Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  “That is something I cannot control,” Savage answered. “But I want to tell your story to the jury just as you told it to me.”

  After considering the chief’s words for a moment, Jesse agreed. Savage pulled out a notepad and pencil. Then—with the same bizarre, matter-of-fact demeanor as before—Jesse repeated his appalling tale, while the older man transcribed the statement word for word.

  * * *

  At four o’clock that afternoon, the coroner’s jury met in the guardroom of Police Station Six. Unlike the proceedings in the Millen case, which had been conducted behind closed doors, the Curran inquest was open to the public—a circumstance that elicited warm praise for Coroner Ingalls from members of the press. Still, not everyone was happy. The crowd of people gathered outside the station house was so enormous that only a fraction gained admission to the show.

  Mrs. Curran spoke first. Attired in funereal garb—a steel-gray dress with a border of black, a black sacque, a dark straw hat with a heavy black veil that obscured much of her haggard face—the heartbroken mother, whose voice quavered audibly throughout her testimony, began by describing her murdered child, who had turned ten the previous December 21.

  “She was always at home,” Mrs. Curran told the jury, “never out of my sight from the day she was born until the day I missed her, except she was at school or unless I knew where she was. . . . I am positive that my girl was not in any way acquainted with the Pomeroy boy. My child didn’t know there was such a person. She might have gone into the store for a paper for her father, but she never knew there was such a person as Jesse Pomeroy. She was smart and bright, but innocent. She was one of the gentlest persons I ever knew. I suppose she can be no gentler now she is in heaven than when she was on earth.”

  After pausing for a moment to regain control of her voice—which had begun to tremble so violently that her last few words could barely be understood—Mrs. Curran continued by recounting her experiences following the disappearance of her daughter: her frantic visit to the police when Katie failed to return; her subsequent trip to the home of the delivery boy, Rudolph Kohr, who insisted that he had seen Katie in Jesse Pomeroy’s store on the morning of her disappearance; the reaction of Officer Adams, who assured her that Kohr was a known liar, that Jesse Pomeroy had “nothing more to do with your Katie than I had,” and that she should put all her trust in the police. “We will bring your little girl back to you without any doubt,” Adams had promised her.

  “Everyone advised me to go see Chief Savage for a warrant to have the place thoroughly searched,” Mrs. Curran testified bitterly. “But I depended on Mr. Adams because he had kept me hoping, and I thought he was my true friend.”

  Exhaling a tremulous sigh, she added: “It is a sad ending to all my sorrow.”

  With that, her testimony ended. She was followed by her husband, who quietly explained that, on the day his little girl vanished, he had been away at work and knew nothing beyond the facts related by his wife. As Coroner Ingalls offered a final word of condolence—assuring them that “everything possible would be done to account for the manner of their little girl’s death”—John Curran signed his wife’s statement. Then he helped her to her feet and led her from the room.

  * * *

  From a purely emotional standpoint, Mrs. Curran’s heartwrenching testimony was the most dramatic moment of the day. But it was the next witness, Police Chief Savage, who created the biggest sensation when he revealed that Jesse Pomeroy had finally confessed to Katie Curran’s murder.

  After announcing that he was “in possession of facts that would greatly aid the jury,” Savage gave a brief summary of his involvement in the case. Following Pomeroy’s arrest for the Millen murder, Savage told the jury, he had begun to suspect that Jesse might “have some possible relation to the disappearance of the Curran girl.” Accordingly, he “gave Captain Dyer and also the other officers of the adjoining territory instructions to make a thorough investigation of every cellar, well, or ditch that could be searched.”

  Savage had also talked directly to Officer Thomas Adams, asking him “if he supposed it was possible to go into the Pomeroys’ cellar and search it without making any particular sensation about it.” Adams said he could. Shortly thereafter, Adams told the chief that he had visited the Pomeroys’ shop, looked into the cellar, and concluded that “it was so open it seemed almost impossible that anything could be hidden down there.” Neverthless, Savage ordered him to pay another visit to the store and “search the cellar thoroughly.”

