Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers

by Carol Anne Davis

  But even this sadistic biting didn’t satisfy Jesse’s increasing lust for blood. Now he produced a needle and stabbed the boy in the armpits and shoulders. Again, each act was accompanied by verbal taunting and Jesse clearly took great pleasure in telling the child what he was going to do to him next. His childhood experiences had turned him into a remorseless psychopath – yet he was still only twelve years old.

  The sixth torture victim

  A fortnight later memories of the previous attacks were no longer enough to sustain him and he struck again. This assault took place on Thursday 5th September, underneath a shadowy railroad bridge. Jesse led six-year-old Harry Austin there, stripped and battered him, the violence escalating by the second as Jesse produced a knife. He cut the screaming child in the back and under his armpits. Then, carrying out the threat he’d used on a previous victim, he tried to emasculate him. The hugely shocked child was found with cuts to his scrotum and numerous bruises. He was lucky to survive.

  Jesse maintained an appearance of normality (or what passes for normality in such an isolated and unhappy boy) and his mother saw nothing different about him after these torture sessions. He continued to attend school and go to Sunday school and have interminable fights with his brother Charles.

  The seventh torture victim

  The next week, on Wednesday 11th September, Jesse struck up a conversation with seven-year-old Joseph Kennedy on the beach and lured him to a vacant outhouse. There he stripped and flogged the terrified child. Again the violence was increasing for he broke the little boy’s nose and dislodged several of his teeth. He laughed wildly as he produced his beloved penknife and slashed the younger boy on the face and thighs. Eventually he untied him, threw him into the salt marshes and ran away. It was clear to the police, and to the public who read about each new assault, that the torturer’s blood lust was escalating and that he’d soon kill if he wasn’t caught.

  The eighth torture victim

  And indeed, on Tuesday 17th September, the next victim almost lost his life. Five-year-old Robert Gould was led to a quiet stretch of the railway by the scheming Jesse. There the youth tore off Robert’s clothes and tied him to a pole. He slashed at the child’s head with his knife, alternately laughing and swearing. As the blood spurted, he showed a strange, frenzied joy. He held the knife in the air to watch the blood drip from it and was clearly transfixed at the sight.

  Seeking yet further sadistic excess, he told the five-year-old that he was going to kill him and was about to cut his throat when railwaymen approached. Jesse ran away, doubtless congratulating himself that he’d once again evaded detection. He was wrong, for his victim had noticed that his torturer had a rare deformity – a milky eye.

  Capture

  There was only one boy in the locale with a milky eye – Jesse Pomeroy. He was arrested and every one of his tortured victims identified him. He admitted his crimes to the authorities, saying vaguely that ‘something’ had made him do it but within hours had retracted his confession and thereafter pleaded his innocence. He was sent to a reform school for boys, most of whom had been convicted of theft. They were terrified to find that the boy torturer now lived amongst them and they tried to keep out of his way.

  Unfortunately the masters at the school flogged the children – and this obviously kept Jesse’s thoughts focused on such cruelties. He would seek out the punished victims and ask them how often they’d been caned and how it had felt. He would become visibly excited whilst hearing these details and undoubtedly used them as a masturbatory aid.

  Ruth Pomeroy possibly knew that she’d failed her youngest child by letting him be beaten for so long by his father. Whatever her motivation, she kept petitioning the reform school to free him, suggesting that he was innocent of the crimes.

  The school was impressed by her loyalty and her hardworking nature – and by the fact that Jesse was a model prisoner who did exactly as he was told. Nowadays we know that organised offenders such as Jesse are often model prisoners, being bright enough to work the system for their own ends. But this was an unsophisticated era and they assumed that Jesse’s good behaviour in an enclosed environment meant that he wouldn’t reoffend in the outside world. As a result, he was released to his mother in March 1874 after serving only seventeen months.

  The first murder

  Fourteen-year-old Jesse now returned home. His mother had opened a small dressmaking shop and his brother Charles was selling newspapers from a street stall. Jesse was immediately employed by both. Outwardly he appeared industrious and helpful – but inwardly he harboured the exact same sadism as before.

  A week after his release, he opened up his mother’s shop in the early morning. A ten-year-old girl called Katie Curran came in to make a purchase and Jesse told her that she’d find what she wanted downstairs. Partway there, the girl realised that she was heading towards a dark cellar – but before she could retrace her steps, Jesse grabbed her from behind and hacked at her neck with his knife.

  He carried the child down the rest of the stairs and cut her clothing away from her bleeding body. Then he proceeded to stab her numerous times and mutilate her genitals. Jesse concealed the little corpse in the cellar and returned to serving in the shop.

  It seems that this was a crime of opportunity rather than design, for on previous attacks he’d brought his torture kit with him – namely rope for binding the victim, a handkerchief to employ as a gag and a stick or belt to carry out the flagellation. This time the victim wasn’t tied or gagged and the only weapon employed was the knife he carried with him at all times.

