Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  Needless to say, whatever sympathy Jesse may have generated with his just-published memoir was completely undone by the discovery of his planned escape. His brazen bid for freedom confirmed the worst fears of those who believed that no prison would ever hold the “boy fiend”; while those who scoffed at his claims of insanity felt bitterly vindicated by this proof of his obvious cunning.

  “For an insane person, as the professional philantropists claim him to be,” the Globe commented dryly, “he certainly displays a remarkably clear head when any planning is to be done.” In a similarly sardonic vein, the Herald observed that “If Jesse Harding Pomeroy . . . is an insane person, as was claimed at his trial, the malady has developed itself in a form heretofore unknown to the profession who have made insanity a study. For a boy of his age, he has recently shown himself to be a genius in cunning, and has within a week made for himself a reputation for faculties rarely found in one of his years, and which are proof positive that he is not only in full possession of his senses, but has an extraordinary adaptability for conceiving bold and desperate schemes and plans for defeating justice, and the nerve to attempt their execution.”

  * * *

  While the the rest of the world may have perceived Jesse as a prodigy of evil and a “genius in cunning,” his mother and brother remained stubbornly convinced of his innocence. At one point in mid-April, for example, they had been visited by a man named James Ingalls, who identified himself as a prison guard at Randall’s Island in New York City. According to Ingalls, one of his inmates, a teenaged boy named Coe who was in the last stages of tuberculosis, had confessed to the murders of Horace Millen and Katie Curran and wished to make a dying statement directly to a member of the Pomeroy family.

  Mrs. Pomeroy—convinced that her faith was about to be rewarded and Jesse fully exonerated—gave Charlie thirty dollars for travel expenses and sent him off with Ingalls. Over the next few days, she waited impatiently to hear from her older son—but the anticipated telegram never arrived. Finally, nearly a week after his depature, Charlie showed up with nothing to relate but a tale of petty and malicious trickery.

  Ingalls, it turned out, was an imposter. After decoying Charlie to New York, he had contrived to finagle all thirty dollars from the boy and left him stranded penniless in the city. Somehow, Charlie had managed to scrape enough money together to make his way home.

  As for Ruth Pomeroy, her feelings about her younger boy were expressed in a lengthy letter she sent to a San Francisco woman who had written to ask for a lock of Jesse’s hair. (Like many notorious sociopaths, Pomeroy attracted the fascinated attention of various—mostly female—correspondents, the sort of morbid admirers we now refer to as serial-killer groupies.) Somehow, the press got hold of Mrs. Pomeroy’s letter, which was widely reprinted in papers throughout the country, including the New York Times. The full text ran as follows:

  DEAR FRIEND

  For such I deem you by your writing me in this, my hour of trouble—I feel it my duty to answer you immediately. Although I may differ with you in regard to this case, you have written to me expressing sympathy with me, and I feel deeply grateful for your kindness, although a stranger to me; yet by your letter it shows that there is one woman who does not feel disgraced by writing to a poor, heartbroken mother. I cannot write you that Jesse is guilty of those terrible crimes, although he has been convicted—yet not proved—by law. You will no doubt be surprised, yet I mean just what I say, there is no justice in Massachusetts for a poor boy. Had he been the son of some rich person, the case would have had a more thorough investigation. That is my view of the subject.

  Jesse’s confession was given after the girl was found in the cellar of the store occupied by three or four different parties, having to go there every day after coal, within three feet of where the body lay. If three policemen searched the cellar, looked in the very spot where it was found, and found nothing—if it was there, then I don’t see why there was no smell, it being about six weeks after the girl disappeared. When found it was only partially covered with ashes, workmen having worked there nine days without smelling anything. I said his confession was made after the girl was found—or the bones—for there was nothing to recognize her by except shreds of clothing, I was told.

