by Ray Black
BEYOND RECOGNITION
When Jason’s father filed a missing persons report on his son, police began a search for the sixteen-year-old. Local residents also volunteered their time to help find the boy including one Justina Morley who knew exactly where he was. At around two o’clock the following day, a group of children riding their bikes through The Trails stumbled across the horrifically battered remains of Jason Sweeney.
The subsequent autopsy revealed the extent of his injuries. Anything up to forty blows had broken every bone in his face save the left cheekbone, rendering him unrecognisable. In fact, investigators on the scene had been unable to tell whether the corpse was young or old. With no identification on the body, Paul Sweeney came to the county morgue on Monday morning and told police the John Doe was his son.
Retracing the dead boy’s steps, detectives brought in Justina Morley and the three boys to help shed some light on what had happened. Potential wit-nesses soon became prime suspects. Confessions to Jason’s murder were forthcoming from Batzig and the Coia brothers but none of them showed any compunction for the crime. All they seemed to care about was when they could return home.
DEAL WITH THE DEVIL
On 17 June 2003, Judge Seamus McCaffery presided over the preliminary court hearing. Having reviewed the shocking photographs of the Sweeney corpse, the official equated the crime akin to something from the Dark Ages. The six-day trial of the three teenage boys culminated in guilty verdicts, charged as adults on four separate counts: first-degree murder, conspiracy to murder, robbery and possession of an instrument of crime. The threesome were later sentenced to life without parole.
Next came the trial of Justina Morley. Too young to receive the death penalty, she also managed to avoid a charge of first-degree murder. Following what prosecution lawyer Jude Conroy termed his deal with the Devil, Morley’s charge was reduced to murder in the third degree in exchange for her testimony during the hearing of her fellow collaborators. This commutation, however, did not prevent the court from learning the evil ways of this enchantress.
She freely admitted in court of her ability to manipulate the gullible, persuading the weak-minded to do her bidding. Prosecution counsel used a series of love letters written behind bars to her accomplices to reveal how wicked this juvenile jezebel truly was. The disturbing and often sexually explicit correspondence told how she claimed to enjoy the flashbacks of the murder, that they gave her pleasure. She even described herself as a cold-hearted devil-worshipping bitch. The jury seemed to agree and on 21 March 2005 Justina Morley received her sentence: seventeen-and-a-half to thirty-five years in jail.
Jesse Pomeroy
Dubbed ’The Boston Boy Fiend’, this milky-eyed monster tricked the trusting, enticing young children away to be savagely assaulted, mutilated and, on two occasions, murdered.
SICK AND UNSIGHTLY
Jesse Harding Pomeroy had a face only a mother could love. But when Ruth Ann gave birth to her second son on 29 November 1859, even she could be forgiven for recoiling from what was placed in her arms. He was born with a cleft lip that highlighted a mouth too wide for his head, quite a feat as his head was considered too large for his body. To top it all off, two large ears jutted from the deformed head to create this distinctly disturbing profile.
Not only was Jesse an unsightly child but a sickly one too. When still just months old, he suffered a brain fever causing three whole days of delirium during which he exhibited convulsive seizures. From then on he experienced regular bouts of dizziness and violent head pains. As if this was not enough, the infant had a disturbing reaction to a smallpox vaccination. Losing sight in his right eye, it turned an eerie milky-white, further adding to his grotesque visage. It was said even his own father could barely look at him.
Thomas Pomeroy may not have enjoyed laying eyes on his son but the same could not be said about his hands. Jesse would often be taken behind the outside privy by his father for a whipping across his bare back. The beatings became so severe that one evening Ruth Ann intervened, chasing her husband out of the house with a kitchen knife. Thomas never came back, though his method of punishment would return in years to come.
