Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  Charles’s testimony, like his mother’s, was a litany of negation. He “didn’t recollect who opened the store” on the morning of March 18, nor did he remember “anything else about this day.” He “did not know where Jesse was, what he was doing, or whether he was in the store.” He couldn’t remember whether he “found the door locked that morning.” He “never smelled anything bad in the cellar, never looked behind the water closet, never thought Jesse had anything to do with the Curran girl, never saw any blood on his clothes, sleeves, or elsewhere.”

  Two more witnesses spoke briefly after Charles. Sergeant Hood of Police Station Nine testified that—shortly after being arrested for the Millen murder—Jesse had hinted that he knew something about the missing Curran girl and was willing to reveal this information “if he could be sure that his mother would get the reward.” Next, one of Katie’s schoolmates, a little girl named Emma Lee, made a brief statement. Early on the morning of March 18, she had spotted Katie looking into a store window on Broadway, near D Street. Though the six-year-old was not officially sworn, her testimony was regarded as important for one reason: apart from the killer himself, little Emma Lee was the last person known to have seen the murdered child alive.

  At that point—at around 5:30 P.M.—the inquest was adjourned until Friday afternoon. Immediately following the conclusion of the day’s proceedings, Mrs. Pomeroy and Charles were escorted—not back to their second-story quarters—but to the Charles Street jail. Given the uproar that Jesse’s mother was capable of provoking in the local populace, the authorities felt it best—for her own protection, as well for the good of the community—to remove her from the neighborhood and keep her locked in a cell.

  * * *

  Immediately after the proceedings ended, a reporter for the Boston Herald sought an interview with Edward Mitchell, the man who had operated a little jewelry business directly adjacent to the Pomeroys’ shop at the time of the murders. Mitchell’s comments, which focused mainly on Jesse’s relationship with Charles, revealed a pattern of sibling hostility that was considerably uglier than the benign teenage bickering their mother had described at the inquest.

  According to Mitchell, the two brothers were constantly at each others’ throats. Mitchell had a particularly detailed memory of a vicious (though by no means atypical) fight that took place on April 22—the day of Horace Millen’s murder. Mitchell was still in his store at about half past nine that evening, removing his display goods from the window and storing them away in his safe, when he heard a squabble break out between Jesse and Charlie. There was nothing unusual about that—“quarrels between the two were frequent,” Mitchell explained to the reporter. On this occasion, however, their struggle turned especially violent. The two boys began “scuffling and tumbling against the thin board partition that separated the two stores.” Mitchell—“afraid that they might break through the partition”—left his shop and headed next door, intent on breaking up the fight. He had just reached the sidewalk when Charlie stormed out of the shop, dragging his younger brother by one ear.

  “What the devil is going on?” Mitchell demanded.

  Yanking himself free of Charlie’s grasp, Jesse turned to lash out at his big brother, who shoved Jesse so hard that the boy went crashing into Mitchell.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Mitchell cried, pushing Jesse away.

  “You son of a bitch!” Jesse shouted, turning his rage on the jeweller. “You are always putting your big nose in other people’s business.”

  Infuriated at the boy’s insolence, Mitchell slapped him sharply across the face. Jesse, eyes tearing, dropped the older man’s lapel and whimpered: “My mother will have you arrested, you son of a bitch.” Then he turned on his heels and headed up Broadway.

  Mitchell—so worked up that his voice quivered slightly—turned to the older boy and barked: “What in blazes are you two fighting for all the time?”

  “I don’t know,” Charlie snarled. “There’s something the matter with him.”

  Not long afterward, Mitchell—still shaken from the episode—closed up his shop and bent his steps toward home. As he approached E Street, he spotted Jesse leaning against a building. As Mitchell walked passed, Jesse glared at him balefully, then immediately turned and started back down Broadway, in the direction of the shop.

