Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  By this time, Jesse’s mood had gone from cocky to peevish. Asked again to describe his day, he sullenly repeated the story he had already told Lucas and Adams. After rising at 6:00 A.M. and eating breakfast, he had gone across the street to help his brother sweep out the store. At around 7:30, he headed off to the city to fetch the weekly papers at the New England News Company, returning with his load about an hour later.

  He remained in the store until about half past eleven, when he had strolled home for lunch. Afterward, he had killed a few hours ambling around the city before picking up his afternoon papers at the offices of the Boston Evening Traveller and the Boston Journal. Then he set off on his 3:00 P.M. route. By 4:30, his supply had run out. Making his way back to the store, he collected another batch of papers, then spent the next hour or so completing his deliveries. He had arrived back home at around half past six, his work day finally over.

  It was immediately clear to his interrogators that there were gaping holes in Jesse’s story, particularly concerning the hours between 11:30 A.M.—when he’d left the periodical shop and returned home for lunch—and 2:30 P.M., when he had picked up his papers for his afternoon route. He claimed that, after crossing the Federal Street Bridge and making his way to Tremont Street, he had spent most of the time strolling around the Boston Common and Public Garden. But when asked for more precise details, his memory got suspiciously hazy. He could not recall, for example, if there was any construction work taking place on Tremont Street (a large section of which had, in fact, been torn up for a public works project). Nor could he say whether there was a baseball match or a military display taking place on the parade ground.

  As the interrogation proceeded, the detectives scrutinized Jesse with practiced eyes. He was wearing an old, visorless cap, mud-stained pants, and a damp, dirty coat with no vest. His boots, like his trousers, were conspicuously muddy.

  “How did your shoes get so dirty?” one detective inquired.

  “From walking around so much,” Jesse answered coolly.

  He was ordered to remove the boots. Upon closer inspection, the left one proved to have several stalks of what appeared to be marsh-grass sticking from a crack between the heel and sole.

  Next, Jesse was told to strip off his jacket. Detective Ham carefully went through the pockets but found nothing incriminating. When Jesse was ordered to remove his shirt, however, the detectives noticed a reddish-brown stain about the size of a thumbprint on the front of his flannel undershirt. This garment was immediately confiscated, along with his boots. Jesse’s jacket and shirt were returned to him.

  Like Lucas and Adams—the two officers who had picked Jesse up at home—Detective Wood and his colleagues were struck by the ugly marks on Jesse’s face: a nasty scratch across his left cheek, and three smaller lacerations under his left ear. They found some other scratches at the base of his neck and on the back of his left hand. As Wood would later testify, “they all seemed of recent origin.” When Jesse was asked how he’d scratched his face, he shrugged and answered: “Shaving.”

  Having learned from Coroner Allen that Horace Millen had been stabbed and mutilated with a small-bladed implement, Captain Dyer asked if Jesse owned a knife. After a moment’s hesitation, Jesse admitted that he did.

  “Do you have it on you?” Dyer asked.

  Jesse shook his head. The knife was at home, in the pocket of his vest.

  Dyer immediately dispatched a sergeant named Hood to the Pomeroy home. A short while later, he returned with the knife. It was a typical boy’s pocketknife, with two slightly rusty blades, the longer of which measured about three inches. When the knife was opened, the investigators noticed that the aperture was clogged with particles of moist dirt. They also found a smudge of what appeared to be dried blood on the mother-of-pearl handle. The weapon was turned over to Coroner Allen, who—eager to learn if the knife matched the stab wounds in the victim’s body—promptly left for Waterman’s undertaking parlor.

  Altogether, the interrogation lasted nearly three hours. At around 2:00 A.M., Jesse was finally led off to a cell, where he curled up on the bunk, closed his eyes, and immediately drifted off into a deep and—to all outward appearances—untroubled sleep.

  17

  Dorchester may soon be called “the dark and bloody land,” for nearly all the great tragedies which have occured in Boston within the past few years have had that location within the limits of that district.

