Fiend (18 page)

With her usual sullenness, Ruth Pomeroy refused to cooperate, folding her arms across her chest and declaring that “she could not imagine what she was wanted for.” The officers—indicating the commotion outside—explained that they were taking her into custody as much for her own safety as for any other reason. Mrs. Pomeroy simply glanced out the window and muttered curses at the mob.

His impatience rising, Foote finally announced to the ill-tempered woman that they were there to arrest her “on suspicion of being connected to a felony.” Mrs. Pomeroy sputtered indignantly, uttered a few more curses, and glowered at the officers. But in the end, she was taken away.

A short while later, a pair of officers named Mountain and Deveny were sent back to the house to await the arrival of Jesse’s brother, Charles, who was out delivering his evening papers. As
soon as Charles returned from his route, he, too, was arrested and taken to Station Six.

In the meantime (as the
Boston Globe
reported) “a strong detail of men remained posted at Mrs. Pomeroy’s house, as rumors were current throughout the evening that her home and all it contained would be destroyed by the outraged populace.”

*  *  *

At approximately 8:00
P.M.
, Chief Savage—accompanied by Chief of Detectives Jason W. Twombly—arrived at the Charles Street jail to interview Jesse. Dressed in his shabby street clothes and wearing his usual surly expression, Jesse was led into Sheriff Clark’s office and seated across a table from the two officials.

“Do you know who I am, Jesse?” Savage began by asking.

“Sure,” Jesse said. “Mr. Savage.”

“What do you think I came to see you about?”

Jesse shrugged. “The dead boy, I guess.”

“No, Jesse,” said the chief. “I have come to tell you that the body of Katie Curran has been found in your mother’s cellar. She was murdered and buried down there. I came to ask if you knew anything about it.”

“No,” said Jesse. “I don’t.”

“I see,” Savage said, regarding the boy closely. “Jesse,” he continued after a moment, “can you guess where her body was found?”

Jesse only shook his head.

Concealing his exasperation at the boy’s stubborn reticence, Savage asked: “Jesse, where do you put your ashes that come from burning coal?”

“Down in the cellar,” Jesse answered matter-of-factly.

Folding his hands on the table, Savage leaned forward and—speaking in an even voice—said, “Jesse, your mother and brother have been arrested for the murder.
Now
can you tell me anything that will throw light upon the subject?”

If Savage was hoping that this intelligence would give the boy a jolt and loosen his tongue, he was disappointed. Keeping his unnerving gaze fixed directly on Savage, Jesse coolly replied: “No. I can’t.”

For a long moment, the chief simply stared back at the coarse-featured boy—at the oversized head, the bulldog jaw, the pallid eye. Then, slapping his hands on his thighs, he rose from his
chair and motioned to Twombly, who quickly got to his feet. With his subordinate following close behind, Savage turned on his heels and strode from the room, leaving the sullen young felon to brood on the bad news.

*  *  *

By nine o’clock the following morning—Sunday, July 19—an immense crowd had already gathered outside the Pomeroy house, which remained guarded by a large detail of policemen. Unable to vent their wrath against the property of the detested family, several dozen people swarmed along Broadway, as though bent on storming the police station, seizing Ruth Pomeroy, and stringing her up. They were met by a line of officers, who quickly dispersed the infuriated mob.

Throughout the day, people came to gawk at the house where the little girl’s body had been found. By late afternoon, according to the
Boston Post,
the murder scene had been “visited by thousands of men and women, many of whom expressed themselves very forcibly regarding the disposition they would like to make of the whole Pomeroy clan.” Scandalous stories about Ruth Pomeroy circulated among the crowd—that she was a woman of shockingly loose morals; that she revelled in the sight of blood and liked to frequent the Brighton slaughterhouses; that she had spewed vicious curses at the mothers of her son’s little victims.