  There was so much malice in Jesse’s look that Mitchell—convinced the boy had mischief in mind—decided to follow him from a slight distance. Mitchell hadn’t proceeded very far when he spotted a neighborhood patrolman named Leighton on the opposite corner. Crossing the street, he told Officer Leighton about his troubles with Jesse.

  “I am afraid the young ruffian means to return to my shop and break the windows,” the jeweller explained.

  “I will go have a talk with him,” said Leighton, then headed after the receding figure of the boy.

  Reassured, Mitchell continued home and went to bed. It wasn’t until the next day, when he read his morning paper, that he learned about Jesse’s arrest for the Millen slaying. Like everyone else in the neighborhood, Mitchell knew all about Pomeroy’s criminal history. Given his own, firsthand experience of the boy’s vile temperament, the notion that Jesse might be guilty of murder was all too easy for the jeweller to believe.

  * * *

  With Ruth Pomeroy sequestered in the Charles Street jail and removed from public sight, the violent, neighborhood protests incited by her presence came to an end. But nothing could stop the rumors that continued to spring up around her. A particularly sensational one made the rounds late Tuesday afternoon. According to this story (which did, indeed, have some basis in fact), Mrs. Pomeroy had been informed by Jesse’s lawyers that her son had finally made a full, highly graphic confession to the murder of Horace Millen.

  The “essential particulars” of this statement were published in the following day’s edition of the Boston Daily Advertiser:

  On the morning of the 22 of April, Jesse rose early and went to the store, and afterwards went to the city, returning home about 9 o’clock. He remained at the store until 111 1/2 o’clock, when he told his mother he was going to the city. She gave her permission, and he went over to his mother’s house, where he remained a few moments, and then started for the city proper. He, however, went up Dorchester Avenue to Eighth Street, where he saw the little Millen boy, and immediately his evil genius got possession of him and he determined to torture him, if not kill him.

  He asked the boy if he would like to see the steamer, and the boy said he would, and both started off in the direction of the marshes. When they arrived at the spot where the body was found, Jesse told the Millen boy to lie down, and the little fellow, not dreaming of his danger, did so. The young fiend then immediately sprang upon him, clapped his left hand over the little innocent’s mouth to stop his outcries, and then, with the same jack-knife that had but a month before been used to murder the unfortunate Katie Curran, the monster deliberately cut the throat of the little boy that had so implicitly trusted him.

  The boy struggled fearfully, and the murderer, desperate at his failure in not at the first blow killing his victim, stabbed him repeatedly in the bowels and chest. He mutilated the body in a frightful manner, but does not know, as he says, to what extent, and finally left his victim in a dying condition. He cleaned his knife and person as well as he could, and then took a car for Boston proper, going to the Common, where he remained some time, and then returned home.

  Stripped of its florid journalistic touches (“the young fiend, “the little innocent,” etc.), this statement proved to be essentially a faithful account of the atrocity commited upon the Millen child. Publicly, Jesse would always maintain his innocence. But there were certain individuals to whom he sometimes confided otherwise. One of these was an elderly fellow familiarly known as “Uncle Cook,” the chaplain of the Charles Street jail. According to news accounts, it was Uncle Cook who had elicited this confession. It happened Tuesday, when the chaplain made his customary evening rounds and foun
d Jesse in an unusually somber mood.

  “Is something the matter, Jesse?” the older man asked, seating himself beside the boy on the edge of the bunk.

  After hesitating briefly, Jesse acknowledged that he was “feeling uneasy” about the death of the Millen boy. The chaplain assured him that he would “feel better if he told exactly what had happened”—whereupon Jesse drew a deep breath and proceeded to unburden himself.

  Uncle Cook listened to the story in silence, then quietly asked the boy what he “felt should be done with him.” Jesse—who had obviously given the matter some thought—promptly replied that he “should be sent to prison for five or six years.” When he got out, he would “then go to sea for two or three years”—by which time he would be a “fully grown man and strong enough to resist the temptation to do such bloody deeds.”

