By contrast, his “moral sensibility” was strikingly aberrant. Though able to discriminate between right and wrong when presented with various hypothetical cases, Jesse was absolutely “obtuse” when it came to his own crimes. “He evinces no pity for the boys tortured or for the victims of his homicide,” Tyler writes, “and no remorse or sorrow for his acts.” Moreover, his wildly “contradictory statements”—his detailed “account of killing the children and subsequent denial of any agency therein”—were the sign of a deeply duplicitous nature.
After describing the “peculiar sensation” that “always preceded” Jesse’s outbursts of violence, Tyler goes on to offer his diagnosis. An especially significant aspect of the case, he notes, was that Pomeroy’s victims “were persons whom he did not even know and towards whom he had no malice or ill-will. . . . None of the usual incentives to crime appear: no offense had been taken, no grudge, no envy felt, no hope of gain or advantage appears.” When queried about his motives, Jesse could only say “I had to.” Tyler correctly concludes that since “no reasonable and satisfactory external motive for these extraordinary acts exists or can be found,” there must be some internal cause, in the form of a mental disease. He then attempts to place Pomeroy within a category of pathological behavior by citing what he takes to be analogous instances:
Cases similar to this are recorded, and a number have been known to the writer, which, however, differed in this—that the impulse was to commit acts comparatively inoffensive, and of which the results were comparatively unimportant. For instance, the child or youth is impelled to wash and rewash his hands, his clothes, the chair he sits upon, the food he eats. He is disturbed if interfered with, and will seek to do it privately. The only reason he can give for his doing so is, “I had to.” So it is with the propensity to cut up clothing, to fire buildings, to steal articles of which no use is ever made and the interest in which ceases with the act.
The problem with this passage, of course, is its indiscriminate lumping together of several distinct mental disorders, from obsessive-compulsive behavior to kleptomania and pyromania—none of which is especially pertinent to Jesse’s pathology. With his complete lack of conscience and deeply sadistic appetites, Jesse was a classic (if unusually precocious) sexual sociopath—a juvenile lust-murderer who delighted in torture and bloodshed, and who certainly would have preyed on other victims had he not been stopped so early in his appalling career. Though Tyler can be commended for recognizing that Jesse’s crimes were the product of a profound psychological disorder, his attempt at diagnosis ultimately misses the mark, equating the atrocities of a serial sex-killer with the acts of a neurotic who is compelled to scrub his hands a hundred times a day or to avoid stepping on sidewalk cracks when he walks along a street.
Tyler’s ultimate opinion is also open to question. There is no evidence to suggest that Jesse suffered from a psychosis—that he had paranoid delusions, experienced bizarre hallucinations, or heard voices commanding him to kill. And according to the results of Tyler’s own testing, Jesse had no trouble discriminating between right and wrong. Given these findings, the doctor’s conclusion comes as something of a surprise:
“It is evident that such a boy as this should be carefully restrained of his liberty that others may not be endangered. . . . In my belief, he is insane.”
29
Six miners went into the mountains
To hunt for precious gold;
It was the middle of the winter,
The weather was dreadful cold.
Six miners went into the mountains
They had nor food nor shack—
Six miners went into the mountains,
But only one came back.
—“Ballad of Alfred Packer”
In the weeks preceding the start of Jesse’s trial, there was no shortage of lurid news to keep the public diverted—grisly accidents, ghastly crimes, a sensational case of frontier cannibalism, and the long-running sex scandal featuring America’s most popular man of the cloth, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher.