  I and my son were dragged to prison, and for what? Just to satisfy the public. I had done nothing, nor did I dream of such a thing as that body being there: nor do I believe, today, that it was. I was taken from my home bareheaded to the station from my work, thinking all the while that everything was coming out right, and I could afford the stings and scorn of people that were cast upon us, when the last blow fell upon me, crushing my heart to atoms. Ah! I never can tell you what we have suffered. No pen can describe, no tongue can tell the deep agony of that hour. From the first I believed the body was placed there after we moved from the store, and that nerved me up to more strength to bear; and I determined to rise above it, believing yet, till at last the terrible news came that Jesse confessed that he had done the deed.

  For a while I was almost wild, but when I came to reason the case, I began to doubt, not believing it possible that it could have been done and we not knowing anything about it. They told me Jesse would tell me all about it, but when I asked to see him they refused my request; they kept me five weeks and my oldest boy six, and after I had been home five or six weeks they allowed me an interview. I knew Jesse thought the world of me, and I knew it would nearly set him crazy to have me and Charlie in jail. My suspicions were correct, for when I got the papers I saw by the Chief’s testimony that Jesse had confessed to save his mother and brother. I was not surprised—I knew Jesse better than anyone, and I knew his generous heart; and today he would rather suffer death than have any harm come to us. I do not doubt that he is insane—driven insane by the treatment that was heaped upon us. Jesse is no ordinary boy, but I do believe he is no criminal. If I could see and talk with you, and tell you all the mysterious circumstances surrounding the mysterious affair, I think you would agree with me that there is some terrible mystery about the whole affair that has not been brought to light. Jesse never was of a cruel disposition; there never was a more kindhearted boy. Is it not a little strange that his mother never saw a thing in the boy that would lead me to suppose him capable of committing such crimes? It is entirely different from his disposition—and the people have been blinded by passion, and shut their eyes to the real facts, and been blinded by the horrible crimes recently committed in our midst; and as I write you this last blow has fallen. They tell me that my boy is to die, and for what? Why, to satisfy the mothers of Massachusetts. Yes—mothers. But I do here declare that the time will come when this great injustice will be known. It may be too late to save the life of my boy, yet it must come, sooner or later. Mark what I say, Massachusetts will yet bow in shame for murdering my boy, for murder it will surely be. I have no fear for my boy; God will take care of him. Remember, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”

  Did you see anything in the lock of hair to make you believe Jesse capable of committing such crimes? I do not know as I can get your kind letter to Jesse, as they will not allow it to be given to him.

  Again, I thank you for your kindness in writing to a brokenhearted mother.

  Deeply grateful,

  Mrs. R. A. POMEROY

  However impassioned, Mrs. Pomeroy’s letter served no other purpose than to impress Bostonians with the deeply deluded nature of blind mother-love. The startling news of Jesse’s aborted escape inspired a fresh burst of calls for his execution. In spite of this pressure, Governor Gaston remained staunchly opposed to signing Jesse’s death warrant. This principled but highly unpopular stance effectively cost Gaston any chance of reelection. In August, 1875, the Democrats nominated the Honorable Charles Francis Adams to run for governor in the fall elections.

  As soon as the campaign got underway, a committee of the city’s most influential women sent a small delegation to sound out Adams’s opponent, Alexander H. Rice
, on the subject of Pomeroy. Rice assured them that, if elected, he would promptly set a date for Pomeroy’s execution. Partly as a result of this promise, he handily won the election.

  Contrary to his pledge, however, Rice—who was, in truth, no more eager than Gaston to send a teenaged boy to the gallows—found ways of stalling his decision. And by the summer of 1876, the situation had undergone a significant change. Nearly two years had passed since Jesse’s trial, and—though feelings against Pomeroy still ran high among a certain segment of the public—most Bostonians had put the matter out of mind. Moreover, on May 26, 1876, Thomas Piper—“the Monster of the Belfry”—had gone to the gallows, and his death seemed to have slaked, at least to a degree, the public’s thirst for vengeance. Even Lieutenant Governor Knight—the most vociferous supporter of the death sentence on the Executive Council—had done an about-face by then and no longer demanded Jesse’s execution.

