Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  * * *

  Jesse’s writing—or at any rate, a vague approximation of it—made the news again the following year, when The Boston Telegram advertised its forthcoming serial publication of “Pomeroy’s own story,” Buried Alive. The front-page, two-column announcement, which ran on June 27, 1921, resounded with the portentous tones of a Gothic melodrama:

  Out of the grim dungeon that is Cell 25, Cherry Hill, Charlestown State Prison, comes the tale of the man who is known all over the country, whose name is a by-word, whose fate has been held up as a warning to evil-doers for 46 years.

  Jesse Pomeroy tells his own story of a lifetime within stone walls.

  It is such a story as has never been written before. It is such a story as will never be written again, unless the world reverts to barbarism.

  The story of his life, ground out by the “lifer” in his cell after he had made himself a master of English by years of study, is an arraignment of the penal methods of civilization so bitter as to appear incredible at first glance.

  Not content with merely piquing the reader’s interest with the promise of a sensational exposé, the announcement went on to compare Jesse to François Villon, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and other “masters of diction [who] have attempted to paint the horrors of prison life for the world to read.”

  The first installment of Buried Alive appeared on page one of the June 28 edition of the Telegram. Though far from masterful, the piece was written in a style conspicuously more polished than Jesse’s clumsy contributions to The Mentor. Indeed, anyone familiar with Jesse’s jailhouse publications would have had good reason to be suspicious of the absolute originality of the supposed autobiography. Unsurprisingly, by the time the third installment appeared, its ostensible author had issued a statement that he had “never written such a story or authorized its publication.”

  Buried Alive turned out to be a fraud, perpetrated by a journalist named Walter C. Mahan, who had assembled it out of various newspaper accounts dating back to the 1870s. Far from being a shocking new exposé, it was nothing but a cobbled-together rehash. It did, however, demonstrate something significant about Jesse Pomeroy—that in 1921, forty-seven years after his arrest, he was still famous enough to be front-page news.

  * * *

  Intermittently throughout the remainder of the decade, stories about Jesse continued to pop up in the nation’s press. One of the papers that covered his case most diligently was the New York Times. In November 1923, the Times—along with various Boston dailies—reported that, like millions of his fellow countrymen in those high-flying days, Pomeroy was playing the stock market. With a bit of money inherited from his mother’s estate, Jesse had purchased shares in a company called Moon Motors through a State Street brokerage house.

  “Naturally, he has no stock ticker in his cell,” Warden William Hendry hastened to assure reporters. “Neither does he telephone his orders. It is all done by mail between Jesse and the brokerage house.” According to the warden, Jesse was “ahead of the game,” having earned dividends of more than $60 on his $300 investment.

  Five months later—in April 1924—Jesse reached his fiftieth consecutive year behind bars, an event that was widely noted in the national press and that provoked yet another round of impassioned calls for his pardon. No less a figure than Clarence Darrow—who had defended the most notorious juvenile thrill-killers of his own era, Leopold and Loeb—publicly denounced the State of Massachusetts for having kept Pomeroy in prison for a half century. “It is an outrage,” Darrow declared. “I have often thought of leading a rescue party into Massachusetts and attempting to free the man.”

  On the opposite side were those like Boston socialite Alice Stone Blackwell, who continued to regard the shambling, half-blind sixty-five-year-old prisoner as a potential menace to society. In a letter to the Boston Herald, published in March, 1925, Miss Blackwell insisted that “It would be mistaken kindness to pardon Jesse Pomeroy. Many of your readers are too young to remember the crimes for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He deliberately tortured several children to death. The case was much worse than that of Leopold and Loeb. He would have been put to death but for his youth—he was 17 at the time, if I remember correctly—and but for a belief that he had an abnormal mental makeup for which he was not responsible. It is this latter fact that makes it unfitting to release him.

  “It is reported that after he had been for some years in prison, he was allowed the companionship of a kitten in his cell. He skinned the kitten alive.”