  A few days later, Adams reported that he had “searched every part of the cellar and was satisfied that there was nothing there.”

  “I will say,” added Savage, “that when Mr. Adams was in our office, we always found him a very thorough man. I had considerable, I may say a great deal of, confidence in his thoroughness.” Clearly, the chief felt it necessary to defend his faith in Adams’s competence—a faith that had turned out to be egregiously misplaced.

  Savage went on to describe his initial interview with Pomeroy; the boy’s stubborn insistence that he knew nothing about the Curran girl; and his stony response to the news of his mother’s arrest.

  “This morning, I went to see him again,” Savage continued. Then—after pausing briefly, as if for dramatic effect—he proceeded to describe his ensuing conversation with Jesse, and the pivotal moment when the boy finally dropped his pretense of innocence and admitted that he had killed Katie Curran.

  The chief’s disclosure sent a ripple of excitement through the crowd. Raising his voice slightly to be heard above the buzz, Savage announced, “We prepared the following statement, which I will now read.”

  Then—as the newsmen strained forward in their seats, poised to transcribe every word—the chief reached into his coat pocket, extracted Jesse’s confession, and began to read it aloud:

  I opened my mother’s store that morning at half past seven o’clock. The girl came in for papers. I told her there was a store downstairs.

  Here, the chief interrupted himself to say that he had originally written cellar instead of stairs. Jesse, however, had quickly corrected him. “If I had told her ‘in the cellar,’ she wouldn’t have gone down,” Jesse had calmly explained, with no apparent awareness that he was revealing himself as a creature of monstrous cunning.

  After giving his listeners a moment to absorb the chilling implications of Jesse’s remark, Savage returned to his reading, with occasional pauses to point out the relevant spots on the hand-drawn diagram the boy had provided:

  She went down to about the middle of the cellar and stood facing Broadway. I followed her, put my arm about her neck, my hand over her mouth, and with my knife cut her throat, holding my knife in my right hand.

  At this point, several sharp gasps arose from the crowd, but Savage, ignoring the disturbance, continued to read:

  I then dragged her to behind the water closet, laying her head furtherest up the place, and I put some stones and some ashes on the body. I took the ashes from a box in the cellar. I [had] bought the knife about a week before for twenty-five cents. The knife was taken from me when I was arrested in April last.

  When I was in the cellar I heard my brother at the outside door which I had locked after the girl came in. I ran upstairs and found him going towards the cellar in Mitchell’s part, and he came back. Two girls worked in the store for mother. They usually got there about nine o’clock. Mother came later. Brother Charles and I took turns opening the store till about April. My mother and brother never knew of this affair.

  Looking up from the page, Savage explained that, after dictating his confession, Jesse had checked it over and approved it, adding only a single additional detail: before emerging from the cellar, he had washed his bloody knife and hands at the pipe in the water closet.

  “This statement was given to me frankly, without holding out any inducement whatever,” Savage declared. “I have always felt that confessions should be free or they would be good for nothing, and this one is
perfectly free, so far as I can tell.”

  Raising a finger to attract the chief’s attention, one of the jury members, Isaac Campbell, asked if Jesse had provided any explanation for his actions. It was a question that people had been asking about Pomeroy ever since his days as the notorious “boy torturer” of Chelsea.

  Savage had, in fact, asked the boy about his motives. At first, Jesse gave the same answer as always: “I couldn’t help it.” A few minutes later, however, when the chief asked again, Jesse offered another explanation—one that a New York Times editorial would describe as “a marvel of cold diabolism.” “I wanted to see how she would act,” the boy had said calmly.

  Jesse himself, along with his mother, was scheduled to appear before the jury that afternoon. But Chief Savage’s testimony had proved so significant that, after a brief consultation, Coroner Ingalls decide to postpone the proceedings, in order to give the jurors “sufficient time to digest what had been told them.” Accordingly, the inquest was adjourned until four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon.

