by Ray Black
The Millen family had moved to Dorchester Street in April 1874. Their youngest child was four-year-old Horace, who had an almost angelic appearance. Horace loved sweets and on this particularly chilly spring morning he had managed to persuade his mother to let him have a couple of pennies to spend at the local bakery. On his way there he met up with an older boy – Jesse Pomeroy. Horace bought a small cake at the bakery which he generously shared with Jesse. Jesse innocently suggested that they take a trip to the nearby harbour, and Horace happily slipped his hand into Jesse’s as they set off.
A number of people saw the two boys heading off towards the bay, and one woman even recalled the look of excitement on the older boy’s face. The last witness to see Horace alive, besides Jesse, was a beachcomber who noticed that the older boy kept looking back over his shoulder as if he was being followed. But he merely shrugged and went back to scouring the shoreline for flotsam.
The two boys headed off across the marshland, eventually stopping in a swale, a shallow troughlike depression that carried water mainly during rainstorms or when the snow melted, which afforded them a little more privacy.
‘Let’s rest for a minute,’ Jesse told Horace, who was still totally unaware of the danger he was in. As soon as Horace sat down Jesse took out his pocket knife and in a frenzied rage grabbed the boy and slit his throat. Horace was still alive after the first attack which angered Jesse even more, and he went berserk repeatedly stabbing the helpless youngster over and over again. His hands and lower arms showed signs of defensive wounds, which meant that even though he was badly injured Horace tried his hardest to fight back. Eventually Jesse succeeded in slicing through Horace’s windpipe, which finally ended the wretched child’s ordeal. However, Jesse’s appetite for blood was not satisfied and he continued to hack at the body, particularly in the area of the genitals. He also punctured the boy’s right eye through the eyelid and attempted to castrate the boy, mutilating his scrotum.
Horace Millen died in the early afternoon, but his mutilated body was not discovered until around
4.00 p.m. Two brothers who had been playing on the beach, ran up the hill that hid Horace’s body from sight. On reaching the top they saw what looked like a rag doll at the bottom of the small valley. The brothers called over some men who were on the marshes hunting ducks and, leaving one adult and a boy guarding the body, the others split up to go and fetch the police.
There were deep gouges in the sand made by the young lad’s legs in his attempts at fighting off his attacker. But what was even more nauseating was that when the coroner examined the body the boy’s fists were so tightly clenched in agony that the fingernails were embedded in the palms, indicating that four-year-old Horace Millen had died an excruciating death. The examiner knew this had to be the work of a complete madman.
Once their gruesome task was over, the coroner’s jury issued a report to the many reporters who had gathered outside the mortuary in the hope of a story. It didn’t take police long to identify the victim and shortly after 9 p.m. a police officer went to the Millen home to give them the dreadful news.
There was only one logical suspect – the teen with the strange eye who loved to torture young boys. The crime fitted his modus operandi perfectly. The only problem was – or so the press and police authorities believed – was that Jesse Pomeroy was safely locked away at Westborough Reformatory. Was it possible that there was another such evil fiend in the South Boston area?
They soon got their answer, however, when the Boston chief of detectives reported that Jesse Pomeroy had in fact been released on parole. The police were immediately ordered to go and pick him up. They found him at home and, despite his mother’s protests, Jesse was once again taken into custody. Jesse reassured his mother that he hadn’t done anything and it wouldn’t be long before he would be back home. But Jesse Pomeroy was never to spend another night in that house on Broadway.
Jesse was subjected to harsh interrogation. He stood up to the barrage of questions fired at him for quite some time, denying any knowledge of the crime and offering explanations of where he had been all day. However, his story left big gaps that he could not account for and, more importantly, he was unable to offer an alibi for his movements between the times of 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. The officers carefully examined their suspect and his clothing was confiscated pending further investigation. When questioned as to how he got the scratches on his face, Jesse replied that he had done it whilst shaving. When asked if he owned a knife, Jesse hesitantly admitted that he had one at home. A sergeant was sent to the house to find it and returned a short while later with the evidence. The knife, with a three-inch blade, was clogged with dirt and there appeared to be dried blood on the handle.
