Fiend (24 page)

In the months preceding his trial, three such experts visited Jesse in his cell—Drs. Clement Walker and John E. Tyler (who had been retained by the defense) and a physician named George T. Choate, who was working for the prosecution. Among them, the three alienists would conduct fourteen separate interviews
with the young prisoner—enough (as Jesse would later report) “to make me nearly insane, if I was not already so.” By the time the doctors were done with him, he felt as if he had been operated on with the mental equivalent of a stomach pump.

Though Walker paid the greatest number of visits to Jesse—seven in all, between mid-September and early December—it was Tyler, a portly little man with a ready wit and an easygoing style, that Jesse felt most comfortable with. During their first meeting, on September 16, Jesse gave Tyler a detailed account of his attacks on the young boys in Chelsea and South Boston, insisting that he had initially approached them “just out of mere companionship,” with “no more idea of whipping and torturing them than I had of jumping up to the moon.” It wasn’t until he had led the little victims to a remote locale that a “sudden impulse or feeling came over me.”

When Tyler pressed the boy for more information about this “feeling,” Jesse pointed to his head and explained that, immediately before each of his crimes, he had experienced a sudden pain that began just over his left ear and passed from one side of his head to the other. This pain, Jesse said, was always the harbinger of violence. “The feeling which accompanied [the headache] was that I must . . . whip or kill the boy or girl, as the case was, and it seemed to me that I could not help doing it.”

Though Jesse claimed he retained only an “indistinct” recollection of his victims—and of the precise torments he had inflicted on them—he freely confessed to the crimes, not only to Tyler but to Walker and Choate as well. In mid-November, however, his story suddenly changed. According to his later account, he began to doubt his own memory after receiving a note from his mother which counseled him “not to say I did it unless I did, and to say I didn’t if I didn’t.” Mulling over this advice, the boy was forced to acknowledge that—though he “really
did
think” he had committed the crimes he was accused of—there was a small voice inside his head that sometimes said, “Jesse, you know you did not do these things, so why do you not stand up and try to clear yourself?” For a while, however, he resisted this inner prompting, fearing that, if he recanted, his mother and brother might fall under suspicion.

When Dr. Tyler visited him in mid-October, however, and began questioning him about the Curran murder, Jesse—almost without intending to—abruptly denied that he had committed it.

Tyler stared at him for a long moment. “Are you saying now
that you did
not
kill the little girl?” the doctor asked, his eyebrows raised.

“That’s right,” Jesse said.

“But you have said that you
did,
Jesse,” Tyler protested. “Which story am I to believe?”

“You must believe me now,” said the boy.

“Well, then,” Tyler said after a momentary pause, “if you didn’t kill her, who did? Your mother?”

Jesse grew instantly incensed. “No gentleman would say such a thing.”

A few days later, Tyler examined him again, but Jesse continued to stick to his new version of events. Indeed, he now claimed that he hadn’t killed either Katie Curran
or
Horace Millen, and that “this was the truth.”

Tyler didn’t try to hide his disbelief. On October 16, during his fifth visit, he took a few more futile stabs at getting Jesse to retract his new claim. When Jesse stubbornly insisted on his innocence, Tyler left and never returned.

*  *  *

Several weeks later, on November 6—just a few weeks shy of Jesse’s fifteenth birthday—Tyler submitted his written report to the defense lawyer, Joseph Cotton. It is a revealing document, offering insight into both Jesse’s pathology and the state of psychiatric knowledge in 1874. It begins with a few brief observations about the subject’s physical condition and mental capacities, both of which were, in Tyler’s estimation, unexceptional. Jesse’s “general health” was “fair though not robust”; his memory “accurate but not quick”; and his learning limited to “some knowledge of the elementary branches of education.” In short—apart from his blighted right eye (which Jesse claimed “was a result of vaccination”)—he was physically and intellectually average.

By contrast, his “moral sensibility” was strikingly aberrant. Though able to discriminate between right and wrong when presented with various hypothetical cases, Jesse was absolutely “obtuse” when it came to his own crimes. “He evinces no pity for the boys tortured or for the victims of his homicide,” Tyler writes, “and no remorse or sorrow for his acts.” Moreover, his wildly “contradictory statements”—his detailed “account of killing the children and subsequent denial of any agency therein”—were the sign of a deeply duplicitous nature.

After describing the “peculiar sensation” that “always preceded” Jesse’s outbursts of violence, Tyler goes on to offer his diagnosis. An especially significant aspect of the case, he notes, was that Pomeroy’s victims “were persons whom he did not even know and towards whom he had no malice or ill-will. . . . None of the usual incentives to crime appear: no offense had been taken, no grudge, no envy felt, no hope of gain or advantage appears.” When queried about his motives, Jesse could only say “I
had
to.” Tyler correctly concludes that since “no reasonable and satisfactory
external
motive for these extraordinary acts exists or can be found,” there must be some
internal
cause, in the form of a mental disease. He then attempts to place Pomeroy within a category of pathological behavior by citing what he takes to be analogous instances:

Cases similar to this are recorded, and a number have been known to the writer, which, however, differed in this—that the impulse was to commit acts comparatively inoffensive, and of which the results were comparatively unimportant. For instance, the child or youth is impelled to wash and rewash his hands, his clothes, the chair he sits upon, the food he eats. He is disturbed if interfered with, and will seek to do it privately. The only reason he can give for his doing so is, “I
had
to.” So it is with the propensity to cut up clothing, to fire buildings, to steal articles of which no use is ever made and the interest in which ceases with the act.