  * * *

  Though Savage’s revelation only confirmed what everyone already believed, the news of the confession created an immediate uproar. As the Boston Globe reported, “The crowd outside the station continued to increase during the holding of the inquest, and when it was known that Pomeroy had confessed, the people seemed almost crazy with excitement and rushed about, spreading the news rapidly, commenting on the terrible story and discussing the probable fate of the author of the horrible deed.”

  Before the day was over, one enterprising local newspaper, the South Boston Inquirer, had rushed out an “extra” containing the substance of Jesse’s confession. Printed on a two-column, five-by-seven-inch sheet and costing two cents a copy, the entire edition sold out immediately.

  It was from the newsies peddling this broadside that Jesse’s mother first learned about the confession. After having been briefly locked in a cell following her arrest, she—along with her older boy, Charles—had been transferred to more comfortable quarters on the second floor of the station. At around 6:00 P.M. on Monday, she was seated by an open window that overlooked Broadway, when she heard the newsboys crying below: “Extra! Extra! Pomeroy confesses!”

  Gazing at Charles, who had turned very pale, she curled her lips into an ugly snarl and said: “It’s a lie.”

  * * *

  The sentiments of the people of the Twelfth Ward—already inflamed against the police—were aroused to an ever greater pitch of fury by Savage’s testimony. Though the most inexplicable blunder had been committed by Officer Adams—whose “thorough search” of the cellar had somehow failed to turn up the decaying, hastily concealed corpse—it was his superior, Captain Dyer, who bore the brunt of the public’s anger.

  Even before the Pomeroy affair erupted, the fifty-seven-year-old Dyer had been a target of community ire. A mason by trade, he had joined the police force in 1849. Five years later, he was promoted to lieutenant and assigned to Station Six in South Boston, where he would spend the remainder of his career.

  It was a career marked by controversy. In June 1856—for reasons that were never made public—he was demoted to the rank of patrol officer. Two years later, when a new administration took power, his lieutenancy was reinstated, and in 1866—when old Captain Taylor of Station Six died—Dyer was appointed his successor. He quickly came to be seen, however, as a singularly ineffectual commander. Indeed his reputation was such that, when Mayor Pierce decided to transfer him to Dorchester, the people of that district objected so vehemently that Dyer was forced to remain in South Boston.

  In the wake of the Millen murder, Dyer had been widely denounced for his reputed support of Jesse Pomeroy’s early parole from reform school. Now, there were new, inflammatory charges against him. It was rumored that on Saturday evening—when as many as ten thousand enraged people had poured onto the streets following the discovery of Katie Curran’s body—Dyer had gone home and retired for the night, in spite of the very real danger (as one newspaper put it) of “imminent riotous proceedings.”

  Indeed, by the day of the inquest, a serious movement was afoot to get rid of Dyer. Petitions calling for his removal were circulated throughout the district, while a delegation of prominent citizens, led by Councilman Flynn, visited the office of Mayor Cobb and demanded Dyer’s immediate resignation.

  Eager to get Dyer’s side of the story, a reporter for the Post visited his home on Dorchester Street early Monday evening and managed to secure an exclusive interview with the beleaguered captain.

  Though Dyer received his visitor very courteously, he was deeply agitated throughout the interview. He stammered, sputtered, and had trouble controlling the quaking of his voice. Though he insisted that he had “made every possible effort to unravel the mystery” of Katie Curran’s disappearance—and indignantly denied the rumors that he and Ruth Pomeroy were on “intimate terms”—the case had clearly taken a serious toll on the man’s equilibrium.

  When the reporter questioned his “conduct in leaving the station house at six o’clock Saturday evening during the extreme excitement,” for example, Dyer defended himself by claiming that his nerves were too fragile to tolerate the strain. He had been “completely prostrated at the discovery,” he explained in a tremulous voice. “To think that all our investigations to find Katie Curran had been such a horrible failure. I am of a very nervous temperament, and upon this denouement I was very nearly unmanned. I was unfit for further duty and turned over the care of the situation to Lieutenant Emerson and then went home.” That this pitiable self-portrait—this image of a police captain reduced to a state of complete emotional debility—might fail to win public sympathy appears not to have occurred to the overwrought captain.

