Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  The inquest concluded on the following day—Tuesday, April 28—with a four-hour session that commenced just after 2:00 P.M. Another half-dozen witnesses were examined, all but one of them police officers involved in the investigation. The most significant testimony of the day was delivered by Detective James Wood, who described the confession Jesse had made to him after viewing Horace Millen’s corpse at Waterman’s undertaking parlor.

  Following the testimony of the final witness—Officer Hood of Police Station Nine—the coroner’s six-man jury retired for its deliberation. They returned shortly after 7:00 P.M. with the following verdict: “That the said Horace Holden Millen came to his death between the hours of eleven o’clock in the forenoon and five o’clock in the afternoon of Wednesday, April 22nd, 1874, from loss of blood and injuries received in the neck and chest, which injuries were produced by some sharp-cutting instrument. And the jury further find, from the testimony before them, that they have probable cause to believe said murder was committed by Jesse Harding Pomeroy.”

  Jesse was returned to his cell to await his arraignment, which took place before Judge Wheelock at the Highlands Municipal Court on Friday morning, May 1. With his lawyer at his side, Jesse pleaded not guilty. He was committed to jail without bail to await the convening of the Grand Jury.

  Approximately one month later, at its June term, the Grand Jury found (in the words of the indictment) “That Jesse Harding Pomeroy, April 22, 1874, at Boston, in and upon one Horace H. Millen (age 4 years), feloniously, wilfully, and of his malice aforethought, an assault did make; and that the said Pomeroy with a certain knife, the said Millen in and upon the throat, breast, hands, and belly of the said Millen, then and there feloniously, wilfully, and of his malice aforethought did strike, cut, stab, and thrust, giving to the said Millen then and there with the knife aforesaid in and upon the throat, breast, hands, and belly of said Millen diverse mortal wounds, of which said mortal wounds, the said Millen of the twenty-second day of April did languish and languishing did live and on the twenty-second day of April, at Boston, the said Millen of the mortal wounds aforesaid, did die.”

  After entering a plea of not guilty, Jesse was once again denied bail and remanded to the Charles Street Jail—this time to await his trial for murder, scheduled to begin in December 1874.

  21

  Every child is a little criminal. He becomes law-abiding only when we have grafted inhibitions—“do nots”—upon his impressionable mind.

  —Dr. A. A. Brill, “Youthful Killers”

  More than a century after the Pomeroy crimes, our country was rocked by a string of preteen homicides that left countless Americans groping for both explanations and solutions. Following the so-called Jonesboro massacre in March 1998, for example—when two Arkansas schoolboys gunned down four fellow students and a teacher—Time magazine ran a piece whose headline posed a question that had suddenly become an issue of heated, nationwide debate: “What Is Justice for a Sixth-Grade Killer?” At least one Texas politician, a State Representative named Jim Pitts, believed he had the answer. A month after the Jonesboro tragedy, Pitt proposed a bill that would permit the death penalty for murderers as young as eleven—a proposal endorsed by a sizable majority of his constituents.

  Others, however, urged a more enlightened approach. Writing in the New York Times, for example, Patrick T. Murphy, the Public Guardian of Cook County, Illinois, argued that “eleven- and thirteen-year olds are not short adults. They are children. . . . Because their characters are not formed, we have a chance to influence them, to divert them from becoming hardened criminals. Let’s not turn the clock back to the harsh justice of the nineteenth century. Let’s treat juveniles who commit crimes like the children they are. If we as a society are saying that it’s too late for an eleven- and thirteen-year-old, we have a lot of soul-searching to do.”

  Clearly—along with internet porn, bioterrorism, and conspiracy theories—the debate over juvenile crime and punishment has become a defining feature of our cultural moment. But it is certainly not unique to modern times. For in this as in other regards, the Pomeroy case precisely foreshadowed the current controversy over underage killers. No sooner had the Millen inquest ended than a fierce argument erupted over how to deal with Jesse—and the terms of that dispute were remarkably similar to those heard in the wake of recent juvenile atrocities.

  The earliest published call for Jesse’s execution appeared on Tuesday, April 28, on the letters page of the Boston Daily Advertiser. The writer—identified only by the initials “S. M. Q.”—pulled out all the rhetorical stops in arguing that only one remedy, Pomeroy’s death, could guarantee the safety of the children of Boston from future depredations by the “boy-tiger.” The complete text of the letter—which was headlined “A Mad Dog”—ran as follows:

  As the poor brute in frenzied torment with foaming jaws and starting eyes tears victim after victim in his headlong course, who can deny that he, as well as they, may be the object of legitimate pity and compassion? He has done no wrong, has been guilty of no offense which punishment will prevent him or others from repeating; and if rabies were a disease from which dogs recovered, one might imagine the owner pleading for the animal’s life with promises of strict confinement until a cure is effected and all danger past.

  Suppose him to be apparently successful, and after the lapse of weeks or months, the beast—to all appearances healthy and harmless—is again at large. A second time the fierce impulse to tear living flesh maddens his fevered blood, and a second time defenseless and innocent youth fall mangled and mutilated victims of his fury.

