Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  The empanelling process went briskly, and by 11:00 A.M., twelve jurors had been selected and sworn in: Moses H. Libby, Ira E. Sanborn, Reuben Rice, Warren J. Poor, Charles H. Joy, George D. Wise, Henry H. Chandler, Eugene T. Hosford, Samuel Mills, Otis Dudley, W. Eames Stillman, and Henry S. Linnell, who was appointed foreman by the Court. The clerk then read the indictment. Immediately afterward, District Attorney John W. May rose to deliver the opening argument for the Commonwealth.

  May’s statement (which typified the entire trial) was a brisk, no-nonsense affair that wasted little energy on courtroom histrionics or sentimental appeals. He began by explaining that, in earlier ages, no distinctions were drawn between different types of homicide (which he defined as “the intentional killing of a fellow being”). Murder—“even its least aggravated form”—had invariably been punished by death.

  As civilization developed, however, and the “spirit of Christianity” modified the harsh practices of former times, a “more humane view” gradually arose. “It was found,” May observed, “that there were degrees of depravity even in murder itself.” Eventually, the law had come to discriminate between killings committed in the heat of passion and those perpetrated “with deliberately premeditated malice aforethought, or with extreme atrocity or cruelty.” Only the latter crimes were defined as murder in the first degree. The evidence to be presented to the jurors, May suggested, would leave no doubt in their minds that the present case fell into that category.

  May then proceeded to recount the “main facts” of the crime, beginning with the discovery of the little boy’s savaged corpse—the body still warm, the throat cut, the chest punctured with “fifteen or twenty” stab-wounds, the genitals horribly mutilated. After being removed to Police Station Nine in Roxbury and “thence to the undertaker’s,” the body was identified as that of little Horace Millen—“an infant, I might call him, four years and three months old”—whose parents had only recently moved to South Boston.

  Next, May summarized the evidence against the defendant: the testimony of various witnesses who had seen the older boy leading the younger one onto the marsh; the precise correspondence between Pomeroy’s boots and the footprints found at the murder scene; the findings of the inquest. As if all this weren’t compelling enough, the “Commonwealth will also introduce to you another and distinct species of evidence,” proclaimed the D. A. “This is a confession!” Though this confession alone was sufficient to convict Pomeroy, May continued, “it was thought the prudent and the better course to present to you, substantially, everything that was known about the matter. And it is with that view that I have detailed to you the evidence which the Commonwealth believes will satisfy you that Horace H. Millen was murdered by Jesse Harding Pomeroy!”

  After appealling to the jurors to discharge “faithfully and fearlessly” the duty they had undertaken—a duty they owed to themselves, to society, and to public justice—the D.A. concluded his statement and rejoined his colleague, Attorney General Charles Train, at the prosecutor’s table.

  The Commonwealth’s case began with the testimony of Horace H. Moses, a civil engineer and surveyor who had mapped out the localities involved in the case, from Mrs. Pomeroy’s shop on Broadway to the place where the victim’s body had been found. Moses’s diagram hung on the wall facing the jury box and would serve as a crucial reference chart throughout the trial.

  The remainder of the morning session was taken up by a string of government witnesses who—under questioning by District Attorney May—methodically traced the events of that raw April morning, eight months earlier, when little Horace Millen had been led to his death. Referring to Moses’s map, twelve-year-old George Powers indicated the exact spot on the marshland—“about half a mile from the railroad” and “within twelve feet of the waterline”—where he and his deaf-mute brother, James, had stumbled on the body. He then told how he had alerted two older men who were out shooting on the marsh. The latter—Patrick Wise and Obed Goodspeed—corroborated Powers’s testimony, adding detailed descriptions of the conditon of the corpse: the blood issuing from the eyes, the throat slashed, the hands badly cut.

