Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  Acclaim for

  HAROLD SCHECHTER,

  “America’s principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers”

  (The Boston Book Review)

  BESTIAL

  The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

  “Yet another essential addition to Schechter’s canon of serial murder history. . . . Deserves to be read and pored over by the hard crime enthusiast as well as devotees of social history.”

  —The Boston Book Review

  “Bestial spare[s] no graphic detail. . . . Reads like fast-paced fiction, complete with action, plot twists, suspense, and eerie foreshadowing. . . . Provides chilling insights into the motivations of a man who killed for killing’s sake.”

  —Amazon.com

  “[A] deftly written, unflinching account.”

  —Journal Star (Peoria, IL)

  DEPRAVED

  The Shocking True Story of America’s First Serial Killer

  “Must reading for crime buffs. Gruesome, awesome, compelling reporting.”

  —Ann Rule, bestselling author of . . . And Never Let Her Go

  “A meticulously researched, brilliantly detailed and above all riveting account of Dr. H. H. Holmes, a nineteenth-century serial killer. . . . Schechter has done his usual sterling job in resurrecting this amazing tale.”

  —Caleb Carr, bestselling author of The Alienist

  DERANGED

  The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Fiendish Killer

  “Reads like fiction but it’s chillingly real. . . . What Albert Fish did . . . would chill the bones of Edgar Allan Poe.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  DEVIANT

  The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original “Psycho”

  “[A] grisly, wonderful book. . . . A scrupulously researched and complexly sympathetic biography of the craziest killer in American history.”

  —Film Quarterly

  THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS

  by Harold Schechter and David Everitt

  “[A] grisly tome. . . . Schechter knows his subject matter.”

  —Denver Rocky Mountain News

  Praise for Harold Schechter’s masterful historical novel featuring Edgar Allan Poe

  NEVERMORE

  “Caleb Carr and Tom Holland are going to have some competition for turf in the land of historical literary crime fiction.”

  —The Boston Book Review

  “Authentic . . . engaging. . . . Schechter manages at once to be faithful to Poe’s voice, and to poke gentle fun at it—to swing breezily between parody and homage.”

  —The Sun (Baltimore)

  “A page-turner. . . . Deftly recreates 1830s Baltimore and brings Poe to life.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “[A] tantalizing tale full of tongue twisters and terror. . . . A literary confection to be read, discussed, and savored by lovers of puzzles and language, this is also a first-rate mystery.”

  —Booklist

  “Schechter . . . recounts the legendary author’s brush with real-life homicide as one of Poe’s own protagonists would—with morbid, scientific rapture . . . plenty of suspense and nicely integrated background details.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Wonderful. . . . I highly recommend Nevermore. I had more fun with this book than any I have read in a long time.”

  —Denver Rocky Mountain News

  “Schechter does a good job of re-creating Poe’s phantasmagoric style.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “In this gripping, suspenseful thriller, Harold Schechter does a spendid job of capturing the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe. I’m sure my late, great cousin would have loved Nevermore.”

  —Anne Poe Lehr

  “Schechter’s entertaining premise is supported by rich period atmospherics and a plot that keeps the finger of suspicion wandering until the very end.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

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  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part 1: Dead Eye

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part 2: The Boy-Killer

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part 3: The Fiend

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part 4: Eye for Eye

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Part 5: Buried

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Acknowledgments

  Photographs

  For my friends

  Miklos, Lisa, Andrei, and Alex

  The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.

  —Genesis 8:21

  PROLOGUE

  The level of actual violence as measured by homicide . . . has never been lower. . . . It may seem that we live in violent times, but even the famously gentle Bushmen of the Kalahari have a homicide rate that eclipses those of the most notorious American cities. All appearances to the contrary, we who live in today’s industrial societies stand a better chance of dying peacefully in our beds than any of our predecessors anywhere.

  —Lyall Watson, Dark Nature

  The longing for a bygone age—for a time when life was slower, sweeter, simpler—is such a basic human impulse that it often blinds us to the fact that the “good old days” were a lot worse than we imagine.

  Living at a time of pervasive pollution, we yearn for those delightful preautomotive days when the air was free of car exhaust—forgetting that the streets of every major nineteenth-century city reeked of horse piss, manure, and the decomposing carcasses of worked-to-death nags. Reading about the pathetic state of public education, we grow teary-eyed for the age of the “Little Red Schoolhouse”—completely unaware of the deplorable conditions of nineteenth-century classrooms (according to one authoritative source, “a survey of Brooklyn schools in 1893 listed eighteen classes with 80 to 100 students; one class had 158”). Affronted by the nonstop barrage of media violence, we pine for a return to a more civilized time—conveniently forgetting that, a hundred years ago, public hangings were a popular form of family entertainment, and that turn-of-the-century “penny papers” routinely ran illustrated, front-page stories about axe-murders, sex-killings, child-torture, and other ghastly crimes.