  Miss Blackwell’s claim about the kitten (one of several widely circulated, though wholly apocryphal, legends that had sprung up around Pomeroy and reflected his status as a semimythical fiend) drew a furious response from Jesse. He immediately retained a lawyer named Ira Dudley Farquhar who—claiming that his client’s “reputation had been damaged”—filed a $5,000 libel suit against the elderly socialite. The case eventually came to trial in January 1928, and ended in a moral victory for the plaintiff, who was awarded a verdict of one dollar in damages. From his cell, Jesse let it be known that the money meant nothing to him. “The pleasure of winning the verdict in my suit,” he declared in a statement to the press, “is satisfaction enough.”

  * * *

  A fascinating glimpse of Jesse during the decade of the twenties was provided by an unusually literate ex-convict named Victor Nelson. Unlike Pomeroy, Nelson really did possess a flair for writing and eventually produced a book called Prison Days and Nights, published to widespread acclaim by the Boston house of Little, Brown, and Company.

  Born to Swedish immigrant parents in 1898, Nelson—a brilliant but deeply troubled young man—landed in reform school at the age of fifteen. In October 1920, he was arrested in Roxbury on a charge of armed robbery and sentenced to three to five years in the Massachusetts State Prison. The following May, he made a spectacular escape and remained at large for the next four months. After attending a lecture by Thomas Mott Osborne—former warden of Sing Sing and an ardent champion of prison reform—Nelson made himself known to the older man, who persuaded the young fugitive to surrender. Nelson was returned to the Massachusetts State Prison, where he spent the next two years. It was during his term in Charlestown that he became intimately acquainted with the “world-famous lifer.”

  On his very first afternoon in Charlestown, Nelson—after receiving his shabby gray uniform—wandered out into the icy yard, where he was immediately accosted by “a short, thickset man with one blind eye and a scraggly moustache.”

  “Hello, lad,” said the old man. “I’m Jesse Pomeroy. They call me ‘Grandpa.’ “

  Nelson was struck by the self-important air of the old-timer, who looked (as he later wrote) “as proud of himself and his sordid fame as if he were a prince of men.”

  Born and raised in Boston, Nelson had been hearing tales about the infamous “boy fiend” all his life. “Sure,” he said. “I know all about you.”

  At this remark, Jesse “straightened his shoulders and beamed with delight.” The “way in which he responded to my recognition of his notoriety—or fame, as he regarded his prominence in the world—astounded me,” wrote Nelson. “I was aghast at the lack of shame or consciousness of guilt the old man showed.”

  As Nelson quickly learned, this way of introducing himself to new arrivals was habitual with Pomeroy. As the years progressed, however, the awed reactions Jesse was accustomed to receiving began to fade. Nelson vividly recalled one of his final glimpses of Pomeroy. It occurred on a raw December afternoon in 1923. A pair of young newcomers, recently sentenced to Charlestown for rolling drunks, were lounging in the prison yard when—“in accordance with his habit”—Jesse “approached them and introduced himself” as he had to Nelson.

  “To Pomeroy’s chagrin and amazement,” Nelson later recalled, the young men were profoundly unimpressed.

  “Oh yeah?” snorted one, “Who the hell is Jesse Pomeroy and what’s your racket? We never heard of you.”


  This sneering rebuff was a devastating blow to Jesse’s vanity. “It was pitiful to see the crestfallen face of the old aristocrat whose claim to stardom in his own domain had been so ruthlessly belittled,” Nelson wrote.

  Mortified and deflated, Jesse “lowered his head, turned on his heels, and slunk away—a dethroned monarch among the minnows.”

  48

  I am going to keep trying for my freedom. Only death will stop me.

  —Jesse Pomeroy, August 3, 1929

  Though Jesse Pomeroy’s name no longer inspired fear (or even recognition) in the younger generation of criminals, the world at large had not forgotten him. That fact was made strikingly clear in the summer of 1929, when stories about the “most remarkable convict in the world” appeared in countless newspapers throughout the country. The occasion was his transfer to the prison farm at Bridgewater. After more than half a century inside the grim fortress of Charlestown, Jesse Pomeroy was about to get his first glimpse of the modern world.