From Omaha came reports of a bizarre and bewildering tragedy—a devastating act of God inexplicably visited upon several of His most devout servants. According to the account in the New York Times—headlined “A CLERGYMAN AND HIS WIFE KILLED BY A THUNDERBOLT WHILE AT WORSHIP”—a Methodist minister named Richard S. Shreve had just seated himself at the dinner table, along with his wife and older brother, John, who was also a preacher. Outside the cozy refuge of the little house, a thunderstorm was brewing. The sky was “overcast with dark, angry clouds, and a few large, scattering drops of water had begun to fall.” Before partaking of their evening meal, the Reverend Shreve proposed that the little party join together in a family prayer. No sooner had he opened his Bible, however, than a “death-dealing” bolt of electricity exploded through the dining window and smote the seated trio. John Shreve eventually recovered, but his brother and sister-in-law were killed instantly—“furnishing one of the most startling exemplifications on record,” as the Times put it, “of the truth of the line in the Book of Common Prayer, to wit, ‘In the midst of life we are in death.’ ”
News of another tragic accident—this one exemplifying the daily perils of nineteenth-century industrial labor—was reported from Vermont. A middle-aged factory worker named Elbridge Williams and his nineteen-year-old son, Edwin—“sober and industrious men,” according to the papers—were working together at the Cook Slate Works in Rutland when the younger of the pair, attempting to adjust the gear in the feeder of a slate planer, got his right hand caught in the moving cogs. When he shouted for help, his father dashed to his side. Instead of reversing the machinery, however, the elder Williams stuck his own right hand into the apparatus and attempted to pull his son free. “In doing this,” the papers reported, “his own hand became entangled, and both were slowly drawn in and crushed in the gear.” Hearing their screams, the factory foreman managed to stop the machine and freed the two men. Though both survived the accident, their mangled right hands had to be amputated—a catastrophic misfortune, since, as the papers reported, “father and son were the only means of support to a poor and worthy family.”
Infanticide was much in the news, particularly in New York City, where the sinister practice of “baby-farming” suddenly began to receive widespread attention after the suspicious death of a seventeen-day-old infant named Charles Corey. At the request of Dr. Harris of the New York City Board of Health, Coroner Wolfman and his associate, Dr. William Shine, visited the child’s supposed caretaker, a middle-aged woman named Kate Kilbride, who occupied a dismal apartment in the basement of a West Side tenement. Under intense questioning by the investigators, Mrs. Kilbride revealed that she had received the infant from a woman named Mary H. Doran, who ran a private “lying-in asylum” on West Twenty-Sixth Street. Further investigation revealed what the New York Times called “the shocking details of a most aggravated case of ‘baby-farming.’ ”
Mary Doran’s establishment, it turned out, was nothing but a kind of squalid little dormitory, patronized by poor, unwed women in advanced stages of pregnancy. For the price of five dollars per week, each of these unfortunates got an iron-framed cot outfitted with a fetid straw mattress and dilapidated bedclothes. Once they gave birth, their babies were turned over to Mrs. Doran to dispose of as she saw fit. The newborns were generally advertised for adoption at the price of twenty-five dollars apiece. When there were no interested takers, the infants were “farmed out” to people like Mrs. Kilbride, who received a small monthly stipend for “taking care” of the babies—meaning that the women were expected to do everything possible, short of outright murder, to make sure the infants didn’t survive.
Mrs. Kilbride’s method was to nurse her little charges on a diet of “poisonous soothing syrup.” In another, equally shocking case, a “baby-farmer” named Elizabeth Graham starved her infants by feeding them nothing but a spoonful of condensed milk and a half-pint of water twice a day. The precise extent of thi
s “nefarious practice” was unknown, but—in a city with more than 5,000 illegitimate births per year (out of an annual total of 34,000 newborns), there were “grave apprehensions among experts of its being very widespread.”
Accounts of other shocking crimes filled the New York and Boston dailies. Within the course of a few weeks in fall of 1874, the front pages were packed with blaring headlines: “ATROCIOUS MURDER IN HACKENSACK, N.J.,” “DOUBLE MURDER AT NEW ROCHELLE,” “MURDER AND LYNCH LAW IN TENNESSEE,” “A WOMAN BRUTALLY MURDERED BY HER HUSBAND,” “A CONDEMNED MURDERER KILLS HIS KEEPER,” “AN ENTIRE FAMILY MURDERED AND BURNED,” “MORE WHOLESALE MURDER AND CREMATION,” and others. One of the more shocking stories came from Topeka, Kansas, where a teenaged grocery clerk named Fred Olds—after arguing with his employer over a checkers game—shot the older man with a carbine, finished him off with a cheese knife, then buried his corpse in the cellar. The next morning, Olds calmly reopened the store, telling customers that his boss had suddenly been called East on personal business.
