Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  * * *

  One official who quickly came under fire was Police Captain Henry T. Dyer, who had supported Jesse’s pardon under the theory that—as he had stated during his interview with Gardiner Tufts of the State Board of Charities—“it isn’t best to be down on a boy too hard or too long.” In the wake of the Millen murder, stories began to spread throughout South Boston that Dyer had been motivated less by his faith in juvenile redemption than by his friendship with Mrs. Pomeroy, with whom—according to rumor—he was on “intimate” terms.

  That Dyer was, for whatever reason, inordinately sympathetic to the Pomeroys appeared to be confirmed on Thursday afternoon, not long after Jesse made his tearful confession to Detective Wood.

  Wood, Ham, and Dearborn had permitted themselves less than a half hour for lunch before hurrying back to Station Six at around 2:30 P.M. Intending to have Jesse put his confession in writing, the detectives took him into an empty office, seated him at a table, and presented him with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper.

  “What’s this for?” Jesse asked.

  “We want you to give us a written statement,” Wood explained. “Put down everything you said about killing Horace Millen.”

  “I never said I killed anyone,” Jesse replied offhandedly.

  Wood looked at his colleagues in astonishment before turning back to Jesse and saying, “You told me you killed him.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Jesse said. “That’s a dirty lie. I’m innocent, and I want to go home.”

  Restraining his impulse to grab the boy by the shoulders and shake the truth out of him, Wood pulled him roughly from the chair and marched him back to his cell. Something had clearly changed in the short time that the three detectives had been gone for lunch. It didn’t take long for Wood to find out what had happened in their absence. Asking around the station house, he was stunned to discover that—in spite of his emphatic request that Jesse not be allowed to see visitors—a man named Stephen G. Deblois, one of the directors of the State Reform School, had been permitted to speak to the boy.

  When Wood returned to Jesse’s cell and asked about Deblois, the boy readily admitted that the director had come to see him.

  “What did he say to you?” Wood demanded.

  “He said he is my friend, and that he doesn’t believe I am guilty,” Jesse answered calmly. “He said that there is nothing against me but circumstantial evidence, and that I should not answer any more questions.”

  Seething, Wood left the cell and made for the captain’s office, where he began remonstrating with Dyer. “Didn’t we tell you not to let anyone see him?”

  Dyer seemed unfazed. “Yes, but the man is on the board of the state reformatory.”

  “That doesn’t matter a damn,” said Wood. “You’ve done a fine thing. Pomeroy will go on claiming he didn’t do it. You’ll see. He’ll stick to it from now on.”

  Dyer only answered with a shrug.

  Wood felt a dangerous urge rising in his chest—an impulse to shower the captain with curses. Choking it back, he swiveled on his heels and stormed out of Dyer’s office.

  Detective Wood’s prediction that Pomeroy would “stick to” his new claim of innocence was fulfilled on the very next day—Friday, April 24—when the official inquest into the Millen murder got underway. It was held at the Ninth Police Station in the presence of Coroner Allen and his six-man jury. Jesse’s mother had retained the services of two South Boston attorneys—Messrs. Joseph H. Cotton and E. G. Walker—who requested the privilege of consulting with their client prior to his testimony in order to discuss his defense. While assuring the lawyers that he “intended to give the lad every opportunity to vindicate himself,” the coroner denied the request, explaining that he could “not permit counsel to see the accused until after the jury had listened to his story concerning his whereabouts on the day of his murder.”

  The proceedings began with the swearing-in of ten witnesses, who were then promptly excluded from the room. A few moments later, Jesse was brought in and seated at a table beside his mother, whose careworn appearance contrasted strikingly with her son’s conspicuous nonchalance. Speaking in a cool, absolutely assured voice, Jesse (who’d had two days by this point to work on his alibi) proceeded to relate a story that—though essentially identical to his original version—was far less vague and inconsistent.

  During his initial interrogation on Tuesday night, for example, he claimed that he had spent the key hours between 11:30 A.M. and 2:30 P.M. strolling up to and through the Commons. He’d been suspiciously hazy, however, about certain important details, such as the condition of Tremont Street (which was undergoing major construction work). Now, by contrast, he was suddenly able to evoke the scene with a remarkable—indeed photographic—precision.