  —Boston Evening Traveller, April 23, 1874

  Early the following morning, Thursday, April 23, a team of investigators—the three detectives from headquarters, along with Sergeants Henry O. Goodwin and Thomas Hood of Station Six—traveled out to Savin Hill Beach. Clutched in Goodwin’s hand was a paper-wrapped bundle containing two sets of footwear: the mud-caked boots confiscated from Pomeroy, plus the smaller—though equally bespattered—shoes belonging to Horace Millen.

  It was another cheerless morning, with a damp, bitter wind coming off the bay and a sky obscured by leaden clouds. In spite of the dismal weather, however, a crowd had already gathered on the marsh. Anticipating this development, Captain Dyer had posted a detail of men around the murder site. When the five officers arrived at around 9:30 A.M., they found a half-dozen guards at the scene, keeping the curiosity seekers from trampling on the evidence.

  Detective Wood and his colleagues began by examining the little clambake pit where the corpse had been found. The soggy mud inside the pit still bore the impression of the child’s body. Two small, parallel gouges were visible in the dirt, where the dying boy had ground his heels in agony.

  The mud all around the little stone-ringed pit was covered with footprints, left by the people who had discovered the body. But—as Detective Wood would later recall—“two pairs of footprints, always close together, stood out distinctly from the rest.” These prints formed a slightly meandering trail that led to the pit from the direction of the Old Colony Railroad Station.

  Tearing open his bundle, Sergeant Goodwin knelt down in the dirt and carefully laid the two sets of shoes inside the prints. Though the match seemed very close, it was impossible to say whether the tracks had been made by Pomeroy and his victim, since other children—like the two Powers brothers, who had first stumbled onto Horace Millen’s body—were known to have been on the marsh.

  With the curious—and steadily growing—crowd following at a slight distance, the investigators began to follow the parallel tracks back toward the railroad station. Fifty years later, Wood would remember the occasion with perfect clarity. “We followed the trail in silence. Sometimes, when the ground grew hard or became grass-covered, the footprints were almost obliterated. Then we would come upon them again—always close together.”

  The trail led to a place called McCay’s Wharf. From the pattern that their shoes had made in the soft clay, it was clear that the older of the two boys had jumped from the wharf first, then assisted the smaller child, apparently by reaching up, taking him in his arms, and lifting him down.

  The officers were about two hundred feet from the railroad station when—as Wood described it—“the trail was lost for good. By then, however, we had seen enough to arrive at the conclusion that the larger footprints, almost the size of a man’s, were evidently those of an older person who had led the younger child on.” Some of the footprints were virtually effaced. Others, however, “were revealed in such startling clarity that it occurred to me that molds could be made.” When Wood voiced this suggestion to his colleagues, Sergeant Hood recalled that a man named Moulton lived nearby. A stonemason by trade, Moulton was sure to have plenty of plaster of Paris on hand.

  An officer was immediately dispatched to Moulton’s shop. A short while later, he returned with a sackful of the powdery substance, which was quickly mixed and poured into the most distinct of the footprints. Altogether the investigators made fifteen casts. In his published reminiscence of the case, Wood described what happened next:

  “As soon as the plaster was sufficiently dry
, we lifted the casts out carefully. Then commenced a minute study. There was a peculiar indentation on the plaster sole impression of one of the larger footprints. Further examination satisfied us that those prints could have been made by only one pair of shoes.

  “Those were the shoes we had taken from the feet of young Jesse Pomeroy.”

  The detectives had found what they were looking for: solid evidence of Pomeroy’s presence at the crime scene. Now there was just one more thing Wood was determined to get.

  He wanted to hear Jesse Pomeroy confess.

  * * *

  It was close to noon when the investigators returned to Station Six. They found Chief Savage waiting for them in Captain Dyer’s office. While Wood and his colleagues reviewed their findings for the chief, two officers were sent downstairs to fetch Jesse from his cell. Seeing that the boy was still fast asleep, one of the men began pounding on the door until Jesse stirred and sat up groggily. At that point—according to Jesse’s own account—the second policeman put his face close to the bars and jeered: “You are guilty and will be shut up for a hundred years!” Then—laughing and cursing—they took Jesse from the cell and roughly escorted him upstairs.

