Fiend (13 page)

Other papers were even more harsh in their condemnation of the officials who had authorized Pomeroy’s probation. “That a pardon should have been granted to such a fiend as Pomeroy shows a culpable lack of judgment somewhere,” proclaimed the
Boston Herald,
“and excites high indignation among those familiar with the circumstances which resulted in his committal to reform school.”

In the face of such criticism, the people responsible for Jesse’s early release from Westborough immediately found themselves on the defensive. Some—like Mr. John Ayers, one of the trustees who had supported the parole—hastened to justify their decision. Interviewed by a reporter from the
Globe,
Ayers declared that “when boys are sent to the Reform School, they are sent for
their minority—unless, after a considerable stay, their behavior has been exemplary. If they give promise of reform and of future good behavior, and if they have a good home to which their parents are anxious to have them returned, they are often pardoned on probation. This is an everyday occurrence, and this was the case with Pomeroy.”

Others involved in the parole process insisted that they had spoken out against Jesse’s release. Mr. D. B. Johnson, for example—an assistant visiting agent of the State Board of Charities—issued a public statement in which he claimed that he had “actively opposed the pardon on the ground that Pomeroy had been in Reform School but seventeen months, and that there had been seven cases of inhuman treatment, by torturing boys, against him at the time of his sentence.”

Whether scrambling to defend his decision or presenting himself as a valiant (if hopelessly outmatched) dissenter, everyone connected to Jesse Pomeroy’s parole from reform school obviously felt himself to be in imminent professional jeopardy. And with good cause. Already the citizens of Boston—appalled at a penal system that had made their children vulnerable to the depredations of a fiend—were demanding an accounting. There was no way of telling yet where the axe would eventually fall. But sooner or later heads were bound to roll.

*  *  *

One official who quickly came under fire was Police Captain Henry T. Dyer, who had supported Jesse’s pardon under the theory that—as he had stated during his interview with Gardiner Tufts of the State Board of Charities—“it isn’t best to be down on a boy too hard or too long.” In the wake of the Millen murder, stories began to spread throughout South Boston that Dyer had been motivated less by his faith in juvenile redemption than by his friendship with Mrs. Pomeroy, with whom—according to rumor—he was on “intimate” terms.

That Dyer was, for whatever reason, inordinately sympathetic to the Pomeroys appeared to be confirmed on Thursday afternoon, not long after Jesse made his tearful confession to Detective Wood.

Wood, Ham, and Dearborn had permitted themselves less than a half hour for lunch before hurrying back to Station Six at around 2:30
P.M.
Intending to have Jesse put his confession in
writing, the detectives took him into an empty office, seated him at a table, and presented him with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper.

“What’s this for?” Jesse asked.

“We want you to give us a written statement,” Wood explained. “Put down everything you said about killing Horace Millen.”

“I never said I killed anyone,” Jesse replied offhandedly.

Wood looked at his colleagues in astonishment before turning back to Jesse and saying, “You
told
me you killed him.”

“No, I didn’t,” Jesse said. “That’s a dirty lie. I’m innocent, and I want to go home.”

Restraining his impulse to grab the boy by the shoulders and shake the truth out of him, Wood pulled him roughly from the chair and marched him back to his cell. Something had clearly changed in the short time that the three detectives had been gone for lunch. It didn’t take long for Wood to find out what had happened in their absence. Asking around the station house, he was stunned to discover that—in spite of his emphatic request that Jesse not be allowed to see visitors—a man named Stephen G. Deblois, one of the directors of the State Reform School, had been permitted to speak to the boy.

When Wood returned to Jesse’s cell and asked about Deblois, the boy readily admitted that the director had come to see him.

“What did he say to you?” Wood demanded.

“He said he is my friend, and that he doesn’t believe I am guilty,” Jesse answered calmly. “He said that there is nothing against me but circumstantial evidence, and that I should not answer any more questions.”

