Fiend (2 page)

More recently, our own country has been shaken by a rash of staggeringly brutal teen homicides. In the span of just a few months during 1997, two adolescent thrill-killers lured a pair of pizza delivery men to an abandoned house in rural New Jersey and gunned them down for fun; an ex-altar boy and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend butchered a middle-aged man in Central Park; an eleven-year-old schoolboy selling door-to-door candy for his P.T.A. fund-raiser was raped and strangled by a fifteen-year-old neighbor; seven Mississippi high-schoolers were gunned down by a rampaging classmate (who began his murder spree by knifing his mother to death); and a fourteen-year-old Kentucky boy mowed down eight members of his high school prayer group with a .22-caliber Luger handgun. In March 1998, just three months after the Kentucky massacre, a pair of schoolboy snipers—ages eleven and thirteen—ambushed their classmates in Jonesboro, Arkansas, killing four female students and a teacher and wounding nine other children.

But even the Jonesboro massacre paled beside the bloodbath that took place the following year at a Colorado high school whose name has become synonymous with the nightmare of juvenile gun-violence: Columbine.

This spate of atrocities by underage killers provoked the inevitable reaction, from a
People
magazine cover story on “Children Without Conscience” to the outcries of assorted pundits, who pointed accusatory fingers at the usual sociological
suspects: family disintegration, loss of religious values, ultraviolent videogames, etc. In attempting to come to grips with any cultural phenomenon, however, it helps to place it in a larger context. And even a cursory glance at the annals of crime makes it clear that “killer kids” have always been with us.

Journalist David James Smith, for example, begins his study of the Bulger killing with a survey of British juvenile murder cases, the earliest of which—that of ten-year-old William York, who was convicted of stabbing a four-year-old girl to death—took place in 1748. In our own country, homicidal children have been a subject of psychiatric and criminological concern for decades. In an article called “Youthful Killers,” published in
Outlook and Independent
magazine in January 1929, journalist Milton Mackaye cited the histories of the top ten “notorious boy killers” of the preceding five years, whose ranks included “Gordon Pirie, the fifteen-year-old New York City lad who killed his chum with an axe to see what it was like” and seventeen-year-old Frank McDowell, who “burned his two sisters to death and exactly a year later shot and killed his father.”

In the December 1959 issue of
The American Journal of Psychiatry,
Dr. Loretta Bender of Creedmore State Hospital published an essay, “Children and Adolescents Who Have Killed,” in which she declared that, since 1935, she had “personally known
thirty-three
boys and girls who, before they were sixteen years of age, had been associated with the death of another person.” A few years later, in the January 1962 issue of
Social Work,
another mental health professional, Dr. Douglas Sergeant of the Detroit Child Study Clinic, flatly asserted that “homicide committed by children is not rare” and noted that no fewer than “nine child homicide cases” had been referred to the Wayne County Juvenile Court in the previous year.

The redoubtable crime historian John Marr has dug up dozens of U.S. cases involving murderous minors, dating from the pre-Civil War period to the Great Depression. And during the winter season of 1998, Manhattan’s cultural offerings included both Paul Simon’s Broadway musical
The Capeman
—about a notorious double-slaying committed by a sixteen-year-old gang member in 1959—and a major exhibit of photographs by the legendary cameraman “Weegee,” which featured a precinct-house portrait of a sixteen-year-old named Frank Pape, who confessed to strangling a four-year-old boy in
November 1944, “for no motive” (according to the
New York Times
) “other than to try out something he had seen in a motion picture.” Other examples abound.

It seems evident that—far from being the product of any particular cultural moment—juvenile violence is a manifestation of something inherent in human nature, of that instinct for primordial cruelty English novelist William Golding portrays so powerfully in his classic parable,
Lord of the Flies.
Shakespeare, too, obviously knew all about children’s potential for evil, as Gloucester’s bitter observation in
King Lear
reveals:

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;

They kill us for their sport.

What Shakespeare doesn’t say, but what criminal history makes frighteningly clear, is that the wanton boys who begin by torturing insects sometimes progress to higher life forms: lizards and frogs, kittens and puppies—and eventually to other children.

*  *  *

If examples of juvenile murder can be found throughout American history, so can instances of public alarm—even hysteria—over the phenomenon. Besides our own time, there have been two periods in particular when worries about “killer kids” have been especially intense—the 1920s, the era of Leopold and Loeb, when (at least according to assorted Jazz Age pundits) the whole country was being engulfed by a tidal wave of youthful crime; and the 1950s, when concern over juvenile delinquency reached a fever pitch, and it was impossible to open a magazine or newspaper without encountering a scare-piece like Gerald Walker’s “Why Children Kill” in the October 1957 issue of
Cosmopolitan:

During the next twelve months, what are the chances that your son or daughter will kill someone? Will the victim be a classmate, a brother or sister, or you, yourself?

Like most parents, you may feel these are unlikely and unnecessarily morbid questions. However, during the year just past, the heartsick families of perhaps a thousand American youngsters had the tragic knowledge forced on them that the unthinkable can happen: Their children had committed murder!

