fought like a tiger and run like a comet.” Listening to his tale, the other boys stared at him in awe. Jesse alone had a big smirk on his face.

  Noticing this expression, Whitman took a threatening step toward Jesse. “What are you smilin’ about, you white-eyed freak,” he demanded.

  Jesse flushed but said nothing. He was a big boy for his age but still puny compared to the hulking fifteen-year-old. When Whitman, his hands balled into fists, repeated his question, Jesse wordlessly slunk away, while the other boys hooted and shouted catcalls at his receding back.

  For as long as Jesse could remember, people had made fun of his appearance—not just his pallid eye but his massive head, his heavy jaw, and the oversized mouth that seemed fixed in a permanent scowl. Even his own father had often muttered comments about Jesse’s looks, cursing his son as a “goddamn jack-o’-lantern.” That was one reason Jesse was glad the old bastard wasn’t around anymore. The beatings, of course, were another.

  It was a funny thing. Though the floggings he had gotten from his father hurt worse than anything he had ever felt in his life, Jesse couldn’t stop thinking about them. He kept replaying them in his mind, almost as if he took some kind of pleasure from recollecting them. He often wondered if other boys were beaten in the same way. Sometimes, he got so absorbed in his daydreams—about the whippings and the Indian tortures and the look on the little boys’ faces when he showed them how it felt to be stripped naked and flogged without mercy—that he wasn’t even sure where he was. That happened frequently at school, particularly when the teacher, Mrs. Yeaton, started yapping about some boring subject like geography.

  * * *

  Given his propensity for sadomasochistic daydreaming, it is possible that Jesse was lost in one of his perverse reveries on the morning of September 21. Or it may be that he was simply trying to hide his identity. In any case, he kept his head bent low and his gaze fixed on the desktop when the headmaster, Mr. Barnes, entered the classroom early that Friday morning, accompanied by a burly policeman and a frail, visibly nervous little boy.

  The policeman was Officer Bragdon of Station Six in South Boston; the little boy was Joseph Kennedy—the seven-year-old who, less than two weeks earlier, had been attacked on the marshes, where his assailant had flogged and cut him, commanded him to spout obscenities, then drenched his wounds with salt water. With the police under intense pressure to apprehend the “boy torturer,” Bragdon had decided to conduct a school-to-school search. Little Joseph was there to identify the suspect. Bragdon would have preferred Robert Gould, the torturer’s most recent—and observant—victim. But five-year-old Robert—whose gashed scalp had required dozens of stitches—was still recuperating from the attack, and his parents would not allow him out of bed.

  Standing in front of the classroom, Joseph was asked to take a careful look at the other boys. He surveyed the seated students, then shook his head and said: “He isn’t here.”

  All of a sudden, the teacher noticed that Jesse Pomeroy appeared to be staring at his desk. “Hold your head up, Jesse,” she commanded.

  Jesse did as he was told. But he kept his eyes downcast, so that his pale, lifeless pupil was concealed by his half-shuttered lid. The Kennedy boy took another look at Pomeroy, then shook his head again.

  Apologizing to Mrs. Yeaton for disrupting the class, Officer Bragdon and the little boy departed.
/>   * * *

  It had been a close call for Jesse, but he had managed to escape detection. And then, on the way home from school that afternoon—for reasons that will forever remain unknown—he decided to stop off at the police station and take a look inside.

  Perhaps it was his guilty conscience that impelled him to commit such a self-destructive act, though—given every known fact of Jesse Pomeroy’s long, utterly incorrigible life—that explanation seems very unlikely. Another possibility is that he was playing a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the police. Certainly, that sort of behavior is consistent with the actions of many sociopathic criminals, who—driven by a desperate need to prove their power and superiority—frequently engage in taunting, “catch-me-if-you-can” gambits with their pursuers.

  Whatever his motives, it is doubtful that Jesse himself understood them. He was often at a loss to explain his behavior. His usual response, when asked why he had committed his dreadful crimes, was to shrug and say, “Something made me,” or “I had to,” or “A feeling came over me.”