OUTHOUSE OF PAINE
Unsurprisingly, young Jessie developed into a mal-adjusted child. Intelligent but antisocial, he refrained from joining in with other children and as he grew older took to stealing from his mother’s purse and playing truant. Cutting class and lifting the odd penny gave way to more violent impulses. He tor-tured the neighbour’s cat and twisted the heads off his mother’s prize canaries before even animal torture became banal for the Boston boy.
Jesse quickly turned his attention to other boys. On 22 December 1871, he lured four-year-old Billy Paine to a ramshackle outhouse on Powder Horn Hill in Chelsea. Lashing his wrists to a roof beam, he brought out his father’s brand of violence, whipping the boy within an inch of his life. When passersby discovered him, they found his pale white back covered in deep welts. He was sadly unable to provide a description of his attacker.
This allowed Jesse to repeat his crime, coaxing one Tracy Hayden to the same abandoned barn with a promise of going to see the soldiers. Stripping and stringing up the seven-year-old, Jesse proceeded to flog his victim, then knocked out his two front teeth, broke his nose and threatened to castrate him before running away, leaving him to an uncertain rescue.
When help did come, Tracy could tell police nothing to help identify his attacker and paranoid rumours began to circulate that a devilish man with a pointy red beard was to blame for the attacks. Two more victims met the same fate while police questioned hundreds of boys in the area. A $500 reward was offered to capture the ‘Boy Torturer’, bringing vigilante groups out onto the street to hunt for the sadist. In just a few months Jesse Pomeroy had succeeded in bringing panic and fear to the streets of Chelsea, Massachusetts.
NEEDLES TO KNIVES
Following the four vicious beatings, Ruth Ann and her two boys moved across the Chelsea Creek to South Boston. Jesse’s mother needed to find a lower rent apartment although, in the back of her mind, she suspected her youngest had something to do with the attacks. Her suspicions gained weight when young children from South Boston were assaulted in the same sick manner.
In fact, Jesse’s routine was changing. He still stuck with his trademark whipping, but now the young sadist elevated the level of violence, introducing needles which he would stick into various parts of his victim’s body. Needles gave way to knives and, in the case of Joseph Kennedy, he slashed at the face then dragged his prey to the shoreline and washed the wounds with salt water. His savagery seemed to know no limits, biting chunks of flesh from the face and buttocks of one child to trying to sever the penis of another.
With the violence escalating, police were relieved when Jesse’s eighth victim, five-year-old Robert Gould, managed to give a workable description of his assailant: a big bad boy with a funny eye. A tour of local schools failed to locate the culprit, until Jesse inexplicably wandered by the police station.He was spotted and hauled inside for questioning. One threat-induced confession later and Jesse was brought before a magistrate. Not even his mother’s testimony could save him from a guilty verdict and, at a mere twelve years of age, he was sent to undergo the harsh discipline of a reform school in Westborough.
THE KILLING OF KATIE CURRAN
Due to remain within this house of reformation until his twenty-first birthday, Jesse worked the system, behaving like a model prisoner. His exemplary conduct earned him a shock release and on 24 January 1874, after just a year-and-a-half inside, Jesse Pomeroy was paroled back to his mother in South Boston. To aid his rehabilitation, he was put to work in his mother’s dressmaking store, but the dark urges within him quickly came to the fore and demanded to be sated.
On the morning of 18 March 1874, while Jesse was opening up his mother’s shop, ten-year-old Katie Curran walked in hoping to buy a new notebook for school. Suggesting there might be stock downstairs, the milky-eyed miscreant lured the
young girl into into the basement. As she reached the last step, Jesse placed his hand over her mouth and slit her throat with a knife. He then dragged her body further into the darkness and proceeded to hack away at her lower body. Dumping Katie’s corpse in an ash heap, he washed his hands and went back to work as if nothing had happened.
Katie’s mother searched the streets for her missing daughter and, on discovering she had last been seen entering Pomeroy’s store, she feared the worst; she knew of Jesse’s past. A detective was dispatched to check out the shop but found nothing amiss. And when a credible witness insisted seeing Katie being lured into a car, the police declared the child a victim of kidnapping. Once more, Jesse Pomeroy was in the clear.
