* * *
In our own time, the sites of sensational murders—John Wayne Gacy’s suburban “house of horrors,” for example, or the squalid little apartment where Jeffrey Dahmer committed his unspeakable crimes—have become such morbid attractions that they have had to be demolished just to keep the crowds away. The situation was no different back in 1874. For days after the discovery of Katie Curran’s body, hordes of curiosity-seekers would congregate outside Mrs. Pomeroy’s former shop and (as the Boston Herald reported) “gaze with apparent awe through the cellar windows, as though expecting to see the original tragedy enacted before their eyes.”
As it happened, the cellar was already in the process of being torn up by workmen—a circumstance that allowed the ghoulish sightseers to collect macabre souvenirs: small bits of masonry from the depths of the cellar, or pieces of excavated rubbish that were often rumored to possess a particular, grisly significance.
At one point on Tuesday, for example, the workmen turned up a few tattered old copies of the Boston Herald, discolored with reddish stains. In a flash, the story spread throughout the neighborhood that the papers had been used by young Pomeroy to wipe the gore from his bloody hands and knife blade. After examining this supposedly damning evidence of Jesse’s guilt, however, Coroner Ingalls concluded that the reddish marks were probably cherry stains and chucked the mildewed papers in the trash.
Later that same day, a reporter for the Herald managed to sneak down into the cellar for a quick, furtive look around the murder site. No sooner did he emerge than he announced to the world that he had discovered convincing “proof of the truth of Jesse’s story that he cut his victim’s throat.”
Remarkably, the reporter’s “proof” hinged on the fact that he had not been able to find any evidence of bloodstains in the cellar. Instead—conducting his search “by the fleeting light of burning matches” (as he described it)—he had perceived a bunch of nicks on one of the grimy brick walls. Considering that two workmen had been wielding pickaxes in the basement for nearly three weeks, the fact that there were gouges on the walls should not have been terribly surprising. To the reporter, however, the marks indicated only one thing—that, in an effort to obliterate all traces of his crime, Jesse had taken his pocketknife and methodically “chipped off every spot of blood that had accidentally become spattered upon the wall when he cut his victim’s throat.” Needless to say, this theory was exceptionally dubious, if not completely far-fetched. But it was precisely the sort of lurid speculation that helped to sell papers to a public that couldn’t seem to get enough of the Pomeroy story.
Indeed, the fascination with the Boston “boy fiend” (as the papers had taken to calling Jesse) was so intense that it struck most news commentators as unprecedented. Searching for parallels, a few editorialists compared it to the uproar over the Abijah Ellis murder in 1872. Others looked even farther back, to another grisly child-slaying that had transfixed the city a decade earlier. This was the appalling murder of the Joyce siblings in the summer of 1865.
On Monday, June 12, of that year, twelve-year-old John S. Joyce and his fifteen-year-old sister, Isabella, were visiting their grandmother in Boston. At around 11:30 in the morning, they expressed a desire to explore a forested area known as May’s Woods in nearby Roxbury. After some initial reluctance, the grandmother finally relented. She packed them a lunch, gave them ten cents each for trolley fare, and told them to return no later than 2:00 P.M. She never saw them again.
When the children failed to return, their grandmother became frantic. For the next five days, search parties scoured the woods around Roxbury. It wasn’t until Sunday, June 18, however, that two men, John Sawtelle and J. F. Jameson—while hiking across the wooded estate of the Bussey family in West Roxbury—stumbled upon the remains of the missing children.
From the evidence, it seemed clear that Isabella and her brother had been playing happily in the woods—creating a little hillock of moss and fashioning hatbands out of oak leaves and twigs—when they were unexpectedly set upon. Their assailant—a “fiend in human shape,” as the newspapers called him—attacked the girl first, savaging her body with a dagger, then tearing off her undergarments and raping her. There were twenty-seven stab wounds on her torso, and another sixteen on her neck. The ground all around her corpse was clotted with blood. She had apparently put up a desperate fight, grabbing the long blade of the dagger and attempting to wrest it from her killer. The index finger of her right hand was completely severed, and the rest nearly cut off. Her clothes were soaked in blood, and clumps of grass had been shoved into her mouth to stifle her cries.
