Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  —Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso

  The second day of the trial, like the first, drew a large, eager crowd to the courthouse. The spectator gallery filled up as soon as the doors were opened, leaving dozens of disgruntled people milling outside the building until they were dispersed by the police.

  The proceedings, which began promptly at 9:00 A.M., picked up where they had left off on the previous day. Mrs. Hannah F. Almeder—wife of the last witness to testify on Tuesday—seconded her husband’s recollections. She had always considered Jesse “a very strange child,” she declared, “and at times thought him insane.”

  Another woman who had known Jesse as a child—Mrs. Lucy Ann Kelly, wife of a Charlestown policeman—took the stand next and offered a vivid instance of the boy’s precocious cruelty, his “peculiar thirst for blood.” Years before, when Jesse was only four or five, she had caught him one day in the yard with a small, piteously mewling kitten in his hands. The cat, whose coat was dabbled with blood, had clearly been tortured: stabbed in the throat, chest, and other parts of its body. When Mrs. Kelly asked the little boy what in the world he was doing, Jesse looked at her with a weird, unnerving smile and said: “This is my little kitty.”

  One of Jesse’s former teachers at the Winthrop School, Mrs. Abbie M. Clark, confirmed that—while Jesse had always been an “apt student”—he was also an extremely difficult one to manage. On various occasions, she had been compelled to whip him with a rattan for whispering in class, annoying his schoolmates, and other infractions. He also had a bizarre, disruptive habit of “making strange faces” at her during lessons. He never displayed the slightest remorse for any of his misdemeanors. On the contrary, he regarded any sort of punishment as an utter injustice, insisting—whenever he misbehaved—that he “could not help it.”

  At this point in the proceedings—and over the objections of Attorney General Train—Jesse’s counsel, Mr. Robinson, was permitted to read from the official record of Pomeroy’s earlier crimes, the ones for which he’d been sent to reform school. This recitation was followed by what the Boston Globe (in an unabashedly Barnum-esque phrase) trumpeted as the “feature attraction” of the morning session—the testimony of the little boys “who had been tortured by the young fiend.”

  In having these juvenile victims give detailed accounts of their sufferings, Jesse’s lawyer was clearly trying to establish that his client was insane—that only a person suffering from a severe mental disturbance could commit such atrocities. But (as Robinson must surely have known) it was the kind of tactic that could easily backfire, working the jury into such a pitch of indignation against Jesse that they would never acquit him, no matter how crazy he seemed. In any case, the little boys’ testimony turned out to be the dramatic highlight of the day, and (as the Globe reported) “the most perfect silence prevailed during its progress.”

  Tracy Hayden, Pomeroy’s second known victim—who had been seven at the time he was assaulted—spoke first. Pointing to the prisoner’s dock, he identified Jesse as the “bad boy” who had taken him to an outhouse on Powder Horn Hill, then stripped him naked, lashed his wrists together with a rope, hung him from an overhead beam, whipped him with a “hard stick,” and threatened to cut off his penis.

  Hayden was followed by five more schoolboys from Chelsea and South Boston, each with a tale of abduction and torture more appalling than the last. Johnny Balch—who had been lured to the same outhouse and subjected to even greater cruelties—began speaking in what the papers characterized as a “clear, ringing voice.” As he described a particularly horrific moment, however—when Jesse, after cutting him down from the beam, laid him on the ground and began stomping on his naked body until he nearly fainted—his voice became so choked with emotion that he had trouble continuing.

  Robert Maier conjured up a picture of Jesse as a being of almost preternatural cruelty, “jumping around” with demonic glee as he flogged his little victim and made him say “naughty words, like ‘kiss my ass’ and ‘shit.’ ” Several jurors seemed openly appalled as the next witness, George Pratt, described the way Jesse had tortured him—whipping him with a strap, “meddling” with private parts, puncturing his cheeks and eyelids with a needle, and biting him “right in the rump.”

