Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  The second possibility was that Jesse “is sane, fully equipped, mentally.” But “if so,” then hadn’t he “suffered enough for the crimes he is supposed to have committed forty years ago? Why shouldn’t he have at least the freedom of the penitentiary the same as an ordinary criminal? Why is he even denied the privilege of attending the concerts? Even the religious services . . . are for the others but not for him. Surely he has suffered enough to merit his release.”

  To stir the indignation of his readers, High reprinted a long, piteous letter sent to him by Jesse’s mother. By then, Ruth Pomeroy was a feeble, ailing woman in her early seventies who had spent the better part of her life in an unavailing effort to persuade the world of her son’s innocence. The past forty years had done nothing to change her feelings about Jesse. “I have never believed my son guilty of these crimes, NEVER!,” she proclaimed. Her son, she insisted, had been a “happy and bright boy” who was railroaded for a murder he did not commit because the South Boston police were under intense pressure to make an arrest in the Millen case, and Jesse—having just been released from reform school and being a “stranger in the neighborhood”—made a convenient scapegoat.

  “Jesse was only a boy of a little over fifteen years when he went to Charlestown State Prison,” Mrs. Pomeroy continued. “In his solitude he put himself down to study and has succeeded in educating himself. . . . He is a learned man and could do a great deal of good if out. He has already served a lifetime and ought to come home, but you see the people do not know the real ‘Jesse Pomeroy.’ No one gets to see him and he is friendless with the exception of his mother. I can do but little; I am old, over seventy, and I feel my time is short here, but through all these years I have cherished the hope that before I passed away I might have my son with me once more. . . . Thank you for your kindness and hope and pray you may be able to do something for my son.”

  High concluded his essay with a heartfelt appeal (plus a dash of racist rhetoric). After leveling a few final insults at the state of Massachusetts (which had “tried for forty years to crush, torture, and brutalize Jesse H. Pomeroy”), Warden Russell of Charlestown (“this Simon Legree of cultured Boston”), and Governor Eugene Foss (a political “turncoat” and “flip-flopper” who was no better than Pontius Pilate), High urged his readers to do all they could “to prevent this disgrace from becoming a greater monstrosity and travesty of justice”:

  Why can’t we try kindness, love, and patience, abolish brutality and barbarity, and see if Jesse H. Pomeroy is not a man who will respond to humane appeals? Who knows but that he may even yet take his place in the world of usefulness to comfort and cheer his faithful old mother who has stood by him through all these years, faithful and true; watching, waiting, working, and hoping against hope that her boy will yet be given back to her. . . . Do the guards, officials, and whatnots of the Massachusetts penitentiary and the yellow journals know the same Jesse Pomeroy that the faithful mother describes? How can they? You might as well hand the score of a symphony orchestra to a band of Hottentots and ask them to bring forth the same soul vibrations that were born in the brain of Mendelssohn.

  As 1914 progressed, Jesse’s written appeals began to fall on more receptive ears. In March of that year, for example, he was finally permitted to file a formal petition with the governor and executive council, requesting a “pardon of my said offense and a release from further imprisonment on said sentence, either absolute or upon such conditions and under such limitations as the Governor deems proper.”

  Jesse’s petition was based on the same highly dubious argument he had been making since 1876—namely, that his conviction of “murder in the first degree on the ground of atrocity” was illegal, since the prosecution had failed to prove that there was anything truly atrocious about the Millen murder. In light of the cruelties inflicted on the four-year-old boy—whose throat had been slashed, right eyeball punctured, and scrotum torn open—this assertion seems outrageous at best. Jesse’s reasoning—which reveals a great deal about his complete inability to comprehend the enormity of his crimes, even after a span of forty years—was that the victim was already unconscious (and possibly dead) by the time he had been gashed, sliced, and nearly castrated. “Hence,” Pomeroy concluded, “no torture, no aggravating circumstances.”

