On August 2, 1872, the family moved to South Boston, where they rented a house on West Broadway. The mother conveniently leased a small store across the street, where she opened a dress shop and sold small stationery items. On August 17, seven-year-old George Pratt was walking on a beach in South Boston Bay (Old Harbor), about a twenty-minute walk from the Pomeroys’ store and apartment when an older boy approached him and offered him money to do an errand. The boy led him to an abandoned boathouse, where he struck him on the head and stuffed a handkerchief in his mouth. After stripping the victim naked, the boy tied his wrists and feet with two pieces of rope. He told Pratt that he was going to be “punished” and whipped him with the buckle end of his belt. He then kicked the restrained boy in the head, stomach and groin and afterward scratched him deeply on the abdomen and chest with his fingernails. Then the boy bit off a chunk of flesh from Pratt’s cheek.
When Pratt began losing consciousness, the assailant revived him, and showed him a long sewing needle in his hand, asking, “Know what I am going to do now?” He then proceeded to torture the child with the needle, jabbing him in the arm, the chest, his wounded cheek and then between his legs. Then he began to attempt to attack the boy’s eyes. Pratt managed to twist his face down into the ground to protect his eyes, and the assailant was unable to get a tight grip on his eyelids with all the blood and sweat pouring down Pratt’s face. Frustrated, he took a bite from Pratt’s buttocks and left. Pratt was found by a fisherman and rushed to the hospital.
Typically for serial offenders, there was an escalating arc in these attacks. They began with a simple beating with a stick but escalated to biting and the use of a belt and a needle. There was an obvious signature, the elaborate tying of the victims and their suspension from exposed beams (when available) in a ritualistic “dungeon” scenario, perhaps inspired by the dime novels Pomeroy was consuming. His attacks were also becoming more frequent.
A week later, on September 11, seven-year-old Joseph Kennedy was lured to a boathouse on South Boston Bay. The boy’s head was slammed against the boathouse walls and he was stripped naked and severely beaten, resulting in a broken nose and knocked-out front teeth. The assailant, for the first time, now drew a knife; he forced the seven-year-old to kneel and, while slashing him on his face, his back and his thighs, made him repeat an obscene version of the Lord’s Prayer. He then doused the boy in salty bay water.
Six days later, on September 17, five-year-old Robert Gould was found naked, lashed to a telegraph pole along a stretch of railway in South Boston. His scalp and face had been deeply cut and his face and hair were saturated with blood. He had been approached by an older brown-haired boy and invited to see soldiers on parade. Once on the railway line, the boy drew two knives, stripped Gould naked and tied him to the pole; he slashed the boy behind both ears, under his eyes and around his scalp, probably in an attempt to scalp him, again something he might have been inspired to do after reading dime novel Western stories of Indian torture. (Incidentally, scalping was a form of war-trophy taking practiced by both Europeans and pre-Columbian Indigenous peoples and other civilizations. It was not introduced to North American Indians by the British, as it is often claimed.)16 He then put a knife to the boy’s throat and told him that he was going to kill him but ran off when he saw workers approaching along the railway line. In this case, Robert Gould made a significant identification: he told police that the boy had a cloudy eye, like a “milky”—a white marble. Police now began taking one of the victims, Joseph Kennedy, around South Boston schools in an attempt to identify the assailant. At one point they came to Jesse’s classroom, but the boy failed to spot his attacker.
Some sort of compulsion drove Jesse Pomeroy several hours later to pass by the local police station on his way home from school and pause at the doorway to stare at the police officer and Kennedy inside. He then turned and left toward home but it was too late. He had attracted the attention of the police officer, who took him into custody and brought him before Kennedy. This time, Kennedy identified Pomeroy.
Pomeroy was still only twelve years old, and on September 21 he was speedily sentenced to six years’ detention in a juvenile reformatory, until the age of eighteen. Pomeroy, however, was intelligent and, when he wanted to be, a charming psychopath. He persuaded a senior South Boston police captain that he had “reformed,” which earned him a “second chance.” After the reformatory reported that Pomeroy’s conduct had been excellent, a social-services inspector visited his mother and saw her and Jesse’s brother diligently working at the dress shop and secured her promise that she would keep Jesse under strict supervision. With the police captain’s endorsement, Jesse Pomeroy was paroled into his mother’s custody on February 6, 1874, and put to work in her store across the street from their apartment and along the paper route that his brother had been working.