  “On Tremont,” he explained, “I noticed that men were digging up the left-hand side going towards the Commons. They were preparing to lay pipes. They were working towards the Scollay Square. When I saw them, I think they were between Winter and Bromfield Streets. Then I crossed to the Commons and sat on a tree stump which was covered with zinc. I noticed that the side of the fence on Tremont Street had been taken away. Some of the walks were covered with tar, and others were covered with boards. After resting a few minutes, I started again and walked along till I came to the Frog Pond. The fountain was not playing when I was there, though the pond was full of water. I did not stop there. I went down by the parade ground. There were some boys playing ball there. Then I went right over to the Public Garden and passed through the fence. I noticed in the doorway of the hothouse a large plant. I don’t know the name of it but it was in a large tub, which was painted green.”

  Altogether, Jesse testified for over an hour. He ended with a firm declaration of his innocence, insisting that he “never saw the murdered boy until I saw him in the coffin at the undertaker’s. I am sure I never spoke to him.” He also asserted that he was unfamiliar with the spot where the murder took place, having “been out there only once, about two years ago this coming summer.”

  When Jesse was finished, his chief attorney, Joseph H. Cotton, requested that his testimony be read back by the scribe. Jesse listened attentively, then—after asking for a few minor revisions—signed the transcript with a bold, clean hand. He was remanded to the custody of Captain Hastings of the Ninth Police Station with instructions that no one be allowed to have conversations with him besides his lawyers and mother.

  By that point, it was already so late in the afternoon that only two more people had a chance to appear before the jury—Officer Roswell Lyons, the first policeman to arrive at the crime scene, and George Powers, the younger of the two beachcombing brothers who had originally stumbled on Horace Millen’s corpse. Following their testimony, the inquest was adjourned until 2:00 P.M. the following Monday.

  As soon as the proceedings were over, the newsmen hurried back to their offices to write up their stories. For the most part, these turned out to be straightforward synopses of the day’s testimony, though several of the reporters also provided their own impressions of the young suspect’s appearance and behavior.

  A few of the journalists were especially struck by Jesse’s unflappable manner, which—as one of them wrote—was so “candid and explicit” that it was “regarded by some as indicative of his innocence.” In 1874, of course, people were far less familiar with the bizarre workings of the psychopathic mind, which makes it possible for these killers to maintain an uncanny composure in the face of the most extraordinary pressures. (For example, when a trio of policemen came to question him about a bleeding, naked fourteen-year-old boy who had just fled in terror from his apartment, Jeffrey Dahmer remained so calm and convincing that the cops turned the boy back over to him—at which point Dahmer promptly tortured, murdered, and dismembered the luckless teenager.)

  To other reporters, however, the very cast of Jesse’s features was sufficient proclamation of his guilt. In an age that gave serious credence to the pseudoscience of phrenology (accord
ing to which a person’s mental characteristics could be deduced from the contours of his skull), it was entirely possible to judge someone’s innermost nature by his facial appearance. The writer for the Boston Globe, for example, needed just a “single glance at the boy’s countenance” to “see how it was possible for him to perpetrate the outrages for which he was taken into custody.” Pomeroy’s innate and incurable degeneracy was, first and foremost, visible in his eyes:

  They are wicked eyes, sullenly, brutishly wicked eyes, and as in moments of wandering thought the boy looks out of them, he seems one who could delight in the writhings of his helpless victims beneath the stab of the knife, the puncture of the awl, or the prick of the pin, as he has so often delighted in. There is nothing interesting in the look. It is altogether unsympathetic, merciless. But worse than all the rest is the sensuality that hangs like lead about those sunken eyes, and that marks every feature of the face. The pallor of his complexion, the lifeless, flabby look that pertains to his cheeks, corresponds with this view; and when the boy walks, it is not the bold, buoyant movement of an innocent lad, but apparently the shuffling of one whose thoughts are of the lowest kind.