  “Spare him once more,” says the philanthropist, “and this time he shall be more securely chained; he is an object of pity and shall be put where he can’t do such things.”

  “He shall indeed,” reply the parents whose darlings have thus far escaped the monster, “he shall indeed, and the policeman’s revolver shall, in accordance with the law, send him there.”

  That the boy murderer whose fearful mania has found another defenseless victim may well be the object of the same compassion which we extend to the raging brute, none will deny. That the self-defense of society, in accordance with the law, should be the same in both instances, the writer believes to be a terrible but solemn duty. Vengeance is the Lord’s, but the protection of innocent and defenseless human life is man’s. For such a human tiger—with the beast’s craving to tear and rend and the man’s intellect to seek methods of gratifying it—there is but one sure prison, and if consigned to any other, more innocent blood will yet cry from the ground against those who might have spared its effusion.

  A lunatic, whose insanity is such as to insure his confinement, may without danger be spared, but a person capable of restraining and concealing such horrible propensities for years, until opportunity may be contrived for its indulgence, is accountable for his actions and forfeits his right to an existence incompatible with the safety of his fellows. If two years of good behavior sufficed for the release of the boy-tiger, the lapse of five or ten at most may presumably set the man at liberty—at which period even the advocates of the abolition of the death penalty may do well to keep their children from the streets.

  This and other equally emotionalistic cries for Jesse’s blood were countered by more measured arguments that focused on the issues of his youth and mental condition. On Friday, May 1, for example, the Boston Evening Transfer published an editorial that—beginning with a derisive allusion to the writer of the “Mad Dog” letter—raised the question of Jesse’s responsibility for his acts:

  A good deal of nonsense is getting into print on account of the horrible developments in the Pomeroy case. In times of hotly excited indignation, the man who says the hardest things is likely to be thought the wisest man. Doubtless extermination is a prompt and sure means of preventing a repetition of offenses by the same offenders. To shoot pickpockets upon first conviction would insure society against trouble a second time from the same sneak. . . . But to sensible mind
s there are objections to this course.

  Law is a general rule of action. It is based on average and aggregate estimates of human nature. It cannot be fitted exactly to every exceptional case. Laws touching homicide and cruelty suppose that those offenses proceed from recognized motives, and propose other motives, such as dread of punishment, to deter offenders from their commission. In the Pomeroy case, there is exceptional absence of the ordinary motives for violence. Vindictiveness, cupidity, fear of exposure—these are not present to the mind of the torturer. Nor is any other impulse which would not be promptly overruled by the ordinary sympathies and sensibilities of human nature, did those exist in Pomeroy. It seems plain that these checks do not exist in him, and if it be true that he had done nothing, when his career of violence began, to eradicate these natural instincts of mankind, it would certainly seem that he is not responsible for the absence of them. It may be expedient to exterminate Pomeroy . . . but it should hardly be called exact justice.

  As these contrasting opinions make clear, feelings about the right way to punish the “boy killer” ran high from the very start of the case (both the “Mad Dog” letter and the editorial response were published before Jesse was even arraigned). Eventually, these emotions would erupt into a full-scale battle that would engage the passions of people throughout the nation, from ordinary citizens to some of the country’s most eminent men.

  * * *

  In the meantime, Jesse languished in jail—reading, brooding, and keeping up a regular correspondence with his mother, brother, and a few staunch (if desperately misguided) supporters who persisted in believing in his innocence. As the spring turned into summer, the Pomeroy case slipped from the papers, supplanted by other more up-to-the-minute crimes, scandals, and atrocities.

  In late May—as though to prove that juvenile depravity was not restricted to Boston—a gang of “young ruffians” (as the newspapers put it) attempted to sneak into the opening performance of Montgomery Queen’s Circus in San Francisco by crawling under the tent. After being chased from the premises by a watchman named James Ramsey, these “idle and dissolute youths” armed themselves with cobblestones, returned to the circus, and proceeded to stone Ramsey to death.

  At almost the same time in New York City, a young nursemaid named Jennie Powell was arrested after dousing an infant boy in coal oil and setting him on fire. Under arrest for the outrage, Powell confessed that, over the years, she had tried to burn a number of babies in her charge, and had also torched several houses. When the police, seeking to fathom her motives, asked “why she had done such horrible things to the babies,” the young nursemaid matter-of-factly replied, “I just wanted to burn them.”

  From Mexico, meanwhile, came tales of ghastly goings-on in a small village in Chihuahua. According to these reports—published in papers throughout the United States, including the New York Times—the alcalde (or mayor) of the village had begun “to meet his friends late at night at a house on the outskirts of the town for supper.” The principal dish at these gatherings was a savory stew, presumably compounded of pork. One day, however—as the Times reported—“a neighbor, an Indian woman, missed her little three-year-old child. . . . Then another, and still another, and yet another neighbor, on succeeding days, reported the losses of their tender infants. Great excitement ensued; and at last suspicion fell upon the midnight suppers of the alcalde and his companions. The political chief of the section was summoned. Armed with his superior authority, he penetrated the secrecy of the alcalde’s mystic rendezvous and there discovered the heads and bones of thirteen children. The alcalde confessed that the missing infants had been barbequed, or roasted whole; and the cannibals, just before they were hanged, told the political chief with fiendish joy that ‘had he ever tasted the roast, he would have joined the infernal association.’ ”

  And then there was the ongoing spectacle of the Beecher adultery case, which, by the summer of 1874, had turned into the nation’s juiciest public melodrama. So intense was America’s fascination with the scandal that (as one historian has pointed out) when Beecher spoke at a Brooklyn church in July, 1874, “the Associated Press alone sent thirty reporters to take down his words.” Ironically, the same grown-ups who never tired of condemning the “lurid rot” found in children’s dime novels appeared to have no qualms about wallowing in the sensationalistic details of the reverend’s affair that were dished up every day by the press.

