Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  After suffering this brutal mistreatment for hours, Jesse was finally allowed to get some sleep—only to be awakened in the middle of the night by an officer who threatened that, if Jesse did not confess, “they will send you to prison for a hunded years.” Unable to bear the pressure any longer, poor Jesse broke down and told the policeman what he wanted to hear. “What wonder is it that I confessed? I was half awake, and nearly dead with fear, and hardly knew what I was saying.”

  Having been coerced into making this false confession, Jesse was then brought to the Tombs and confronted with a number of his supposed victims, all of whom positively identified him as their assailant. As far as Jesse is concerned, however, all seven of the little boys were mistaken:

  Now is it not singular that those boys [could] not identify me except on account of my eye. Not one of them did or could tell what dress I wore or how my voice sounded—in fact, failed to notice everything that a sharp boy would, and fell back on the untenable ground of identifying me by my eye. And how, you will say, untenable? For this reason: it is utterly impossible for me to believe that these boys could be taken on the street and done as they said they were used, and not see some other points of this boy; they would be most likely to see what kind of clothes this boy wore, if he had a black, white, or blue suit on, and in fact all about his personal apprearance. And again, their position of identifying me solely on the ground of my eye is untenable for the reason that there are other boys with eyes like mine.

  The trial that followed was—from Jesse’s point of view—an utter miscarriage of justice. “The complaints were read to me, and I understood them about as much as I would Greek or Latin . . . no one was allowed to speak for me; I was not allowed to speak for myself.” In the end, he was unfairly convicted on the “untenable” testimony of the seven untrustworthy boys, and sentenced by a judge “who would not (or didn’t know enough to) weigh the testimony against me; who allowed himself to judge in a partial manner.” “No,” Jesse protests with all the indignation he can muster, “I did not have justice, have not had it, and what I am the law has made me.”

  After describing at some length his stint in reform school—during which he was “never punished in any way, shape, or manner” and was universally regarded as “a good, behaved boy”—Jesse arrives at the crux of the work: his convoluted and flagrantly specious attempt to prove himself, if not absolutely innocent of the two murders, then at least not morally responsible for them.

  Shortly after his return from Westborough, he informs us, “a small boy was murdered on the South Boston marsh.” For some inexplicable reason, the police immediately assumed that Jesse might have a connection to the crime. “Somehow—I have never been able to find a reason—suspicion fell on me,” he declares in a perfectly disingenuous tone, “and at ten o’clock that night, just as I was going to bed, two gentlemen came to see me . . . and told me that they wanted to know where I had been during the day.”

  At this point in the memoir, Jesse launches into an amazingly detailed, virtually minute-by-minute account of his supposed whereabouts on the day of the Millen murder. Needless to say, he was nowhere near the crime scene. Nevertheless, he was dragged down to the police station, stripped of most of his clothes, and subjected to hours of grueling interrogation. “All this time,” he avers, “I had not the slightest idea of what I was arrested for.”

  It was not until the following morning that Chief Savage informed him that he had been “arrested for the murder of that boy on the marsh.” According to Jesse, this disclosure came as such an unexpected shock that—when his interrogators persisted in grilling him—he finally blurted out, “I might have done it.” This statement, however, was merely the desperate recourse of a stunned and terrified boy. “I was so frightened and resolved to say it so as to get rid of them,” he insists. “I did not know hardly what I was saying.”

  As for his confession to Detective Wood following the viewing of Horace Millen’s corpse at Waterman’s undertaking parlor, Jesse indignantly denies having made it. “His story of my confessing is a lie from beginning to end, and he knows it,” Jesse proclaims. “Or at least, if I did say so, I have no recollection of it, and I do not believe I said I did do it.” Wood’s behavior, according to Jesse, was typical of the deplorable tactics of the police. “They get every fact they can from the accused, and somehow or other they twist it and turn it against [him].”