Apparently, her brother had stood paralyzed for a few moments with terror. When he finally turned to run, it was too late. He was found lying facedown, having evidently tripped over a tree root while attempting to escape. His killer had pounced on the prostrate boy and stabbed him through the back a half-dozen times. The wounds were so deep that, in several instances, the blade had gone all the way through the little victim’s body, coming out the skin in front.
There were two houses within a few hundred yards of the scene. But the inhabitants were so accustomed to shouts, laughter, and yells from picnic and excursion groups that, as the newspapers noted, “they would not have paid any attention even if they had heard screams on this occasion.”
The appalling savagery of the Joyce murders provoked a citywide furor. From their pulpits, ministers decried the murders as a sign of the growing degeneracy of the age—of the country’s deplorable descent into vice, immorality, and crime. An enormous manhunt was undertaken to track down the “inhuman wretch” who had committed the “fiendish deed.” But—though the police issued many confident pronouncements, assuring the public that the culprit could not possibly get away with his crime—no one was ever arrested. The ghastly deaths of the Joyce children would remain forever unsolved.
* * *
The Millen-Curran slayings were undoubtedly the most sensational Boston child-murders since the Joyce atrocities. But there was one significant difference between the two cases: in the former, the public knew exactly whom to blame. Indeed, they had not one but two targets for their outrage: the “boy fiend” himself and his grim, unrepentent mother.
The public’s antipathy toward Mrs. Pomeroy was vividly demonstrated early Tuesday morning, when a large, noisy crowd gathered outside Station Six to denounce the police for their mishandling of the Curran affair. All at once, several of the protestors spotted Ruth Pomeroy staring down at them from an open second-story window. One glimpse of her face was all it took to send the crowd into a frenzy. They began screaming, hooting, demanding that the police remove the hated woman from their sight.
Far from being intimidated by the mob, Jesse’s mother seemed intent on inciting them to even greater heights of fury. She leaned her head out the window and answered their jeers and insults with imprecations of her own. The scene turned so ugly that some observers were convinced that a riot was about to break out. It wasn’t until several police officers forced Jesse’s mother away from the window that the crowd finally quieted down.
Given the public’s feelings about Ruth Pomeroy, it’s no surprise that a story quickly sprang up linking her child’s blood-crazed behavior directly to her own presumed penchant for butchery. The story—which had already gained citywide circulation by late Monday afternoon—was summed up in Tuesday’s early edition of the Boston Globe:
Directly after Pomeroy was first arrested after torturing a number of children in Chelsea and South Boston, three well-known physicians, who were anxious to learn all that they could about the boy, called upon his mother and had a candid interview with her. They told her their errand, and she gave them all the information in her power.
Among other things, she said that her husband was a butcher, and that during the period of her pregnancy she went daily to the the slaughterhouse to witness the killing of the animals, and that somehow she took a particular delight in seeing her husband butcher the sheep, th
e calves, and the cattle, and not infrequently she assisted him in this bloody work. She also said that after Jesse was born and became old enough to hold a knife in his hands, he was all the time, when opportunity offered, jabbing a knife into pieces of meat, and when still older and about his father’s market, he did the same thing.
These facts certainly explain in some measure why Jesse “could not help” committing his crimes, as he told the court. He was simply marked by his mother, as other children had been, only in a different way.
The theory that Jesse was “marked” by his mother—i.e., born with an innate penchant for violence because of his prenatal exposure to animal-butchering—was quickly discounted by Coronor Ingalls and other medical experts. Ingalls was especially disdainful of the idea, comparing it to the primitive folk-belief that, should a woman have a tooth extracted during her pregnancy, her infant will be born with a harelip. In his fifteen years of practice, Dr. Ingalls declared, he had “never met with such a case, and scientific research has never revealed a single instance in which some secret influence has affected offspring.”
