Fiend (17 page)

Among the police and much of the public the consensus continued to be that “a difference of religious opinions” was at the bottom of Katie’s disappearance—that the child had been caught in the middle of a nasty dispute between her Protestant mother and Catholic father and had been spirited off to a convent. In short, for most Bostonians, the Curran case wasn’t a crime story at all, but rather a kind of cautionary tale about the evils of intermarriage—about the misery that is bound to result when a Protestant commits the grievous mistake of wedding a Catholic.

22

Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long.

—Shakespeare,
The Merchant of Venice

W
hile the public at large had turned its attention to other matters by early summer, things were different in the South Boston neighborhood where the Millen, Curran, and Pomeroy families resided within a short distance of each other. There, community indignation against the “boy killer” and his relations continued to run high. The situation wasn’t helped by the attitude of Mrs. Pomeroy, who persisted in proclaiming her son’s innocence to anyone who would listen. Far from displaying any sympathy for the Millens and Currans, she openly blamed them for her poor Jesse’s travails.

Needless to say, such callousness did not endear her to her neighbors. Business at the Pomeroys’ dressmaking/periodical store at 327 Broadway dropped off precipitously. People still came by the store—but only to gawk at the place where the notorious killer had once worked as a newsboy. Before long, Mrs. Pomeroy couldn’t afford to keep paying the rent. On Sunday, May 31, she and Charles moved her dummies and sewing machine across the street to their little frame house at 312 Broadway and closed up the shop for good. For the next few weeks, she struggled—with meager success—to operate the business from her home.

*  *  *

The two-story frame building that housed the vacated shop had been on the market for months. The ground floor was divided in half by a metal partition. One side had been occupied by the Pomeroys’ store; the other by a defunct little jewelry business run by a man named E. C. Mitchell. The owners of the
premises, a couple named Margerson, lived on the second floor.

The building—originally L-shaped—had been renovated a few years earlier. The long, narrow rear had been broadened to the same width as the front, so that the entire structure was now rectangular. The cellar, however, had not been expanded accordingly. A dank, airless vault that stretched beneath the original floor-space of the building, it contained two gas meters; a rank little privy; a faucet that discharged a continual drip; a pair of storage bins containing the Margersons’ monthly supplies of wood and coal; and—in one pitch-dark corner—a sizable heap of ashes and refuse. It was the kind of cellar that unnerved even grown-ups; for children, descending into that fetid gloom, where the vermin scurried at the first sound of human intrusion, was creepy enough to cause nightmares.

Situated a few doors down from the Margersons’ building—at 342 Broadway—was a little grocery, owned by an enterprising gentleman named James Nash. Nash, whose business was booming, had been looking for a larger space in the neighborhood, and when Mrs. Pomeroy’s store became available, he saw his opportunity. In mid-June, several weeks after she abandoned the shop, Nash purchased the entire building from the Margersons and began to renovate the premises. Foreseeing the need for increased storage facilities, he decided to begin by enlarging the cellar. And so, during the last week of June, a pair of workmen named Charles McGinnis and Patrick O’Connell made their way down into the cellar to begin the excavation.

The smell hit them even before they reached the bottom of the stairs—a carrion stench that caused the two men to screw up their nostrils.

“What’s that stink?” asked O’Connell.

McGinnis shook his head, then hurried off to fetch Nash, who returned a short while later with the workmen. Armed with oil lamps, the three men made a search of the cellar but found nothing to account for the fetor. Heading upstairs, Nash spoke to Mr. Margerson, who acknowledged that he, too, had noticed a rotten smell in the cellar the last time he’d been down there. But, assuming that some small creature—a rat or possibly a cat—had crawled into a corner and died, he had paid little attention to the matter.

Nash and his workers did what they could to dispel the odor.
They propped open the five tiny windows spaced around the basement walls, and gave the foul little water closet a thorough cleaning. The excavation work helped, too. Within days of beginning the job, McGinnis and O’Connell had torn down most of one outer wall, letting in plenty of fresh air. They also dug up part of the hard-packed dirt floor, releasing the aroma of newly turned earth into their work area. By the second week of July, the two laborers had largely forgotten about the stink.

And then, on Saturday, July 18, they uncovered its source.

It was McGinnis who actually made the discovery. He was still hard at work at around 5:00
P.M.
, demolishing a wall in the far corner of the cellar where the ash-and-refuse pile lay. At one point—weary from his long day of labor—he took an errant swing, striking the heap with his pick blade. Something small and spherical went flying into the air. McGinnis, who caught only a glimpse of the object as it sailed to one side, assumed it was an old tin bowl or water dipper, discolored with rust.

The next blow of his pick dislodged a large chunk of the wall, which dropped into the ashes. As McGinnis raised his implement again, he glanced down and noticed something odd that had been exposed by the falling debris. Frowning, he bent to take a closer look—then let out a startled cry.

The thing sticking out of the ashes was a skeletal human forearm, black with putrefied flesh and partially clothed in decaying fabric.

McGinnis staggered back a few steps. As he did, he caught sight of the small, rounded object he had taken for a rusty bowl. It took him a few seconds to understand what he was looking at. When the realization hit him, he dropped his pick, stumbled upstairs, and ran off to find James Nash.

The round, dirt-covered object was a small human skull. Tufts of wavy brown hair still clung to the cranium in patches.