  Two policemen were the next to testify: Officer Roswell Lyons, who had been summoned to the murder site by James Powers; and Sergeant Henry O. Goodwin, who had taken the victim’s body to Waterman’s undertaking parlor and been present when the plaster casts were made of Jesse’s bootprints on the marsh. Coroner Ira Allen followed the policemen to the stand. His graphic description of the terrible wounds inflicted on the victim—and particularly of the child’s partially castrated genitals—brought gasps of dismay from the crowd, who also reacted with audible shock when Horace Millen’s blood-stiffened shirt was held up for display.

  Mrs. Eleanor Fosdick, the next witness, testified that—around 11:00 A.M. on the day of the murder—she had been seated at the window of her residence on the corner of Dorchester and Eighth Streets when she saw the Millen boy enter the bakeshop across the street. Another, much larger boy huddled in a nearby doorway. According to Mrs. Fosdick, there was something so strange about the bigger boy’s expression that she put on her glasses to study him more closely. As she did, he suddenly glanced up at her window, and she “noticed that he had a white eye.” A few moments later, the Millen boy reappeared with a drop cake. After breaking off half for himself, the older boy led the younger one away.

  Asked by District Attorney May if she saw the older boy in the courtroom, Mrs. Fosdick raised a finger toward the prisoner’s dock and, in a voice quivering with emotion, exclaimed: “There, in that box, is the big boy—the boy Jesse Pomeroy, who took the cake and went off with the little child!”

  The most heartwrenching moment of the day occurred when Mrs. Leonora Millen took the stand. Clad entirely in black—as though still deep in mourning for her murdered son—she described, in a faltering voice, the final morning of his life. She had given him a few pennies to buy a treat at the bakeshop, expecting him to return within minutes. Instead, she had never seen her little boy again.

  When the district attorney held up Horace’s mangled, bloodstained garments and asked her to identify them, Mrs. Millen broke into piteous sobs. The sight was so affecting that it elicited tears from many of the spectactors. The district attorney himself seemed deeply moved, and—acting with what one reporter described as “commendable delicacy”—excused the anguished woman from further testimony.

  Three more witnesses testified before the afternoon break: Elias Ashcroft, who had spotted Pomeroy leading Horace Millen by the hand along the Old Colony Railroad track; Robert Benson, the fifteen-year-old who had encountered the pair by a little creek on the marsh and was able to identify Jesse by the “white spot on his eye”; and Edward H. Harrington, the clam digger who had seen Pomeroy fleeing from the spot where Horace Millen’s body was subsequently found.

  At 3:00 P.M., following a one-hour recess, the Commonwealth resumed its case with the testimony of several police officers—Thomas Adams, John Foote, and James Wood—who traced the chain of events from the time of Jesse’s arrest to his viewing of the corpse at Waterman’s undertaking partlor. They were followed to the stand by the undertaker’s son, George, who offered corroborating testimony, and a South Boston physician named Horace Everett, who had made a microscopic examination of Jesse’s pocketknife and told the jury that the reddish-brown substance staining the smaller of its blades was, in his opinion, human blood.

  After Everett left the witness box, May stood before the jury and read them the testimony Jesse had given at the coroner’s inquest, in which he had denied any involvement in the murder. Then, the D.A. played his trump card.

  As his next witness, he summoned the chaplain of the county jail, “Uncle” Rufus P. Cook, who testified that the previous July—without any prompting or “inducement”—Jesse had offered him a radically different account of the Millen slaying, in which he freely confessed to the murder. After showing a sheet of paper to Cook—who identified it as Jesse’s handwritten ver
sion of this confession—May proceeded to read it aloud to the court.

  Essentially it was the same statement that had been widely reported in the press five months earlier, in which Jesse graphically described how—after luring Horace Millen onto the marsh by promising to show him a steamboat—he had overpowered the struggling child, slashed his throat with a pocketknife, stabbed him again and again in the chest, and savagely mutilated his lower body.

  At the end of May’s recital, there was a protracted silence in the courtroom, as spectators, reporters, and even some of the jurors fixed their gaze on the prisoner, curious to see his reaction. But if they were expecting that this last and single most damning piece of evidence would somehow shake his composure, they were gravely mistaken. Head back, hands laced behind his neck, Jesse stared up at the ceiling with a look of perfect nonchalance—the very picture of a young lad with not a trace of care in the world.

