Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  The boys were given a half hour to eat and another half hour to play. Then it was back to their jobs until 4:30 P.M., when it was time for their afternoon classes. School was dismissed at 5:30. At 6:30, dinner was served—more bread and coffee. After their meal, the boys were allowed to play for about forty-five minutes until bedtime. The lights were doused at 7:45. Altogether, the average day at Westborough consisted of nearly eight hours of work, three hours of school, and about an hour and a half for “amusement,” which—according to accounts of former inmates—more than one boy devoted to intense, yearning daydreams of escape.

  Of course, there were other features of reform school life not specified in any official charter: The floggings for even the smallest infractions. The “dungeons” where the most intractable inmates were locked for prolonged stretches of solitary confinement. The brutal persecutions that smaller boys suffered at the hands of bigger ones. And the frantic, furtive, and often coercive sex.

  * * *

  Every time a new boy was admitted to the reform school, the salient facts of his case were recorded in a massive, leatherbound volume titled History of Boys. This volume—still preserved in the vaults of the Massachusetts State Archives—offers striking confirmation of the claim made by the New York Times: that the case of the Boston “boy torturer” was “one of the most remarkable on record.”

  On the day Jesse Pomeroy arrived at Westborough—September 21, 1872—there were slightly more than 250 boys at the reform school. Most of them had been sent there for crimes ranging from shoplifting to breaking-and-entering. A significant number had been committed by their own fed-up parents for what the official registry calls “stubbornness.” The History of Boys is full of cases like that of “William Fitzgerald, 13 yrs., admitted Sept. 13, 1872, because he will not attend school and plays with bad boys against his parents’ wishes.” Another typical entry reads: “John O’Neill, 14 yrs., admitted Sept. 2, 1872, because he stole two boxes of cigars from a store on Hanover Street.” Only one inmate in the entire population—an eighteen-year-old named Richard Moore—had been sentenced to the school for a violent assault on another person.

  All of these cases, even Moore’s, appear positively trivial in comparison to that of Jesse Pomeroy, whose crimes were of a shockingly different order from those of any other boy in the history of the institution. His official entry in the reform school register—recorded on the day of his admission, when Jesse was still two months shy of his thirteenth birthday—reads as follows:

  The boy pleaded guilty to the several assaults. . . . The statement given at the hearing by the Austin boy was that the Def. met him on a street in South Boston and induced him by offering a small sum of money to go with him under a Rail Road bridge in So. Boston, and when they arrived there the Def. stripped all the clothing off the Austin boy, and with the blade of a pocketknife stabbed him several times between the shoulder blades, under each arm, and in other places. The Dr. stated that “he examined the Austin boy Sept. 5—the day the assault was alleged to have been committed—and found wounds like stabs made by some sharp instrument between the Austin boy’s shoulders, under each arm, and penis nearly half cut off.”

  The statement given by the Pratt boy was that the Def. induced him by the offer of money to go with him to a beach and boathouse in So. Boston, that Def. took all the Pratt boy’s clothing off, and then tortured him by sticking pins into his flesh.

  The statements made by the other two boys [Kennedy and Gould] were that they were induced by Def. to go with him to some out of the way place, that he took their clothing all off and then cut them with a knife and beat them.

  Another complaint was made at the same time by Mr. Drury, City Marshal of Chelsea, against this Def. alleging assaults of a similar character on two small boys [Hayden and Balch] in Chelsea in the months of Feb. and July last. Johnny Balch (about nine years old), one of the boys assaulted in Chelsea, stated that in July last, he met the Def. in the street and was induced by Def.’s offering a small sum of money to go with him to a locality in Chelsea known as Powder Horn Hill. When they arrived there, Def. stripped all the clothing from the Balch boy, tied him to a post by the hands, and beat him with a rope. All the boys were very much younger and smaller than the Def.

  In a population of 254 “bad boys,” Jesse Harding Pomeroy was easily the worst—a sexual sadist of remarkable precocity. But he was no fool. It didn’t take him long to figure out that the sooner he could prove he was “reformed,” the sooner he’d be back on the street. Or that—in Westborough as in other institutions of its kind—severe corporal punishment was swiftly meted out to the misbehaved.