Seething, Wood left the cell and made for the captain’s office, where he began remonstrating with Dyer. “Didn’t we tell you not to let anyone see him?”

Dyer seemed unfazed. “Yes, but the man is on the board of the state reformatory.”

“That doesn’t matter a damn,” said Wood. “You’ve done a fine thing. Pomeroy will go on claiming he didn’t do it. You’ll see. He’ll stick to it from now on.”

Dyer only answered with a shrug.

Wood felt a dangerous urge rising in his chest—an impulse to shower the captain with curses. Choking it back, he swiveled on his heels and stormed out of Dyer’s office.

Detective Wood’s prediction that Pomeroy would “stick to” his new claim of innocence was fulfilled on the very next day—Friday, April 24—when the official inquest into the Millen murder got underway. It was held at the Ninth Police Station in the presence of Coroner Allen and his six-man jury. Jesse’s mother had retained the services of two South Boston attorneys—Messrs. Joseph H. Cotton and E. G. Walker—who requested the privilege of consulting with their client prior to his testimony in order to discuss his defense. While assuring the lawyers that he “intended to give the lad every opportunity to vindicate himself,” the coroner denied the request, explaining that he could “not permit counsel to see the accused until after the jury had listened to his story concerning his whereabouts on the day of his murder.”

The proceedings began with the swearing-in of ten witnesses, who were then promptly excluded from the room. A few moments later, Jesse was brought in and seated at a table beside his mother, whose careworn appearance contrasted strikingly with her son’s conspicuous nonchalance. Speaking in a cool, absolutely assured voice, Jesse (who’d had two days by this point to work on his alibi) proceeded to relate a story that—though essentially identical to his original version—was far less vague and inconsistent.

During his initial interrogation on Tuesday night, for example, he claimed that he had spent the key hours between 11:30
A.M.
and 2:30
P.M.
strolling up to and through the Commons. He’d been suspiciously hazy, however, about certain important details, such as the condition of Tremont Street (which was undergoing major construction work). Now, by contrast, he was suddenly able to evoke the scene with a remarkable—indeed photographic—precision.

“On Tremont,” he explained, “I noticed that men were digging up the left-hand side going towards the Commons. They were preparing to lay pipes. They were working towards the Scollay Square. When I saw them, I think they were between Winter and Bromfield Streets. Then I crossed to the Commons and sat on a tree stump which was covered with zinc. I noticed that the side of the fence on Tremont Street had been taken away. Some of the walks were covered with tar, and others were covered with boards. After resting a few minutes, I started again and walked along till I came to the Frog Pond. The fountain was not playing when I was there, though the pond was full of water. I did not stop there. I went down by the parade ground. There
were some boys playing ball there. Then I went right over to the Public Garden and passed through the fence. I noticed in the doorway of the hothouse a large plant. I don’t know the name of it but it was in a large tub, which was painted green.”

Altogether, Jesse testified for over an hour. He ended with a firm declaration of his innocence, insisting that he “never saw the murdered boy until I saw him in the coffin at the undertaker’s. I am sure I never spoke to him.” He also asserted that he was unfamiliar with the spot where the murder took place, having “been out there only once, about two years ago this coming summer.”

When Jesse was finished, his chief attorney, Joseph H. Cotton, requested that his testimony be read back by the scribe. Jesse listened attentively, then—after asking for a few minor revisions—signed the transcript with a bold, clean hand. He was remanded to the custody of Captain Hastings of the Ninth Police Station with instructions that no one be allowed to have conversations with him besides his lawyers and mother.

By that point, it was already so late in the afternoon that only two more people had a chance to appear before the jury—Officer Roswell Lyons, the first policeman to arrive at the crime scene, and George Powers, the younger of the two beachcombing brothers who had originally stumbled on Horace Millen’s corpse. Following their testimony, the inquest was adjourned until 2:00
P.M.
the following Monday.