  Inside Dyer’s office, Jesse was subjected to another thorough grilling, this one conducted primarily by Savage. The chief began by asking him about the motives for his earlier crimes, the series of slashings that had landed him in Westborough.

  Jesse gave his usual, shrugging response: “I don’t know. I couldn’t help myself.”

  Next, he was made to repeat his account of the previous day’s events. This time, he displayed considerably more confidence about certain details, relating his story with a coolness that struck the observers as nothing less than remarkable in a fourteen-year-old boy in such daunting circumstances. He maintained his composure even when Savage suddenly leaned forward and announced that Jesse was under arrest for the murder of Horace Millen.

  “You can’t prove anything,” Jesse replied offhandedly.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Captain Dyer. “We found some pretty damaging evidence against you this morning.”

  Jesse appeared unimpressed.

  “Well, then,” said Savage, “if you did not kill Horace Millen, then I suppose you won’t mind going out to Mr. Waterman’s funeral establishment and looking at the body.”

  The statement had its intended effect. Jesse was visibly rattled. “I don’t want to go,” he said nervously.

  Ignoring his protests, Chief Savage nodded to Dearborn, Ham, and Wood, who immediately hauled the boy outside, bundled him into a hack, and drove him to the undertaking parlor in Roxbury. Jesse—his arms tightly clamped in the grip of Dearborn and Wood—was dragged inside and ushered into the embalming room, where a small, shrouded figure lay stretched upon a table.

  “I don’t want to see him,” Jesse cried, struggling to break free of his captors’ hold. “You can’t make me.”

  “Yes, we can,” Wood said grimly, then signaled to Waterman, who lifted the sheet from the tiny form. When Jesse tried to turn his head away, one of the detectives grabbed him by the back of the neck and forced him to look squarely at the corpse.

  At the sight of the savaged body—the gaping throat, the ruptured eye, the perforated chest—Jesse began to tremble violently.

  “Did you do it?” asked Dearborn. “Did you kill him?”

  In a tremulous voice, Jesse replied, “I guess I did.”

  “What did you do it for?” demanded Wood.

  “I don’t know,” Jesse said weakly. “Something made me.” For the first time, he appeared genuinely stricken. “Take me out of here. I don’t want to stay here.”

  Seated again in the carriage, Jesse continued to tremble. “I am sorry I did it,” he said as the vehicle headed back to the police station. “Please don’t tell my mother.”

  “Where did you wash the blood off your knife?” Wood asked.

  “I didn’t wash it,” Jesse answered. “I stuck the blade into the marsh mud and cleaned it.”

  “What about your hands? Did you wash them?”

  There was no need to wash them, Jesse explained. He had been careful not to get any blood on his hands.

  When Wood asked Jesse what he thought should be done with him, the boy tearfully replied: “Put me somewhere, so I can’t do such things.”

  Not long afterward, the carriage pulled up at Station Six, where—in order to prevent him from communicating with other prisoners—Jesse was placed in an isolation cell with a heavy wooden door. By that time, Wood and his colleagues had gone without food since just after daybreak and were ravenously hungry. Informing Captain Dyer that they were going out for lunch and would return shortly, they requested that no one be allowed to see Pomeroy on any account during their absence. Dyer gave them his assurance, and the three men departed.

  From a purely professional point of view it had been a gratifying morning. The ghastly crime had been solved less than twenty-four hours after its commission. As he and his colleagues looked for a place to eat, Wood could not help feeling pleased. He had gotten exactly he was hoping for: a confession from Jesse Pomeroy’s lips.

  18

  It is a matter of great surprise to those conversant with the facts of the case that the Pomeroy boy, after his conviction of so many heinous offenses, should have been pardoned out of reform school.