  The final disposition of the case occurred on the afternoon of August 31, 1876, when—during a brief, closed-door meeting—the council reversed its previous position and, by a six-to-three vote, decided to commute Jesse’s death sentence. From all reports, the councillors were deeply influenced by the impassioned pleas for mercy submitted by some of the most eminent members of the Suffolk bar, including Judges George Tyler Bigelow, Benjamin F. Thomas, and Dwight Foster, all ex-justices of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. Recognizing, however, that the public would not be placated unless Pomeroy were subjected to something more extreme than mere imprisonment, Governor Rice sentenced the boy to “solitary confinement for the remainder of his life.”

  The news of the governor’s decision created only a minor stir among the populace. True, there were those who felt that, in sparing Jesse’s life, Rice had commited political suicide. “The Pomeroy business killed Gaston last year,” one Boston man commented bitterly, “and it will send Mr. Rice back to private life.” For the most part, however, the public appeared to respect the decision, viewing it (in the words of the Boston Herald) as “the honest conviction of those upon whom the great responsibility of this trying duty has devolved.”

  For Ruth Pomeroy, news of the commutation came as a joyous surprise, and she received it, according to the Globe, “with tears of gratitude.” Jesse’s reaction, on the other hand, was considerably more subdued. By that time, he was nearly seventeen years old. Though no longer the barely pubescent “boy fiend” of the popular imagination, he was still appallingly young to be facing the awful prospect of a lifetime in solitary. From his vantage point, the governor’s decision was no cause for celebration. Jesse had concluded his published autobiography by remarking that the prospects he faced were equally grim. “If they say I must die, I am dead,” he had written. “If they send me to prison for life, I am dead too.” Now, the second of these two ghastly fates had come to pass. Jesse Pomeroy had been saved from the gallows—but condemned to a living entombment.

  42

  Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein.

  —Proverbs 26:27

  On September 7, 1876—a bleak, drizzly Wednesday, less than three months before he turned seventeen—Jesse Harding Pomeroy entered the Massachusetts State Prison at Charlestown. Except for a brief interval during the early 1880s—when he, along with the other inmates, were temporarily transferred to another institution while Charlestown underwent renovations—he would remain immured within its grim, granite walls until 1929: a period of fifty-three years, extending from the time of “Custer’s Last Stand” to the start of the Great Depression. And of that half century of internment, he would spend forty-one years in solitary confinement—the second-longest such stretch in U.S. penal history (surpassed only by the forty-two years in “deep lock” endured by Robert F. Stroud, the so-called “Birdman of Alcatraz”).

  Though he would eventually be transferred to a somewhat larger space, Jesse passed the first decade of his sentence in what was little more than a sealed, granite vault—a seven-by-nine-foot cell with a few narrow loopholes high in the walls to provide a modicum of light and ventilation. His only furnishings were a little table, a narrow bunk, a metal wash pail, and a wooden slop bucket. The inner, solid iron door weighed more than five hundred pounds; the outer door of heavy wood shielded him from the sight of any other living being.

  His endless, crushingly dreary days were all the same. He would rise at around 8:00 A.M., when the daylight leaking into his cell had grown strong enough to see by. At the height of summer, his cell was as stifling as a coke oven; but in the winter, it was so frigid that the water in his wash pail would freeze overnight. After breaking the top crust of ice, he would perform his morning ablutions—assuming that the rats hadn’t made off with his soap chips and tooth powder.

  Three times a day, a guard would slide his tasteless meals through a slot in the wrought-iron door. The food was always the same: beans, brown bread, hash, rice, molasses, and a thin, flavorless soup with a few limp cabbage leaves or slivers of onion floating in it. His only beverage was a weak, barely palatable coffee-substitute, made of burned rye steeped in boiling water.

  Any infraction of the rules, no matter how small, was met with brutal punishment. According to the statute books, prisoners in solitary were forbidden any form of communication with fellow inmates. Sometimes, however, in his desperation for human intercourse, a man might try to contact his neighbor by tapping out a message on the stone wall dividing their cells. Anyone caught committing this offense, however, was liable to be subjected to a swift, savage beating—often meted out with a brass-handled cane.