  “Uncle” Cook turned out to be the prosecution’s final witness. At approximately 4:45 P.M.—less than six hours after the district attorney made his opening argument—the Commonwealth rested its case.

  * * *

  No sooner had May reseated himself at the prosecution table than Jesse’s senior counsel, Charles W. Robinson, Jr. (who had joined the defense team in the fall), rose to make his opening remarks. It immediately became clear that—as the press had long speculated—an insanity argument was the only recourse open to Jesse’s defenders.

  Addressing the jury in a solemn voice, Robinson began by describing Pomeroy’s case as “the most remarkable in the history of crime or criminal law.” Two factors made it so unusual: the extreme youth of the offender (who, at fourteen years and five months old, had only just reached the age “when the law says he can be held responsible”) and the motiveless malignity of his acts. Indeed, Robinson—whose tone made it clear that he deplored his client’s behavior as much as any man—made no effort to mitigate the awfulness of Jesse’s crimes. On the contrary, his speech (which several commentators characterized as “ingenious”) consisted largely of a detailed itemization of every atrocity Pomeroy had been accused of committing, beginning with the series of assaults that had landed him in reform school.

  After describing each of these incidents in turn, Robinson proceeded to summarize Pomeroy’s time at Westborough, recounting—among other disconcerting episodes—the time that Jesse had taken such savage delight in pounding a snake to death that he had to be dragged away from the creature’s mangled carcass.

  It was soon after his release that Jesse committed the first of his two homicidal “transactions” (as Robinson, in jarring legalese, persisted in calling the murders). “This transaction occurred . . . on the 8th day of March. On that day, he did kill the Curran girl.” Jesse, of course, was not on trial for the slaying of Katie Curran. Neverthless, Robinson proceeded to provide the jurors with a dramatic précis of her death.

  At half past eight on that morning, he explained, Jesse had gone across the street as usual to open his mother’s store. “While he was there, engaged in sweeping it out, the Curran girl came in. She was an entire stranger to him, and he to her, and before her coming in there, he did not know there was a Curran girl in the world.

  “Instantly, the thought came to him, and he told her to go into the cellar. And then, within three minutes from the time the girl went into that cellar, she was dead!

  “She went and asked for some article. He told her it was downstairs. She went down and he immediately locked the front door. As I understand, she stepped down and stood right in the center of the place below, facing Broadway. He stepped up behind her and in an instant cut her throat.

  “It was done in an instant! She died quite suddenly, without any great struggle. He then took her and drew her on one side and covered her over with some few things and left her.

  “The next transaction was this transaction of which you have heard today. These are the particular transactions connected with this boy.”

  Having given the jury the gruesome details of Pomeroy’s “transactions,” Robinson then got down to the crux of his case—that Jesse, as a being who could not control his most violent impulses, fell under the legal definition of insanity.

  It was not, Robinson stressed, that the boy lacked intelligence. “He understands what is wrong and what is right. He understands that if he does an act, he is liable to be punished for it. He was in school and learned rapidly.” Nor was the lawyer suggesting that Jesse ever be set free. “This boy cannot go out safely. It would not be safe to the community to have him at large.”

  Indeed, if Jesse moved into Robinson’s own neighborhood, “where I have my children, I would move, because there is no more safety with that boy around than there is with powder and fire in close proximity.” At one point, Robinson told the jurors, he had put a question to Jesse—“If it was my little boy, and I should leave him here with you, would he be safe?” Jesse had looked him in the eye and answered “No.” He might not mean to do anything bad, he told the lawyer. But if the “feeling came over him, which he could not control, he would do these things again.” In a period of approximately two months from the time of his discharge from the State Reform School, he had killed two children. “As I understand it,” Robinson said, “if he had had an opportunity within the last six months, he might have killed six more.”