It was during this period—in the spring of 1956—that a man named George Woodbury, a resident of Bedford, New Hampshire, wrote to the Massachusetts Department of Correction in Boston. His letter (which has been preserved in the files of the Massachusetts State Archives) began with a straightforward statement of purpose: “As a professional writer, I am working on an article on Jesse Harding Pomeroy, longtime (1874–1932) prisoner.” Woodbury acknowledged that “few prisoners have been more written about” than Pomeroy. Still, he believed that the story was worth retelling, in light of contemporary concerns over youthful crime. “My interest in writing about Jesse Pomeroy,” he explained to the officials, “relates to the present-day excitement about juvenile delinquency—as though it was something new.”

For fully half a century, Pomeroy had proudly held the status of Boston’s most infamous murderer—a figure of such monstrous proportions that several generations of recalcitrant children were kept in line with the same parental warning: “If you don’t behave yourself, Jesse Pomeroy will come and get you!” At the time of Woodbury’s letter, however, this legendary bogeyman had been dead for nearly twenty-five years and largely forgotten by the public. He remains obscure today—despite a brief but memorable appearance in Caleb Carr’s bestselling 1994 novel,
The Alienist.

Pomeroy’s cameo occurs about halfway through the book, when the titular hero, Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, travels to Sing Sing with his reporter-companion, John Moore, to interview the infamous killer. They find him locked in a dank, windowless room at the far end of a forbidding cell block—his wrists shackled, his head encased in a heavy, cagelike “collar cap.” In spite of these impediments, the prisoner is deeply engrossed in a book:

“Pretty hard to get an education in this place,” Jesse said after the door had closed. “But I’m trying. I figure that’s maybe where I went wrong—no education. I taught myself Spanish, you know.” He continued to sound very much like the young man he’d been twenty years ago.

Laszlo nodded. “Admirable. I see you’re wearing a collar cap.”

Jesse laughed. “Ahh—they
claim
I burned a guy’s face with a cigarette while he was sleeping. They say I stayed up all night, making an arm out of wire just so’s I could reach him
with the butt through the bars. But I ask you—” He turned my way, the milky eye floating aimlessly in his head. “Does that sound like me?” A small laugh escaped him, pleased and mischievous—again just like a young boy’s.

“I gather, then, that you’ve grown tired of skinning rats alive,” Kreizler said. “When I was here several years ago, I heard that you’d been asking other prisoners to catch them for you.”

Still another chuckle, this one almost embarrassed. “Rats. They do squirm and squeal. . . . ”

Availing himself of artistic license, Carr deviates in this episode from strict historical accuracy. For one thing, Pomeroy was never imprisoned in Sing Sing (he spent nearly all the years of his long incarceration in the Massachusetts State Prison at Charlestown). Moreover, Carr turns Jesse into a figure of almost superhuman evil, a character that owes more to the overwrought fantasies of psycho movies and horror novels than to the facts of real life.

Still, Pomeroy was frightening enough: if not an adolescent Hannibal Lecter then certainly a junior John Wayne Gacy—an incipient serial killer who tortured over half-a-dozen children and butchered two more by the time he was fourteen. At a time when juvenile misbehavior was epitomized in the popular mind by the shenanigans of Tom Sawyer—conning his chums into whitewashing a fence—and the comical hijinks of Peck’s Bad Boy, the atrocities of young Jesse Harding Pomeroy seemed almost unimaginably monstrous.

And even today, they remain uniquely appalling. As any chronicle of U.S. crime proves, there have been plenty of bad seeds scattered throughout our history. But beyond doubt, the most heinous of all was the barely pubescent child-torturer and killer who came to be known as the “Boston Boy Fiend,” and whose crimes—committed just a few years after the Civil War ended—would continue to haunt America for the next half century.

1

He had now entered the skirts of the village. A troop of strange children ran at his heels, hooting after him, and pointing at his gray beard. . . . The very village was altered; it was larger and more populous. There were rows of houses which he had never seen before, and those which had been his familiar haunts had disappeared. Strange names were over the doors—strange faces at the windows—everything was strange.

—Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle”

A
UGUST
1, 1929

D
ressed in the street clothes they had given him—a shabby gray suit, its baggy pants supported by galluses; a rumpled white shirt, its collar too small to button; an old silk tie that dangled halfway down his chest; and a grotesque, checkered cap that sat on his head like an enormous mushroom—he emerged into the sun-drenched prison yard. In his right hand, he clutched a paper-wrapped bundle about the size of a shoebox. His entire fund of worldly possessions was inside: a Bible, two or three poetry books, a few legal documents, some old, dog-eared letters.

Above him—patrolling the walls and stationed in the armored cupola of the gray, stone rotunda—the rifle-wielding guards peered down curiously at the spectacle below.

A crowd of journalists—reporters, photographers, representatives of international wire services—had assembled in the yard. At the first glimpse of the shambling old man—his face half-hidden by the brim of his comically oversized cap—they began calling his name, snapping pictures, shouting questions.

He pulled the brim lower over his eyes, tightened his mouth into a deep frown, and allowed the attendants to hurry him past the crowd and toward the rotunda.

The clamor of the mob was deeply unnerving. Still, their presence was a source of some satisfaction—a confirmation of his celebrity. He had always taken pride in his status as “America’s most famous lifer,” in the awed looks he drew from new inmates when they caught their first glimpse of him. Lately, however, a whole generation of fresh fish had begun to filter inside—young punks who neither knew nor cared anything about the old man everyone called “Grandpa.” And when somebody told them who he was, they just shrugged, sneered, or looked utterly blank. His name—once so notorious that its mere mention could induce shudders in impressionable children—meant nothing to them.