Fiend (35 page)

It was Willie Baxter who initiated the correspondence. Unfortunately, his letters have not survived, though their general content can be inferred from Jesse’s replies. Within a day or so of his arrest, Baxter had managed to pass his infamous jailmate a note, in which he identified himself by name and evidently asked if Jesse remembered him from the old neighborhood in Chelsea. He also included a few jokes.

Jesse promptly replied with a brief letter. He admitted that, though the name sounded familiar to him, he could not recall Baxter’s face. “I should very much like to see you,” he wrote, then suggested a way for Willie to show himself: “When the Man comes around and sweeps out your room tomorrow or the next day, step out on the corridor (that place in front of your cell). They will allow you too [sic]. Thanks for them jokes.”

The next day, following Jesse’s instructions, Willie positioned
himself in a place where Pomeroy could see him. At the same time, he managed to slip another note to Jesse, which elicited an immediate response:

Friend Will,

I hasten to reply to your note. Of course I have seen you, did you not live on Ferrin St. when you knew me. I think you did. . . . I will send you all the paper I can. Let us write good long letters to each other and so beguile our captivity but don’t make too much noise. I have only this lead pencil but will let you take it. Of course you know what I am here for and what I was sent up to the reform school for. Tell me what it is and what I did. Tell me all you have heard of me, everything bad and don’t think I will be angry. Tell me what you thought when you heard of my doing in 1872. Tell me all you heard of and what the boys said. . . . There is one thing I wish to ask. Do you go to the Winthrop School. I have heard they flog the boys unmercifully there and that Willie Almeder got into a row with the Master and that the man whipt [sic] him till the blood ran down Almeders back and Almeder was almost killed. Is that story true. I don’t ask out of curiosity but to find out the truth; and does Bert Pray or Frank Atwood get punished much. You will tare [sic] our notes up or do something with them so that the people here will not see them, and when you go out take care that they don’t find it out or tell any of the boys what we write. You say you are 14. I am 15. I am quite tall. Willie I am sorry you are in trouble. What will they do with you. I am not going to preach you a sermon but I will say this. Willie if you love your friends and parents reform your ways. You know that if you persist in doing wrong you will come to a bad end. I ask you for and on the strength of former friendship take warning by example and while you and me are young let us turn back and do right. Answer all questions & write a long letter and believe me your friend,

Jesse H Pomroy [sic]

This letter introduces several motifs that would continue to inform Jesse’s correspondence with Wille Baxter. First, there is Jesse’s preoccupation with his own reputation (“Tell me all you have heard of me”), a common characteristic of psychopathic killers, who tend to derive great satisfaction from their own notoriety. Such beings have generally been filled from their earliest
years with feelings of utter worthlessness and self-loathing, and their criminal celebrity allows them, for the first time in their lives, to feel like powerful and significant people—
some
bodies instead of absolute nobodies. That same perverse sense of egotism, of inflated self-importance, can also be seen in Jesse’s closing exhortation, which rings with a kind of paternalistic superiority—with the desperate conceit that, though only one year older than Willie Baxter, Jesse is a person of infinitely greater wisdom and experience.

Most striking of all, however, is Jesse’s avid interest in hearing every detail about the corporal punishment inflicted on other boys. Indeed, in his succeeding letters, this deeply prurient desire becomes the dominant theme.

Friend Willie,

I received your note and wish you to reply to this when you can . . . Willie I remember you now. Have you not changed some during the last 2 or 3 years. Now you will please reply to the question I wrote in my last letter of last night. You are a good looking fellow and look as though you could not do wrong or ever get punished. Do you get a liking [sic] very often. I never used to much. Tell me if you do and tell me of the hardest whipping you ever got. Tell me all the particulars of it and I will tell you of the hardest flogging I ever got. Do not forget to tell me for if we are to be friends in here we ought to tell each other everything about ourselves. Will you tell me as I ask you about the hardest whipping you got, if it hurt much and how it was done to you and I will tell you about the hardest one I got. Also tell me all you have herd [sic] of about my doing to those boys on Powder hill and Railroad. Don’t forget it. Write me a long letter.