  Though he had been struggling to get out of Charlestown for decades, the transfer was not his idea. On the contrary, he vigorously protested the move. And there were some who sympathized with Jesse’s desire to stay put. “Old people cling tenaciously to their homes, to every article of furniture, every valueless knickknack, every creaking floorboard,” observed a writer for the Worcester Telegram in a widely reprinted editorial. “Thus they maintain their identity in a world that has forgotten them. Transplant them and they wither and die. Jesse Pomeroy’s original crime is probably to him no more than the half-remembered dream of some former existence. But his Charlestown cell is his life, vivid to him through a hundred little habits of the daily round. One need not descend to pathos to wish that he might be permitted to die where he has lived—and where all of us want to die—at home.”

  But cell space was at a premium at Charlestown, and Jesse had become what one official described as a “drone.” Old, infirm, with an enormous inguinal hernia and failing eyesight, he was perceived by officials as little more than deadwood. By placing him in the airier, far more pleasant surroundings of Bridgewater, they could presumably perform a humanitarian act, while freeing up his cell for more practical uses—for criminals who represented a far more serious threat than a half-blind, increasingly disabled seventy-one-year-old.

  And so on August 1, 1929, Jesse was compelled to pack up his belongings and leave his barred and cloistered home. Physically, he was a radically different figure from the smooth-shaven adolescent he had been when he first entered Charlestown: a shambling, hollow-cheeked, balding old man. But his temperament hadn’t undergone much of a change. According to one reporter who had known him for more than thirty years, the younger Pomeroy had been “an unlikable, harsh, sullen fellow. He was stubborn and unruly from the first. And when he left prison today, he was just about the same singular figure.”

  When Warden Hogsett came by to wish him good luck, Jesse refused to say a word or shake the warden’s hand. Dressed in a rumpled business suit, his face half-hidden by a floppy, checkered golf cap, he shuffled out into the yard, stepped inside a waiting automobile, and was whisked through the gates of the prison, while spectators gawked, newsmen scribbled notes, and a horde of cameramen snapped photos.

  His one-hour-and-forty-three-minute ride was tracked by a caravan of reporters. The following day, newspapers from Maine to California ran major stories on Jesse’s “remarkable journey”—“probably among the most unusual ever taken by man,” as one newsman proclaimed. Headline after headline trumpeted his supposedly wonderstruck reaction to a world that had “changed more in the last 50 years than in the preceding 500.” “POMEROY HELD ALMOST SPEECHLESS AS HE SEES FOR FIRST TIME TWENTIETH-CENTURY INVENTIONS.” “POMEROY AWED BY WONDERS SEEN ON RIDE TO PRISON FARM.” “POMEROY MARVELS AT MODERN PROGRESS.” “POMEROY AMAZED AT MODERN WORLD.”

  According to all these accounts, every sight Jesse glimpsed had filled him with rapt fascination—an airplane, a steam roller, an elevated train, a string of high-tension power lines. “Where have all the horses gone?” he plaintively asked at one point. At another, his car stopped at Randolph, where one of his guards ran into a drugstore and bought Jesse a bottle of ginger ale and a vanilla ice cream cone—the first time the old man had ever tasted such treats. The portrait that emerges from almost every one of these newspaper stories is of a man almost stupefied by awe—“struck dumb, eyes bulging from his head, mouth agape.”

  In truth, there was no real way of knowing how Jesse reacted to his trip, since—apart from his question about the horses and a favorable word about the ginger ale—he said almost nothing during the drive. Nor (in spite of the colorful descriptions of his bulging eyes and gaping mouth) did his expression betray much excitement. Only one journalist, a writer for the Waterbury American, acknowledged this fact, offering a perspective that—though considerably less dramatic than the countless stories comparing Jesse to a “modern Rip Van Winkle”—was probably closer to the truth:

  The story of the automobile ride of the famous “lifer,” Jesse H. Pomeroy . . . is not a story of the real impressions upon the mind of Pomeroy but of the imagination of writers.