The problem with this passage, of course, is its indiscriminate lumping together of several distinct mental disorders, from obsessive-compulsive behavior to kleptomania and pyromania—none of which is especially pertinent to Jesse’s pathology. With his complete lack of conscience and deeply sadistic appetites, Jesse was a classic (if unusually precocious) sexual sociopath—a juvenile lust-murderer who delighted in torture and bloodshed, and who certainly would have preyed on other victims had he not been stopped so early in his appalling career. Though Tyler can be commended for recognizing that Jesse’s crimes were the product of a profound psychological disorder, his attempt at diagnosis ultimately misses the mark, equating the atrocities of a serial sex-killer with the acts of a neurotic who
is compelled to scrub his hands a hundred times a day or to avoid stepping on sidewalk cracks when he walks along a street.

Tyler’s ultimate opinion is also open to question. There is no evidence to suggest that Jesse suffered from a psychosis—that he had paranoid delusions, experienced bizarre hallucinations, or heard voices commanding him to kill. And according to the results of Tyler’s own testing, Jesse had no trouble discriminating between right and wrong. Given these findings, the doctor’s conclusion comes as something of a surprise:

“It is evident that such a boy as this should be carefully restrained of his liberty that others may not be endangered. . . . In my belief, he is
insane.”

29

Six miners went into the mountains

To hunt for precious gold;

It was the middle of the winter,

The weather was dreadful cold.

Six miners went into the mountains

They had nor food nor shack—

Six miners went into the mountains,

But only one came back.

—“Ballad of Alfred Packer”

I
n the weeks preceding the start of Jesse’s trial, there was no shortage of lurid news to keep the public diverted—grisly accidents, ghastly crimes, a sensational case of frontier cannibalism, and the long-running sex scandal featuring America’s most popular man of the cloth, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher.

From Omaha came reports of a bizarre and bewildering tragedy—a devastating act of God inexplicably visited upon several of His most devout servants. According to the account in the
New York Times
—headlined “A CLERGYMAN AND HIS WIFE KILLED BY A THUNDERBOLT WHILE AT WORSHIP”—a Methodist minister named Richard S. Shreve had just seated himself at the dinner table, along with his wife and older brother, John, who was also a preacher. Outside the cozy refuge of the little house, a thunderstorm was brewing. The sky was “overcast with dark, angry clouds, and a few large, scattering drops of water had begun to fall.” Before partaking of their evening meal, the Reverend Shreve proposed that the little party join together in a family prayer. No sooner had he opened his Bible, however, than a “death-dealing” bolt of electricity exploded through the dining window and smote the seated trio. John Shreve eventually
recovered, but his brother and sister-in-law were killed instantly—“furnishing one of the most startling exemplifications on record,” as the
Times
put it, “of the truth of the line in the
Book of Common Prayer,
to wit, ‘In the midst of life we are in death.’ ”

News of another tragic accident—this one exemplifying the daily perils of nineteenth-century industrial labor—was reported from Vermont. A middle-aged factory worker named Elbridge Williams and his nineteen-year-old son, Edwin—“sober and industrious men,” according to the papers—were working together at the Cook Slate Works in Rutland when the younger of the pair, attempting to adjust the gear in the feeder of a slate planer, got his right hand caught in the moving cogs. When he shouted for help, his father dashed to his side. Instead of reversing the machinery, however, the elder Williams stuck his own right hand into the apparatus and attempted to pull his son free. “In doing this,” the papers reported, “his own hand became entangled, and both were slowly drawn in and crushed in the gear.” Hearing their screams, the factory foreman managed to stop the machine and freed the two men. Though both survived the accident, their mangled right hands had to be amputated—a catastrophic misfortune, since, as the papers reported, “father and son were the only means of support to a poor and worthy family.”

Infanticide was much in the news, particularly in New York City, where the sinister practice of “baby-farming” suddenly began to receive widespread attention after the suspicious death of a seventeen-day-old infant named Charles Corey. At the request of Dr. Harris of the New York City Board of Health, Coroner Wolfman and his associate, Dr. William Shine, visited the child’s supposed caretaker, a middle-aged woman named Kate Kilbride, who occupied a dismal apartment in the basement of a West Side tenement. Under intense questioning by the investigators, Mrs. Kilbride revealed that she had received the infant from a woman named Mary H. Doran, who ran a private “lying-in asylum” on West Twenty-Sixth Street. Further investigation revealed what the
New York Times
called “the shocking details of a most aggravated case of ‘baby-farming.’ ”

Mary Doran’s establishment, it turned out, was nothing but a kind of squalid little dormitory, patronized by poor, unwed women in advanced stages of pregnancy. For the price of five dollars per week, each of these unfortunates got an iron-framed
cot outfitted with a fetid straw mattress and dilapidated bedclothes. Once they gave birth, their babies were turned over to Mrs. Doran to dispose of as she saw fit. The newborns were generally advertised for adoption at the price of twenty-five dollars apiece. When there were no interested takers, the infants were “farmed out” to people like Mrs. Kilbride, who received a small monthly stipend for “taking care” of the babies—meaning that the women were expected to do everything possible, short of outright murder, to make sure the infants didn’t survive.

Mrs. Kilbride’s method was to nurse her little charges on a diet of “poisonous soothing syrup.” In another, equally shocking case, a “baby-farmer” named Elizabeth Graham starved her infants by feeding them nothing but a spoonful of condensed milk and a half-pint of water twice a day. The precise extent of this “nefarious practice” was unknown, but—in a city with more than 5,000 illegitimate births per year (out of an annual total of 34,000 newborns), there were “grave apprehensions among experts of its being very widespread.”