Fiend (36 page)

The first of these notes concerns Horace Millen and Katie Curran:

Friend Willie,

You asked me to tell you why I did those things and what I said to the boy and girl. The girl came in the store one morn and asked for paper. I told her there is a store down stairs. She went down, I killed her. Oh Willie you don’t know how bad I feel for her and also the boy. What I said to the boy I have no reccollection [sic] but you know I killed him too. I feel very bad for him, and believe me I can’t tell you the reason I did those things.

In the next letter, written later the same day, he spoke about the depredations he had committed in Chelsea and South Boston:

Dear Will,

I met the boys and took them up on the hill and beat them but I do not remember sticking pins or knifs [sic] in them or putting salt water in their backs. I do not know why I did those things. I hope you will never do as I did, but hope you will and I also will be good boys here after don’t you. Do you mean to be good or bad. Willie I hope you will be good. Give your heart to God. Are you a Christian.

A few days later, Willie Baxter was taken to court and sentenced to a stint at Westborough. In his final letter to his friend, Jesse offered him the benefit of his own experience by telling him what to expect at reform school. Like his previous letters, this one contains a bizarre mix of elements—a preoccupation with corporal punishment, a markedly erotic interest in the younger boy, and a prim, paternalistic tone—that make it ineffably creepy:

Friend Willie,

Each of the boys have a separate bed. They go in bathing every Saturday. The boys work at making chairs, washing clothes, making shoes, getting the dinner for the boys and officers, and working on the farm. I hope you will behave up there for if you do you will get out soon. If you don’t you will get a good flogging every time you don’t do right. . . . Don’t do anything bad to yourself. You know what I mean don’t you Willie. Don’t mind the boys up there. They will plage [sic] you at first and ask you to do bad things but don’t mind them. If you do you will get a whipping with a strap. Tell me about your being in Court. How do you feel to-day Willie. I am well. Did you undress & pray last night. I took off all my clothes except my shirt. I prayed too. Tell me all.

Your friend forever

Jesse H. Pomroy [sic]

40

Human beings seem so many departures, more or less gross, from the line of beauty. For every success in nature’s evident aim at perfection there are a thousand failures, and when the deviation from the type becomes extreme, we call it monstrous. What shall we do with it?

—Epigraph to the
Autobiography of Jesse H. Pomeroy
(1875)

L
ike certain infamous serial killers of our own era (most notably John Wayne Gacy, whose paintings of leering circus clowns and deranged-looking Disney characters are prized by collectors of macabre art), Jesse Pomeroy possessed something of a creative streak. His metier, however, was not visual art but the written word. Though the letters he composed to Willie Baxter display little, if any, literary potential, he clearly had a certain affinity for writing. Indeed, he would eventually turn himself into a jailhouse poet, contributing occasional verses to various publications and even issuing a slender volume of his collected works.

His first significant production, however, was a two-part memoir, initially published in the
Boston Times
on successive Sundays in July, 1875. Immediately following its newspaper appearance, this flagrantly self-serving life story would be reissued as a slender, fifteen-cent volume entitled the
Autobiography of Jesse H. Pomeroy, Written by him while imprisoned in the Suffolk County Jail and under sentence of death for the murder of H. H. Millen.

There seems little doubt that this work is, by and large, the product of Jesse’s own hand. True, it has clearly been treated to a certain amount of editorial polishing (as Jesse’s letters indicate, he was an egregious speller, consistently miswriting even his own last name as
Pomroy).
And the syntax and punctuation have also been regularized for publication.

Even so, the memoir is a thoroughly amateurish piece of
work, rambling, repetitious, almost unreadably dull in places—precisely the sort of thing that a moderately literate fifteen-year-old would produce. Even Jesse was abashed by its shortcomings, describing it in a closing apology as “merely the disjointed ideas that are in my mind.” Appended to the text, moreover, is an affadavit by his mother—sworn before Justice of the Peace Russell H. Cornwell—in which she declares that “the composition of said autobiography is wholly and exclusively the work of the said Jesse H., and that the same was written by him without the assistance of any person.” Almost without question, the document is authentic. As such—like Jesse’s correspondence with Willie Baxter—it affords valuable insight into its author’s mentality.

There is one major difference, however, between his letters and the autobiography. Writing confidentially to his boyhood pal, Jesse readily (even eagerly) confesses the truth of his crimes. In addressing the general reader, on the other hand, he insists on his innocence, going to great, often tortuous, lengths to deny all the charges against him. Indeed, one of the things this memoir reveals most clearly about Jesse is his genuine gift for hairsplitting, evasion, and casuistry. Had he not been a psychopathic killer of frightening precocity, he might well have turned out to be a successful lawyer.

In an effort to dispel the widespread conception of himself as a “fiend”—a natural-born killer who had engaged in acts of cruelty from the time he was a toddler—Jesse begins by depicting his early childhood as an era of idyllic pursuits. In describing this part of his life, he comes across as a kind of urban Huck Finn—a high-spirited lad who liked to play hooky from school so he could hang around the Navy Yard and “whittle a piece of wood.” On Saturdays, he and his “chums” would go boating on the Mystic River or play baseball in a vacant lot.

To be sure, he occasionally got into trouble. He recounts the time that—after setting off some firecrackers in school—he was forced to stand in a corner “with a dumb bell in one hand and a stone on top of my head; [my teacher] told me if I dropped either of them or made any noise she would give me a thrashing, and I believe she would.” Still, Jesse hastens to add, “you must not think I was always bad at school; I gave my teacher trouble enough I am sure; but as a general thing I was what is commonly called a good boy.” Indeed, he describes himself as an inveterate
reader not only of adventure novels but of “good solid books that will be to my advantage in the future.” He also “went to Sunday School every Sunday.”

