Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  Curious, Benson paused and looked back in the direction of the marsh to see if someone was chasing the boy. But no one was there.

  15

  It’s like a lion at the door;

  And when the door begins to crack,

  It’s like a stick across your back;

  And when your back begins to smart,

  It’s like a penknife in your heart;

  And when your heart begins to bleed,

  You’re dead, and dead, and dead, indeed.

  —Nursery rhyme

  By the time they arrived at Savin Hill Beach at around 3:45 P.M., the tide was in and the water too high for clamming, so the two Power brothers—eleven-year-old George and his older brother, James—decided to do a little beachcombing instead. George, as he always did, quickly took the lead. Striding along the shoreline, he kept his gaze fixed on the sand for any treasures that might have washed up with the tide. He had gone about a hundred yards when he stopped and let out a piercing yell.

  Deaf since birth, thirteen-year-old James didn’t hear his brother’s cry. But when he glanced up, he saw George waving to him frantically and took off at a run. The sight that struck him when he reached his brother’s side made him gape in confusion.

  A few feet away in the sand, surrounded by a circle of charred stones, lay a little clambake pit, empty shells scattered all around. Something resembling a doll was stretched out inside the pit. Looking closer, James saw that it was the half-naked body of a little boy. He lay stiffly on his back, britches and drawers pulled down around his ankles. There was caked blood all over his face, hands, and upper thighs. His shirtfront was covered with gore.

  Glancing around for help, George spotted two men about fifty yards away. They were moving cautiously through the tall grass, rifles cradled in their arms. Leaving his older brother with the body, George ran across the marshland and alerted the pair—a couple of duck-hunters named Obed Goodspeed and Patrick Wise—who hurried back to the little stone-ringed pit. A few moments later, they were joined by another man, a fellow named H. F. Harrington, who had noticed the commotion and come over to investigate.

  Kneeling by the body, Goodspeed took note of its condition—the blood issuing from the mouth and right eye, the stab wounds on the hands, the punctured shirt, the mutilated groin. Then—leaving the others to stand watch over the dead child—Goodspeed headed toward Washington Village in search of a policeman, while the thirteen-year-old deaf-mute, James, took off in the opposite direction.

  * * *

  At around 5:15 P.M., Officer Roswell M. Lyons of the Ninth Police Station was patrolling his beat near the Old Colony Railroad line when a breathless young boy came running up to him and began motioning frantically in the direction of the bay.

  “What’s the matter, lad?” asked Lyons. The boy—who looked to be about thirteen—was so deeply agitated that he seemed incapable of intelligible speech. It took Lyons a moment to realize that he was a deaf-mute.

  Raising his chin, the boy ran a hand across his windpipe in a throat-slitting gesture. Lyons interpreted this pantomime to mean that someone was dead. Pulling out a notebook and pencil, he flipped to an empty page and printed the words, “Is anyone drowned?” The boy quickly scanned the query, then snatched the pencil from the policeman’s hand and, on the bottom of the same page, wrote: “One murdered.”

  Frowning, Lyons gestured for the boy to lead the way. They had gone about half a mile in the direction of Savin Hill Beach when Lyons saw three men and another, smaller boy huddled around a circle of stone just a few yards from the shoreline. As he drew closer to this solemn little group, he noticed the stricken look on the faces of the men. Then he glanced down into the pit, and felt his own features grow taut with dismay.

  Lyons would later testify that, in all his years of police work, he had never confronted a more appalling sight. It was clear at a glance that the little victim in the pit—who looked barely older than a toddler—had been subjected to an agonizing ordeal. The writhing of his limbs had caused his heels to gouge deep furrows in the sand, and his fists were so tightly clenched in pain that his fingernails were embedded in his palms. There were ugly lacerations on the back of his hands that Lyons immediately recognized as defensive wounds, inflicted when the child had tried to ward off his attacker. The boy had been stabbed in the chest at least half-a-dozen times, and his throat was gashed so deeply that his head was nearly severed from the body. Bloody fluid oozed from one punctured eyeball. He had also been partially castrated. Looking down at the child’s exposed groin, Lyons saw one testicle hanging loose from the mutilated scrotum.