  Joseph Kennedy—who had been stabbed in the hands with a horseshoe nail, slashed on the face with a pocketknife, and forced to recite an obscene version of the Lord’s Prayer—also had a visibly dismaying effect on the jury. “He cut me here,” Kennedy said in a faltering voice, pointing down at his crotch. “Then he made me say my prayers and naughty words, and said he was going to kill me, and that I would never see my father and mother any more.”

  Robert Gould, the last of the little victims to take the stand, elicited shocked reactions in the courtroom before he even spoke. Gould still bore the scars of the knife-wounds inflicted by Jesse, and the mere sight of the child’s mutilated face brought scattered gasps of horror from the audience.

  After the Gould boy finished speaking, Robinson summoned one more witness with firsthand experience of the defendant’s explosively violent temperament—Laura Clarke, a teacher at Westborough, who recalled the time that Jesse had gone into a frenzy of bloodlust while killing a snake in the school garden. Mrs. Clarke also described another occasion, when—just days after Jesse’s arrival at the reform school—she was walking past the chair shop and noticed a sobbing young boy, who claimed that Jesse had been hurting him. When she approached Jesse to ask “why he had done so,” Pomeroy—a “wild look in his eyes”—brandished a knife that he’d evidently stolen from the shoe shop. Certain that he meant to attack her, Mrs. Clarke froze in her tracks. But after a brief, terrifying moment, the crazed expression evaporated from his eyes, and—lowering his weapon—he returned to his work as though nothing had happened.

  Aside from those two incidents, Mrs. Clarke testified, Jesse’s “conduct was good.”

  Following the brief and wholly inconsequential testimony of William Lee Miller—the principal of Westborough at the time of Pomeroy’s incarceration—Robinson proposed to submit Jesse’s confession to the Katie Curran murder. His intent, the lawyer explained, was to offer “further evidence of my client’s insanity.” Attorney General Train vehemently objected on the ground that the document “had no reference whatever to the trial in progress.” Chief Justice Gray, however, ruled in favor of the defense—whereupon Robinson proceeded to read aloud the same chillingly matter-of-fact statement that Chief Savage had first made public at the Curran inquest.

  The time had now arrived for the defense to summon its psychiatric specialists. And here, too, the situation in 1874 was remarkably similar to the way things are now. Like their counterparts today, the opposing lawyers in Pomeroy’s trial managed to find experts who completely contradicted each other—“men of a quarter-of-a-century’s experience” (as the Boston Globe dryly noted) who were brought in “to swear positively on both sides and to put in evidence of an almost diametrically opposite character.”

  Dr. John E. Tyler was the first of the “insane experts” to take the stand, and his testimony was essentially a verbal recapitulation of the written report he had submitted to Jesse’s lawyer a few months earlier. After describing the handful of visits he had paid to the defendant in the county jail, Tyler stated his belief that the boy was insane and “not responsible for his actions.” His opinion was based on a number of factors: the bizarre nature and extraordinary barbarity of the crimes; the absence of any discernible motive; and Jesse’s complete lack of any “feeling in regard to the murder.” Tyler acknowledged that, by themselves, none of these things necessarily “denoted insanity.” But “taken together,” they offered a clear indication of an “unsound mind.”

  Another sign of the boy’s “mental derangement” was his insistence that he “could not help” committing his atrocities—that he “had to.” Tyler cited the cases of several patients he had known who suffered similar—if “less disastrous”—compulsions, such as the n
eed to wash their hands dozens of times a day. Like these unfortunate people, Jesse, too, was the victim of an “uncontrollable impulse”—albeit one with infinitely more dire consquences.

  In response to Robinson’s questions, Tyler insisted that the ability to distinguish between right and wrong was not necessarily a sign of sanity. “Insane persons,” he declared, “may have their own idea of what is right and what is wrong.” They are also able to “carry out a preconceived plan of murder,” and often display a “great deal of cunning in concealing their crimes.” Moreover, the fact that Jesse appeared to be perfectly rational most of the time proved nothing about his mental condition, since “a man may be insane on one subject and not another. “Indeed, Tyler insisted, “there are insane persons who would not be recognized as such by any but experts.”

