Fiend (16 page)

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”

M
ore 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 minds 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.