  After rearranging the dead boy’s undergarments and pants, Lyons carefully took the little corpse in his arms and—with the help of Wise, Harrington, and Goodspeed (who had returned to the crime scene after his own futile search for a policeman)—carried it to the Crescent Avenue railroad station, where he quickly secured a carriage. Then he conveyed the body to Police Station Nine, where it lay for an hour or so before being transferred to Waterman’s undertaking parlor at 1912 Washington Street to await the arrival of Coroner Ira Allen.

  * * *

  At first, Leonora Millen had assumed that her son was simply dawdling. But when Horace still wasn’t home by 11:30 A.M., she became worried enough to throw on a shawl and go looking for him.

  The bakery owner, a woman named Moulton, confirmed that she had sold a penny drop cake to a four-year-old boy in a black velvet cap about a half-hour earlier. But she had no idea what had become of the child once he left the store.

  After searching the neighborhood streets without finding her son, Mrs. Millen felt sufficiently alarmed to seek out her husband. After months of unemployment, John Millen had just secured a job at John Clark’s cabinet manufactory on Newman Street, and his wife was reluctant to disturb him. But by then, she had worked herself into a state and did not know where else to turn.

  Her husband tried to soothe her fears. Horace had probably encountered some chums on his way home from the bakery and, ignoring his mother’s instructions, had decided to go off and have fun. The boy was due for a licking; he was becoming more disobedient by the day. Turning back to his work, John advised Leonora to go straight home. Horace was probably already there, wondering where his mother was.

  When John arrived home later that afternoon, however, he found his wife sobbing at the kitchen table. Horace had never come back. Now, it was the father’s turn to become alarmed. Turning on his heels, he hurried from the house and scoured the neighborhood.

  At approximately 5:30 P.M., after failing to turn up any trace of Horace, he bent his steps toward Police Station Six, to report that his four-year-old son was missing.

  * * *

  It was approximately 7:30 P.M. when Coroner Allen arrived at Waterman’s undertaking parlor. By then, word of the gruesome discovery on Savin Hill Beach had spread throughout the neighborhood, and the street outside the funeral home was packed with curiosity-seekers. When a number of people tried to force their way inside the building to get a glimpse of the victim’s remains, the undertaker summoned the police, who promptly dispersed the morbid crowd and cordoned off the block.

  Allen’s examination of the body—conducted in the embalming room with a six-man coroner’s jury in attendance—revealed two distinct wounds to the child’s throat, inflicted with a sharp, small-bladed implement like a pocketknife. One of the incisions had exposed the boy’s windpipe; the other had severed his jugular vein. In Allen’s estimation, either of these wounds would have been “necessarily fatal, as there was no one about who could staunch the flow of blood.”

  The postmortem made it horribly clear that the “poor little victim” (as the newspapers would invariably describe the murdered boy in the coming days) had been subjected to an attack of unspeakable savagery. His right eyeball had been punctured through the lid, his hands had been slashed more than a dozen times, there were no less than eighteen stab wounds in his chest, and—in the words of the coroner’s offici
al report—“an attempt had apparently been made to sever the whole of his private parts. The scrotum was opened so much that the left testicle had fallen out and was lying in that condition.”

  The examination lasted until nearly 9:00 P.M., by which time reporters from every newspaper in Boston were crammed into the outer rooms of the mortuary, waiting to learn the results. At a few minutes after nine, a police sergeant named Hood—who had observed the postmortem along with the coroner’s jury—emerged from the embalming room and supplied the clamoring newsmen with a graphic description of the crime. Then, while the reporters hurried off to make their midnight deadlines, Hood proceeded to Police Station Nine to transmit a bulletin to other precincts around the city in the hope of identifying the still-unknown victim.