Other rumors were bandied about and immediately picked up by the papers. South Boston suddenly seemed to be populated by young children who had barely escaped from the murderous designs of Jesse Pomeroy. Several months earlier (according to one widely reported story), Jesse—who was alone in his brother’s shop—had looked out the window and spotted two little girls playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. Going to the door, he had beckoned to the girls and—handing them a few coins—persuaded them to run across the street to the grocers and buy him some oranges. When the children returned with the fruit, Jesse was in the rear of the store, lowering the window-curtains. The little girls immediately became suspicious and, “instead of entering the shop, tossed the oranges into the place and ran away, greatly frightened.”

Another neighborhood child, a nine-year-old girl named Minnie Tappan, claimed that, shortly after Katie Curran’s disappeared, Jesse had asked her to come into his store, “as he had
some papers for her brother which he wished her to carry to him.” Minnie, however, had been so alarmed by the strange look on Jesse’s face that she had immedatiely turned and dashed for home—“whereupon he became enraged and chased her down the street, threatening to drag her back into the store whether she would or not.”

How much truth there was to any of these claims is, of course, an open question, since sensational crimes have a way of generating overheated—and often hysterical—mass fantasies. Still, the newspapers could not resist plastering their front pages with these and similar stories, titillating readers with lurid speculations about the dreadful fate that would surely have befallen “the little innocents, had they been induced to enter the store on those occasions.”

*  *  *

In the meantime, the remains of the “little innocent” who really
had
fallen into Jesse Pomeroy’s clutches had been transferred to J. B. Cole’s undertaking establishment, where—starting at approximately two o’clock on Sunday afternoon—the autopsy took place. The examination was conducted by a pair of physicians, Drs. E. A. Gilman and Hugh Doherty, and viewed by Coroner Richard M. Ingalls and his jury.

The flesh of the upper body was so badly decomposed that it was impossible to determine the precise nature and extent of the wounds that had been inflicted on the child. Her skull, which Charles McGinnis had inadvertently struck while excavating the cellar, was completely separated from the body—but the doctors couldn’t say whether it had been severed by her killer or by the blow from McGinnis’s pickaxe. Still, there were unmistakable signs that the child had been brutally slashed about the neck.

The lower body was in a substantially better state of preservation than the upper. As a result, the doctors were able to discover a critical—and thoroughly appalling—fact. Whoever murdered Katie Curran had sliced open her dress and undergarments with a sharp implement—presumably the same weapon used to cut her throat. Then—in an apparent frenzy of bloodlust—he had savagely mutilated the ten-year-old girl’s lower abdomen, thighs, and genitals.

24

I felt bad that they were arrested, and I resolved to do all I could to get them out, so I kept in mind that proverb, “One may as well be hanged for stealing a sheep as for stealing a lamb,” altering it to suit my case: “One may as well be hanged for killing one as two.”

—
Autobiography of Jesse H. Pomeroy

E
arly Monday morning, Chief Savage—having given Jesse two days to mull things over—returned to the Charles Street jail. Chief of Detectives Twombly had asked to come along, but Savage—believing that the boy might speak more freely if no one else was present—thought it best to handle the interview by himself.

As before, the meeting took place in Sheriff Clark’s office. This time, however, instead of confronting Jesse across the table, Savage seated himself directly beside the boy.

“Jesse,” Savage solemnly began,“I have come to give you one more chance to clear your mother. It seems to me that you must know something about the little girl, and I would like you to tell me the facts of the case.”

For a moment, Jesse—head bowed, hands clasped on his lap—did not answer. Then, he slowly looked up at the older man and said: “Well, Mr. Savage, I killed her, but I don’t want to say how.”

“Jesse,” the chief said firmly, “that just won’t do. You must tell me how you killed her.” He paused for a moment, then, in a voice full of calm but compelling authority, asked: “Now, at what time did you open the store?”

After a brief silence, Jesse softly replied: “At half past seven.”

Savage nodded in encouragement. “And exactly what happened after that?” he asked.