  With his shuffling gait, sunken eyes, and corpselike complexion, the figure portrayed in this passage sounds less like a severely disturbed adolescent than like the nightmarish creation dreamed up by Mary Shelley fifty years before. And indeed, that is precisely what the press had already begun turning Jesse Pomeroy into—a fourteen-year-old Frankenstein monster, a homegrown horror that would haunt the people of Boston for decades to come.

  19

  The dime novels came in libraries; for years, until ready for the sober classes of high school, I devoured such series as the Old Cap Collier, Old Sleuth, Nick Carter, and Pluck and Luck. Unhappy was the day when I could not go through at least one of these. What a phantasmagoria of murder, arson, and sudden death! Yet all it taught me was a vocabulary of long words and literary clichés.

  —Isaac Goldberg, “A Boston Boyhood”

  Friday saw another significant development besides the start of the inquest. Under the headline “A Young Demon,” an article about the Millen murder appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Though preoccupation with the killing continued to be particularly intense in Boston (where, as one journalist reported, “the cruel death of the Millen boy remains the general topic of conversation in the community”), the Pomeroy case was no longer a matter of merely local interest. It had become national news.

  “The story of the Boston child-murderer is one of the most extraordinary of the period,” proclaimed the Times. Two things made it so remarkable: the extreme youth of the culprit and the enormity of his acts, the same factors that have turned the “killer kid” tragedies of our own day into a source of such widespread consternation. Indeed, if it proves nothing else, the Pomeroy case offers striking confirmation of the Scriptural truism that “there is no new thing under the sun.” In every essential respect—from the savage nature of the crimes to the stunned reactions they have provoked—the juvenile atrocities that have horrified the modern world (and which are often regarded as a uniquely contemporary phenomenon, a symptom of societal decay) were prefigured more than a century ago by the deeds of Jesse Pomeroy.

  The modern-day outrage with the closest parallels to the Horace Millen slaying was the 1993 torture-murder of three-year-old James Bulger by a pair of preteen thrill-killers, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. Indeed, the two crimes bear astonishing similarities. In each case, a little boy, hardly older than a toddler, was lured from a public place in broad daylight (in Bulger’s case, from a crowded shopping center just outside Liverpool; in Millen’s, from the bustling streets of his South Boston neighborhood). The juvenile abductors then led their little victims by the hand on a meandering trek, pausing occasionally to speak to other people (at one point, Venables and Thompson asked an elderly woman for directions, while Jesse exchanged a few words with a young clam digger on the beach). The victims were eventually brought to isolated locales (Bulger to the verge of a railroad line, Millen to a remote stretch of marshland), where they were tortured and slain. Afterward, the underage killers returned to their homes and families, acting with such perfect nonchalance that they might have been guilty of nothing worse than a day of playing hooky.

  In both cases, public reaction was similar, too. Like the people of Great Britain—who were plunged into a state of anguished soul-searching by the Bulger atrocity—the citizens of Boston struggled to make sense of the Millen slaying and of the motives that had (as one reporter put it) “prompted the inhuman wretch, Pomeroy, to deprive the little child of life.”

  The communal outrage and distress aroused by the crime were summed up by a front-page story that appeared in Saturday’s Boston Herald:

  It is many a day since anything has happened in Boston which has so wrought upon the feelings and sympathies of the public, as the late terrible tragedy on the beach at the foot of Crescent Avenue. Murder, committed in a heat of passion or when the perpetrator of this greatest of crimes is unmanned by an excessive use of intoxicants, is horrible enough. But when, as in the present instance, a child of less than five years is seduced away by a lad of fourteen and tortured until the little life can no longer dwell within its earthly tenement, and that so inhumanly, what shall be said? The moral sentiment of the community is shocked, confounded, and everyone ponders in vain search for a rational solution of the causes which could have brought about the death of the little boy, Millen, at the hand of his supposed youthful murderer.

  Various theories were advanced to account for the crime. Pomeroy’s “mental makeup”—a subject that would generate a great deal of heated debate in the months to come—was analyzed by a number of commentators, who concluded that, despite the extreme depravity of his behavior, Jesse was apparently sane. The writer for the Herald offered a typical appraisal: “He does not look like a youth actuated by the spirit of a fiend, and, with the exception of a peculiarity about the eyes, he has no marked expression in his face from which one might read the spirit within. The idea that he is insane is not supported, except by the extraordinary character of his conduct.”