  Following a one-hour recess that lasted until 3:00 P.M., Tyler was subjected to a rigorous—indeed, often grueling—thirty-minute cross-examination by Attorney General Train. Train began by asking if Tyler knew of any facts in the boy’s life—apart from his crimes—that indicated an unsound mind.

  “I know of none,” Tyler conceded.

  Tyler was also compelled to admit that Jesse knew his acts were wrong, and that the “circumstances attendant to his crimes”—the cunning he’d shown in luring his victims to secluded spots, the care he’d taken to clean his weapon, his efforts to avoid detection following the murders—were consistent not only with a “sane mind” but with “mental capacities of a high order.”

  After getting Tyler to acknowledge that “merely killing someone was not in itself evidence of insanity,” the attorney general asked what distinguished Jesse from other murderers. Tyler, who seemed a bit rattled by this point, reiterated that it was the “accumulation of unnatural barbarities”—as well as the sheer “motivelessness” of the crimes—that “gave doubts as to his sanity.”

  “But it does not necessarily follow,” said Train, “that because you could not detect a motive, there was none. Isn’t that so, Dr. Tyler?”

  Tyler admitted that it was.

  “Could not the love of cruelty for its own sake be a motive?” Train inquired.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” said the psychiatrist, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

  After wresting one final concession from the witness—that “an examination in a jail cell might not be the best means of judging a prisoner’s mental condition”—Train excused him from the stand. It was the general consensus among observers that the cross-examination represented a solid victory for the prosecutor, who had (as the Boston Globe reported) compelled Dr. Tyler to make a number of key “admissions which considerably shook his direct testimony in many of its vital points.”

  Tyler was followed to the stand by his colleague, Dr. Clement A. Walker. Superintendent of the Boston Lunatic Hospital since 1851, Dr. Walker stated that he had “given the subject of insanity his attention almost exclusively for twenty-five years, and during that time had treated some two thousand patients both in the hospital and outside.”

  It was his belief—based on his examination of Jesse, as well as on “the evidence thus far presented at the trial”—that “at the time the deed was committed, its perpetrator was laboring under a mental disease.” Like Dr. Tyler, he based this opinion on the “apparent want of motive, the peculiar age of the boy, and the extraordinary number and character of his crimes.”

  Jesse, moreover, had never displayed “any sorrow or pity for his wrong acts.” He showed “no visible sign of any such thing as moral responsibility and seemed dead to all the finer emotions which are met with in sane persons.” During one of their interviews, for example, Walker had asked him how he felt about the “wretchedness he had caused the Millen family.”

  “I hardly ever think of it,” Jesse replied with a shrug. Then, expelling a little snort of bemusement, he added: “It’s funny, isn’t it?”

  It was Dr. Walker’s belief that Jesse might be suffering from an obscure form of epilepsy, a condition that would account for the various symptoms the boy complained of—the frequent headaches, the bizarre dreams, and the peculiar, “misty” sensation that seemed to come over him right before he engaged in one of his crimes. If this were the case, “it followed as a matter of course that he had commited his acts through a lack of control.” A person suffering from such a condition, Walker explained, “might be able to determine as between right and wrong, and still be compelled, by the violence of his mental disease, to adopt the wrong.” Dr. Walker concluded by reiterating his “firm belief” that Pomeroy “was not responsible when he committed the acts charged against him.”

  Under a relentless cross-examination by Attorney General Train, Walker held firm to his conviction that Jesse’s motiveless atrocities were “indicative of a mental disease.” Indeed, Walker opined, Jesse’s disorder might well eventuate in his “total loss of mind.”

  Even so, Train forced the witness to admit that “the mere evidence presented at the trial was not, in itself, sufficient to establish insanity.” Walker also conceded that “the fact that the boy ran away after committing the acts, so as to escape punishment, was clear evidence of his power to distinguish between right and wrong, and established that he was fully conscious of his responsibility.”

  With the conclusion of Dr. Walker’s testimony, the defense rested its case. The time was a little before 5:00 P.M. The jurors were allowed a five-minute recess, after which the government’s rebuttal witness, Dr. George T. Choate, was sworn in.