“Well,” Jesse began, “the little girl came into the store, and I
was standing over near the far end of—” All of a sudden, he broke off his recitation and said, “I have made a little drawing of the store. It is in my cell, if you will let me go get it.”

“All right,” said Savage. Stepping to the door, he beckoned to the jail-keeper, who escorted Jesse from the office. Several minutes later, Jesse returned with a small piece of notepaper that he laid out on the table in front of Savage. Sketched on the sheet was a simple floor plan of the cellar and store. Pointing out the various locations as he spoke—and displaying no more emotion than if he had been describing a typical workday—Jesse proceeded to relate the events of that ghastly morning back in March, when he had slaughtered the ten-year-old girl who had wandered into his store in search of a notebook.

When Jesse was done, Savage regarded him in silence for a long moment. Then—speaking in a tone that suggested he only had the boy’s best interests at heart—he said: “Jesse, this is an important case. I would like to write down exactly what you said, so as to get the facts of the case just right when I speak to the jury of inquest this afternoon.”

“I don’t want to want to have it in the papers,” Jesse said warily.

“That is something I cannot control,” Savage answered. “But I want to tell your story to the jury just as you told it to me.”

After considering the chief’s words for a moment, Jesse agreed. Savage pulled out a notepad and pencil. Then—with the same bizarre, matter-of-fact demeanor as before—Jesse repeated his appalling tale, while the older man transcribed the statement word for word.

*  *  *

At four o’clock that afternoon, the coroner’s jury met in the guardroom of Police Station Six. Unlike the proceedings in the Millen case, which had been conducted behind closed doors, the Curran inquest was open to the public—a circumstance that elicited warm praise for Coroner Ingalls from members of the press. Still, not everyone was happy. The crowd of people gathered outside the station house was so enormous that only a fraction gained admission to the show.

Mrs. Curran spoke first. Attired in funereal garb—a steel-gray dress with a border of black, a black sacque, a dark straw hat with a heavy black veil that obscured much of her haggard face—the heartbroken mother, whose voice quavered audibly
throughout her testimony, began by describing her murdered child, who had turned ten the previous December 21.

“She was always at home,” Mrs. Curran told the jury, “never out of my sight from the day she was born until the day I missed her, except she was at school or unless I knew where she was. . . . I am positive that my girl was not in any way acquainted with the Pomeroy boy. My child didn’t know there was such a person. She might have gone into the store for a paper for her father, but she never knew there was such a person as Jesse Pomeroy. She was smart and bright, but innocent. She was one of the gentlest persons I ever knew. I suppose she can be no gentler now she is in heaven than when she was on earth.”

After pausing for a moment to regain control of her voice—which had begun to tremble so violently that her last few words could barely be understood—Mrs. Curran continued by recounting her experiences following the disappearance of her daughter: her frantic visit to the police when Katie failed to return; her subsequent trip to the home of the delivery boy, Rudolph Kohr, who insisted that he had seen Katie in Jesse Pomeroy’s store on the morning of her disappearance; the reaction of Officer Adams, who assured her that Kohr was a known liar, that Jesse Pomeroy had “nothing more to do with your Katie than I had,” and that she should put all her trust in the police. “We will bring your little girl back to you without any doubt,” Adams had promised her.

“Everyone advised me to go see Chief Savage for a warrant to have the place thoroughly searched,” Mrs. Curran testified bitterly. “But I depended on Mr. Adams because he had kept me hoping, and I thought he was my true friend.”

Exhaling a tremulous sigh, she added: “It is a sad ending to all my sorrow.”

With that, her testimony ended. She was followed by her husband, who quietly explained that, on the day his little girl vanished, he had been away at work and knew nothing beyond the facts related by his wife. As Coroner Ingalls offered a final word of condolence—assuring them that “everything possible would be done to account for the manner of their little girl’s death”—John Curran signed his wife’s statement. Then he helped her to her feet and led her from the room.