About six weeks later, on March 18, 1874, ten-year-old schoolgirl Katie Curran realized she needed a new notebook. Her mother gave her a few coins and sent her to Broadway to purchase a notebook from Tobin’s, a neighborhood store. She warily cast her eye at the clock as her daughter ran off to get the notebook. It was 8:05 a.m.
That morning it had been Jesse’s turn to open the store at 7:30 a.m. and prepare it for business. The shopkeeper at Tobin’s would later testify that Katie had come in around 8:15 but left without finding a notebook she liked.
Rudolph Kohr, a neighborhood boy who earned pocket money by assisting in the Pomeroys’ store, arrived at around 8:00 a.m. He would later testify that he was chatting with Jesse when a little girl came into the store seeking a school notebook. Jesse, he said, offered the girl a notebook at a discount because it had an ink spot on its cover. Just at that moment, the Pomeroys’ cat came up from the cellar, meowing for food, and Jesse asked him to run over to the butcher for a few scraps of meat. When Kohr returned to the store, the little girl was gone and Jesse was nonchalantly sweeping up.
Katie never returned home. When Katie’s mother began a frantic search of the neighborhood, another girl told her that she had seen Katie go into Pomeroy’s store. Everybody in the neighborhood knew the story of Jesse Pomeroy, and Katie’s mother rushed to the police station, where she was interviewed by the station commander, the same police captain who had endorsed Jesse’s early release. The police officer assured her that Jesse had been “reformed,” and moreover, he had a history of attacking little boys, not girls. In the meantime, to calm the woman down, the police agreed to make a search of Pomeroy’s store. The search apparently turned up nothing suspicious or out of order.
A reward was offered for information on the missing girl, and a few weeks later a witness surfaced claiming he saw a weeping Katie lured into a closed carriage and taken away. Katie was a product of a mixed marriage between her Protestant mother and Catholic father. In the 1870s, sectarian tension between the Protestants and Catholics in the United States had not eased, and the consensus among Boston’s Protestant ruling elite was that Katie’s Catholic father had abducted his own daughter and sent her away to a convent.17 The case went cold.
In the weeks that followed, several boys were approached by an older boy offering them either money for running an errand or to show them the circus or soldiers on parade. The now-wary children refused to go with him. None of these encounters were reported to the police.
On the morning of April 22, 1874, four-year-old Horace Millen was allowed by his mother to go to a bakery and buy himself a sweet. Numerous witnesses saw the boy share the pastry with an older boy on Dorchester Avenue and the two of them walking toward Boston’s Savin Hill Beach. That afternoon Horace’s corpse was found in a clambake pit surrounded by empty shells and scorched stones on the beach. The child was half-naked, his pants and underwear pulled down to his ankles; he was lying on his back with his face, hands and upper thighs and shirt caked in blood. The victim’s heels had plowed deep furrows in the sand as he struggled. His fists were tightly clenched from the pain being inflicted upon h
im. His hands were slashed in defensive wounds from attempting to ward off the knife blows. Two cuts to the throat, one exposing the boy’s windpipe and the other severing his jugular vein, were so deep that, despite being inflicted with a small knife, they nearly severed the boy’s head. There were eighteen stab wounds to the chest and an attempt was made to castrate the victim, slashing open the scrotum so deeply that a testicle had fallen out nearby. The boy’s right eye had been punctured by a knife stab through the eyelid.
With this murder, the Boston police’s “linkage blindness” came to a speedy end. Senior police investigators immediately recalled the Jesse Pomeroy attacks and were shocked to learn that Pomeroy had been paroled several months earlier into the same neighborhood where Katie Curran disappeared. That same evening, police took Pomeroy into custody and cataloged the scratches and marks on his body. Shoes worn by Pomeroy would be matched to the two sets of footprints along the beach leading to the crime scene, and the knife that Pomeroy used was seized as evidence.