  Nor could his family circumstances account for his appalling behavior. “There was not, so far as is known, any insanity among his progenitors, so he could not have inherited it,” the Herald reported. True, there were some questionable factors in Jesse’s background. Probing into his ancestry, the Boston Globe discovered a history of family instability that was highly unusual in the mid-nineteenth century.

  At a time when couples rarely split up, the marriages of both Jesse’s parents and his paternal grandparents had ended in divorce. (In the era just before and after the Civil War—when the nation included over fourteen million married couples—there were only about 10,000 divorces per year in America.) According to the Globe, the “union of Pomeroy’s grandparents was not a happy one, and as the current report has it, the fault was with the man, not the woman. In some subsequent divorce proceedings, it appeared that the husband ill-treated his wife in various harsh ways.” Following in the old man’s footsteps, Jesse’s own father, Thomas, had also been abusive to his wife. “In consequence of their continual quarrels,” the Globe reported, Jesse’s parents had separated, “leaving the boy to drift pretty much at his own will. Thus, there seems to have been nothing in the relations of his home which was calculated to counteract the natural weaknesses of his moral character.”

  Still, even the “lack of elevating influences” in Jesse’s home life could not—in the opinion of most observers—explain the staggering brutality of his crimes. Desperate to construe the horror in rational (or at least comprehensible) terms, the public grasped at increasingly tenuous straws. As soon as it became known, for example, that Thomas Pomeroy worked in the Faneuil Hall meat market, some journalists began proposing that Jesse’s bloodthirsty propensities derived from his childhood exposure to butchering.

  It wasn’t long, however, before a numb
er of commentators came up with another—and, in the minds of many people, far more persuasive—theory. And here, too, the Pomeroy case served as a striking forerunner of contemporary issues. Virtually every notorious case of juvenile murder in recent years has been blamed, at least partly, on media violence. At the height of the Bulger affair, for example, much was made of the fact that one of the young killers, Jon Venables, had reportedly watched the horror video Child’s Play 3 right before the murder. And when a fifteen-year-old New Jersey teenager was arrested in October 1997 for the strangulation-murder of an eleven-year-old neighbor, New York City tabloids ran front-page stories trumpeting the suspect’s “violent obsessions with Smashing Pumpkins and Beavis & Butthead.”

  Within days of the Horace Millen murder, similar accusations were circulating about Jesse Pomeroy. In the pre-electronic era of 1870s America, however, the medium that came under attack was not television, film, gangsta rap, or Nintendo. It was the dime novel.

  * * *

  The dime novel was born in the summer of 1860, when the New York publishing firm of Beadle and Adams put out a cheaply made, paperbound adventure story—Ann Sophia Stephens’s Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter—and priced it at ten cents. (“A dollar book for a dime!” was Beadle’s advertising slogan.) Within a few weeks of its appearance, Mrs. Stephens’s novel had sold more than sixty-five thousand copies. Beadle immediately followed up with other crudely printed page-turners, published at the rate of two per month. When the eighth title in the series—Edward S. Ellis’s Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier—appeared in October 1860, the American public snapped up half a million copies.

  Before long—as other publishers began churning out scores of these throwaway publications—the marketplace became flooded with them. During the Civil War, they were shipped by the freight-car load to Union soldiers, who—starved for escapism—devoured countless works like Fugitives of the Border, The Phantom Horseman, and Bald-Eagle Bob, the Boy Buccanneer. The product of underpaid and largely talentless hacks, these outlandish fantasies might not have offered much in the way of convincing characters, credible stories, plausible dialogue, or anything resembling literary merit. But—with their extravagant tales of heroic frontiersman, savage “redskins,” swashbuckling pirates, and romantic desperadoes—they did offer the kind of easy, fast-paced thrills that, in a subsequent era, would be supplied by superhero comics, television westerns, and action movies. And like those later forms of pop entertainment, they soon came under attack by assorted moral watchdogs—politicians, religious leaders, educators, and the like.