BURIED IN THE BASEMENT
Feeling invincible, Pomeroy continued to coax children from the streets but found none naive enough to fall for his tricks until one day in late April. Permitted to visit a bakery on his own, four-year-old Horace Millen had the misfortune of bumping into Jesse who persuaded the blond-haired child to come see a steamship at the harbour. Taking a rest from their journey, Jesse took out his pocket knife and slashed the boy’s throat with its three-inch blade. When the boy’s body was discovered on Savin Hill Beach, it had been savagely mutilated. More than a dozen stab wounds had pierced his flesh and the right eye had been punctured.
Police immediately linked Pomeroy to the crime and ordered his arrest without delay. Forced to look at Millen’s corpse at the morgue, Jesse broke down and confessed. News of this teenage killer swept across both state and nation and the resultant infamy forced Ruth Ann Pomeroy to close her dressmaking store. When the building was taken over by a local grocer’s, workmen renovating the space noticed a foul smell emanating from the cellar. Closer inspection revealed the decomposed body of Katie Curran.
His reign of terror now over, Jesse Pomeroy stood trial early that December where a packed court recorded his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury took five hours to disagree, pronouncing him guilty of first-degree murder. While they recommended clemency on account of his age, Massachusetts law imposed mandatory execution and in February 1875 Judge Horace Gray handed down the sentence: death by hanging.
EXECUTION TO SECLUSION
As a clamour for clemency clashed with the hard-line call for the full force of the law, Governor William Gaston agonised over the signing of Jesse’s death warrant. He set up an executive council to decide how Pomeroy should be punished. Following two voting sessions upholding the death sentence, Gaston’s replacement, Alexander Rice, revisited the case. In August 1876, the council officially commuted his sentence to life imprisonment.
Due to the severity of his crimes, Jesse was ordered to spend his life term in solitary confinement. On 7 September 1876, aged just sixteen, he was transferred to Charlestown State Prison where he spent the next fifty-three years of his life. In 1917, the state commuted his sentence, allowing him to join general population. He had spent forty-one years alone and, aside from Robert Stroud, the infamous Birdman of Alcatraz, had become the longest serving American prisoner held in isolation.
In 1929, an elderly Pomeroy was transferred to Bridgewater Hospital for the Criminally Insane where he spent the last three years of his life. Two months before his seventy-third birthday, the murderer with the milky eye took his last breath, his body cremated, his ashes scattered to the four winds.
Jon Venables and Robert Thompson
Described as evil freaks of nature, these two truants were captured on camera abducting a blue-eyed baby before leading him on a two-and-a-half mile trip of torture and torment that ended in murder.
BEFORE BULGER
The two ten-year-olds who stole James Bulger had more than just murder in common. Both August-born boys suffered a difficult childhood. Robert Thompson was the fifth of six brothers abandoned by their father and left to fend for themselves by a neglectful alcoholic of a mother. His siblings were little better. Ranging from career thief to arsonist, sex offender to repeat suicide attempter, they often bullied Robert at home. When he came of age he began to replicate the treatment he received, once abandoning his younger brother Ryan at a canal – a shocking premonition of what was to come.
Jon Venables also lived in an unstable family atmosphere. Though separated, his mother and father had an on-off relationship that would deeply affect their three children. Jon was the middle child. His older brother and younger sister both received special education leaving Jon to feel unnoticed. This led to attention-seeking acts of self-harm – banging his head and cutting himself with scissors – that quickly developed into violence towards others. When he attempted to choke a fellow classmate with a wooden ruler, it was decided he needed a fresh start elsewhere.
Jon Venables was transferred to St Mary’s Primary School. Unable to cope with the advanced levels of a new year, he was held back and soon made a connection with another difficult pupil forced to repeat a year; Robert Thompson. Both past targets for bullies, together they formed a formidable bond, emboldening one another. Tough as a two they then became bullies themselves, bringing out the worst in each other, choosing to skip school and make mischief beyond their bedtime.