Police in Boston used the same technique as authorities in Bavaria attempted in 1808 to get a confession from serial killer Andreas Bichel: they brought Pomeroy to the mortuary to view the body of the victim.18 Pomeroy quickly confessed in the mortuary but then recanted his confession, claiming police had tricked him into making it. He would maintain his innocence to the end. After an arraignment in which Pomeroy pleaded not guilty, his trial was scheduled for December.
In the meantime, Jesse’s mother, who insisted that her son was framed and even went so far as to blame the victims’ parents for allowing their children to roam around the city unsupervised, garnered so much hostility in the neighborhood that business dried up. On May 31 she vacated the store, and a neighboring business began expanding into the premises. On July 18 a worker was demolishing a dividing wall in the cellar near a corner where a heap of ash and refuse had accumulated. As he struck the earth with his pickax, he saw a round object suddenly fly up from the blow and roll into a dark corner. At first he paid no attention to it, assuming it was a discarded piece of broken crockery, but then his next pickax blow exposed a small human forearm draped in moldy clothing. Stunned, the worker glanced back at the round piece of “crockery” in the corner and realized it was a piece of human skull with tufts of hair adhered to a decomposing scalp. The body of Katie Curran had been discovered.
The case of the “Boy Killer” became a scandal of police incompetence for not only failing to properly search the premises of the store and therefore allowing the murder of Horace Millen, but also because of the police captain who had endorsed Pomeroy’s early parole. The dime novels Jesse enjoyed reading were cited as an evil influence on juveniles. The judicial and juvenile penal systems came under attack for their “soft-on-crime” policies. There were cries for the fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy to be tried in adult court and given the death sentence.
In the end Pomeroy was sentenced to life imprisonment. He served forty-one years in solitary confinement before he was transferred into the regular prison population in 1917, where he remained until his death in 1932 at the age of seventy-two, after a total of fifty-six years in prison.
Jesse Pomeroy is a good candidate for not only America’s first modern serial killer but America’s youngest serial killer on record. On a global scale, this serial killer’s youth is surpassed only by Britain’s eleven-year-old serial killer Mary Bell, who murdered and mutilated two boys in 1968. (Bell was released at the age of twenty-four and is now a grandmother, living in court-protected anonymity.)19
Joseph LaPage, the “French Monster”— Vermont–New Hampshire, 1875
Joseph LaPage (LaPagette) is also a good candidate for America’s first serial killer, although technically he was a Canadian employed as an agricultural worker in Vermont and New Hampshire. Born in 1838, LaPage married at the age of twenty and fathered five children. He apparently attempted to rape his own daughters. In 1871, like one of those medieval werewolves, he attacked his sister-in-law in a pasture while disguised in the skin of either a buffalo or a bear. He raped her and attempted to strangle her, but she survived and LaPage fled across the Canadian border into Vermont to avoid arrest. A year later he returned to Canada, where he attacked and bludgeoned a young woman and attempted to lure a fourteen-year-old girl into the woods, before fleeing back to Vermont again.20
On July 24, 1874, he ambushed Marietta Ball, a young schoolteacher, bashed in her head with a rock, raped her and horrifically mutilated her. After being questioned by police as a suspect, LaPage fled Vermont to New Hampshire before they could complete the investigation.
LaPage went to work as a threshing-machine operator in Pembroke, New Hampshire. LaPage was a little peculiar, but nonetheless his boss, a Mr. Fowler, found him to be a good worker and even invited him to dine with his family. On one of these occasions, LaPage saw Fowler’s teenage daughter, Litia, and immediately became obsessed with her. He questioned her brother as to what route she took to school, and over the next few days, at least one witness saw him lurking in the bushes on the road to the schoolhouse.
On October 4, 1875, a schoolmate of Litia’s, seventeen-year-old Josie Langmaid, left on her usual two-and-a-half-mile walk to school but never arrived. A search party began looking for her, and at around nine p.m., her decapitated body was found about half a mile away from the school in a bush near the road. Her head was found the next morning about four hundred yards away, wrapped in her blue oilcloth cape. Her face had been slashed and battered, the killer’s bootheel imprinted on her cheek. Nearby a bloodstained wooden club was found. An autopsy determined that Langmaid was raped, and her vagina had been partially excised.