  This prison inmate who began his life sentence at 17 years of age and spent 41 years of his prison life in solitary confinement, is a deadened creature gazing with lusterless eyes upon a world that means nothing to him. He does not show the quick, excited reaction to an amazingly progressing world that an alert boy would evidence. It is notable that the newspaper reports do not quote any animated conversation from him with comments upon automobiles, high tension wires, aeroplanes, and all the other things of the modern world upon which his eyes were gazing for the first time.

  Immediately the reporter thinks, as the reader thinks, “I wonder how this new world would appear to me if I were suddenly to gaze upon it for the first time after being removed from it for 50 years?” The answer to that speculation does not give the correct answer to what the effect would be upon a mind like Pomeroy. . . . Pomeroy is not a normal human being. That he should look upon whatever the world had to show with dullness of perception is to be expected. What the world has been doing has meant nothing to him, even though he might have read about it. Why should he be stirred at reading that radios had been invented or that motor cars capable of speeding a man along paved highways at 50 miles an hour had supplanted horses? He could not use them. Nor is he to be able to enjoy them even now that he has gazed upon them in this change in his status. He is still a prisoner. And if he were to be released, he would not know what to do with life. Death would probably come to him all the more quickly, as it usually does to those who have been released after years of prison life.

  For the first few days after his arrival at the prison farm, Jesse—still deeply resentful over his forced removal from Charlestown—maintained an obstinate silence. When reporters interviewed Bridgewater’s superintendent, Henry G. Strann—who had been introduced to Pomeroy several years earlier during a visit to the state prison—Strann remarked: “He was surly, reticent, and unsmiling then, and he is surly, reticent, and unsmiling now. As far as I know he has told no one whether he likes this place or not. He only answers when he feels like it.”

  Gradually, Jesse seemed to adjust to his new circumstances. One year later, however, in June, 1930, he was back in the headlines after a guard discovered a cache of getaway tools—a hand drill, a crude saw, several pieces of heavy wire, a screwdriver, and a short length of bent iron—stashed in his room. Not that Superintendent Strann or anyone else at Bridgewater seriously believed that the incapacitated seventy-one-year-old man was capable of escaping.

  “He would have collapsed after hobbling for half a mile,” a prison doctor told reporters.

  “He just didn’t want Lindbergh hogging all the news,” said Strann. “You know, Jesse hasn’t had much publicity since he was compelled to leave the state prison, and he doesn’t like an environment that keeps him out of the newspapers.”

  * * *

/>   Two years later, on September 29, 1932—exactly two months shy of his seventy-third birthday—Jesse Harding Pomeroy died of coronary heart disease at the Bridgewater prison farm.

  His passing was universally unlamented. “If one were to seek for the most friendless man in the world,” the Springfield Republican noted, “Jesse Pomeroy would have been the man finally designated.”

  “He was a psychopath,” the New York Times said flatly.

  Perhaps the bitterest obituary notice appeared in the October 2, 1932, edition of the Boston Sunday Globe. Written by a reporter named Louis Lyons, the piece was an outpouring of unmitigated bile, denouncing Pomeroy as a “mean, scheming criminal with an inflated idea of his own importance” and heaping scorn on the “bleeding hearts” who had expended years of misplaced sympathy on him. “His was the greatest case of miscarriage of sentiment in the annals of American crime. . . . There was nothing in his personality to commend him to the sympathy that was slobbered over him in lugubrious gobs of maudlin sentiment year after year.”

  In accordance with Jesse’s final wishes, his body was cremated. Having already been entombed for what must have seemed like an eternity, he had no desire to be buried again.

  Fifty-eight years after he was first jailed for the most heinous crimes ever committed by a juvenile, Jesse Harding Pomeroy was free at last.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks, first and foremost, go to David Bates, researcher and friend, who not only provided me with a mountain of material but—even more invaluably—shared his own ideas and opinions on the case, particularly on Pomeroy’s extraordinary term in Charlestown (“the greatest prison story never told,” in David’s view). Without his help, this book would have been infinitely more difficult to complete, and I owe him a great debt of thanks.