  Not that Jesse wasn’t intrigued to the point of raptness by the idea of corporal punishment—as long as it happened to someone else. He loved nothing better than to hear all about a flogging, particularly from the lips of a boy who had just received a good one. He would often seek out a recent victim and urge him to describe the experience in detail—exactly how many lashes had been administered, how hard they’d been applied, how much the scourging hurt. At night, Jesse would sometimes lie awake in his cot for hours and bring himself to climax over and over while picturing the torture in his mind.

  During the days, he kept out of trouble. When the bigger boys taunted him because of his looks, he did his best to ignore them. The younger inmates tended to give him a wide berth, partly because of his creepy appearance, partly because of the stories they’d heard about Jesse—about the things he had done to all the little boys outside.

  At first, Jesse was put to work in the chair shop, caning seats at the rate of one and a half per day. His eyes, however, proved too weak for the task, and after several months at the reform school, he was made into a kind of dormitory monitor, responsible for maintaining order in the sleeping halls. For a temperament like Jesse’s—one that derived profound satisfaction from the exercise of power—it was an ideal job. He thrived in this position of authority.

  As far as his teachers and supervisors were concerned, he was a model inmate, applying himself to his studies, performing his work with efficiency and zeal. Not that they didn’t notice a few peculiarities about Jesse. He seemed to take unusual—if not unsettling—pleasure in the sight of blood: when two boys engaged in a savage fistfight, for example, or someone punctured a finger in the shoe shop, or a child got his hand slashed in the barn. And—at least on one occasion—his teacher witnessed a degree of cruelty in Jesse that left her deeply appalled.

  This latter incident occured during the fall of 1873, when his teacher, Laura Clarke, came hurrying around to the front of the school, where Jesse was enjoying a few moments of quiet. She had been tending her garden, she breathlessly explained, and had encountered a big black snake among the flowers. Would Jesse please come and kill it.

  Eager to oblige, Jesse had followed her back to the garden, snatching up a stick along the way. After a brief search, he uncovered the snake and immediately began to strike it again and again, working himself up into a kind of frenzy as he reduced the writhing creature to an awful, oozing pulp. In the end, his shrieking teacher could only get him to stop by grabbing his shoulders and shaking him. At last, panting and vacant-eyed, he dropped the bloody stick and stood staring at her sightlessly, as though his mind had drifted somewhere far away. It was a look she would never forget.

  Still, even Mrs. Clark had to admit that, on the whole, Jesse was a reliable, hardworking boy, who not only followed all the rules but could be counted on to make sure that others stuck to them as well. Once—when two particularly incorrigible boys engineered a breakout—it was Jesse who discovered the escape and alerted the authorities. And good luck seemed to conspire with him. On the morning of May 5, 1873, nearly one hundred boys—fully a third of the population—managed to abscond when the main gates of the reform school were accidentally left unlocked. Nearly all of the fugitives were recaptured by nightfall and subjected to severe penalties. As Jesse later admitted, he might have gone along with the escape himself, b
ut was saved from this catastrophe—which would have left an ineradicable blot on his record—by a fortuitous illness, which had him confined to the infirmary at the time of the episode.

  Altogether, his exemplary behavior made a deep and favorable impression on his superiors. As the months went by, Jesse was given free run of the institution, and even allowed to go on several field trips—to a cattle show in Westborough village, a military parade in Framingham.

  As the superintendent of the reform school noted in the register about a year after Jesse’s admission: “The boy’s conduct here has been excellent.”

  11

  No wonder that the workmen at the gas-house at Cambridge shrank back aghast when they found the headless trunk of a murdered man. It was a treasure trove that does not often float on tidal waters.

  —From the trial of Leavitt Alley (1873)

  With the perpetrator safely consigned to reform school—presumably for the term of his minority—the case of the notorious “boy torturer” quickly faded from the papers. But Bostonians who craved sensational crime stories didn’t have to wait long for a new one.