  It was a revealing answer. Like all sociopathic lust-killers, Pomeroy was clearly incapable of grasping either the true enormity of his acts (for which he felt that a few years behind bars would be sufficient punishment) or the dark, implacable forces that fueled his mania—forces which, however dormant they might sometimes lay, could never be entirely expunged or outgrown.

  27

  It is unfortunately true, as most of us know by observation, that the cruelest of living animals is a boy.

  —The New York Times, July 26, 1874

  Seeking to avoid a repetition of Wednesday’s mob scene—when a horde of people had shown up at the station house in the hope of glimpsing the “boy fiend”—Coroner Ingalls had tried to arrange a trip to the Charles Street jail, where his jury could hear Jesse’s testimony in private. When the proceedings resumed on Friday afternoon, however, Ingalls had a disappointing announcement to make. He had sent a note to Sheriff Clark, asking for permission to visit Jesse in jail. Much to Ingall’s chagrin, Clark had declined the request. “While it would be pleasant for me to do anything to favor you,” the sheriff had written in reply, “I feel obliged to decline, because the boy does not wish to appear before a coroner’s jury to be seen or to be asked any questions. And as he could not be compelled by any court to testify in a case against himself, it is not right for me to exercise my power and take him before you or for you to take the jury before him.”

  Ingalls explained to the jurors that—although he had the “power to require the attendance of Jesse at the inquest, as of any other person”—he thought it best not to do so. Since Jesse clearly had no intention of volunteering any useful information, there was no point in dragging him down to the station house, particularly since his presence in South Boston was bound to cause an uproar.

  Having taken care of these preliminaries, Ingalls called the first witness of the day, Dr. E. A. Gilman, the physician who had conducted the autopsy on Katie Curran’s remains. Though the essentials of the Curran murder had been public knowledge for days, Gilman’s official report—which he read aloud to the jurors—revealed grim, new details:

  The appearance of the remains was that of a body in a stage of decomposition, with clothing also in a decayed condition; the skull detached from the trunk; the flesh, with some exceptions, rotted away from the bones; and the whole mixed with a quantity of moist coal, ashes, cinders, etc. The above was the remains of a young girl.

  Gilman then proceeded to describe the victim’s garments—her sacque (or outer jacket) of cheap, “gray shaggy goods”; her dress “trimmed with wide strips of plaid”; her blue flannel petticoat; her white cotton chemise, drawers, and stockings. Though the decayed condition of the remains made it difficult “to ascertain the precise cause of death,” Gilman’s investigation made it clear that the young victim had suffered an appalling degree of violence at her killer’s hands:

  The clothing of this girl was found to have been either forcibly pulled open or cut apart, up and down in front. The sacque and waist of the dress were unfastened and appeared as if pulled apart without time being given to unbutton the sacque or unhook the waist. The front of the waist of the petticoat and a part of the skirt had been cut down the middle, as was also the waist of the drawers, the two cuts corresponding. The chemise was in such a dilapidated condition that it was difficult to say whether it was cut or torn, but one or the other had been done. The right side of the drawers was buttoned to the waist, while the left side was not, but appeared as if torn down the outside of the leg to the bottom.

  The skin and flesh of the lower part of the abdomen was in a remarkable state of preservation in comparison with the other parts of the body. Here were found evidence of wounds inflicted with a cutting instrument. On the left thigh, a little below the groin, was a stab. In a line directly upwards and continuous with the opening of the external genitalia was the plainest cut, which extended through the skin and cellular tissues and into the abdominal cavity; but how far upwards this cut was carried it was impossible to determine, as the skin a few inches above was decayed away.

  Another cut of four or five inches in extent, over the right iliac fossa, or the right lower part of the abdomen, and in an oblique direction, was quite plain to be seen. As regards the middle and upper part of the abdomen and the chest and neck, the skin and tissues being entirely destroyed by decomposition, it is impossible to say what wounds might have been inflicted in those parts. There was found no fracture of the skull or of any other bone.