STEALING CANDY AND A BABY
Friday 12 February 1993 was just another typical school day for the terrible twosome. With no intention of going to class, Jon Venables ditched his bag and joined Robert Thompson to play truant. Wandering about town, they were drawn to the bright lights of The Strand Shopping Centre, a two-storey retail complex in Bootle, just north of Liverpool City Centre. Dipping into random stores to steal sweets, batteries, and a can of blue enamel paint, the pair of shoplifters soon grew restless for a new challenge. Bored of playing with inanimate objects, the petty thieves turned their minds to kidnapping.
Searching the walkways and shop-fronts, the hookey-playing child hunters tried to snatch a number of potential victims without success. Then at around 3.40 pm they spotted two-year-old James Patrick Bulger outside a butcher’s shop. While his distracted mother sorted out a mix-up with her order inside, the two boys approached the toddler and lured him away. Seconds later, all three boys were lost in the crowd of shoppers, and Denise Bulger found her blue-eyed baby had vanished.
Denise quickly reported her son missing to the centre security but, by the time his name was called over the public address system, all three boys had left the shopping precinct. Leading little James by the hand, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson had now embarked on an aimless walk around the streets of Liverpool that would culminate in the death of their innocent captive.
IDLE EYEWITNESSES
With no plan in mind, the kid kidnappers meandered their way along Stanley Road and eventually ended up at a canal where the pair considered pushing the boy into the water. Instead, they dropped him on his head leaving a nasty gash which they covered up with his anorak hood. Following this first violent assault, the partners in crime continued to torture their victim, punching and shaking him as they roamed the streets.
Along their vagrant and violent ramble across busy intersections, passing shops, houses and pedestrians on the street, the two schoolboys and their charge were spotted on a number of occasions. Many witnesses, who later became known as the Liverpool 38, merely assumed the three were brothers, never suspecting the toddler had been abducted. A handful, however, did make enquiries, having spotted the fresh wound to James’ head, but their concerns were too easily mollified by the kidnappers’ lies.
After endless blind eyes had been turned, James Bulger came within a whisker of rescue when they stopped inside a shop. One woman, sensing not all was right between the boys, wanted to take the teary-eyed tyke to the nearby police station. However, when she asked another woman with a dog to watch over her little girl while she made the short trip, the pet owner refused. This lack of community spirit allowed poor James to be escorted to meet his end.
THE RAILWAY CHILDREN
Following a series of sporadic highlights, including a visit to a pet shop, an altercati
on with some older boys and gazing at a fire that had broken out in a street, captors and captive arrived at the entrance of the disused Walton and Anfield railway station; the final stop on their eventful two-and-a-half mile journey. Two hours had passed since the abduction from the shopping centre, and now darkness was descending on this late winter day.
As the sky turned black so did the thoughts of the kidnappers. Crawling through a hole in the fence, Venables and Thompson began to conceive further acts of cruelty as they led little James across the white shale towards the railway lines. In a subconscious move to dehumanise their victim, the two boys threw the stolen blue paint into James’ face before pelting him with bricks and stones. They then struck him repeatedly with a two-foot-long iron bar until the tiny body stopped moving.
Some reports have stated the boys then removed his trousers and underwear to molest the toddler before deciding to leave the lifeless body on the tracks, weighing his head down with rubble. The two boys then left James Bulger and made their journey home. Two days passed before their discarded plaything was discovered. The corpse had been run over by a train and severed in two. Medical examiners were quick to confirm the cause of death was unrelated to the impact.
THE BLAME GAME
Detective Superintendent Albert Kirby led the police investigation into the murder. After analysis of the surveillance cameras at the shopping centre revealed indistinct images of two young boys with little James, officers questioned over sixty youngsters. When news broke that the suspects were boys, amateur-sleuthing went into overdrive leading many parents to report their own children as the killers.