Fiend (39 page)

42

Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein.

—Proverbs 26:27

O
n September 7, 1876—a bleak, drizzly Wednesday, less than three months before he turned seventeen—Jesse Harding Pomeroy entered the Massachusetts State Prison at Charlestown. Except for a brief interval during the early 1880s—when he, along with the other inmates, were temporarily transferred to another institution while Charlestown underwent renovations—he would remain immured within its grim, granite walls until 1929: a period of fifty-three years, extending from the time of “Custer’s Last Stand” to the start of the Great Depression. And of that half century of internment, he would spend forty-one years in solitary confinement—the second-longest such stretch in U.S. penal history (surpassed only by the forty-two years in “deep lock” endured by Robert F. Stroud, the so-called “Birdman of Alcatraz”).

Though he would eventually be transferred to a somewhat larger space, Jesse passed the first decade of his sentence in what was little more than a sealed, granite vault—a seven-by-nine-foot cell with a few narrow loopholes high in the walls to provide a modicum of light and ventilation. His only furnishings were a little table, a narrow bunk, a metal wash pail, and a wooden slop bucket. The inner, solid iron door weighed more than five hundred pounds; the outer door of heavy wood shielded him from the sight of any other living being.

His endless, crushingly dreary days were all the same. He would rise at around 8:00
A.M.,
when the daylight leaking into his cell had grown strong enough to see by. At the height of summer, his cell was as stifling as a coke oven; but in the winter, it was so frigid that the water in his wash pail would freeze
overnight. After breaking the top crust of ice, he would perform his morning ablutions—assuming that the rats hadn’t made off with his soap chips and tooth powder.

Three times a day, a guard would slide his tasteless meals through a slot in the wrought-iron door. The food was always the same: beans, brown bread, hash, rice, molasses, and a thin, flavorless soup with a few limp cabbage leaves or slivers of onion floating in it. His only beverage was a weak, barely palatable coffee-substitute, made of burned rye steeped in boiling water.

Any infraction of the rules, no matter how small, was met with brutal punishment. According to the statute books, prisoners in solitary were forbidden any form of communication with fellow inmates. Sometimes, however, in his desperation for human intercourse, a man might try to contact his neighbor by tapping out a message on the stone wall dividing their cells. Anyone caught committing this offense, however, was liable to be subjected to a swift, savage beating—often meted out with a brass-handled cane.

Though Jesse, in his lifelong intransigence, often refused to do any work whatsoever, he was expected to perform “hard labor” during his sentence. For the first few years of his incarceration, his main task consisted of making scrubbing brushes. He would sit at his little table for hours at a stretch, affixing the stiff bristles to the wooden handles while reading sporadically from a book propped open on his lap.

Even at the height of summer, dusk would begin to gather in the unlighted cell by mid-afternoon. By 5:00 or 5:30
P.M.
(earlier in winter), night had fallen for Jesse Pomeroy.

Retreating to his bunk, he would lie there listening to the pandemoniac sounds that issued from the neighboring cells and filtered into his own: shouts, catcalls, curses, whoops, shrieks—a crazed, infernal racket that would last throughout the night.

There was virtually no relief from this unbearable existence. Once every three months, as permitted by prison regulations, his mother came to see him, a ritual that continued until her death in 1915. On a handful of occasions, he received visits from various notables. In 1910, for example, during a Christmas Day tour of the prison, the wife of Governor Eugene Foss chatted with him briefly about his reading. Four years later, Foss’s successor, Governor David I. Walsh, held a brief conversation with Jesse through the bars of his cell. Otherwise—beside prison officials,
an occasional clergymen, and a lawyer or two—Jesse had no direct contact with other human beings for forty-one years.

*  *  *

By condemning Jesse Pomeroy to life under such harrowing conditions, the state of Massachusetts had, in effect, taken a man that the courts had found sane and condemned him to an existence almost guaranteed to drive him crazy.

Both anecdotal evidence and scientific research have shown that, for many men, even a few days of solitary can be a shattering experience. At the time of Jesse’s incarceration, every newly admitted prisoner to Charlestown was forced to serve the first twenty-four hours of his sentence in isolation—partly as a brusque initiation into life in the “big house,” and partly as a foretaste of the punishment meted out to anyone who violated its rules. Many first-time convicts found this experience—as one former inmate testified—“the most terrifying twenty-four hours in life.” Condemned to longer stretches, even the toughest men might crack. Writing in the
Boston Globe
of his experiences in Charlestown, an ex-prisoner named Waldrop recalled that, when faced with the prospect of a month’s stint in a solitary cell, a jailmate of his named Romano—an unregenerate hardcase doing time for manslaughter—hanged himself.