  Indeed, throughout his autobiography, Jesse presents himself as the persecuted young victim not only of the police but of the public and the news media as well. “The moment suspicion falls on anyone, whether justly or unjustly,” he complains, “the people, led on by the press, raise such a hue and cry against this one or that one that a candid person cannot, for the life of him, tell whether the one is guilty or not.”

  At this point in the memoir, Jesse provides his own, novel version of the Katie Curran affair. Once again, he professes shock and indignation that he was accused of the crime. After all—aside from the fact that he was already in custody for child-murder and that the little girl’s decomposed corpse was found in the cellar of his family’s store—there was no reason in the world to suspect him. By arresting his mother and brother, moreover, the police were guilty once again of resorting to coercive tactics. Full of concern for his loved ones, Jesse “resolved to do alI I could to get them out, so I kept in mind that proverb, ‘One may as well be hanged for stealing a sheep as for stealing a lamb,’ altering it to suit my case, ‘One may as well be hanged for killing one as two, etc.’ ” By the following morning, he had concocted an extremely convincing but (as he now reveals) completely phony confession.

  After denouncing the inquest into the Curran murder as yet another travesty (“Strip the case of all its glitter, and we find the evidence consists only of finding the body in the cellar. . . . Do you see justice? No! Injustice!”), Jesse goes on to dissect, at significant length, the testimony offered at his trial. He begins by deriding the witnesses who claim to have seen him with Horace Millen. He is scathing toward Mrs. Eleanor Fosdick, for example, who testified that she had noticed his white eye from a distance of forty or fifty feet. “How foolish for her to say so,” he sneers, “when she knows she did not nor cannot. If she did, she ought to hire out to Barnum.”

  As for the evidence presented by the prosecution, it was—he declares—“not sufficient. They produced none to show that I led the boy from the street, that I sent him to buy the cake, that I took him along the track, or that I went along the wharf. They produce none to show that anyone saw me go off from the marsh, or that I got any blood on my clothes, or that anyone saw anything strange in my behavior, and in fact they produce not a particle of evidence to show what became of me during the rest of the day.”

  Ultimately, Jesse takes as many straws as he can grasp and weaves them into an argument of breathtaking illogicality. Summed up in a sentence, his conclusion is that the evidence positively shows that he did not murder Horace Millen; but if he did, he must have been insane. His exact argument, however, is such a dizzying example of harebrained reasoning that it is worth quoting at length:

  These are the reasons why I THINK THAT IF I DID THOSE THINGS I WAS INSANE, or that I could not help doing it. Considering:

  That I was found at the age of five years cutting a kitten with a knife.

  That I was subject to a peculiar feeling in the head at times.

  That those acts to those boys indicate a diseased mind on the subject of those acts; they were insane because no one but an insane person would do so. . . .

  Because of making a boy go on his knees and repeat the Lord’s Prayer, and then swear.

  Because of the sticking of a boy with a knife, and holding it up so that the blood could drop down, and laughing at the time, and then repeating it.

  Because it is the blood that seems to be that which excites me, as shown by the story of the snake; also, of sticking the knife into the boy and the holding it up and letting it drop off; and that two doc
tors, who had each of them been to see me six times, pronounce me insane; I think, therefore, that if I did those things I was insane.

  But, notwithstanding all that, as I have said, I DO NOT THINK I DID THOSE THINGS, for these reasons:

  That I was not at the age of five seen on the street cutting a cat.

  That the Government failed to prove me guilty of those first cases.

  Because my confession was given through fear and under promise. . . .

  Because the evidence was not sufficient to show that I was the boy who did those things.

  Because all the evidence came from the boys who were injured, and they were prejudiced against me. . . .

  Because the judge did not weigh the evidence impartially.

  Because the sentence was unjust.

  And because I know that I did not do it to those boys, I conclude that I was not guilty of the acts.