  A self-described “expert in insanity,” Dr. Choate had served as superintendent of the State Lunatic Asylum in Taunton for seventeen years before establishing a private sanitarium about thirty miles north of New York City, on the Hudson River. In the course of his career, he had treated hundreds of patients, among them the renowned journalist and statesman, Horace Greeley.

  He began by explaining that he had interviewed Jesse twice in October. During his first visit, Jesse had freely confessed to the Millen murder and demonstrated at least a modicum of remorse, “acknowledging that what he’d done was wrong.” Choate had been struck by the boy’s “intelligence and shrewdness.” Evidently, Jesse had been spending his time in jail “investigating the legal aspects of his case.” With cool, even cocky, self-assurance, Jesse had stated “that the authorities will never hang me, as I am too young. They have never hung a boy as young as fourteen in Massachusetts, and I do not believe they will begin with me.” Instead, he expected to be sentenced to either the state prison or a lunatic asylum—though he firmly believed that “if he could be sent away to sea, he would get over his desire to commit cruelties.” When Choate had remarked that “it would be difficult for you to get a chance, since a captain might have fears that you would kill him in the night,” Jesse had replied: “I have no desire to injure men. Only boys.”

  Choate was taken aback when—at the start of their second interview a few days later—Jesse completely retracted his confession, claiming that he had only admitted to the murder to clear his mother and brother from suspicion. In Choate’s view, this was further evidence of Jesse’s cunning, deeply manipulative mind. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Choate’s ultimate diagnosis completely contradicted the opinion of the two defense experts. In his view, Jesse was not suffering from a mental disease. “There is no insane temperament or taint of hereditary insanity in the boy,” he testified. To be sure, Pomeroy’s mind was “different”—but it was different in its “moral qualities, in its proneness to certain forms of sin and its weakness in resisting those impulses.” Jesse had “a weak character—not a weak intellect.” In short, it was Dr. Choate’s conviction that on April 22, 1874, the day of Horace Millen’s murder, Jesse Pomeroy was not insane.

  Robinson cross-examined Choate at some length, but the alienist didn’t waver from his opinion that Pomeroy—though possessed of a “weak moral nature”—was “not mentally unsound.” It was nearly six when his testimony ended. There were no further witnesses to be heard on either side. Having be
gun only the day before, the trial of the Boston “boy fiend” was already drawing to an end.

  A few minutes after Choate left the stand, court was adjourned for the day. Beginning at nine o’clock on Thursday morning, the jury would listen to the final arguments before retiring to deliberate on Jesse Pomeroy’s fate.

  32

  Any person [who] shall commit the Crime of Willful Murder . . . who, in the Supreme Judicial Court, shall be duly convicted . . . shall suffer the punishment of death.

  —Declaration of the Massachusetts State Legislature, 1804

  To more than one observer, the scene inside the courtroom on Thursday morning resembled a packed downtown theater during the sold-out performance of a hit show. “Not only every seat,” reported the Boston Herald, “but every inch of standing room was occupied as well.” The crowd had clearly flocked to the final session of the trial in the hope of seeing something dramatic—and they were not disappointed. For in the closing arguments of the opposing attorneys, the audience was treated to a pair of speeches that were (according to one journalist) “masterpieces of legal acumen,” containing “many brilliant passages,” as well as “wonderfully ingenious pleas and interpretations of evidence.”

  Jesse’s lawyer, Charles Robinson, spoke first. Addressing the jury in sonorous tones, he began by recapping the salient points of Pomeroy’s life—his childhood illnesses, his mental idiosyncrasies, his perverse nature, his “love of blood and cruelty.” “All the evidence introduced during the trial,” he declared, “clearly establishes the fact that at the time the homicidal act was committed, the accused was not responsible, for the reason that his mind was diseased.”

  In a voice tinged with incredulity, he asked: “Could a boy of fourteen be in his senses and drag away a bright little child, the delight of his home and the hope of his fond parents, and—without any motive or provocation and with premeditated malice aforethought—cut, mangle, and murder him in cold blood?”