  I examined very carefully for evidence of stabs made through the clothing, but saw nothing which I could call a stab, except a hole through the left leg of the drawers, which might have been over the stab in the thigh. The clothing was evidently opened before any wound was inflicted below the neck. . . .

  This is a direct description of all the facts which the autopsy revealed.

  After giving the jurors a few moments to absorb the ghastly specifics of this report—with its horrific depiction of butchery and sexual mutilation perpetrated on a ten-year-old girl—Ingalls called the next witness, the onetime jeweller Edward Mitchell, whose recollection of Jesse’s vicious altercation with Charlie on the night of the Millen murder had appeared in the Boston Herald that very morning. Mitchell now related the same story to the jurors, along with some additional accounts of Jesse’s loutish behavior.

  According to his testimony, Michell began to notice a “bad smell, like the smell of offal” wafting up through his floorboards a few days after Jesse got out of reform school and went to work in his brother’s shop. Descending into the cellar with a candle, he found the toilet completely stopped up with paper. After clearing it out with a stick, he went back upstairs to have a talk with Charles, who acknowledged that his younger brother seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom. Just then, Jesse came into the store.

  “Young man,” Mitchell said to him sternly, “if you don’t use that water closet in a different way, I shall nail it up.”

  Jesse’s response was to mutter something nasty under his breath, turn his back on the jeweller, and slouch away.

  Several weeks later, on a Saturday morning in mid-March, Jesse got embroiled in a fight with his brother, who flung him out onto the street. A late-winter storm had hit Boston a few days earlier. Scooping up handfuls of filthy snow, Jesse began to mold them into balls and hurl them at the open door of his brother’s shop. When one of these missiles shattered against the partition separating the two stores and sent chunks of grimy snow spattering onto Mitchell’s showcase, the older man strode to the doorway and warned Jesse to stop.

  “Shut your damned door if you don’t want it thrown in,” was Jesse insolent reply.

  “Young man,” Mitchell said, his voice tight with anger, “you have been in the House of Correction once, and if you don’t take care, you will get there again.”

  “It’s none of your damned business,” sneered Jesse.

  “It is mine or any good citizen’s business,” answered Mitchell. Then—resisting the impulse to go outside and give the impertinent teenager a well-deserved whack in the face—the jeweller stepped back into his store and slammed the door beh
ind him.

  Mitchell (who had given up the jewelry business and was now employed as a special police officer in Chester Square) concluded his testimony by stating that—for all his trouble with the vile-tempered boy—it had never occurred to him that Jesse might have done away with the Curran girl. “If I had suspected him,” Mitchell told the jury, “I would have searched the cellar myself.”

  The remaining witnesses at Friday’s session had few new revelations to offer. Officer Thomas Adams repeated the story he had already told to the papers. Under sharp questioning by the jurors, he continued to maintain that his examination of the cellar—conducted with a kerosene lamp and a long, pointed stick—had been thoroughly professional, in spite of his failure to detect the fetid, clumsily concealed corpse. His colleague, Asel B. Griggs, who had assisted with the search, corroborated Adams’s story.

  Next, Charles McGinnis, the laborer who had uncovered the Curran girl’s remains, gave a graphic account of his discovery, describing the horrifying moment when he had come upon the child’s moldering skull and arm. Finally, two more policemen—Officer John Foote and Sergeant George Hersey of Station Six—described a visit they had paid to Ruth Pomeroy’s residence at 312 Broadway, where they had fruitlessly searched the cellar for evidence.

  At that point the inquest was adjourned until 4:00 P.M. the following Monday.

  * * *

  Perusing their weekend papers, Bostonians would have been briefly distracted from the grim business of the Pomeroy case by a blaring, front-page announcement. Though designed to resemble a major news story, this item was actually a paid advertisement, trumpeting the upcoming, three-week run of what was being ballyhooed as “The Event of 1874!”