While the coroner took the knife to see if it would fit Horace Millen’s wounds, Jesse was left alone in a cell, where he promptly fell into a peaceful sleep.
The next morning, detectives went to the fens armed with Jesse’s boots and Horace’s shoes in an attempt to place both the boys at the crime scene. They found a meandering trail of both large and small footprints in the area, and after making a plaster of Paris cast of the prints, discovered that the larger ones matched perfectly with the shoes they had just taken from the feet of the young Jesse Pomeroy. Now, armed with the evidence that Jesse had definitely been at the scene of the crime, the officers returned to the South Boston precinct to wake up the sleeping fourteen-year-old.
Jesse continued to deny any involvement. Then Captain Henry Dyer, suggested that if Jesse was innocent, he wouldn’t object to going to the funeral parlour to see Horace’s body. Despite his objections, Jesse was taken down to the undertakers where, confronted with the fruits of his crime, he broke down and admitted killing Horace Millen.
‘I am sorry I did it,’ he wept. ‘Please don’t tell my mother.’
When asked if he knew what would happen to him now, Jesse replied, ‘Put me somewhere so I can’t do such things.’
When Jesse Pomeroy was finally called to the stand at the inquest, he once again denied everything and told a much more convincing story of how he had spent the fateful day. The evidence against him was sufficient to warrant the charges and he was indicted for first-degree murder.
The penalty in Massachusetts for murder was death by hanging, but the state had never had to execute anyone as young as fourteen. On the other hand, they had never had anyone as young as Jesse commit such a heinous crime. So, even before the case went to trial, there was a lot of discussion about what should happen to the boy.
REPERCUSSIONS
Things were going from bad to worse for Ruth Pomeroy and her son Charles, as they lived in close proximity to both the Millen and Curran families. Business at the shop and the newsstand were declining rapidly and it seemed the only people that now ventured in were curious onlookers who just wanted to see where the notorious Jesse had worked. Ruth did not make life easy for herself because, whilst still proclaiming her son’s innocence, she blamed the two grieving families for the fate of her son. Ruth realized that they could no longer make a living out of the shop and decided to close the store down. Ruth and Charles left the original building in Broadway and tried in vain to eke out some sort of a living. Unbeknown to the Pomeroys, their former co-tenant in the building back at Broadway was enjoying great success in his business and decided it was time to expand. This expansion meant that the basement of Ruth’s former shop needed to be refurbished, and it wasn’t long before the workmen found the decaying remains of Katie Curran’s body.
When her body was uncovered, Katie’s head was severed from her body. The body was in such a state of decomposition that it was difficult for the coroner to assess quite how badly she had been hurt, but one thing that did come to light was that her genitalia had been a particular target of her murderer.
The police were in no doubts as to who had committed this atrocious act, but what they did need to ascertain was whether his family had known about it. Both Ruth and Charles were immediately taken into c
ustody as accessories to murder. When confronted with the news of the discovery and the subsequent arrest of his family, Jesse seemed totally unperturbed, adding that he didn’t know anything about it. The detectives gave him two days to think over what had transpired and then gave him the final opportunity to clear his mother and brother. It was then that Jesse confessed to killing Katie Curran. He recounted the details of the murder step-by-step in chillingly sharp detail, pointing out that his family knew nothing of the murder until the day the body was found.
LIFE OR DEATH?
Now Jesse Pomeroy stood accused of two murders and it looked all the more likely that Jesse Pomeroy would be the youngest person ever executed in the state of Massachusetts. The only way he could escape the gallows was if it could be proved that he was legally insane at the time he committed the crimes. This was the question that was left for Jesse Pomeroy’s lawyers to prove – was their client just plain sick or was he legally insane? The outcome would mean the difference between life and death.