  The police believed that Katie had been kidnapped by a stranger passing through the area, so Jesse remained free to seek further victims. He asked other children to accompany him into the empty store, but was so eager to get them on their own that they took fright and ran away.

  The second murder

  Serial torturers and killers are incredibly single minded, so Jesse continued his search for vulnerable victims. Five weeks later he found four-year-old Horace Miller who had gone to the nearby bakery to buy himself a cake. Jesse made up a story and lured the little boy to the marshes. There he threw him to the wet ground, undressed him below the waist and brandished a knife. Little Horace put out his arms to defend himself and received cuts to both hands. The blood-crazed Jesse stabbed him again and again. The fourteen-year-old also cut his victim’s scrotum, knowing that no one was likely to hear his agonised screams. All of Jesse’s rage went into his knife-wielding arm as he lunged at the four-year-old for a final time, almost decapitating him.

  Hearing or seeing other people on the horizon he raced off, taking his knife with him. Within minutes two marsh walkers found the newly-dead child.

  When the constabulary saw that the victim was a young male who had been undressed, stabbed and partially castrated, they thought of a youth who had committed such crimes before – Jesse Pomeroy. They wondered if he’d escaped from his reform school and checked to find that he’d been released. The police immediately went to Jesse’s home and arrested him. He denied everything, despite his shoeprints being found in the wet mud beside the body and dried blood being found on his knife.

  At the police station, Jesse continued to invent alibis until they took him to the mortuary and showed him Horace’s mutilated corpse. For the first time he lost his composure and staggered backwards, admitting that ‘something’ had made him kill the little boy. He was referring to the compulsion to hurt and kill that every serial killer has.

  This compulsion is incredibly strong – but the killer still chooses to give in to it. As such, he should be found responsible for his actions. After all, he can control it, in that he doesn’t give in to the compulsion when there are witnesses around. Jesse took his victims to comparatively remote locations and brought along the means to restrain them and muffle their shrieks and pleading. He also made sure that he didn’t get their blood on his clothes.

  Seeking scapegoats

  Now that Jesse had been cap
tured, the local people and the press looked for an explanation. They didn’t understand the significance of the violence he’d suffered at his father’s hands.

  Instead they blamed Jesse’s sadism on the pulp fiction that he read, with its themes of sailors being brutalised by violent pirates or of Redskins torturing their prisoners. In reality, most of these novels had print runs of over sixty-thousand so if truly corrupting one would have expected them to produce sixty-thousand boy torturers – but there was only one.

  Awaiting trial

  Jesse read ferociously in jail whilst awaiting trial, though presumably the ostensibly-dangerous pulp novels weren’t on offer. He spent the rest of his time writing notes to the youth in the next cell, asking him about his school floggings and telling the boy that he couldn’t get thoughts of his own childhood beatings out of his head. He also wrote frequently to his mother and to his brother Charles.

  His mother sold her dressmaking shop to a neighbour – and to everyone’s horror they found Katie Curran’s decaying corpse in the cellar. As usual, Jesse alternately admitted and denied having anything to do with the crime.

  The trial

  He remained in jail until 8th December 1874 when his trial began. Witness after witness described seeing him leading Horace away. Others had seen Katie entering Ruth Pomeroy’s little shop. Even Jesse’s own defence lawyer suggested that Jesse was often overpowered by the need to hurt. These were superstitious times so the defence added that Jesse might have been born with evil powers.

  Harsh discipline was only mentioned when one of his teachers said that he sometimes whispered to other children in class and that she ‘had to’ cane him for this. No one made the connection between Jesse being victimised by his father and then going on to victimise other boys. Jesse himself admitted that his sole interest was in hurting young males. The murder of Katie Curran appears to have been one of sexual curiosity and ongoing blood lust rather than intense desire.

  The trial took place over three days and the verdict was guilty of first degree murder. The sentence was life imprisonment. Ironically, the local paper suggested the crimes wouldn’t have happened if Jesse had received parental discipline.

  Prison

  In prison, Jesse was put into solitary confinement, living in a small cell with his meals pushed through a slot in the door. This was best for the other prisoners as he would undoubtedly have tortured them. But it was bad for his own mental health – isolated prisoners often go mad. He was to spent forty-one years in such enforced solitude, with the exception of visits from the prison clergy and, twice a month, from his mother.

  His sanity did seem to crumble during these years as he made numerous wildly-improbable escape attempts, some of which suggested a death wish. On one occasion he used a makeshift tool to bore through his cell and cut into a gas pipe, hoping to blast his way to freedom. He was knocked unconscious by the blast but made a full recovery.

  Jesse wrote simple rhymes for the prison magazine during those years. He continued to read everything that he could get his hands on. His mother brought him snacks – and he was pleased to receive them but showed no pleasure at seeing her. They often discussed the letters requesting his freedom that she was still writing to the governors.