  Police news traveled fast in 1874. Though the telephone would not be invented for another two years, all the station houses in Boston were connected by an ingenious communication system known as a “patent-writing telegraph.” Using an electromagnetic pen, an officer would write out a message that, within seconds, was transcribed in facsimile by a matching apparatus on the receiving end.

  When Hood’s bulletin reached Police Station Six—where John Millen had gone earlier in the day to report his son’s disappearance—Captain Dyer immediately wired back for further details. Moments later, the electromagnetic device produced a reply: “He is rather tall for a child four or five years old but is slender with long light hair, light complexion, with dark brown eyes and dressed in knee breeches with a checked waist, attached to which is a red-and-white checked shirt trimmed with black velvet. He wore white woolen socks and high-laced boots. His cap is of black velvet trimmed with a gold lace band.”

  The captain exchanged a grim look with his subordinates. Every detail of the murder victim’s dress and appearance precisely matched the description of John Millen’s missing boy. Dyer and an officer named Childs immediately repaired to the Millen home on Dorchester Street, where—as the Boston Evening Traveller reported—the “scene that ensued was heartrending.” Though both parents had already begun to fear the worst, Dyer’s awful tidings left them shattered.

  Leaving his prostrate wife in the company of Childs, John Millen accompanied Captain Dyer to Waterman’s, where he broke down anew at the sight of his butchered son. Helped into a waiting room, he was observed by a reporter for the Boston Evening Journal, who described the father’s “terrible bereavement.” Arrangements had been made to leave the child’s body at the undertaking parlor overnight. Horace would be retrieved by his parents in the morning—though exactly how the Millens would afford a proper funeral for their murdered boy was an agonizing question.

  “The family are in indigent circumstances,” the reporter wrote, “and amid the father’s lamentations came the painful inquiry, ‘How shall we bury our dead?’ ”

  16

  I continued my daily work of carrying newspapers, as usual, and nothing worthy of record happened until the 22nd day of April. On that day a small boy was murdered on the South Boston marsh. Somehow—I have never been able to find a reason—suspicion fell on me.

  —Autobiography of Jesse H. Pomeroy (1875)

  In the hours immediately following the discovery of Horace Millen’s body, the crime produced a chilling sense of déjà vu in the people privy to its details. No one familiar with the facts of the case—policemen, reporters, Coroner Allen and his jury—could fail to be reminded of the horrific attacks committed in Chelsea and South Boston less than two years before.

  At first, there was some confusion about the name of the “boy torturer” who had terrorized the city in 1872. In their early morning editions, some newspapers would refer to him as “Willie Pomeroy,” others as “Eddie.” But there was no doubt that the Millen crime shared the same grisly m.o. with the earlier outrages: a very small boy slashed, tortured, and sexually mutilated after being lured to an isolated location. As the Boston Globe put it when the story first broke: “The similarity of the crimes is so great that it seems almost a logical conclusion that they are the work of one and the same hand.”

  * * *

  Among the people whose thoughts immediately turned to Pomeroy was the chief of the Boston police, Edward Hartwell Savage.

  Sixty-two years old at the time of the Millen murder, Hartwell was a failed businessman from New Hampshire who had emigrated to Boston in his twenties, reportedly five thousand dollars in debt. After working several years as a handcart-jobber to pay off his creditors, he joined the police force in 1851 and quickly worked his way up the ranks. Within just three years, he was made captain in the North End, the toughest section of the city. By 1861, he had been promoted to Deputy Chief of the entire department. During his tenure as deputy, he instituted a number of important innovations, including an extensive rogues gallery, a modernized system of record-keeping, and a specialized detective corps. In his spare time, he was also an amateur historian, who published a popular chronicle of the city, Boston Events, and a bestselling history of the department, Police Records and Recollections, or Boston by Daylight and Gaslight for Two Hundred and Forty Years.