  Shortly thereafter, the reporter took his leave. Dyer bid him farewell with a final, plaintive remark. “I know that we have made a miserable failure of the case,” he said, his voice cracking slightly. “But I did my best to solve the mystery concerning her.” Gazing into his face, the reporter saw an expression of hopeless resignation—the look of a man who knows that his professional days are numbered.

  25

  The great characteristic of American society is an increase of immorality and infidelity. Are our young men growing up in such a way that they will be able to bear the burdens borne by their fathers? Are our young women growing up with the charms of modesty and feminine grace and domestic virtue? Away with all the absurd fashions, follies, and frivolities of society, behind which all kinds of vice and crime lurk and conceal themselves!

  —Reverend W. E. Copeland, June 21, 1865

  Whatever faint hope Dyer might have had about holding on to his job was dashed on Tuesday morning, July 21, when the New York Times ran an editorial on the Pomeroy case that leveled a stinging rebuke at the Boston police. “In passing,” read the piece, “it may be said that Boston is not to be congratulated on the skill of its detective Police. A four months’ search for a missing child failed to discover anything, though her remains were thinly buried in an ash heap in the cellar of the home in which a boy charged with the murder lived when the child disappeared.”

  The editorial was the final nail in Dyer’s professional coffin. He had not only antagonized the people of his district; he had made the whole department a national laughingstock. As the Boston Herald put it in its own editorial demanding his dismissal, Dyer had “put a stain on the department which should cause every official connected with it to wince.”

  The inevitable climax came before noon. Summoned to City Hall by Mayor Cobb, Dyer acknowledged that he had gone home to bed during the near-riot on Saturday evening because of “a nervousness that he could not overcome.” Regarding this behavior as “sufficent evidence that he was unfit to hold the responsible position of captain,” the mayor offered Dyer a classic Hobson’s choice: he could resign within the hour or be summarily discharged. Dyer opted for the former, whereupon Lieutent E. Y. Graves was immediately put in charge of Station Six.


  The response to Dyer’s ouster was positively jubilant. A typical headline in Tuesday’s Boston Herald crowed: “Off Goes His Head!”

  Though every bit as culpable as his boss, Officer Thomas Adams—the man who had actually conducted the bungled search of the Pomeroys’ cellar—somehow managed to elude the axe. Like Dyer, he was approached by reporters and given the chance to present his side of the story to the public.

  Adams explained that—although he was a “regular patrol officer”—he was frequently employed in detective work and was “given the duty of finding Katie Curran.” He insisted that he had “worked on the case zealously and did his best to discover her whereabouts, but was misled by the stories of different persons who stated positively that they had seen the girl taken into a carriage.” Adams had done “all he could to keep up Mrs. Curran’s hopes, because he did not think her child had been foully dealt with. He was at her house two, three, and even four times a week, and—along with an officer named Griggs—had searched the cellar under Mrs. Pomeroy’s store a few days after Mrs. Curran told him her suspicions.”

  As for the most critical issue—how he could have possibly missed the little girl’s remains—Adams offered the following, highly questionable excuse:

  Officer Griggs and I searched the cellar, as we thought, thoroughly. There were no indications that the ground of the cellar had been upturned, nor was there any offensive smell to be perceived. The ground where the body was finally found was, at the time of the search, as hard and as solid as any other part of the cellar. We did our best, and it is unfortunate that we did not succeed. The body may have been deeper in the ground when we searched than when it was discovered, as the heavy rain which came down a day or two previous poured into the cellar and washed away some of the dirt which covered the body.

  In spite of its flaws (Adams’s suggestion that “the body may have been deeper in the ground” at the time of his search was disingenuous at best, since the corpse had not been buried in the ground at all, but rather dumped in an ash heap), the mayor and Chief Savage evidently chose to accept this explanation. Or perhaps the public’s demand for accountability had been sufficiently appeased by Captain Dyer’s removal. Whatever the case, Adams avoided his superior’s fate and was allowed to remain on the force.