  Following his wholesale attack on the witnesses, the judge, the prosecution, and the jury, Jesse goes after the petitioners who are clamoring for his death. A total of 2,300 signatories, he says, have demanded his execution. But “does 2,300 names represent a total population of 300,000 people? No, it does not, and the fact . . . proves that Boston people do not want me executed.” Moreover, he insists, the “ones that signed those petitions are nearly all women . . . and their demand is so extraordinary that it shows that WOMEN KNOW NOTHING OF LAW OR HUMANITY, or at least those who petitioned didn’t. No. I do not believe that they proved by presenting petitions from women that people wished me executed.” Like other criminals of his ilk, Jesse possessed a monstrous egotism that made him oblivious to anything beyond his own desires, and that often led him to make statements that were astonishingly tactless and ill-advised. Here—even while attempting to win the sympathy of the public—he manages to insult the entire female population of Boston.

  That same self-defeating arrogance is evident at the close of the memoir, where Jesse makes what is arguably the most outrageous statement in the entire work. Proffering a final “word about our jury system,” Jesse actually raises a valid concern, one that continues to be a knotty issue in our age of saturation news coverage. The rise of modern mass communication, he argues—railways, telegraphs, and especially newspapers—has made it difficult for certain highly notorious criminals (like himself) to receive fair and impartial trials. “A murder is committed,” he writes, “there is great excitement, the papers are full of it, and men read about it. The case is to be tried by twelve of the men of the county in which the murder was committed, and . . . the men can’t help forming an opinion of the case, or help hearing of it.”

  So far, Jesse’s point is perfectly reasonable, even astute. He immediately undercuts himself, however, by delivering a brazenly offensive remark that is clearly aimed at the jurors in his own case. “The result,” he says, “is that the twelve men who have formed their opinion, but are willing to change it if the evidence warrants it, are turned away, and their place is filled with a set of human donkeys. . . . Ten to one they say he is not guilty when he is, and say he is guilty when he isn’t.”

  Having thus reviled the jurors as “human donkeys (or, as he elsewhere puts it, “twelve jackasses . . . good and true”), Jesse then goes on to make an even more outlandish statement, one that crosses the line separating the merely insulting from the actively disturbing. In both the newspaper and pamphlet versions, it is printed in capital letters for added emphasis: “IT IS A QUESTION IN MY MIND,” he declares, “WHETHER THE JURY ARE NOT FITTER TO DIE THAN THE PRISONER.”

  That Jesse would conclude his memoir by suggesting that the men who convicted him ought to be taken out and killed seems, at best, highly impolitic—certainly not the smartest way of convincing the public of his harmless good nature. But then, rational and prudent judgment was not Jesse Pomeroy’s long suit—as the world would be forcibly reminded before his full confession was even published.

  41

  I ain’t going to be shut up here all my life.

  —Jesse Pomeroy

  Written communications were forbidden among prisoners at the county jail, as Jesse was perfectly aware. As a result, he and Willie Baxter had taken pains to conceal their correspondence, passing their messages back and forth as surreptitiously as possible. Willie had also been instructed to destroy Jesse’s notes after reading them and to keep their letter-writing a secret from the other inmates.

  In spite of these precautions, the turnkey, Mr. Bradley, had somehow gotten wind of the exchange. And so, on Tuesday, July 20—just two days after the first installment of Jesse’s autobiography appeared in the Boston Times—Bradley decided to pay an unexpected visit to Pomeroy’s cell, hoping to catch him in the act of writing one of the forbidden letters to his friend.

  Since his conviction, Jesse had been incarcerated in cell No. 19, located on the second tier of the south wing of the jail about midway between the rotunda and the barber shop. The cell—normally used for the detainment of debtors—was relatively spacious and equipped with an iron-framed cot, a wooden chair, two slop buckets, and a wash basin. Besides these meager furnishings, it contained Jesse’s books and papers, an iron spoon, and some miscellaneous articles—including various tins of prepared food—supplied by his mother.