While the public and the press were calling for his head, doctors started to examine Jesse to see if they could find out what was going on in his mind.
It was a Doctor John Tyler that managed to get closest to the truth when they started to examine Jesse. On their very first meeting, Jesse told the doctor all about his history of molesting children younger than himself, and blamed the attacks on ‘a sudden impulse or feeling’ which just came over him. He also told him that just before he committed each crime he felt a sharp pain on the left side of his head which subsequently passed to the right side and then went back and forth. It was the pain that prompted the violence, he claimed.
‘The feeling that accompanied the pain was that I must whip or kill the boy or girl . . . and it seemed to me that I could not help doing it,’ he told Tyler. Jesse quite freely confessed his crimes to his doctors, or that was the case until the day he received a note from his mother. Having read this note Jesse started to deny his role in the killings, saying that he had a voice in his head calling on him to stand up and defend himself. Two months before he went to trial Jesse repudiated his confessions, and in a conversation with Tyler he adamantly denied having anything to do with either murder.
Tyler issued a final report which stated that Jesse ‘envinces no pity for the boys tortured or the victims of his homicide, and no remorse or sorrow for his acts’. He finished his report by saying that Jesse could discriminate between right and wrong and felt that the boy was, and forever would be, a threat to society. He finished by saying that in his opinion, Jesse Pomeroy was insane.
THE TRIAL
The trial opened on December 8, 1874, before a packed courtroom in Boston. Throughout the often boring, but sometimes gruesome testimonies, Jesse sat unemotionally, with a look of boredom and indifference on his face. Jesse’s lawyer laid all the groundwork for an insanity defence, and called up witnesses who could back-up his assertion. The first witness was Jesse’s own mother, Ruth, who, under intense questioning, told of the number of childhood illnesses that had left Jesse mentally deranged. Most notable of these was the sickness he suffered just before his first birthday, a brain fever which induced a three-day delirium followed by an unexplained shaking of the head. Following that, Jesse suffered from numerous mental ailments – insomnia, dizziness and frequent violent headaches. Other witnesses who took the stand followed with similar lines of testimony.
The prosecution, however, contradicted the two defence lawyers, stating that Jesse was cunning and deeply manipulative, and said that the boy was totally free of any mental defect.
The jury retired to ponder Jesse’s fate. It took them five hours to reach a verdict – Jesse Pomeroy was found guilty of first-degree, premeditated, murder. The sentence for such a crime was mandatory – death by hanging. However, the jurors requested leniency for the boy on account of his age. This was a decision only the governor could grant, and the judge had no option but to condemn the prisoner to death.
Although capital punishment in 19th century America was usually swift, because Jesse was still only fourteen years of age, there was considerable argument against carrying out the punishment. The final decision was left in the hands of Governor William Gaston, who appointed a committee to study the case and report back to him. When the committee came back hopelessly divided, Gaston turned to the people for a public hearing.
Many weeks went by and in this time another Boston child died at the hands of a second mentally disturbed young man, this time in his twenties. This instigated a public outcry for a decision in the Pomeroy case – by this time things had reached fever pitch. Gaston reconvened his committee for further debate and a final vote. By a vote of 5–4, the committee recommended that the sentence stand and that Gaston should sign the death warrant. But Gaston remained resolute in his unwillingness to execute Jesse. It was probably this decision that cost Gaston his re-election and in 1876 Alexander Rice was appointed the new governor of Massachusetts.
Several years after the trial, in 1887, when the hunger for Jesse’s blood had died down, Rice called his advisors together and discussed the fate of the boy waiting on death row. The decision was that although the punishment must remain severe, people were now distant enough from the crime to accept a lesser form of punishment. Rice was in agreement and, without causing too much attention in the press, he commuted Jesse’s death sentence to life in prison. However, to make the sentence more severe due to the severity of the crime, Rice ordered that Jesse serve his sentence in solitary confinement.