  Between these and other, far more substantial (if less titilating) events, the story of the infamous “boy killer” had been entirely displaced from the nation’s papers by early summer. Even in Boston, the public had, by and large, put the case out of mind.

  To be sure, small items about the Katie Curran mystery occasionally showed up in the news. During the first week of May, for example, a report briefly circulated that the missing girl’s body had been found in a sandbank near South Boston harbor. But this story turned out to be completely groundless. The prevailing opinion among the Currans’ friends and neighbors was that (as the Boston Globe reported) “Pomeroy knows something about the case and . . . may someday confess a connection with the disappearance.” But most law enforcement officials felt differently. They remained convinced that a nine-year-old girl would have held no interest for Jesse, whose depraved tastes ran entirely (so far as was known) to little boys.

  Among the police and much of the public the consensus continued to be that “a difference of religious opinions” was at the bottom of Katie’s disappearance—that the child had been caught in the middle of a nasty dispute between her Protestant mother and Catholic father and had been spirited off to a convent. In short, for most Bostonians, the Curran case wasn’t a crime story at all, but rather a kind of cautionary tale about the evils of intermarriage—about the misery that is bound to result when a Protestant commits the grievous mistake of wedding a Catholic.

  22

  Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long.

  —Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

  While the public at large had turned its attention to other matters by early summer, things were different in the South Boston neighborhood where the Millen, Curran, and Pomeroy families resided within a short distance of each other. There, community indignation against the “boy killer” and his relations continued to run high. The situation wasn’t helped by the attitude of Mrs. Pomeroy, who persisted in proclaiming her son’s innocence to anyone who would listen. Far from displaying any sympathy for the Millens and Currans, she openly blamed them for her poor Jesse’s travails.

  Needless to say, such callousness did not endear her to her neighbors. Business at the Pomeroys’ dressmaking/periodical store at 327 Broadway dropped off precipitously. People still came by the store—but only to gawk at the place where the notorious killer had once worked as a newsboy. Before long, Mrs. Pomeroy couldn’t afford to keep paying the rent. On Sunday, May 31, she and Charles moved her dummies and sewing machine across the street to their little frame house at 312 Broadway and closed up the shop for good. For the next few weeks, she struggled—with meager success—to operate the business from her home.

  * * *

  The two-story frame building that housed the vacated shop had been on the market for months. The ground floor was divided in half by a metal partition. One side had been occupied by the Pomeroys’ store; the other by a defunct little jewelry business run by a man named E. C. Mitchell. The owners of the premises, a couple named Margerson, lived on the second floor.

  The building—originally L-shaped—had been renovated a few years earlier. The long, narrow rear had been broadened to the same width as the front, so that the entire structure was now rectangular. The cellar, however, had not been expanded accordingly. A dank, airless vault that stretched beneath the original floor-space of the building, it contained two gas meters; a rank little privy; a faucet that discharged a continual drip; a pair of storage bins containing the Margersons’ monthly supplies of wood and coal; and—in one pitch-dark corner—a
sizable heap of ashes and refuse. It was the kind of cellar that unnerved even grown-ups; for children, descending into that fetid gloom, where the vermin scurried at the first sound of human intrusion, was creepy enough to cause nightmares.

  Situated a few doors down from the Margersons’ building—at 342 Broadway—was a little grocery, owned by an enterprising gentleman named James Nash. Nash, whose business was booming, had been looking for a larger space in the neighborhood, and when Mrs. Pomeroy’s store became available, he saw his opportunity. In mid-June, several weeks after she abandoned the shop, Nash purchased the entire building from the Margersons and began to renovate the premises. Foreseeing the need for increased storage facilities, he decided to begin by enlarging the cellar. And so, during the last week of June, a pair of workmen named Charles McGinnis and Patrick O’Connell made their way down into the cellar to begin the excavation.

  The smell hit them even before they reached the bottom of the stairs—a carrion stench that caused the two men to screw up their nostrils.

  “What’s that stink?” asked O’Connell.

  McGinnis shook his head, then hurried off to fetch Nash, who returned a short while later with the workmen. Armed with oil lamps, the three men made a search of the cellar but found nothing to account for the fetor. Heading upstairs, Nash spoke to Mr. Margerson, who acknowledged that he, too, had noticed a rotten smell in the cellar the last time he’d been down there. But, assuming that some small creature—a rat or possibly a cat—had crawled into a corner and died, he had paid little attention to the matter.