  It was just before noon when Bradley unlocked the wooden door of cell nineteen and entered without warning. Contrary to his expectation, he did not find its occupant seated on his cot, composing a letter to Willie Baxter. Instead, Jesse was casually leaning against the front wall, right beside the barred window. His arms were folded carelessly over his chest, his features arranged into a look of extreme nonchalance. There was something so exaggerated about the boy’s pose that Bradley immediately grew suspicious. As he glanced around the cell, his attention was suddenly caught by a bewildering sight—several bricks lying on the floor beneath the cot.

  Hurrying over to Jesse, Bradley ordered him to step aside. For a moment, the boy simply glowered at the turnkey. Then, with a little snort of contempt, he did as he was told—revealing several sheets of paper stuck to the wall directly below the bottom edge of the window. Frowning deeply, Bradley tore away the paper—then made an incredulous sound.

  Underneath the paper, there was a gaping hole in the wall where three bricks had been removed. A quick examination of the space revealed that the mortar around four adjoining bricks had also been dug out. It was clear at a glance that—had Jesse succeeded in extracting those remaining bricks and prying out a single bar of the window—he would have created a hole large enough to wiggle through.

  Bradley immediately summoned Sheriff Clark, who—along with the turnkey—proceeded to conduct a thorough search of Jesse’s cell. They quickly turned up the makeshift tools that Jesse had used in his attempted jailbreak: a length of stout wire pried from the outer rim of his washbasin; his iron spoon (which had become severely bent out of shape); a rung from his chair; and the sharpened lid of a sardine tin (one of the treats sent by Jesse’s mother). To conceal his handiwork, he had used a bar of soap to paste together several blank sheets of paper and affix them to the wall. Sitting on the window ledge—concealing the bottom of the iron bar he’d already begun loosening with his implements—was a large world atlas that had been given to him by the charitable Miss Burnham. Suddenly, Jesse’s observation in his just-published memoir—that he had been supplied with “good solid books . . . [that] will be to my advantage in the future”—assumed a new and deeply ironic meaning.

  At first, Jesse sullenly refused to talk. Before long, however, his egotism got the best of him, and—unable to resist the chance to flaunt his ingenuity—he told his captors everything.

  His plan—which he had hoped to put into effect sometime during the coming week—was to wait until midnight, when the officer who kept watch over the inmates retired for the night. With five unattended hours before the morning guard came on duty, Jesse would finish sawing off the outermost bar of the window, squeeze outside his cell, and lower himself to the ground floo
r of the rotunda by means of a long, knotted rope he had fashioned from the cords that supported his mattress. Though he expected to meet no resistance, he was prepared (as he told his interrogators) to “knock over”—and, if necessary, to kill—“anyone who opposed him.” Once he had cleared the jail building and scaled the outer wall, he intended to make his way to Canada, traveling by night, and “become a citizen of that country.”

  How Pomeroy planned to saw off the iron window bar was made clear in a letter that Sheriff Clark discovered inside the boy’s coat pocket. Addressed to his mother, this letter described Jesse’s jailbreak scheme in lengthy detail, and urged her to bring him a file when she came for her next semiweekly visit. The file, he suggested, could be hidden inside “a banana, as fruit can be passed to a prisoner without examination.”

  Following his interrogation, Jesse was placed in a different cell, this one on the lower tier of the north wing. One of the most impregnable in the jailhouse, its walls were constructed of solid granite blocks “which no one could cut through in a year,” as Sheriff Clark assured the public. Taking no chances, Clark also posted a twenty-four-hour watch in front of the cell.

  Just before locking him inside, turnkey Bradley asked Jesse “why he did it.”

  “I ain’t going to be shut up here all my life,” Pomeroy growled in reply. “I was going to make a trial for liberty.”

  News of Jesse’s “latest exploit” (as the Boston Post called it) caused a sensation. By Thursday morning, every paper in the city had run a major story about the “boy fiend’s” attempted escape. “An Ingenious and Daring Plan!” proclaimed a headline in the Boston Globe. “One of the Most Remarkable Attempts of Jail-Breaking on Record!” declared the Herald. According to the Boston Journal, Pomeroy had diplayed “The Cunning of an Old Jail Bird” in concocting the scheme.