Jesse Pomroy [sic]

The ardent, if not slavering way, in which Jesse hungers for stories about child-flogging is both deeply unsettling and highly revealing. Indeed, in reading this and Jesse’s next few letters, it is hard to escape the conclusion that his perverse appetite for cruelty—thwarted by his long incarceration—sought vicarious gratification from the quasipornographic details that Baxter could provide: in short, that Jesse was using Baxter’s graphic descriptions of juvenile corporal punishment as an aid to masturbation.

Such a conclusion is consistent not only with the profoundly sadistic nature of psychopathic killers in general but with Jesse’s own admission to the alienist, Theodore W. Fisher, that he masturbated most frequently “at the periods when his crimes were committed.” Fisher, of course—reflecting the skewed Victorian attitudes of his day—interpreted this to mean that “self-abuse” was at the root of Jesse’s criminal behavior. But the more reasonable explanation is that, like other sadists, Jesse was driven to a high pitch of sexual excitation by torture.

In any event, Baxter complied with his jailmate’s request by describing (if not quite as fully as Jesse had hoped) a particularly brutal whipping he had received from his father. Jesse’s reply is arguably the most revealing letter in the series:

Dear Will,

Your note I have. I think you ought to write me longer letters but I suppose it tires you. Your account of the whipping is amusing. Tell me more about it. Did it hurt very much and was [sic] your clothes off at the time he did it. I will tell you about the hardest licking I got was about 3 or 4 years ago. I played truant and stole some money from mother. My father took me into the woodshed and I had to strip off my jacket & vest and two shirt so as to leave my back naked. Father took a whip and gave me a very hard whipping. It hurt me very much and every time I think of it I seem to be undergoing the flogging again. My father was sorry he had to whip & use so much severity but as I had played truant very much he thought I deserved it. You may just bet I never played truant again. Another severe flogging I got was . . . in July 1872. I ran away from home and got brought back again. My father gave me a lecture and ended by ordering me upstairs and take off the whole of my close [sic]. He took a strap and gave me a sound liking [sic]. It hurt me did yours.

The perverse, salacious tone of this note (“Your account of the whipping is amusing. Tell me more about it. Did it hurt very much . . . ”) is, of course, profoundly unnerving and speaks volumes about Jesse’s alarmingly sadistic nature. Even more significant, however, is the light this letter sheds on one major
cause
of his pathology. Though information about Jesse’s background is scarce, we do know that there was a history of wife-beating and child-abuse in his family. His paternal grandfather had been
known in the community as a drunken brute who had driven his wife to divorce—a desperate expedient at the time. Jesse’s mother had left her husband for the same reason. A violent alcoholic (who would ultimately die of cirrhosis of the liver), Thomas Pomeroy, Jesse’s father, was always ready to mete out extreme physical punishment to his unruly younger boy. (Why Jesse received harsher treatment than his brother is an intriguing question, though his deeply unsettling appearance—repugnant even to his own father—seems to have been one of the reasons.)

Indeed Jesse’s only recorded memories of his father involved beatings. In a published reminiscence, for example, he recalled the time he had attended a Sunday School picnic and returned home with his clothes so “covered with dust” that his mother seemed to despair of ever getting them clean. Thomas Pomeroy’s solution—though presumably offered as a sort of jest—was nevertheless typical of the man. “Give him a good thrashing,” he had growled, “that will make the dust come off.”

While a brutalized upbringing might not be the sole cause of psychopathic lust-murder, it is certainly a key element. Criminological studies reveal that, almost without exception, serial killers have suffered extreme, often grotesque, forms of abuse—physical, emotional, sexual—during childhood. (Henry Lee Lucas, to cite just one of many examples, was forced to watch his prostitute-mother have sex with her tricks. She also made him dress in little girl’s clothes, routinely beat him with a two-by-four, and took pleasure in torturing his pets.) As forensic psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Lewis observes in her 1998 book,
Guilty by Reason of Insanity,
“murderers are made not born.” Subjected to torturous punishment as children, such people grow up full of a murderous rage that is directed against all of humanity—a frenzied need to take vengeance on the world by inflicting as much pain and death as possible.