  So it is probable that even Jesse would have been hard-pressed to say why—just hours after his young victim had looked him in the face and failed to identify him—he paused on his way home from school, strolled into Police Station Six, and contrived to get himself arrested.

  9

  “What was you and your Ma down at the police station for so late last night?” asked the grocery man of the bad boy, as he kicked a dog away from a basket of peaches standing on the sidewalk. “Your Ma seemed to be much affected.”

  —George W. Peck, Peck’s Bad Boy and His Pa

  The depredations of the Boston boy torturer were by no means the only crimes involving young children in the fall of 1872, as even a cursory look at contemporary newspapers makes clear. In early September, a seven-year-old boy named William Loftus lured a five-year-old neighbor—a little girl named Jenny Chandler—into a stable. There, according to an account in the New-Albany Ledger, “he tried to get her to put her arm under the blade of a cutting machine, in order that he might cut it off.” When the little girl resisted and ran away, the Loftus boy grabbed a shotgun, pursued her into her backyard, and discharged the weapon into her body, “filling the poor little girl’s stomach with slugs.” She died at sunrise the next morning, after clinging to life for more than sixteen agonizing hours.

  Just a few days later, Boston papers reported the shooting death of a four-year-old named William Hill at the hands of a sixteen-year-old neighbor, James Duffy, who—while showing off his father’s new Colt revolver—accidentally discharged the loaded pistol into his little neighbor’s head. On the same day in New York City, another four-year-old boy, Stephen Quail of East Fourteenth Street, was slain when an elderly woman—irritated at the noise coming from the alleyway, where little Stephen and several raucous friends were playing ring-a-levio—threw a brick at the child from the roof of their tenement and fractured his skull.

  And then there was the case of the Newark, New Jersey, girl named Becky Holloway—also four years of age—whose parents were arrested after punishing her “by holding her mouth to the spout of a tea-kettle which was filled with boiling water” (as the New York Times reported). “The steam rushed into the child’s mouth, scalding her so severely as to threaten fatal consequences.”

  Even among these assorted tragedies and atrocities, however, the arrest of Jesse Pomeroy drew special attention in the press. For, as the New York Times proclaimed—in a piece that ran on Sunday, September 22, under the headline “A Fiendish Boy”—the case of this “mere child” who “delighted in torturing and mutilating other children” was “one of the most remarkable on record.”

  * * *

  When Jesse—impelled by whatever unknown motive—peered into Police Station Six that Friday afternoon, September 20, 1872, his eyes immediately lit upon the two individuals who had visited his school a few hours earlier: Officer Bragdon and little Joseph Kennedy. Without a moment’s hesitation, he turned on his heels and headed out the door. Back on the street, he bent his steps toward home—a small rented flat at 312 Broadway.

  He hadn’t gone more than a block, however, when a strong hand gripped him by the arm and pulled him to a halt. Startled, he turned and found himself staring up into the face of Officer Bragdon, who had spotted Jesse hastening from the station house.

  Keeping a tight grip on the boy’s arm, Bragdon led him back inside the station and brought him face to face with Joseph Kennedy. This time, there was no way for Jesse to keep his most conspicuous feature concealed. “That’s him!” Kennedy cried. “I know him by his eye!”

  Tearfully protesting his innocence, Jesse was locked in a cell, where Bragdon and a colleague, William Martin, subjected him to a harsh, protracted grilling. But in spite of their threats, curses, and cajolements, Jesse would not be budged. He had never hurt anyone, he insisted. After several relentless hours of questioning, Jesse lost control. “Go away!” he shrieked, his face reddening with fury. He would not talk to them anymore.

  Leaving him alone in his cell, the two officers proceeded to 312 Broadway, where they informed Jesse’s mother that her younger son was under arrest as a suspect in the Chelsea and South Boston child-assaults. Ruth Pomeroy was stricken. Her son could not possibly be the culprit, she cried. He was a good boy—dutiful, obedient, hardworking at school. Besides, he was only twelve years old—far too young to be guilty of such atrocities. When she asked if she could see him in his cell, the officers shook their heads and returned to the station house.