Jesse was confined in Charlestown State Prison, and the only visitor Jesse ever received during his time there was his mother, Ruth, who was permitted to see him once a month. Jesse suffered a exceptionally boring existence, he ate alone in his cell, exercised alone, and was periodically allowed to bathe. He was granted access to reading material and became a voracious learner.
Over his years of confinement, with nothing more to occupy his mind, he made several attempts to dig his way out. He did on one occasion actually manage to get out of his cell, and on another he attempted to blow off his cell door by stopping up a gas line. The only people he ever saw were the guards who patrolled by his door.
Finally, in 1917, four decades after he was imprisoned in his little cell, Jesse’s sentence of solitary confinement was relaxed and he was allowed to move in with the other inmates. For a while he relished in the fact that he was the prison’s most notorious inmate. He loved approaching new prisoners, introducing himself and asking them what they knew about him. It pleased Jesse greatly that most of the inmates had grown up hearing of the infamous Jesse Pomeroy. But over the years when young men sent to Charlestown prison had never heard of him, Jesse became just another old face in the anonymous prison crowd.
Gradually his health began to deteriorate and he was moved from Charlestown to Bridgewater prison farm, where he could receive better medical care. It was his first and only ride in a car and he showed no sign of excitement or curiosity whatsoever in a world that had long stopped having any meaning for him.
Jesse Pomeroy died at the age of 71 after having spent 58 years of his life behind bars, almost all of it spent in solitary confinement. He was dismissed by the press as ‘the most friendless person in the world
. . . a psychopath’.
Jessica Holtmeyer
In Clearfield, Pennsylvania, unable to sleep the last 48 hours, Rick and Jodi Dotts watched the clock and paced the floor. Their eyes were bleary, their bodies exhausted, but they could not sit still . . .
It was Mother’s Day, Sunday May 10, 1998, around 5.45 p.m. Rick Dotts was driving home along a bumpy country backroad after having first stopped at the shops. He had been working long hours and was exhausted. On the front seat beside him were a dozen red roses for his wife. He was looking forward to a nice dinner with his family as his oldest daughter was coming home for a visit. All of a sudden his car hit a deer.
He stopped the car and got out to see if the deer was still alive. As he sta
red at the motionless doe a dark premonition replaced the nice thoughts he had been happening, and he somehow knew that something horrible was about to happen . . .
THE GANG
Jessica Holtmeyer was a second-year student at Clearfield High in a small rural Pennsylvanian town. She was a big-boned, tall and very intimidating teenager. She loved to make fun of people at her school, especially taunting them about their clothes and hairstyles. She was both rough and tough with a frighteningly mean streak. She was known to worship the Devil, cut herself with razors and loved to frighten other kids by pulling out a knife. She had a tattoo ‘666’ behind her left ear, the sign for the Devil. She had a self-tattoo on her right forearm of a pentagram, or a five-pointed star which is said to have mystical significance. She had two other tattoos, one on the back of her neck ‘Kurt Cobain 1967–1994’ and her boyfriend’s name on her shoulder. Jessica Holtmeyer had pure evil running through her veins. In her early teens she had killed many animals. Once she gathered six feral cats into a bin liner, set it on fire and then threw it into a river. Another time, she strangled a poodle to death with its own leash.
In 1998, when Jessica was 16, she made plans with a gang of friends to run away to Florida. The gang, six in total, gathered together late one morning on Mother’s Day, May 10, and went to pick up one more member for the trip – Jessica Holtmeyer. The gang, unbeknown to Jessica, had invited fifteen-year-old Kimberly Dotts to join them. Kimmy, as she was known, was learning-disabled and badly wanted to be friends with the gang. The group arrived at the house where Jessica lived with her grandparents. They were out at church and Jessica had just started to watch the movie Scream when she answered the door.