  In 1870, Savage—then a distinguished, gray-haired widower who lived at home with a spinster daughter—became head of the force. He quickly established himself as the most successful and popular police chief in Boston history. Among the city’s business elite, he was known as a stalwart protector of property. During the Great Fire of 1872, he was in direct command of over 1800 men—including members of the military—and remained continuously on duty for nearly ninety-six hours, ensuring that civil order was maintained. It was a particular source of pride to him that, during his nearly decade-long service, no more than $100,000 in property was stolen in any given year (a drop of more than 300 percent from previous years). Not a single bank in Boston was robbed during the entire time he was chief.

  Savage also took credit for a dramatic improvement in the department’s investigative capabilities. At the time Horace Millen’s savaged body was discovered on the marsh, not a single homicide had gone unsolved by his detectives in four years.

  * * *

  At around 9:30 on the evening of the Millen murder, one of Chief Savage’s most trusted men—a detective named James R. Wood—arrived at police headquarters in City Hall. Wood (who, fifty years later, would publish a personal reminiscence of the case in The Master Detective, a popular true-crime magazine of the 1930s) was immediately directed to the chief’s office. There, he found Savage in consultation with three other detectives named Dearborn, Ham, and Quinn.

  “A young boy has been murdered in South Boston,” Savage said by way of a greeting. “Brutal business. Some clam diggers found his body on the marshes.”

  “Any suspects?” asked Wood.

  Savage shook his head. “It’s the damndest thing,” he said, as if musing aloud. “It sounds just like the work of that kid we’ve got in the reformatory. Remember? The one with the mania for tying up little boys and slashing their faces?”

  “You mean the Pomeroy boy?” said Detective Quinn. “He’s not in the reformatory. They let him out on probation in February.”

  Savage cast a sharp look at his subordinate. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” Quinn said. “I heard that he’s living with his mother. She keeps a dress shop somewhere in South Boston.”

  Rising from his chair, Savage crossed the room and, using the patent-writing telegraph device, transmitted a message to Captain Dyer at Station Six: “Is Jesse Pomeroy living in your precinct?”

  Several moments elapsed while the chief and his four detectives huddled silently around the apparatus. All at once, the electromagnetic pen stirred to life and printed the reply: “Yes. His mother has a store on Broadway. They live at 312 Broadway.”

  Savage immediately wired back, instructing Dyer to “send an officer to the house. If he can find young Pomeroy, bring him along to the station house. I’ll send some men over without delay.” Then—after officially assigning Dearborn, Wood, and Ham to
the case—he ordered them to proceed to Station Six at once.

  Without a word, the trio hurried outside onto Congress Street, summoned a hack, and headed for South Boston.

  * * *

  In response to Savage’s message, Captain Dyer immediately dispatched two of his men—Officers Samuel Lucas and Thomas H. Adams—to the Pomeroy home at 312 Broadway. Arriving at the ramshackle little house shortly after 10:00 P.M., they were admitted by Mrs. Pomeroy, who grudgingly informed them that her younger son was up in his room, getting ready for bed.

  Summoned downstairs, Jesse sauntered into the parlor still dressed in his street clothes. As the two officers questioned him about his whereabouts that morning, they studied his appearance, taking special note of several fresh scratch marks on his face and the reddish-brown mud stains on his trouser cuffs and shoes.

  After listening to Jesse’s rambling account of his day’s activities, the two policemen announced that they were taking him down to Station Six for further questioning. Mrs. Pomeroy bitterly protested, but the officers assured her that her son would be back soon.

  “Don’t fret, Ma,” Jesse said breezily as he was led out the door. “I didn’t do nothing.”

  * * *

  The hack carrying Dearborn, Wood, and Ham pulled up at Police Station Six just as Jesse was being escorted inside. Ushered into Captain Dyer’s office, he was seated in the center of the room, while more than half a dozen men—Dyer, Coroner Allen, the three detectives, Lucas, Adams, and a few of their fellow officers—crowded around his chair and began pummeling him with questions.