  On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 6, 1872—less than two months after Jesse Pomeroy was sent away to Westborough—an employee of the Cambridge Gas Works named Stephen McFadden spotted a pair of barrels bobbing along the Charles River. As they floated toward shore, McFadden noticed something strange sticking out of the larger one. Making his way down to the river’s edge, he took a closer look—then let out a startled cry.

  The thing protruding from the barrel was a human hand.

  With the help of several coworkers, McFadden retrieved the barrels, then summoned the police, who took one look at the contents and immediately sent for the coroner, Dr. W. W. Wellington. By the time Wellington arrived, a large, excited crowd had gathered around the barrels, whose staves enclosed a ghastly trove.

  Inside the larger one, packed among a load of horse manure and sawdust, was a man’s decapitated trunk, both legs chopped off at the thighs. Whoever had butchered and disposed of the body had taken few precautions to conceal the victim’s identity. The torso was still clothed in a suit, the pockets of which were full of personal items—keys, pieces of scrip, an engraved pocket watch. The smaller barrel contained the missing head, its features perfectly recognizable. The murdered man—who had died from an axe-blow to the back of his skull—turned out to be a prosperous merchant and landlord named Abijah Ellis, missing since the previous night.

  A more thorough search of the barrels turned up a vital clue—a piece of brown paper with the words P. Schouller, No. 1049 Washington Street printed on it. Questioned by the police, Schouller—a reputable manufacturer of billiard tables—revealed that the sweepings from his factory were generally carted away by a local teamster named Leavitt Alley, who used the sawdust to carpet the floor of his stable.

  Alley, it turned out, had a direct link to the murdered man. Not only was he one of Ellis’s tenants; he was in arrears to Ellis for one hundred dollars—two months’ rent.

  An investigation of Alley’s home and stable on Hunneman Street turned up a spate of evidence. The boards of one horse-stall were spattered with blood, concealed by a pile of dry manure, which—from the looks of it—had been hastily shoveled into the compartment sometime within the last twenty-four hours. Inside Alley’s bedroom, police found several articles of bloodstained clothing. Alley’s own son would later testify that, on the morning after the murder, he had noticed a large patch of dried blood on his father’s shirtfront. When he asked where it came from, Alley had mumbled something about a horse’s nosebleed.

  And there was other damning evidence, too: A witness who had seen the two men arguing on the night of the murder. A neighbor who had heard Alley cursing at someone in his barn. A merchant who swore that he had sold an axe to Alley shortly before the killing. A man who spotted Alley’s wagon carting the two barrels toward the mill-dam bridge. When he passed the wagon again a little while later, the barrels were missing.

  Alley was immediately indicted for the crime.

  For Bostonians, the slaying of Abijah Ellis became a major front-page story—the most sensational murder case in a quarter-century. Not since 1849—when Professor John Webster of Harvard killed his colleague, George Parkman, and incinerated the corpse in a lab furnace—had the public been so riveted by a crime. The story dominated the front pages for days, until it was supplanted by another, far more calamitous event—a huge conflagration that erupted in the wholesale district on Saturday evening, November 9, and raged unabated until the following noon, laying waste to more than sixty-five city acres.

  When Alley was brought to trial in February 1873, however, the case exploded back into the headlines. His case seemed so hopeless that his own attorney, Gustavus Somerby, appeared visibly dispirited at the start of the proceedings. But as the trial progressed, Somerby grew increasingly confident, summoning expert witnesses who seriously undermined the prosecution’s case. A particular blow was struck by Dr. Charles Jackson, a graduate of Harvard, who testified that—contrary to the assertions of the prosecution’s “expert” (a self-styled physician who had never formally studied medicine)—it was scientifically impossible to determine whether dried blood came from humans or horses.

  In the end, Somerby managed to sow enough reasonable doubt to reap a victory. In spite of the overwhelming circumstantial evidence against the defendant—and a closing argument by Attorney General Charles Train characterized by observers as “one of the ablest ever made in a capital case in Massachusetts”—Alley was acquitted.