As soon as the proceedings were over, the newsmen hurried back to their offices to write up their stories. For the most part, these turned out to be straightforward synopses of the day’s testimony, though several of the reporters also provided their own impressions of the young suspect’s appearance and behavior.

A few of the journalists were especially struck by Jesse’s unflappable manner, which—as one of them wrote—was so “candid and explicit” that it was “regarded by some as indicative of his innocence.” In 1874, of course, people were far less familiar with the bizarre workings of the psychopathic mind, which makes it possible for these killers to maintain an uncanny composure in the face of the most extraordinary pressures. (For example, when a trio of policemen came to question him about a bleeding, naked fourteen-year-old boy who had just fled in terror from his apartment, Jeffrey Dahmer remained so calm and convincing that the cops turned the boy back over to him—at
which point Dahmer promptly tortured, murdered, and dismembered the luckless teenager.)

To other reporters, however, the very cast of Jesse’s features was sufficient proclamation of his guilt. In an age that gave serious credence to the pseudoscience of phrenology (according to which a person’s mental characteristics could be deduced from the contours of his skull), it was entirely possible to judge someone’s innermost nature by his facial appearance. The writer for the
Boston Globe,
for example, needed just a “single glance at the boy’s countenance” to “see how it was possible for him to perpetrate the outrages for which he was taken into custody.” Pomeroy’s innate and incurable degeneracy was, first and foremost, visible in his eyes:

They are wicked eyes, sullenly, brutishly wicked eyes, and as in moments of wandering thought the boy looks out of them, he seems one who could delight in the writhings of his helpless victims beneath the stab of the knife, the puncture of the awl, or the prick of the pin, as he has so often delighted in. There is nothing interesting in the look. It is altogether unsympathetic, merciless. But worse than all the rest is the sensuality that hangs like lead about those sunken eyes, and that marks every feature of the face. The pallor of his complexion, the lifeless, flabby look that pertains to his cheeks, corresponds with this view; and when the boy walks, it is not the bold, buoyant movement of an innocent lad, but apparently the shuffling of one whose thoughts are of the lowest kind.

With his shuffling gait, sunken eyes, and corpselike complexion, the figure portrayed in this passage sounds less like a severely disturbed adolescent than like the nightmarish creation dreamed up by Mary Shelley fifty years before. And indeed, that is precisely what the press had already begun turning Jesse Pomeroy into—a fourteen-year-old Frankenstein monster, a homegrown horror that would haunt the people of Boston for decades to come.

19

The dime novels came in libraries; for years, until ready for the sober classes of high school, I devoured such series as the Old Cap Collier, Old Sleuth, Nick Carter, and Pluck and Luck. Unhappy was the day when I could not go through at least one of these. What a phantasmagoria of murder, arson, and sudden death! Yet all it taught me was a vocabulary of long words and literary clichés.

—Isaac Goldberg, “A Boston Boyhood”

F
riday saw another significant development besides the start of the inquest. Under the headline “A Young Demon,” an article about the Millen murder appeared on the front page of the
New York Times.
Though preoccupation with the killing continued to be particularly intense in Boston (where, as one journalist reported, “the cruel death of the Millen boy remains the general topic of conversation in the community”), the Pomeroy case was no longer a matter of merely local interest. It had become national news.

“The story of the Boston child-murderer is one of the most extraordinary of the period,” proclaimed the
Times.
Two things made it so remarkable: the extreme youth of the culprit and the enormity of his acts, the same factors that have turned the “killer kid” tragedies of our own day into a source of such widespread consternation. Indeed, if it proves nothing else, the Pomeroy case offers striking confirmation of the Scriptural truism that “there is no new thing under the sun.” In every essential respect—from the savage nature of the crimes to the stunned reactions they have provoked—the juvenile atrocities that have horrified the modern world (and which are often regarded as a uniquely contemporary phenomenon, a symptom of societal decay) were prefigured more than a century ago by the deeds of Jesse Pomeroy.