  —Boston Evening Journal, April 24, 1874

  Few figures in the annals of American crime have had the ability to generate as much controversy as Jesse Harding Pomeroy. For more than fifty years, he managed to find ways of stirring up intense indignation in the Boston public. And that power to provoke manifested itself from the very beginning of the Millen case, even before Pomeroy was officially named as a suspect.

  Nowadays, an accused criminal can count on a fair degree of protection from the excesses of the press. Even when the evidence points overwhelmingly to someone’s guilt, the news media must be careful to identify him as a mere suspect. A man can be discovered with a dozen corpses in his crawl space, a freezer full of human viscera, and a bedroom decorated with body parts. But until he’s been convicted—or has confessed—journalists are legally required to describe him as an “alleged” criminal.

  Things were substantially different a hundred years ago, when the press had fewer compunctions about branding someone a criminal. Just hours after the Powers brothers made their awful discovery on Savin Hill Beach—and before he had even been picked up by the police—Jesse Pomeroy was already being trumpeted by some newswriters as the killer. By the following morning, his name was plastered on the front page of every paper in the city, along with a detailed account of his earlier crimes against children. The result was an immediate explosion of public outrage, directed at those who had elected to put “the boy fiend” back on the streets after less than eighteen months in reform school.

  Typical of this outcry was an editorial that ran in the Boston Globe on Friday morning, April 24, under the headline “The Boy Murderer”:

  There must be something wrong in the regulations under which an inmate of the Reform School, sentenced for his minority, can be pardoned out on probation and turned loose in the community without regard to the crimes that he has committed or the propensities which he has displayed. In the case of the young fiend, Jesse Pomeroy, all that was necessary to secure his liberty on probation seems to have been an appeal of his mother, backed by a friend, although he had wantonly tortured no less than seven small boys for no apparent reason but a morbid delight in their sufferings. There is evidently need of a more careful consideration before the decrees of the law in the case of juvenile offenders are thus nullified. The boy Pomeroy seems to be a moral monstrosity. He had no provocation and no rational motive for his atrocious conduct. He did not know the little lad Millen at all, but enticed him away, and cut and hacked him to death with a penknife merely for sport. . . .

  While we favor a humane treatment for juvenile delinquents . . . it should not be so eas
y to obtain a remission of penalties on pleas of good behavior or the interposition of too sympathetic petitioners.

  Other papers were even more harsh in their condemnation of the officials who had authorized Pomeroy’s probation. “That a pardon should have been granted to such a fiend as Pomeroy shows a culpable lack of judgment somewhere,” proclaimed the Boston Herald, “and excites high indignation among those familiar with the circumstances which resulted in his committal to reform school.”

  In the face of such criticism, the people responsible for Jesse’s early release from Westborough immediately found themselves on the defensive. Some—like Mr. John Ayers, one of the trustees who had supported the parole—hastened to justify their decision. Interviewed by a reporter from the Globe, Ayers declared that “when boys are sent to the Reform School, they are sent for their minority—unless, after a considerable stay, their behavior has been exemplary. If they give promise of reform and of future good behavior, and if they have a good home to which their parents are anxious to have them returned, they are often pardoned on probation. This is an everyday occurrence, and this was the case with Pomeroy.”

  Others involved in the parole process insisted that they had spoken out against Jesse’s release. Mr. D. B. Johnson, for example—an assistant visiting agent of the State Board of Charities—issued a public statement in which he claimed that he had “actively opposed the pardon on the ground that Pomeroy had been in Reform School but seventeen months, and that there had been seven cases of inhuman treatment, by torturing boys, against him at the time of his sentence.”

  Whether scrambling to defend his decision or presenting himself as a valiant (if hopelessly outmatched) dissenter, everyone connected to Jesse Pomeroy’s parole from reform school obviously felt himself to be in imminent professional jeopardy. And with good cause. Already the citizens of Boston—appalled at a penal system that had made their children vulnerable to the depredations of a fiend—were demanding an accounting. There was no way of telling yet where the axe would eventually fall. But sooner or later heads were bound to roll.