To be sure, other factors beside child-abuse are involved in the creation of a serial killer, and Jesse’s next letter to Willie Baxter reveals another possible source of his pathology:

Friend Will,

I think you ought to tell me the answers to the questions I asked you in my letter last night. Don’t be afraid of answering, for I only want to see if you know what I did to those boys on Powderhill [sic] and the railroad. Answer in full all you know about it and I will tell you if you are right. Did you know of Will Almeder ever getting a whipping. I never did. Tell me some more of your floggings for want of something to talk about. Tell me it the same as I have told you of my two floggings, if it hurt and how your father did it. What do you think of me, my appearance. Do I look like a bad boy. Is my head large. You don’t look as though you were 14 but as though you were only 10 or 12. I hope you do not do anything bad to yourself while you are in here. You understand what I mean don’t you. I meant playing with yourself or abusing yourself. I am glad you prayed last night.

Yours truly

J. H. Pomroy [sic]

P.S. teare [sic] up my notes

*  *  *

Jesse’s ostensible solicitude for Willie (“I hope you do not do anything bad to yourself while you are in here”) clearly masks a keen, prurient interest in the younger boy’s masturbatory habits. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the letter, however, is the part concerning Jesse’s appearance.

At the core of most serial killers is a bottomless well of self-loathing. Their crimes are a way, not only of striking back at the world, but of boosting their egos. Torturing helpless victims becomes their perverse means of achieving a sense of power. The notoriety they receive also provides them with a twisted feeling of significance, affirming that they are people to be reckoned with.

The extreme sense of inadequacy that underlies their behavior derives from various sources. Foremost among these, of course, is growing up in a disturbed, pernicious household, where they are regularly beaten, belittled, and made to feel utterly worthless. But there may be other causes, too. In an intriguing 1994 article titled “The Role of Humiliation and Embarrassment in Serial Murder,” sociologist Robert Hale argues that, in many instances of serial murder, the killer “is releasing a smoldering rage that is rooted in early embarrassment.”

There is no question that, from his youngest days, Jesse Pomeroy had been made to suffer a great deal of embarrassment. With his exceptionally ill-favored looks—his milky eye, oversized head, heavy jaw, and satchel mouth—he had been
ridiculed all his life, not only by his peers but by his own inimical father as well. The “smoldering rage” he must have felt as the result of this constant humiliation was manifested most clearly, perhaps, in the way he mutilated the faces of several of his young victims. These acts can be seen as the pathological expression of his own sufferings, as if—having been unfairly disfigured by life—he was determined to make others share the same fate.

Given the horrendous nature of his crimes, it is clearly impossible to work up much pity for Jesse Pomeroy. Still, of everything he wrote, the plaintive questions he posed to Willie Baxter—“What do you think of me, my appearance. Do I look like a bad boy. Is my head large”—come closest to eliciting a certain amount of sympathy. They reflect the painful self-consciousness of an unsightly adolescent whose peculiar looks have brought him a lifetime of mortification.

Complying with Jesse’s insistent demands—“Write and tell me what I did to those boys & the boy and girl. . . . Tell me all you have heard of me doing to those boys. . . . Don’t forget to tell me about what you have heard of my doing on Powderhill & railroad”—Willie evidently replied to this letter by repeating what he knew about Pomeroy’s crimes. Jesse’s next two letters are extremely important. Written in the belief that their contents would remain confidential (he had advised the younger boy to destroy their correspondence and warned him not to “say anything to anyone of what we write for if we are found out we will be punished”), they constitute nothing less than signed, unequivocal confessions of his crimes. As such, they stand in marked contrast to his public statements, which would continue to hedge on the question of his guilt.