Ruth Pomeroy herself was given an opportunity to address the issue on Tuesday morning, when—at the request of several reporters—Jesse’s lawyer, Joseph H. Cotton, paid her a visit to ask about the rumor. Mrs. Pomeroy immediately composed a reply, which—while convincingly refuting the slaughterhouse story—proposed an equally reductive theory of her own. (In its reference to the “absurd requests” she had been receiving from all over the country, her reply also makes clear that—like the psycho-killers of our own day, who invariably attract the perverse devotion of various “groupies”—Jesse Pomeroy had already achieved a macabre celebrity.)
Mrs. Pomeroy’s answer, which appeared in every major daily in Boston, as well as in the New York Times and other papers throughout the nation, went as follows:
Before going into the butcher business, my husband worked in the Navy Yard at Charlestown, where he was employed for a period of ten years. He was at work there four years before Jesse was born, and remained there until [Jesse] was nearly six years of age. It was after this he went into the butcher business. He did not kill cattle, but carried the carcasses about the market. I never saw an animal of any kind slaughtered. I do not believe in the theory of being marked.
The statement regarding the visit of the three physicians is false. The only gentleman of science that questioned me on the subject of Jesse was a phrenologist, and he did not seem to be able to understand Jesse’s mania at all.
I have frequently received letters from persons in all parts of the country, principally in the West, asking for some of Jesse’s hair and other absurd requests that I have not paid any attention to.
The story of Jesse sticking knives into raw flesh is also false. I think his vaccination had more effect on him than anything else. He was vaccinated when he was four weeks old, and shortly after, his face broke out and had the appearance of raw flesh, and some fluid issued from the wounds that burned my arm when it dropped on it, from which fact I judge the fluid was poison. This lasted until he was six months old, when his whole body was covered with large abscesses, one of which was over the eye and occasioned that cast or fallen appearance that it wears at present. At the time, it was thought he would die, but he recovered slowly, and Dr. Lane, who attended him, stated that the sickness was occasioned by vaccination.
Both the slaughterhouse story and Ruth Pomeroy’s own theory that her son had been poisoned by a smallpox vaccination represented only two of countless efforts to comprehend the mystery of Jesse Pomeroy’s actions. In the end, these efforts—which would continue for many months—weren’t especially productive. For the most part, they consisted of describing Jesse’s bizarre personality in the colorful, prepsychiatric lingo of the day: “moral malformation,” “horrible monomania,” “innate depravity,” etc.
Perhaps the most intriguing early comments on the Pomeroy case appeared on the editorial page of Tuesday’s Boston Globe. The piece, headlined “A Curious Case,” compared Jesse to a number of notorious figures, including Gilles de Rais—the fifteenth-century nobleman who reputedly butchered more than one hundred young boys and who is generally regarded as the model for the fairy-tale monster Bluebeard—and Martin Dumollard, a French lust-murderer responsible for the deaths of at least ten servant girls in the mid-1800s.
True, the editorial did not shed any new light on Jesse’s motivations. But it astutely placed him in the correct behavioral context—within that criminological category we now call serial sex-murder. (The editorial—published in July 1874—also makes it very clear that, far from being a uniquely contemporary phenomenon, serial homicide has always been a feature of human society.)
In the end, it was Jesse himself who offered what might have been the only possible explanation for his acts. Shortly after noon on Tuesday, he was visited by his lawyer, Joseph H. Cotton, who gave the boy a rundown of the previous day’s proceedings. Just before he departed, Cotton asked Jesse the question that was on everyone’s mind: Why had he killed Katie Curran? What made him do it?
At first, Jesse gave the same answer as always: “I do not know. I couldn’t help it.” Then, raising his right hand, he pointed to the side of his head and added: “It is in here.”