  Needless to say, this argument didn’t carry much weight with Governor Foss and his councillors. Far more compelling was Jesse’s assertion that, after thirty-eight years of solitary confinement, “the ends of justice have been obtained.” Indeed, the sheer, inhuman length of Jesse’s immurement had become the most politically charged and controversial aspect of his case. Even those who recalled, with undiminished horror, the “boy fiend’s” reign of terror felt that it was time “to give Pomeroy a little freedom—a little of God’s pure air and sunshine” (as one petitioner, a man named Levi Parker, urged the governor).

  In the spring of 1914, responding to growing public pressure, Governor Foss appointed a commission of four medical experts to examine Pomeroy and ascertain whether, in their opinion, “the severity of his solitary condition” might be eased. Their final report, issued on July 14, 1914, constitutes the most complete description of Pomeroy’s psychology on record and is therefore worth quoting at length.

  The report begins with a survey of Jesse’s criminal history and childhood background, then continues with a brief but telling summary of his prison experiences:

  Although living in solitary confinement all these years, Pomeroy has been far from idle. From the first he has been a constant reader and student and claims to have taught himself to read books in several foreign languages including Arabic. He has also spent much of his time in tireless and incessant efforts to make his escape from prison, beginning shortly after his commitment. Besides making ten or twelve determined attempts to break out which were thwarted as he was putting them into execution, tools and other cleverly devised implements have been repeatedly found in his possession. . . . A fellow prisoner reports that he seems to have a mania for anything that will cut or bore. This has been the extent of his manual labor for he has repeatedly refused to take up any of the various kinds of prison work or even to exercise regularly in the prison yard. . . .

  His main employment is his determined and unremitting effort to prove that he was illegally sentenced, in order to secure pardon or discharge from custody. This is his aim in life. He has made a study of his case with the aid of law books furnished him. . . . He has written many hundreds of pages setting forth his defense which has been sent to various courts (including the United States Supreme Court), to the Secretary of State, and to His Excellency the Governor and numerous lawyers. His applications have been invariably denied and he has received no encouragement from legal sources whatever. Nevertheless, he persists in his appeals . . . and will not deny that he intends to urge his claims until he obtains his freedom.

  Throughout his prison life he has been uniformly insensible to personal interest taken in him by others. . . . He takes kindnesses as a matter of course, is highly egotistical and inclined to dictate to prison authorities. His only interest in his mother is the aid she can give him in securing his release. He shows no pleasure at seeing her but begins on his case as soon as she comes and talks of nothing else. He is very unreliable on account of his untruthfulness. He thinks everyone is against him and apparently never loses his suspicions for a moment.

  Turning to Pomeroy’s mental condition, the physicians agreed that the prisoner was an “extreme example” of “a moral degenerate.” Possessed of “sharp wits,” a “good memory,” and “a desire to improve his mind,” Jesse had “no delusions whatever, the nearest approach to one being his fixed obsession that he was illegally convicted, a common one with long-sentence convicts.” He possessed a “knowledge of right and wrong in the abstract,” had acquired an impressive “knowledge of criminal law,” and had “shown indefatigable energy and considerable ability to utilize legal points.” In short, in terms of his reasoning abilities
and “intellectual capacity,” Pomeroy seemed perfectly normal, even above-average.

  “On the other hand,” the experts cautioned, he was “unquestionably defective on the moral side to a degree which . . . was plainly extreme and much more pronounced than in the ordinary criminal. The unusual, atrocious, and cruel nature of his criminal acts, his pursuit of crime for crime’s sake only, . . . his utter insensibility to suffering, and his gratification in torturing his victims ‘for the same reason that a cat does a mouse before killing it’ . . . are typical of the moral defective, and when taken as a whole are far different from the motives and conduct of the ordinary malefactor.” Jesse, in short, was a classic case of what later criminologists would call a sociopath: a terrifyingly depraved individual whose superior cunning and rationality were linked to—and deployed in the service of—an utterly remorseless, sadistic, and bloodthirsty nature.