  It was said that during these years he paid other prisoners to catch rats for him, which he then skinned alive – but these tales are undoubtedly apocryphal. After all, he was kept apart from other prisoners for most of his life. Then, as now, other prisoners and guards would have sold stories to reporters who were hungry for sensational information about high profile criminals. Then, as now, they doubtless made wild stories up.

  After forty-one years alone in his cell, Jesse was given leave to go to religious services and take exercise with the other prisoners. He used his infamy and his machismo to inspire respect in them – but they were unafraid as he was becoming physically weak. Twelve more years passed in this way and Jesse didn’t make any close friends.

  A change of scene

  By the 1920’s, humanitarian reformers began to suggest that Jesse be allowed to live out his final months in a less punitive setting. Eventually the governor agreed. At first, like a battery chicken, Jesse Pomeroy resisted this, saying that his entire life was his cell. But over time he clearly rethought the situation and agreed to be moved to Bridgewater, the prison’s mental hospital.

  In the summer of 1929 he was finally transferred to Bridgewater, having spent more than fifty years in Charlestown prison. By then he was almost seventy and had muscle wastage through spending so many years cooped up in a tiny cell. He was also partially blind and increasingly lame.

  He remained surly after his transfer to Bridgewater and none of the staff managed to create a rapport with him. Some said that they never saw him smile. He often threatened to make escape attempts but it was clear that, given his growing number of infirmities, he wouldn’t get very far. He continued to protest his innocence until his death – the result of a heart attack – on 29th September 1932 when he was almost seventy-three.

  The rationale

  Jesse Pomeroy committed the early tortures and later torture-murders out of an overwhelming sense of bloodlust. Like many people from highly abusive backgrounds, he’d made a strong connection between sexual satisfaction and extreme sadism. These desires would remain throughout his life.

  Jesse’s strongest stimulus for years (though he’d hated such floggings at the time) had been as a victim of severe beatings accompanied by verbal taunting. Watching a boy writhe and squeal as he flogged him and threatened him was much more exciting than a lover’s caress.

  Early criminologists suggested that Jesse’s crimes were merely acts of violence, that they weren’t sex crimes because the victims weren’t sexually assaulted or raped. This shows a misunderstanding of sexual sadism. In sadistic attacks, the orgasm isn’t triggered by sexual intercourse but by inflicting pain on someone else.

  Indeed, many sadists avoid coitus. If penis-based activity does take place it is often forced sodomy followed by forced oral sex, both of which further demean or hurt the victim. But as a callow youth Jesse Pomeroy may not have been aware of these optional extras. He orgasmed during the flagellation or the stabbing attacks, after which his sadistic urge was spent.

  Jesse’s attacks began at twelve, the age when his libido awoke. He was undoubtedly homosexual so chose males as his lust objects. He chose small boys rather than boys his own age as they were easier to lure away from safe locations. They were also easier to restrain and were soon completely in his increasingly murderous power.

  2 Pale Shelter

  William Newton Allnutt

  The pre-teen killer profiled in the last chapter came from a violent American home – but several years earlier in Britain, William Newton Allnutt was born into a British household that was equally damaging.

  William was born in 1835 to a farmer and his wife. He came into the world to find that he already had five siblings. His mother was deeply distressed at the time of his birth as she’d borne the brunt of her husband’s temper for many years. But she was used to raised voices and fists as her father had also been a violent and tyrannical man.

  William was a low-weight baby who was often ill. Several of his brothers and sisters were also poorly. Nevertheless his mother went on to have another two children after his birth.

  When William was eighteen months old he fell against a ploughshare and the resultant injury was so severe that the doctor warned there might be brain damage. No such mental change was noted during these pre-school years but the abused little boy understandably became an increasingly sad and sullen one.

  His father had by now become an alcoholic who kept terrorising his wife and all eight of his children. As a result, William sleepwalked and had terrible nightmares. The household was religious so sometimes these nightmares were filled with religious imagery.

  He was an intelligent and articulate child who did well in his schoolwork and achieved a high standard of literacy.
But he showed the disturbed behaviour that children from violent households invariably show – everything from fighting to truancy – so his teachers were often upset with him.

  When William was nine years old his father became so cruel that he was considered insane. Mrs Allnutt at last found the courage to leave him. She sent all eight children away to boarding school or to stay with friends. (Within a year of their separation, her husband had developed epilepsy and within three years, at the age of thirty-seven, he would die.)

  From frying pan to fire

  She now moved in with her father, Samuel Nelme, and his second wife who were both in their seventies. They had a palatial home in the Hackney district of London with its own grounds. Samuel had been a successful merchant in the city so the family were able to afford a live-in maid.

  Unfortunately William’s ill health continued, and his boarding school decided to send him home. And so the small, pale boy came to live with his mother in his grandfather’s deeply religious and all-adult household. It was a cheerless life without his siblings or schoolfriends for company. Samuel Nelme had always been quick to anger – and this anger was now often directed at William when he got up to everyday boyish pranks.