Most appalling of all, however, was the case of the Colorado man-eater, Alfred (aka “Alferd”) Packer. Though his crimes had first come to light in the spring of 1874, it wasn’t until mid-October—when Harper’s Weekly ran a gruesomely illustrated, front-page account—that the case gained nationwide notoriety.
Born in 1842, Packer had started his career as a shoemaker, a trade he abandoned for good after enlisting in the Union army during the Civil War. (It was during his military stint that he began to be known as “Alferd,” supposedly after a semiliterate tattoo artist etched the misspelling onto Packer’s forearm.) Following his disability discharge (for epilepsy), Packer headed out West to try his hand at gold mining. By 1873, he was working as a wilderness guide in Utah and Colorado.
On November 17 of that year, he set out from Provo, Utah, as the leader of a twenty-one-man prospecting party headed for the gold fields near Breckenridge, Colorado. Two months later—after an arduous trek during which they were reduced to subsisting on their horses’ feed—the exhausted band straggled into a camp of Ute Indians near the confluence of the Gunnison and Uncompaghre Rivers. They were welcomed by Chief Ouray—widely known throughout the West for his friendly relations with whites—who advised them to wait until spring before attempting to negotiate the snow-covered mountains. After a few restless weeks, however, Packer and five of his companions—Shannon Bell, James Humphreys, Frank Miller, George Noon, and Israel Swan—decided to risk the journey. On a mild day in early February, 1874, the six men bid farewell to their Indian hosts and headed off into the mountains.
Only one of them was ever seen alive again. Sixty-six days after leaving the Ute camp—on April 17, 1874—Packer alone appeared at the Los Pinos Indian Agency. When questioned about the fate of his five comrades, he initially claimed that—after becoming too footsore and snow-blind to travel—he had been abandoned by the others, who had gone off in search of food and shelter. When it became clear that they had no intention of returning for him, he had somehow managed to fight his way out of the mountains.
This story was greeted with a good deal of skepticism. Among other things, Packer looked suspiciously fit for a man who had supposedly suffered near-starvation; he was also equipped with Frank Miller’s hunting knife and Israel Swan’s rifle, and had a pocketful of money that he began spending freely at a frontier saloon. Subjected to a second, far more grueling interrogation, he related a grisly tale of bloodshed and cannibalism.
According to Packer’s confession, he and his five companions had become snowbound in the mountains not long after leaving the camp of Chief Ouray. Within two weeks, their food supplies had run out. When Israel Swan, the oldest of the group, perished of hunger and exposure, the others—Packer included—had feasted on his flesh. Humphreys died next, then Miller. Their bodies, too, served to keep the survivors alive. George Noon was the fourth to go—killed, according to Packer, by Bell. When the two survivors had picked Noon’s body clean of meat, Bell tried to murder Packer, who slew his attacker in self-defense, then cannibalized his corpse.
Several months later, in early August, a magazine illustrator named J. A. Randolph—working on a story about the ill-fated expedition for Harper’s Weekly—stumbled on the remains of Packer’s five companions. The article—complete with Randolph’s graphic engravings of the decomposed corpses—appeared in the October 17, 1874, issue, sending shockwaves of horror throughout the country.
Packer was ultimately sentenced to hang by Judge Melville Gerry, who—according to legend—indignantly declared: “Packer, there were only seven Democrats in all of Hinsdale County, and you ate five of them, you son of a bitch!” Three years later, defense lawyers managed to obtain a retrial. This time, the “man-eater” was sentenced to forty years in the state penitentiary. Paroled in 1901, he settled in Littleton, Colorado, just south of Denver, where he lived out his days regaling the local youngsters with colorful tales of life in the old West.