  Clearly, there is some abiding human need to imagine the past as a paradise—a golden age of innocence from which we have bee
n tragically expelled. But a dispassionate look at the historical facts suggests that there are few, if any, contemporary problems—from gang violence to drug use to tabloid sensationalism—that didn’t plague the past. And often, in more dire and insidious forms.

  For those Miniver Cheevys among us who are convinced that they inhabit the worst of times, one irrefutable sign of present-day degeneracy is the terrifying rise in vicious juvenile crime. And in truth, the past few years have witnessed a string of particularly savage murders committed by children. The whole world was aghast in 1993 when two ten-year-old British boys named Jon Venables and Robert Thompson abducted three-year-old James Bulger from a Liverpool shopping center, then led him to a remote stretch of railroad line, where they tortured him to death before placing his mangled remains on the tracks to be cut in half by the next passing train.

  More recently, our own country has been shaken by a rash of staggeringly brutal teen homicides. In the span of just a few months during 1997, two adolescent thrill-killers lured a pair of pizza delivery men to an abandoned house in rural New Jersey and gunned them down for fun; an ex-altar boy and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend butchered a middle-aged man in Central Park; an eleven-year-old schoolboy selling door-to-door candy for his P.T.A. fund-raiser was raped and strangled by a fifteen-year-old neighbor; seven Mississippi high-schoolers were gunned down by a rampaging classmate (who began his murder spree by knifing his mother to death); and a fourteen-year-old Kentucky boy mowed down eight members of his high school prayer group with a .22-caliber Luger handgun. In March 1998, just three months after the Kentucky massacre, a pair of schoolboy snipers—ages eleven and thirteen—ambushed their classmates in Jonesboro, Arkansas, killing four female students and a teacher and wounding nine other children.

  But even the Jonesboro massacre paled beside the bloodbath that took place the following year at a Colorado high school whose name has become synonymous with the nightmare of juvenile gun-violence: Columbine.

  This spate of atrocities by underage killers provoked the inevitable reaction, from a People magazine cover story on “Children Without Conscience” to the outcries of assorted pundits, who pointed accusatory fingers at the usual sociological suspects: family disintegration, loss of religious values, ultraviolent videogames, etc. In attempting to come to grips with any cultural phenomenon, however, it helps to place it in a larger context. And even a cursory glance at the annals of crime makes it clear that “killer kids” have always been with us.

  Journalist David James Smith, for example, begins his study of the Bulger killing with a survey of British juvenile murder cases, the earliest of which—that of ten-year-old William York, who was convicted of stabbing a four-year-old girl to death—took place in 1748. In our own country, homicidal children have been a subject of psychiatric and criminological concern for decades. In an article called “Youthful Killers,” published in Outlook and Independent magazine in January 1929, journalist Milton Mackaye cited the histories of the top ten “notorious boy killers” of the preceding five years, whose ranks included “Gordon Pirie, the fifteen-year-old New York City lad who killed his chum with an axe to see what it was like” and seventeen-year-old Frank McDowell, who “burned his two sisters to death and exactly a year later shot and killed his father.”

  In the December 1959 issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry, Dr. Loretta Bender of Creedmore State Hospital published an essay, “Children and Adolescents Who Have Killed,” in which she declared that, since 1935, she had “personally known thirty-three boys and girls who, before they were sixteen years of age, had been associated with the death of another person.” A few years later, in the January 1962 issue of Social Work, another mental health professional, Dr. Douglas Sergeant of the Detroit Child Study Clinic, flatly asserted that “homicide committed by children is not rare” and noted that no fewer than “nine child homicide cases” had been referred to the Wayne County Juvenile Court in the previous year.

  The redoubtable crime historian John Marr has dug up dozens of U.S. cases involving murderous minors, dating from the pre-Civil War period to the Great Depression. And during the winter season of 1998, Manhattan’s cultural offerings included both Paul Simon’s Broadway musical The Capeman—about a notorious double-slaying committed by a sixteen-year-old gang member in 1959—and a major exhibit of photographs by the legendary cameraman “Weegee,” which featured a precinct-house portrait of a sixteen-year-old named Frank Pape, who confessed to strangling a four-year-old boy in November 1944, “for no motive” (according to the New York Times) “other than to try out something he had seen in a motion picture.” Other examples abound.

  It seems evident that—far from being the product of any particular cultural moment—juvenile violence is a manifestation of something inherent in human nature, of that instinct for primordial cruelty English novelist William Golding portrays so powerfully in his classic parable, Lord of the Flies. Shakespeare, too, obviously knew all about children’s potential for evil, as Gloucester’s bitter observation in King Lear reveals:

  As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;

  They kill us for their sport.