McGinnis and his employer were back within minutes, along with Officer John H. Foote of the Sixth Police Station. Using a shovel, Foote carefully uncovered the entire remains, which (as the
Boston Post
would later report) “emitted a disgusting odor—for there was still something left of the intestines.”

A short while later, three other men arrived at the scene—Captain Dyer, Patrolman Thomas Adams, and Coroner Ingalls. Adams, who had been deeply involved in the search for Katie
Curran, required only a glance at the corpse’s green-and-black-plaid dress to identify the victim. The ten-year-old girl who had been missing for months—ever since she had left home one spring morning in search of a new schoolbook—had just been found under a fetid ash heap in the cellar of the shop that had once been the workplace of Jesse Harding Pomeroy.

23

If the Pomeroy boy had fallen at this time into the hands of an average assembly of citizens of ever quiet Massachusetts, the chances are that he would have been torn limb from limb, like some furious beast which had fallen among those upon whom he had preyed.

—Anonymous,
The Life of Jesse H. Pomeroy, The Boy Fiend
(1875)

F
or John and Katherine Curran, the months since their little girl vanished had been a time of unremitting torment—made even worse by the rumors that they themselves were at the bottom of the terrible mystery. It was hard enough to live with the horror of Katie’s disappearance. Having to endure the public’s wholly groundless suspicion that she had fallen victim to her own father’s religious zeal made the situation that much more agonizing.

Knowing full well that the story was a bigoted lie, the Currans could only imagine what had really happened—and by the beginning of summer, they had given up hope that their daughter would ever be found alive. They knew how much she loved to wander by the wharves. For the parents of South Boston, the nearby waters of Dorchester Bay were an ever-present danger that had claimed the lives of many local children.

It was dreadful to think of their pretty ten-year-old girl dying that way. But after so much time without a hint of her whereabouts, they had begun to resign themselves to the likelihood that Katie had fallen into the water and drowned. Though her loss would scar their hearts forever, the lapse of four months had (as one newspaper put it) “begun somewhat to assuage the poignancy of their grief.”

And then, at around 6:00
P.M.
on Saturday, July 18, Officer Thomas Adams knocked on their door.

He did not break the awful news right away, saying only that
some evidence relating to Katie had just been discovered, and that their presence was needed at once. Still, the stricken parents must have guessed the truth. By the time they descended into the dismal basement of the house across the street, Mrs. Curran was already trembling violently.

Captain Dyer led them to a remote corner of the cellar, as far away as possible from the spot where a group of policemen stood in grim silence around the ash heap. First, Dyer showed Mrs. Curran a soiled scarf that she instantly recognized as the one her daughter had been wearing on the morning of her disappearance. Next, she identified the old-fashioned jacket, or sacque, Katie had thrown on just before leaving the house. As Mrs. Curran examined this garment, sounds of barely stifled anguish began to arise from deep within her throat. When Dyer finally held out a rotting scrap of Katie’s black-and-green-plaid dress, the heartsick woman let out a groan and fainted.

She revived a minute later. Leaping to her feet, she sprang toward the ash pile and attempted to break through the cluster of policemen blocking her way. “Let me see her!” she screamed. But the officers held her back. Her husband came up behind her and, taking her by the shoulders, led her back across the cellar. Sobbing convulsively, Mrs. Curran begged Captain Dyer to let her take her daughter’s body home. As gently as possible, he explained why he could not honor her request. The child’s remains had to be examined by a specialist. Arrangements had already been made to transport it to J. B. Cole’s undertaking parlor. But the captain promised that every care would be taken with the body.

Dyer, of course, had another reason for refusing Mrs. Curran’s plea. After four months in the cellar, her daughter’s corpse was in such unspeakable shape that the mere sight of it would have been more than either parent could bear. But, of course, Dyer said nothing about this to the Currans.

At last, the sorrowing woman allowed her husband to lead her back home. As she mounted the cellar steps, she threw back her head and cried out: “If only she had drowned! Anything but a death like this!”

*  *  *

The bustle of activity at 327 Broadway—the comings-and-goings of the police, the entrance of the Currans in the company of Patrolman Adams, the arrival of reporters who had gotten
wind of the story—alerted the neighborhood residents that something dramatic had happened. Within the hour, a large and increasingly restive crowd had gathered outside the building. When the Currans finally reemerged—the grim-faced husband with his arm around his wailing, barely ambulatory wife—the sight of the devastated couple confirmed the rumor that had already spread through the crowd: that the body of the missing Curran girl had been unearthed in the cellar of Mrs. Pomeroy’s former shop.

All at once, the crowd let out an angry roar and surged across the street. Men and boys snatched stones, trash, and mud from the gutter and began pelting the Pomeroy house, while others cried out angrily for vigilante justice. It seemed, as one newsman reported, “as if the excited mass of humanity would wreak its vengeance on all the Pomeroy family. Had not restraint prevailed, Judge Lynch would, undoubtedly, have held high carnival at this time.”

By that time, around 6:00
P.M.
, Chief Savage had been notified of the developments in South Boston and was on his way to Station Six. The moment he arrived, he dispatched a contingent of officers to the Pomeroy home. While several of the men stood guard outside, keeping the clamorous mob at bay, two others—Officers Bragdon and Foote—entered the house and asked Jesse’s mother to accompany them to the police station.