Sensational violence, of course, was only one of the topics that kept the country riveted in the fall of 1874. Intense as it was, the morbid fascination exerted by the Packer case was overshadowed by the public’s unbridled obsession with the scandalous allegations surrounding the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. Then, as now, few things sold more newspapers than lurid accounts of sexual misconduct among the nation’s most eminent men.
Beecher wasn’t merely eminent; he was a major celebrity, whose “Gospel of Love”—spread through his sermons, speeches, newspaper columns, and magazine articles—struck a powerfully responsive chord in his Gilded Age contemporaries. His weekly services at the Plymouth Church in the fashionable neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights drew admirers by the thousands. Though unremarkable in appearance—in 1874, he was a portly, moon-faced sixty-one-year-old—he possessed a charismatic appeal, particularly to women. His flowery orations, delivered with a showman’s flair, inspired the kind of female adulation that, in future generations, would be lavished on crooners, movie idols, and rock stars.
One of his most ardent followers was thirty-five-year-old Elizabeth Tilton, whose husband, Theodore, was Beecher’s closest friend. In 1868—after turning to Beecher for solace following the death of her newborn son—Elizabeth embarked on an eighteen-month affair with the older man (whose own marriage, to an aloof and censorious woman named Eunice, had been emotionally bankrupt for years). Their illicit relationship remained a secret until 1870, when a guilt-ridden Elizabeth finally confessed to her husband, who in turn confided in a number of prominent friends. Before long, Beecher’s adultery had been exposed in the press, precipitating the greatest sex scandal of the era.
For months, accusations and denials flew back and forth, with Beecher indignantly denying the charges, and his supporters (including his famous sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe) rallying to his defense. In the fall of 1874, matters came to a head when Tilton brought suit against Beecher, charging him with adultery and demanding $100,000 in damages. Eventually (and in spite of the overwhelming evidence of his guilt), Beecher would be acquitted. His wildy sensational trial (covered by the press with a prurient zeal that made it the late-nineteenth-century equivalent of the O.J. Simpson media circus) kept the nation transfixed from January through July, 1875, a six-month span that coincided with a period of renewed furor over another sensational story—the crimes, accountability, and punishment of the Boston “boy fiend,” Jesse Harding Pomeroy.
30
Christine: Tell me, do children ever commit murders? Or is crime something that’s learned gradually, so that only adults do really dreadful things?
Tasker: Well, I have thought about that, and so have several authorities I’ve consulted lately. Yes, children have often committed murders, and quite clever ones, too.
—Maxwell Anderson, The Bad Seed
For the three days of its duration, the trial of Jesse Harding Pomeroy for the murder of Horace H. Millen was not only front-page news in every Boston paper but also the hottest show in town. So many people c
lamored for admission each morning that the courthouse guards—unable to handle the crowds—had to be assisted by a special detail of police. Still, the real commotion wouldn’t begin until after the verdict was rendered—and it wouldn’t subside for more than a year.
With the Supreme Judicial Courtroom packed to capacity, the proceedings got underway on Tuesday, December 8, 1874, at precisely 9:30 A.M. As Jesse was led to the dock, several hundred spectators half-rose from their seats, straining to get a better look at the notorious “boy fiend,” who hadn’t been seen in public since the previous spring. Except for his jailhouse pallor, he looked essentially the same. His preternatural composure hadn’t changed, either. Throughout the trial, he seemed coolly indifferent to—even bored by—the proceedings.
At least one observer, however—a reporter for the Globe—claimed to perceive an occasional crack in Jesse’s stolid demeanor, one that exposed the prisoner’s deep, underlying malevolence. According to this writer, “While the counsel were relating his atrocities and the manner in which they were committed, Pomeroy found it difficult to restrain his laughter, and his face gave evidence of a secret pleasure.”
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