  What Shakespeare doesn’t say, but what criminal history makes frighteningly clear, is that the wanton boys who begin by torturing insects sometimes progress to higher life forms: lizards and frogs, kittens and puppies—and eventually to other children.

  * * *

  If examples of juvenile murder can be found throughout American history, so can instances of public alarm—even hysteria—over the phenomenon. Besides our own time, there have been two periods in particular when worries about “killer kids” have been especially intense—the 1920s, the era of Leopold and Loeb, when (at least according to assorted Jazz Age pundits) the whole country was being engulfed by a tidal wave of youthful crime; and the 1950s, when concern over juvenile delinquency reached a fever pitch, and it was impossible to open a magazine or newspaper without encountering a scare-piece like Gerald Walker’s “Why Children Kill” in the October 1957 issue of Cosmopolitan:

  During the next twelve months, what are the chances that your son or daughter will kill someone? Will the victim be a classmate, a brother or sister, or you, yourself?

  Like most parents, you may feel these are unlikely and unnecessarily morbid questions. However, during the year just past, the heartsick families of perhaps a thousand American youngsters had the tragic knowledge forced on them that the unthinkable can happen: Their children had committed murder!

  It was during this period—in the spring of 1956—that a man named George Woodbury, a resident of Bedford, New Hampshire, wrote to the Massachusetts Department of Correction in Boston. His letter (which has been preserved in the files of the Massachusetts State Archives) began with a straightforward statement of purpose: “As a professional writer, I am working on an article on Jesse Harding Pomeroy, longtime (1874–1932) prisoner.” Woodbury acknowledged that “few prisoners have been more written about” than Pomeroy. Still, he believed that the story was worth retelling, in light of contemporary concerns over youthful crime. “My interest in writing about Jesse Pomeroy,” he explained to the officials, “relates to the present-day excitement about juvenile delinquency—as though it was something new.”

  For fully half a century, Pomeroy had proudly held the status of Boston’s most infamous murderer—a figure of such monstrous proportions that several generations of recalcitrant children were kept in line with the same parental warning: “If you don’t behave yourself, Jesse Pomeroy will come and get you!” At the time of Woodbury’s letter, however, this legendary bogeyman had been dead for nearly twenty-five years and largely forgotten by the public. He remains obscure today—despite a brief but memorable appearance in Caleb Carr’s bestselling 1994 novel, The Alienist.

  Pomeroy’s cameo occurs about halfway through the book, when the titular hero, Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, travels to Sing Sing with his reporter-companion, John Moore, to interview the infamous killer. They find him l
ocked in a dank, windowless room at the far end of a forbidding cell block—his wrists shackled, his head encased in a heavy, cagelike “collar cap.” In spite of these impediments, the prisoner is deeply engrossed in a book:

  “Pretty hard to get an education in this place,” Jesse said after the door had closed. “But I’m trying. I figure that’s maybe where I went wrong—no education. I taught myself Spanish, you know.” He continued to sound very much like the young man he’d been twenty years ago.

  Laszlo nodded. “Admirable. I see you’re wearing a collar cap.”

  Jesse laughed. “Ahh—they claim I burned a guy’s face with a cigarette while he was sleeping. They say I stayed up all night, making an arm out of wire just so’s I could reach him with the butt through the bars. But I ask you—” He turned my way, the milky eye floating aimlessly in his head. “Does that sound like me?” A small laugh escaped him, pleased and mischievous—again just like a young boy’s.

  “I gather, then, that you’ve grown tired of skinning rats alive,” Kreizler said. “When I was here several years ago, I heard that you’d been asking other prisoners to catch them for you.”

  Still another chuckle, this one almost embarrassed. “Rats. They do squirm and squeal. . . . ”

  Availing himself of artistic license, Carr deviates in this episode from strict historical accuracy. For one thing, Pomeroy was never imprisoned in Sing Sing (he spent nearly all the years of his long incarceration in the Massachusetts State Prison at Charlestown). Moreover, Carr turns Jesse into a figure of almost superhuman evil, a character that owes more to the overwrought fantasies of psycho movies and horror novels than to the facts of real life.

  Still, Pomeroy was frightening enough: if not an adolescent Hannibal Lecter then certainly a junior John Wayne Gacy—an incipient serial killer who tortured over half-a-dozen children and butchered two more by the time he was fourteen. At a time when juvenile misbehavior was epitomized in the popular mind by the shenanigans of Tom Sawyer—conning his chums into whitewashing a fence—and the comical hijinks of Peck’s Bad Boy, the atrocities of young Jesse Harding Pomeroy seemed almost unimaginably monstrous.