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I had heard of the loss of the Curran girl, but never suspected that Jesse had anything to do with her. I never saw anything in connection with Jesse that led me to think that he had done wrong, and never thought he had a propensity for doing wrong.
—Ruth Pomeroy
On Wednesday, July 22—four days after the discovery of her body and more than four months since she vanished from sight—Katie Curran was finally laid to rest. At approximately half past three in the afternoon, Undertaker Cole delivered the little girl’s encoffined remains to the home of her grief-numbed parents. Wishing to bury their child with as much dignity as possible, John and Katherine Curran had taken pains to keep the funeral a secret, particularly from the press. As a result, few people observing the mournful little cortege as it passed along the streets on its way to Holyhood Cemetery had any idea that it bore the pathetic remains of the “boy fiend’s” penultimate victim.
Only a few people were present at the burial site—Katie’s parents, a priest, and a handful of relatives and friends. The scene was so somber and hushed that Mrs. Curran’s heartbroken whimpers resounded through the graveyard as she watched her daughter’s white-painted coffin being lowered into the ground.
* * *
The solemnity of the funeral was in marked contrast to the tumultuous scene taking place simultaneously at Police Station Six, where the coroner’s inquest into Katie Curran’s murder was about to resume. Hoping for a glimpse of the infamous “boy fiend”—who was supposedly slated to appear before the jury—an enormous crowd had gathered on the sidewalk, clamoring for admission. They jostled and shoved their way into the building, quickly filling up every available seat in the guardroom and occupying every inch of standing space in the outer offices and hallways.
Among those who managed to make it inside the room was the same “well-known spiritualist” who had announced that Jesse was controlled by a band of bloodthirsty Indian spirits. But the presence of this publicity-hungry charlatan was deemed to be so distracting to the jury that Coroner Ingalls demanded his removal before the proceedings began.
As it turned out—and much to the disappointment of the spectators—Jesse didn’t put in an appearance. Still, the afternoon’s proceedings—which lasted one and a half hours, beginning at 4:00 P.M.—weren’t entirely without interest. Though the star attraction never showed up, the audience did get to witness the next best thing: the testimony of his mother, Mrs. Ruth Ann Pomeroy, who—by this time—had achieved nearly as much notoriety as her son.
She wore a plain, dark dress and a deeply careworn expression. Surprisingly, she showed none of her normal pugnacity, delivering her remarks in a low, even voice. Essentially, her testimony consisted of a stri
ng of denials. She did “not recollect seeing anything unusual” when she arrived at her shop on the morning of March 18, the day of Katie Curran’s disappearance. She did not “remember whether anyone was in the store” when she came in. She did not “recollect anything about Jesse on the 18th of March.” She “did not go into the cellar” until the following week. She “never saw anything that led me to think there was anything wrong in the cellar.” She “never to my knowledge saw this Curran girl.” She “never perceived any bad smells in the store that led me to think there was something wrong.” She “never knew of Jesse’s being in the cellar more than he ought to be, or saw any efforts made to conceal anything that might have been done.” She “never saw on Jesse’s clothing or on the floor of the cellar anything in the shape of blood.”
Jesse, she insisted, was a “good and clever boy, and never quarreled with his brother more than boys generally will.” She knew that he “carried a small knife” but always “trusted him, and never thought there was anything wrong.”
* * *
With her subdued, ladylike demeanor, Mrs. Pomeroy made a surprisingly favorable expression on the spectators, who were expecting a harridan. The case was precisely the opposite with the next witness, her older son, Charles. Consistently portrayed in the papers as a model of youthful diligence, the sixteen-year-old boy turned out to be a sullen adolescent, who slouched in his seat, chewed on a toothpick throughout his testimony, and spoke with such careless indifference that Coroner Ingalls felt obliged to admonish him repeatedly that he was under oath.
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