  * * *

  On February 12, 1872—the day the trial ended—Jesse Pomeroy had been locked away for five months, long enough to be forgotten by everyone except those most directly involved in his case: his victims, their parents, and his own brother and mother. (As for Jesse’s father—estranged from the family and working as a meat porter in Quincey Market—there is no way of telling what he thought of his son’s notoriety, history having left no record of his reactions.)

  Ruth Ann Pomeroy was a familiar type: the mother of a frighteningly dangerous criminal who maintains to her dying day that her darling boy is a victim of false charges—a good, dutiful son who, whatever his flaws, couldn’t possibly have done the terrible things he’s been accused of. Virtually from the moment of Jesse’s incarceration, she had begun petitioning for his release. In letter after letter to the board of trustees at Westborough, she insisted that her son was innocent. “He could not be the one who whipped the boys in Chelsea, for he was far too young at that time,” she declared in one letter. The police had picked on Jesse because he had drawn attention to himself by impulsively taking a look inside the station house on his way home from school.

  He made a suitable scapegoat, moreover, because the Pomeroys were strangers in the neighborhood, having moved to South Boston only a few months earlier. Sequestered in a cheerless cell—terrified and alone—her twelve-year-old child had been browbeaten into confessing. If he had been allowed to see a lawyer, he “would not have been sent to the reform school.” Her son, she insisted, was a “bright and happy” boy who had never given her cause for complaint.

  “I have never believed him guilty of these crimes,” she proclaimed. “NEVER!”

  As the months progressed and Jesse continued to be a model of upright behavior, the board began to heed his mother’s pleas. Finally, in January 1874, an investigator named Gardiner Tufts—an agent of the State Board of Charities—was dispatched to 312 Broadway to evaluate the condition of the Pomeroy household. He came away favorably impressed. Mrs. Pomeroy struck him as an honest, hardworking woman, who had opened a little dressmaking business at 327 Broadway, directly across the street from her residence. Jesse’s older brother, Charles, seemed equally commendable—a thrifty and diligent young man who ran a little newsstand in the front of the shop and had his own paper route.

  True, there were some troubling aspects of the situation. Mrs. Pomeroy was bitterly separate
d from her husband, who had nothing to do with the family. As the product of a broken home, Jesse had clearly been without adequate parental control—“left to drift pretty much at his own will,” as Tufts reported. On the whole, however, the investigator was impressed by Mrs. Pomeroy’s obvious devotion and reassured by her promise to keep her son under close supervision.

  As part of his final report, Tufts also interviewed Police Captain Dyer of Station Six in South Boston, who—expressing his belief that “it isn’t best to be down on a boy too hard or too long”—suggested that Jesse be set free on probation. “Give him a chance to redeem himself,” he urged.

  On January 24, 1874, the trustees received Tufts’s report and forwarded their recommendation to the superintendent of the reform school. Two weeks later—on February 6—Jesse Harding Pomeroy was sent home.

  His release went unnoted by the newspapers. As far as the people of Boston knew, their city’s most notorious juvenile offender was safely locked away for the rest of his adolescence. Eventually—and much to its outrage—the public would discover the truth: less than seventeen months after his arrest, “the boy torturer” had been turned loose on the streets.

  12

  A simple child

  That lightly draws its breath,

  And feels its life in every limb,

  What should it know of death?

  —William Wordsworth, “We Are Seven”

  To secure her son’s release, Mrs. Pomeroy had promised that Jesse would be put to work right away, assisting his older brother, Charles—a strapping sixteen-year-old who earned a small but steady income by selling newspapers. More than a half-dozen papers were published in Boston during the 1870s—the Globe, the Post, the Journal, the Herald, the Daily Advertiser, the Evening Traveller, the Evening Transcript, and others. Charles sold them all from the little newsstand he ran in the front part of his mother’s dressmaking shop at 327 Broadway. He also had a delivery route, with more than two-hundred-and-fifty subscribers.