  What made Pomeroy so dangerous was precisely his bizarre mental makeup—his manifest intelligence combined with an absolute “want of capacity” to resist his savage impulses. Where this deficiency came from Robinson could not say. Perhaps it was an innate defect and there “was always something wanting in him.” Or perhaps he’d been “born with evil powers.” Or his incapacity might have resulted from a childhood disease. Whatever the case, there was no doubt that Jesse Pomeroy was “not a responsible being.”

  Having sketched out his argument—that Jesse, by virtue of his “unsound mind,” should be found not guilty by reason of insanity—Robinson concluded by stressing that such a verdict would not result in Pomeroy’s freedom. “The legislature has passed a law to meet just such a case,” he assured the jurors. “That law reads: ‘When a person indicted for murder or manslaughter is acquitted by the jury by reason of insanity, the court shall order such person to be committed to one of the State Lunatic Hospitals during his natural life.”

  Immediately following his remarks, Robinson called his first witness, Ruth Ann Pomeroy. There was a great deal of public curiosity about Jesse’s mother—whose foul-tempered manner and ferocious loyalty to her son had earned her a notoriety nearly equal to his own—and every eye in the courtroom was riveted on the small, hard-featured woman as she rose to take the stand. Every eye, that is, except the disquieting pair belonging to Jesse, who—seemingly lost in some strange reverie of his own—sat in the prisoner’s dock, staring off into space.

  Under questioning by Robinson—who was clearly trying to establish that Jesse had been aberrant since birth—Mrs. Pomeroy described several near-fatal childhood illnesses that had left her son both physically scarred and emotionally damaged. At three months of age, he had come down with a terrible infection that ulcerated his face, permanently damaged his eyesight, and “almost reduced him to a skeleton.” Just before his first birthday, he had been afflicted with another, equally dire disease that plunged him into a three-day delirium and caused “his head to shake constantly” for weeks. Since that time, he had suffered from a range of afflictions—bouts of dizziness and insomnia, “pains in his eyes,” and frequent, violent headaches. He was “addicted to dreaming extravagant dreams, which would usually haunt him the following day.”

  In school, he was known as a somewhat eccentric child (though not, Mrs. Pomeroy insisted, a bad one). During the past three or four years, his “peculiarities” had grown more extreme. Mrs. Pomeroy continued to believe that her son was innocent of the charges that had sent him to reform school—that every one of the half-dozen little boys who had identified him as their assailant was mistaken.
But if Jesse had committed those crimes, he must have done so while suffering from one of his increasingly frequent “spells.”

  After a sharp cross-examination by Attorney General Charles Train (who got her to admit that, since starting school at five, Jesse had always been a quick learner and capable student), Mrs. Pomeroy was excused. She was followed by three more witnesses who were asked about Jesse’s eccentricities. An officer of the Charles Street jail, John F. Bailey, testified to Jesse’s “unnatural indifference” to his crimes. Mrs. Helen Brown, a former neighbor of the Pomeroys, told of the time that she had seen a cat dash from the alleyway, pursued by Jesse, whose face wore a “wild” expression. Another former neighbor, Mr. Francis J. Almeder, described Jesse’s “peculiar actions while at play. He would break off suddenly from his games, run away by himself, and sit down and hold onto his head, which would shake violently.” When one of these attacks came on, Jesse’s bad eye would blaze “like a ball of fire.”

  Almeder brought down the house when, at one point in his testimony, he remarked that “Jesse had a dog, a little pup, and he had a fit that lasted nearly all night.”

  Jesse’s lawyer, Charles Robinson, gave the witness a puzzled look for a moment before asking, “Well, who had the fit, the dog or Jesse?”

  “The dog,” answered Almeder.

  “Well, what has that got to do with Jesse?” Robinson exclaimed.

  Almeder shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  This exchange triggered such an uproarious burst of laughter in the courtroom that Chief Justice Gray had to pound his gavel for a full half minute before order was restored.

  It was on that raucous note that the first day of Jesse’s trial ended. By then, the time was nearly 7:00 P.M. Almeder was dismissed without cross-examination, and the proceedings were adjourned until the following morning at nine o’clock.

  31

  Cruelty ever proceeds from a vile mind.