While most of these recollections are presented in entirely general terms, he does take time to recount two incidents in specific detail. Both of these passages represent heavy-handed attempts to address a recurrent charge against Jesse—
i.e.,
that his glaring lack of remorse was the sign of his cruel, unnatural temperament. To counter this allegation (made by virtually everyone who had observed him, from policemen to reporters to psychologists), he describes a time when he and his brother were fishing side-by-side on Chelsea Bridge. As Charlie went to cast his line into the river, the hook “struck and caught” Jesse’s face just below his left eye, burying “itself deep right near the bone.” The two boys rushed to the home of the neighborhood physician, Dr. Bickford, who extracted the hook from Jesse’s cheek.

Jesse’s reason for mentioning this incident, he writes, “is this—that though the pain was great and hurt very much, I did not show any feeling at all, either when it was in there or when the doctor was taking it out; and now what strikes me as curious at this time is that it might furnish a clue as to why I do not show any feeling now in regard to this case. Though I did not at this time show any feeling, it was no sign I had none, and now if I do not show any in regard to these cases, it is not to be supposed that I have none.”

The second incident he relates is meant to reinforce this very point. Several years earlier (according to Jesse), he and his Sunday School class were returning by train from a picnic at Walden Pond when the locomotive struck a deaf man who was strolling on the tracks and did not hear the warning shriek of the engineer’s whistle. “When the train was stopped,” Jesse writes, “the men of the engine picked him up dead. Poor man! To be cut off so suddenly, almost without warning, it was too bad. I know it made me feel bad the rest of the night, and I could not help thinking about it for a long time after; the rest of our company felt very bad, for some of them cried, particularly the girls; but then as they are the weaker sex I suppose that was all right.” Like the tale of the embedded fishing hook, this anedote is clearly meant to demonstrate that—far from being a callous brute—Jesse is a person of deep feeling (“Poor man! . . . it was
too bad”) who is simply not given to open displays of emotion, partly because of his natural disposition and partly because (as his remark about the “weaker sex” suggests) he regards it as girlish to do so.

Having covered (in less than three pages) the highlights of his life between 1859 and 1871, Jesse then cuts to “the time my troubles came”—the period when (as he tells it) he was unjustly accused of crimes that he never committed. According to his version of events, he was strolling home from school on the afternoon of September 21, 1872, when—“out of mere curiosity”—he stopped to take a perfectly innocent look inside Police Station Six. A few moments later, as he continued on his way home, he was accosted by an officer who grabbed him by the arm and led him back into the station house. Protesting that he had “done nothing,” Jesse “commenced to cry, I was so frightened.” Inside the station, several “of those boys that had been so maltreated by another came and said that I was the boy that did it to them, and the only way they identified me was because I had a spot on the right eye.”

Terrified and confused, Jesse was “locked up in a cell, not allowed to see my parents or friends. Here that night I was kept in torture. . . . I could not give an iota of the way I was treated by the men and officers of that station. They used nasty language to me, called me all sorts of names, and I venture to say that never was a boy of my age placed before in such a condition. All this time, bear in mind, I . . . did not have hardly an idea of what I was arrested for.”

After suffering this brutal mistreatment for hours, Jesse was finally allowed to get some sleep—only to be awakened in the middle of the night by an officer who threatened that, if Jesse did not confess, “they will send you to prison for a hunded years.” Unable to bear the pressure any longer, poor Jesse broke down and told the policeman what he wanted to hear. “What wonder is it that I confessed? I was half awake, and nearly dead with fear, and hardly knew what I was saying.”

Having been coerced into making this false confession, Jesse was then brought to the Tombs and confronted with a number of his supposed victims, all of whom positively identified him as their assailant. As far as Jesse is concerned, however, all seven of the little boys were mistaken:

Now is it not singular that those boys [could] not identify me except on account of my eye. Not one of them did or could tell what dress I wore or how my voice sounded—in fact, failed to notice everything that a sharp boy would, and fell back on the untenable ground of identifying me by my eye. And how, you will say, untenable? For this reason: it is utterly impossible for me to believe that these boys could be taken on the street and done as they said they were used, and not see some other points of this boy; they would be most likely to see what kind of clothes this boy wore, if he had a black, white, or blue suit on, and in fact all about his personal apprearance. And again, their position of identifying me solely on the ground of my eye is untenable for the reason that there are other boys with eyes like mine.

The trial that followed was—from Jesse’s point of view—an utter miscarriage of justice. “The complaints were read to me, and I understood them about as much as I would Greek or Latin . . . no one was allowed to speak for me; I was not allowed to speak for myself.” In the end, he was unfairly convicted on the “untenable” testimony of the seven untrustworthy boys, and sentenced by a judge “who would not (or didn’t know enough to) weigh the testimony against me; who allowed himself to judge in a partial manner.” “No,” Jesse protests with all the indignation he can muster, “I did not have justice, have not had it, and what I am the law has made me.”

After describing at some length his stint in reform school—during which he was “never punished in any way, shape, or manner” and was universally regarded as “a good, behaved boy”—Jesse arrives at the crux of the work: his convoluted and flagrantly specious attempt to prove himself, if not absolutely innocent of the two murders, then at least not morally responsible for them.