  Though Jesse, in his lifelong intransigence, often refused to do any work whatsoever, he was expected to perform “hard labor” during his sentence. For the first few years of his incarceration, his main task consisted of making scrubbing brushes. He would sit at his little table for hours at a stretch, affixing the stiff bristles to the wooden handles while reading sporadically from a book propped open on his lap.

  Even at the height of summer, dusk would begin to gather in the unlighted cell by mid-afternoon. By 5:00 or 5:30 P.M. (earlier in winter), night had fallen for Jesse Pomeroy.

  Retreating to his bunk, he would lie there listening to the pandemoniac sounds that issued from the neighboring cells and filtered into his own: shouts, catcalls, curses, whoops, shrieks—a crazed, infernal racket that would last throughout the night.

  There was virtually no relief from this unbearable existence. Once every three months, as permitted by prison regulations, his mother came to see him, a ritual that continued until her death in 1915. On a handful of occasions, he received visits from various notables. In 1910, for example, during a Christmas Day tour of the prison, the wife of Governor Eugene Foss chatted with him briefly about his reading. Four years later, Foss’s successor, Governor David I. Walsh, held a brief conversation with Jesse through the bars of his cell. Otherwise—beside prison officials, an occasional clergymen, and a lawyer or two—Jesse had no direct contact with other human beings for forty-one years.

  * * *

  By condemning Jesse Pomeroy to life under such harrowing conditions, the state of Massachusetts had, in effect, taken a man that the courts had found sane and condemned him to an existence almost guaranteed to drive him crazy.

  Both anecdotal evidence and scientific research have shown that, for many men, even a few days of solitary can be a shattering experience. At the time of Jesse’s incarceration, every newly admitted prisoner to Charlestown was forced to serve the first twenty-four hours of his sentence in isolation—partly as a brusque initiation into life in the “big house,” and partly as a foretaste of the punishment meted out to anyone who violated its rules. Many first-time convicts found this experience—as one former inmate testified—“the most terrifying twenty-four hours in life.” Condemned to longer stretches, even the toughest men might crack. Writing in the Boston Globe of his experiences in Charlestown, an ex-prisoner named Waldrop recalled that, when faced with the prospect of a month’s stint in a solitary cell, a jail
mate of his named Romano—an unregenerate hardcase doing time for manslaughter—hanged himself.

  Clinical studies have proven that prisoners subjected to even relatively short periods in solitary confinement commonly begin to show severe psychopathological symptoms, ranging from hallucinations to panic attacks to paranoid delusions. More protracted stints can drive a man to madness. In December 1949, after three years in Alcatraz’s notorious “dungeon,” a small-time hood named Henri Young stabbed a fellow inmate to death. At his trial, his lawyers successfully argued that Young’s prolonged isolation was a form of cruel and inhuman punishment that had made him insane. Even the administrators of Devil’s Island—the infamous penal colony off the coast of French Guiana—put a two-year limit on the time a man could spend in solitary.

  That Jesse Pomeroy survived forty-one years of this treatment has made him—in the eyes of certain devotees of American penal lore—something of a folk-hero, a man who refused to be subjugated by the brutal conditions of the “pen,” who never caved in to authority or surrendered to the system. Even some people with very little love for Jesse Pomeroy have expressed a grudging admiration for his fierce, unbending willpower. In October 1930, for example, James R. Wood—the onetime Boston police detective who had played such a key role in Jesse’s arrest a half century earlier—published an article on the case in a pulp magazine called The Master Detective. (“At last!” screamed the headline. “The real truth about America’s most notorious lifer—this ogre in human form who, as a boy, took his place among the most infamous arch-fiends of modern times!”) Though Wood was no fan of Pomeroy’s, he could not keep a certain respectful tone from his voice when describing Jesse’s prison existence. “But there was one thing they could not break,” wrote Wood, referring to the Charlestown officials. “That was Pomeroy’s indomitable spirit.”