  In the final section of the report—labeled “Prognosis”—the authors made it clear that the vicious propensities of “moral degenerates” like Pomeroy could never be fully controlled, let alone eliminated. Once past a certain age, such beings were utterly immune to rehabilitaton. “To properly safeguard the community,” they declared, “close and continual custody is absolutely necessary.” There was no doubt in their minds that “if at large, [Pomeroy] would still be a menace to society in spite of his thirty-seven and a half years of solitary confinement.” That Jesse had not committed any atrocities since 1874 was a result of only one factor—“lack of opportunity.”

  The doctors concluded with a cautious, carefully hedged recommendation that indicated just how dangerous they still considered the fifty-five-year-old prisoner to be. “We are of the opinion,” they wrote, “that some amelioration of the prisoner’s solitary confinement would be advantageous and that he might be allowed certain of the privileges that are enjoyed by other life-prisoners provided absolutely effective measures be taken to prevent his escape. If he could be induced to take up regular employment and if his yard-privileges could be extended—always under adequate supervision—life would be less irksome to him and possibly his mind might be diverted from his obsession with escaping and from continual legal contention about his rights. We should regard it, however, as a hazardous experiment in view of the fact that this besetting determination of his, which has been growing in strength ever since his commitment, has become a habit of mind and calls for the exercise of the utmost precaution.”

  46

  I am glad of this opportunity to show the world that I can behave myself because it may lead to further consideration and possibly a pardon. I know people think I am some sort of an animal thirsting for blood. I know that they think I will pounce on the first living thing I see, human or animal, and try to kill it. I have a normal mind. I am not deranged. I will prove it to you all.

  —Jesse Pomeroy, January 24, 1917

  Ruth Pomeroy’s feeling that—as she wrote to Fred High—“my time is short here” was not so much a premonition as an accurate appraisal of her condition. Always a tough and hardworking woman, she had been the proprietress of a lunchroom at 489 Neposet Avenue, near the terminal of the Bay State and Boston Elevated car lines, for many years. But a severe bout of double pneumonia in 1909 had shattered her health and forced her to close her business. Since that time, she had been residing in the home of her married granddaughter, Mrs. Walter Giddens, at 47 Pearl Street in the town of North Weymouth, Massachusetts.

  By the late fall of 1914, Ruth had become so weak that—for the first time in nearly forty years—she was unable to make her monthly visit to Jesse. A few months later, during the first week of January, she was again stricken with pneumonia. “Aged and weakened with sorrow,” as the Boston Globe would report, “she could not fight the disease.”

  On the afternoon of January 10, 1915, Ruth Pomeroy died in her sleep, without having realized her most “cherished hope”—that “before I passed away I might have my son with me once more.”

  * * *

  Even with his most ardent champion gone, the pressure to alleviate Jesse’s condition became more intense as 1916 approached. September 7 of that year would mark the fortieth anniversary of his incarceration in Charlestown—a grim milestone not only for Pomeroy but for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as well. Never before in U.S. penal history had a human being been subjected to such a torturous stretch of solitary confinement.

  True, there were some people who continued to protest any mitigation of his sentence. Interviewed by the Boston Post, James Bragdon—the former police officer who, in 1872, had collared Jesse for the series of child-assaults that had terrorized South Boston—declared that he would be “sorry to see” Pomeroy given any sort of liberty. “The mania which caused him to cut little children will never leave him,” said Bragdon, now a frail and wizened seventy-year-old, “and he will not be safe, even in a jail ward with men. No one will ever convince me that he will ever be normal or safe, and I think he should be kept in solitary confinement to the end of his days.”

  For the most part, however, there was a growing clamor throughout the country for a commutation of Jesse’s sentence. In California, for example, an editorialist in the Los Angeles Times—noting with horror that Pomeroy was about to observe his fortieth year in solitary confinement (“in other words, his fortieth year spent in hell”)—exclaimed: “It does not seem possible that this is true. It appalls the soul to think of it. And in Massachusetts, above all places. Massachusetts, with its boasted intellectuality, its schools, its churches, its learnings, and the sacred codfish whirling in the winds of heaven on the spire of the old State House in Boston!”