  By then, Jesse had dozed off on his cot. They let him sleep until midnight, when Bragdon shook him awake and began to curse and threaten him again. Jesse burst into tears. At that point, Martin came into the cell, took the sobbing boy onto his lap, and gently explained that unless Jesse confessed, he would end up in prison “for a hundred years.”

  Jesse finally broke down. At approximately half past midnight on Saturday, September 21, he admitted that he was the “boy torturer.”

  Early the following morning, he was transferred to the Tombs, where five of his victims were paraded before him. First in line was Johnny Balch, who took one look at Jesse’s pallid eye and began to shout, “That’s the boy who cut me!” The other little victims—Tracy Hayden, Harry Austin, George Pratt, Robert Gould—rapidly confirmed the identification.

  That same afternoon—Saturday, September 21, 1872—Jesse was arraigned in a room crammed with people: spectators, witnesses, newsmen, and family members of both the defendant and his accusers. Five of Jesse’s victims—Johnny Balch, Harry Austin, George Pratt, Joseph Kennedy, and Robert Gould—testified against him. Called upon to speak on her son’s behalf, Ruth Pomeroy repeated the same story she had told the police—that her son was a good boy who had never demonstrated the slightest tendency toward cruel behavior, etc., etc. Jesse himself—when asked why he had done such awful things—only bowed his head and said that “he could not help himself.”

  After a brief consultation with Officer Bragdon and City Marshal W. P. Drury of Chelsea, the judge—William G. Forsaith, recently appointed to handle cases involving juvenile offenders—handed down his sentence. Jesse was to be confined to the House of Reformation at Westborough “for the term of his minority”—a period of six years. Hearing the verdict, all three members of the Pomeroy family—Jesse, his brother, Charles, and their heartbroken mother—broke into bitter tears.

  As Jesse was led from the courtroom, the mothers of several of his victims approached Ruth Pomeroy to express their sympathy—a remarkable act of Christian compassion, considering the horrors that Mrs. Pomeroy’s boy had inflicted on their own sons. As the New York Times reported, several of the victims present at the arraignment had suffered permanent mutilation at the hands of their attacker, who had deliberately “cut small holes under each of their eyes, so as to leave them disfigured for life.”

  10

  I hope you will behave up there, for if you do you will get out soon. If you don’t you will get a
good flogging every time you don’t do right.

  —Letter from Jesse Pomeroy to a friend

  Established in the town of Westborough in 1847, the Massachusetts House of Reformation—like other institutions of its kind—combined the features of a prison, sweatshop, and vocational school. Overseen by a board of trustees appointed by the governor, it was designed to turn incorrigible boys into industrious ones through a regimen of forced labor, firm discipline, and practical education—to achieve (in the words of its official charter) “reform through instruction and employment, so that when discharged the boys could enter a normal relationship with society.”

  Any boy between the ages of ten and sixteen convicted of a crime against the Commonwealth could be sentenced to a term at Westborough. It was also possible for the parents of particularly unmanageable boys to have their sons committed, in the hope that a stint at reform school would straighten them out before it was too late. (One typical industrial school of the era urged the parents of “bad boys” to “send them to us at eight. Then maybe we can reform them in time.”) An inmate could be discharged, according to the charter, for only three reasons: “if his term had expired, or he had reached the age of twenty-one, or he was reformed.”

  Daily life in the school consisted of a stringent routine. The boys arose at 5:00 A.M., made their beds, washed up in the communal washroom. They then trudged off to their morning classes, remaining in school until 7:30, when they proceeded to the dining room for their unvarying breakfast of bread and coffee.

  At 8:00, the work-whistle blew, and the boys marched off to their various jobs: in the chair shop, shoe shop, sewing room, laundry, kitchen, or farmhouse. They worked until noon, with a fifteen-minute break at 10:30, then broke for their dinner: mush on Monday, hash on Tuesday, beans on Wednesday, fish chowder on Thursday, meat soup on Friday, beans again on Saturday, and leftovers on Sunday.