The news of the murder reached Vermont, where authorities noted the similarity in the attack to the ambush-rape-murder of Marietta Ball the previous year and alerted the New Hampshire authorities, who then arrested LaPage. There was no linkage blindness in this case. LaPage was arrested, tried, convicted and executed in March 1878.
A fifteen-foot-tall monument and two stone hubs were erected at the site of one of America’s earliest serial-killer crime scenes, on Academy Road in Suncook, New Hampshire. An inscription on the monument reads: “Death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flow’r of all the field; Body found 90 ft north at stone hub, head found 82 rods north at stone hub.” It’s a popular geocaching site today.21
Thomas W. Piper, the “Boston Belfry Murderer” or the “Bat”—Boston, 1875
As the Jesse Pomeroy case was weaving its way through the courts in Boston, the city was shaken by another serial killer. The first homicide occurred on Friday, December 5, 1873, in the Uphams Corner neighborhood. At approximately nine p.m. witnesses working in a blacksmith shop at the corner of Hancock and Columbia Road heard a woman scream outside. When they emerged they saw a woman lying in a pool of blood by a brick wall with a man dressed in an opera cape and a tall silk hat standing over her (the way Jack the Ripper is frequently portrayed . . .). He ran off, his cape fluttering like the wings of a bat, according to some witnesses. The woman had been dealt a severe blow to the head with a sawed-off length of wagon shaft (the forklike frame that secures the horse to a wagon). The piece of wood was found resting on top of a wall next to where the victim lay; it was still wet with her blood, her blond hairs adhering to it.22 The victim died at the scene from severe head trauma before she could say anything.23 She was identified as Bridget Landregan, a servant girl “of good character” in her early twenties.
Several witnesses would describe the killer as a young, well-dressed “gentleman” in his early twenties. One remarked that the suspect ran with a “sailor’s gait” and that he seemed to be short of breath, frequently pausing as he ran. The description of the caped suspect and the weapon was widely publicized. With Jesse Pomeroy newly put away in the reformatory for a series of assaults, this new outrage was the talk of the town that weekend.
On Monday, Thomas C. Piper, a prosperous house carpenter
who had recently immigrated to Boston with his wife and nine sons from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, appeared at a police station with a piece of wagon shaft, which he kept stored in the basement workshop of his house on West Cottage Street near Dudley Avenue, about twelve minutes’ walk from the crime scene in the direction the assailant was seen fleeing.24 Piper told police that over the weekend he’d discovered that a piece of his wagon shaft had been mysteriously sawn away without his knowledge. When police compared the shaft to the weapon used to murder Landregan, the two pieces matched.
Piper told police that during the day he rarely locked the basement door that led out into the backyard and that recently he allowed workers who had been laying new sewers on his street to store their tools behind his house. But police suspicion was aroused by the fact that the assailant had been seen running in the direction of the house. That week police descended on the house, searched it and interviewed the tenants, including T. C. Piper’s sons.
The historical record does not indicate why the police first came to suspect T. C. Piper’s second-oldest son, twenty-four-year-old Thomas W. Piper. Perhaps it was because he matched the descriptions given by several witnesses. Perhaps it was because Thomas claimed to have a kidney ailment that prevented him from running, or at least running any distance without pausing to catch his breath. Perhaps it was that Thomas had recently returned to Boston after spending five months working aboard a ship sailing to Liverpool, which might have explained the suspect’s “sailor’s gait” as reported by a witness. Perhaps there was something in his demeanor that set the police off.
The father, Thomas W. and some of his brothers were summoned that week to testify before the coroner’s jury inquiring into the death of Landregan.
Piper was well-spoken and self-possessed. He stated that on Friday evening he had been to a church service with his brothers at the Dearborn Street Baptist Church, in the opposite direction from his house. He had returned home by horse-drawn streetcar but just before he reached his house he saw a crowd gathered watching a fire. He insisted that he alighted from the streetcar and watched the firemen combating the blaze. Several of his acquaintances from church and the neighborhood saw Piper there and would confirm his alibi. Piper said that after that he returned home and went to bed. Police could not shake his alibi.
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