  The Literary Digest, in its February 19, 1916, issue, equated Jesse’s forty-year immurement with the “barbarity [of] the Dark Ages” and reprinted an editorial from the Kansas City Star that vividly evoked Jesse’s appalling isolation from the world of the living:

  Ever since the year of the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Pomeroy has lived within those stone walls, never walking out into the sunshine, never speaking to any one, never seeing a person from the outside world, except his mother, who has faithfully visited him once every two months. Within one hunded yards of his cell, the human tide of the great city of Boston has ebbed and flowed for nearly half a century, but he has never heard even a footfall of it. Mule-cars have given way to trolleys and the underground tubes; the telephone has come into general use, but he has never seen one.

  The judge who tried him, the attorney general and district attorney who prosecuted him, the lawyer who defended him, the governor who spared his life and gave him a living death instead, all died years ago; he has survived nearly all who knew him. His keepers say he has read every one of the eight thousand books in the prison library, that he reads French, German, Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic, and that he is a superior mathematician, having educated himself, but that in all the forty years his face has never been seen to lighten with a smile.

  Responding to this growing outcry, Governor Samuel McCall appointed a three-man committee to interview Pomeroy at Charlestown. Their visit took place on December 8, 1916. Arriving at the prison at around 2:45 P.M., they found Jesse enjoying his daily, fifty-minute walk in the prison yard under the scrutiny of an armed guard. He was escorted to an office in the Cherry Hill section, where the committee members—Councillors Richard F. Andrews and Timothy J. Buckley of Boston and Henry C. Mulligan of Natick—conferred with him for more than two hours.

  Though Jesse’s attorney, Edwin J. Weiscopf, was also present at the meeting, it was Pomeroy himself who did most of the talking. Pleading with “all the eloquence of an able lawyer” (as one newspaper reported), he asked that he be granted, if not a full pardon, then at the very least “equal privileges with other inmates of the institution.” He requested that the “solitary features of his sentence be eliminated”; that a window be cut into the rear wall of his cell so that he could “get just a few more stray beams of God’s sunshine”; that the heavy oaken do
or that shielded him from view be removed; that he be allowed to participate in religious services and holiday entertainments, play ball, and mingle with the other men in the yard during exercise. He made it clear, however, that—though he wished to be treated like the rest of the prisoners in all other ways—he drew the line at work. After so many years of idleness, he explained, he did not care to be employed in the prison shops. Instead, he “preferred to devote his time to reading and studying.”

  To demonstrate that he had put his long incarceration to good use, Jesse gave a display of his shorthand technique (another skill he had mastered during his endless hours of solitary) and demonstrated his linguistic abilities. At the end of the meeting, he was informed that—though they “could hold out absolutely no hope for his pardon”—the councillors would “report favorably on his request for greater liberties.”

  The following month, on January 17, 1917, while speaking before the Elms Hill Council, Knights of Columbus, in the Columbus Club of Dorchester, District Attorney Joseph C. Pelletier declared that—though he was against any form of pardon for Pomeroy—he supported “such commutation as would take him out of solitary.”

  Exactly one week later, on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 24, the Governor’s special committee made a formal recommendation of clemency. That same evening, Governor McCall—acting “with the advice and consent of the Council”—signed an official order, commuting Jesse’s sentence from life in solitary to straight life imprisonment.

  As one observer noted, Jesse’s four decades of “almost unbroken solitude” had been a punishment of epical proportions, “surpassing by several months the forty-year period during which the children of Israel were condemned to wander in the wilderness.” If a full pardon represented Jesse’s Promised Land, then—like Moses—he would never achieve his goal. Still, the fifty-seven-year-old prisoner had at least been granted a certain measure of freedom.