Clinical studies have proven that prisoners subjected to even relatively short periods in solitary confinement commonly begin to show severe psychopathological symptoms, ranging from hallucinations to panic attacks to paranoid delusions. More protracted stints can drive a man to madness. In December 1949, after three years in Alcatraz’s notorious “dungeon,” a small-time hood named Henri Young stabbed a fellow inmate to death. At his trial, his lawyers successfully argued that Young’s prolonged isolation was a form of cruel and inhuman punishment that had made him insane. Even the administrators of Devil’s Island—the infamous penal colony off the coast of French Guiana—put a two-year limit on the time a man could spend in solitary.

That Jesse Pomeroy survived forty-one years of this treatment has made him—in the eyes of certain devotees of American penal lore—something of a folk-hero, a man who refused to be subjugated by the brutal conditions of the “pen,” who never caved in to authority or surrendered to the system. Even some people with very little love for Jesse Pomeroy have expressed a grudging admiration
for his fierce, unbending willpower. In October 1930, for example, James R. Wood—the onetime Boston police detective who had played such a key role in Jesse’s arrest a half century earlier—published an article on the case in a pulp magazine called
The Master Detective.
(“At last!” screamed the headline. “The real truth about America’s most notorious lifer—this ogre in human form who, as a boy, took his place among the most infamous arch-fiends of modern times!”) Though Wood was no fan of Pomeroy’s, he could not keep a certain respectful tone from his voice when describing Jesse’s prison existence. “But there was one thing they could not break,” wrote Wood, referring to the Charlestown officials. “That was Pomeroy’s indomitable spirit.”

Other historians of crime, however, have seen Jesse’s experience in a very different light. According to these writers, Jesse never lost his sanity during his decades in solitary for the simple reason that he had none to lose—
i.e.,
that he was criminally insane to begin with. These experts view Pomeroy’s unremitting struggles against his captors, not as a sign of his heroic willpower, but as the symptom of his monstrously warped, hopelessly incorrigible nature. In a
Boston Globe
article that appeared in 1932, for example, a writer named Louis Lyons described Pomeroy as “the meanest prisoner” in the history of Charlestown:

He could not be trusted a minute. He would steal from other prisoners. A moral degenerate, a pervert, a sadist, his traits persisted through the years. Even at the State Farm, young lads had to be kept away from him. . . . He never responded to kindness, was always suspicious of everyone, and never showed any interest even in his mother, who martyred herself to seek his freedom through forty years. He never would talk to her about anything except his case and her efforts toward his release. . . .

Obsessed with his importance, he was forever demanding hearings, pardons, commutations, forever complaining, forever seeking publicity by any means, never ceasing to insist on his martyrdom.

However one views Pomeroy—as a resolute, unyielding freedom-seeker (a kind of homegrown Papillon) or a sociopathic monster
forever contriving diabolical ways to break out of his cage (a sort of real-life Hannibal Lecter)—one fact is incontrovertible. From virtually the moment that he entered the grim fortress of Charlestown until the day, fifty three-years later, that he was finally transferred to the State Farm at Bridgewater, Jesse Pomeroy was a persistent, rankling, irredeemable source of trouble for his captors.

*  *  *

The “punishment books” from the years of Jesse Pomeroy’s confinement in Charlestown can be found today in the vaults of the Massachusetts State Archives in Boston. These enormous ledgers—fourteen in all—record the transgressions of each prisoner, along with the sanctions meted out (typically, a day or more locked up in the “strong room,” a lightless isolation cell in the basement).

These bare-bones entries offer a revealing glimpse of the exceptionally strict discipline enforced at the penitentiary—of the harsh penalties imposed for even the most trivial reasons. Indeed, for the most part, the infractions noted in the books seem no more heinous than the misdemeanors of unruly high-schoolers. In any given year, the average inmate might have committed one or two offenses, the most common of which were “disobeying orders,” “insolence to officer,” “refusing to work,” “bad conduct in hall,” “smoking in cell,” “talking in cell,” “singing in cell,” “talking on line,” “fooling in corridor,” and “fighting in shop.”

Jesse Pomeroy’s record, however, is of a strikingly different order. A typical yearly entry for a prisoner in Charlestown, for example, reads as follows:

JOHN LOFTUS

By contrast, Jesse Pomeroy’s entries from November 9, 1877, through 1912 are as follows: