Fiend (45 page)

And Hosiery, both short and long,

With underwear, so neat and strong;

Our Brushes too

Of all sorts view;

And Mattresses for modest sum,

With wares shaped from Aluminum.

Jesse’s book elicited the kind of reaction that Samuel Johnson famously ascribed to the sight of a dog walking on its hind legs (“It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all”). Because of the author’s notoriety, the book attracted a certain amount of fascinated attention. A popular monthly magazine of the time,
The Survey,
described it as “a book of almost unique interest”—but only because it had been written by the most infamous life-prisoner in U.S. history. As for the writings themselves, the reviewer’s judgment was brutal (if accurate). Pomeroy’s poetry and prose only served to prove that he “could not acquire, even in the concentration of his cell, any real mental ability; there is nothing in his book of intrinsic merit.”

*  *  *

Jesse’s writing—or at any rate, a vague approximation of it—made the news again the following year, when
The Boston Telegram
advertised its forthcoming serial publication of “Pomeroy’s own story,”
Buried Alive.
The front-page, two-column announcement, which ran on June 27, 1921, resounded with the portentous tones of a Gothic melodrama:

Out of the grim dungeon that is Cell 25, Cherry Hill, Charlestown State Prison, comes the tale of the man who is known all over the country, whose name is a by-word, whose fate has been held up as a warning to evil-doers for 46 years.

Jesse Pomeroy tells his own story of a lifetime within stone walls.

It is such a story as has never been written before. It is such a story as will never be written again, unless the world reverts to barbarism.

The story of his life, ground out by the “lifer” in his cell after he had made himself a master of English by years of study, is an arraignment of the penal methods of civilization so bitter as to appear incredible at first glance.

Not content with merely piquing the reader’s interest with the promise of a sensational exposé, the announcement went on to compare Jesse to François Villon, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and other “masters of diction [who] have attempted to paint the horrors of prison life for the world to read.”

The first installment of
Buried Alive
appeared on page one of the June 28 edition of the
Telegram.
Though far from masterful, the piece was written in a style conspicuously more polished than Jesse’s clumsy contributions to
The Mentor.
Indeed, anyone familiar with Jesse’s jailhouse publications would have had good reason to be suspicious of the absolute originality of the supposed autobiography. Unsurprisingly, by the time the third installment appeared, its ostensible author had issued a statement that he had “never written such a story or authorized its publication.”

Buried Alive
turned out to be a fraud, perpetrated by a journalist named Walter C. Mahan, who had assembled it out of various newspaper accounts dating back to the 1870s. Far from being a shocking new exposé, it was nothing but a cobbled-together rehash. It did, however, demonstrate something significant about Jesse Pomeroy—that in 1921, forty-seven years after his arrest, he was still famous enough to be front-page news.

*  *  *

Intermittently throughout the remainder of the decade, stories about Jesse continued to pop up in the nation’s press. One of the papers that covered his case most diligently was the
New York Times.
In November 1923, the
Times
—along with various Boston dailies—reported that, like millions of his fellow countrymen in those high-flying days, Pomeroy was playing the stock market. With a bit of money inherited from his mother’s estate,
Jesse had purchased shares in a company called Moon Motors through a State Street brokerage house.

“Naturally, he has no stock ticker in his cell,” Warden William Hendry hastened to assure reporters. “Neither does he telephone his orders. It is all done by mail between Jesse and the brokerage house.” According to the warden, Jesse was “ahead of the game,” having earned dividends of more than $60 on his $300 investment.

Five months later—in April 1924—Jesse reached his fiftieth consecutive year behind bars, an event that was widely noted in the national press and that provoked yet another round of impassioned calls for his pardon. No less a figure than Clarence Darrow—who had defended the most notorious juvenile thrill-killers of his own era, Leopold and Loeb—publicly denounced the State of Massachusetts for having kept Pomeroy in prison for a half century. “It is an outrage,” Darrow declared. “I have often thought of leading a rescue party into Massachusetts and attempting to free the man.”

On the opposite side were those like Boston socialite Alice Stone Blackwell, who continued to regard the shambling, half-blind sixty-five-year-old prisoner as a potential menace to society. In a letter to the
Boston Herald,
published in March, 1925, Miss Blackwell insisted that “It would be mistaken kindness to pardon Jesse Pomeroy. Many of your readers are too young to remember the crimes for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He deliberately tortured several children to death. The case was much worse than that of Leopold and Loeb. He would have been put to death but for his youth—he was 17 at the time, if I remember correctly—and but for a belief that he had an abnormal mental makeup for which he was not responsible. It is this latter fact that makes it unfitting to release him.

“It is reported that after he had been for some years in prison, he was allowed the companionship of a kitten in his cell. He skinned the kitten alive.”

Miss Blackwell’s claim about the kitten (one of several widely circulated, though wholly apocryphal, legends that had sprung up around Pomeroy and reflected his status as a semimythical fiend) drew a furious response from Jesse. He immediately retained a lawyer named Ira Dudley Farquhar who—claiming that his client’s “reputation had been damaged”—filed a $5,000 libel suit against the elderly socialite. The case eventually came to
trial in January 1928, and ended in a moral victory for the plaintiff, who was awarded a verdict of one dollar in damages. From his cell, Jesse let it be known that the money meant nothing to him. “The pleasure of winning the verdict in my suit,” he declared in a statement to the press, “is satisfaction enough.”

*  *  *

A fascinating glimpse of Jesse during the decade of the twenties was provided by an unusually literate ex-convict named Victor Nelson. Unlike Pomeroy, Nelson really did possess a flair for writing and eventually produced a book called
Prison Days and Nights,
published to widespread acclaim by the Boston house of Little, Brown, and Company.

Born to Swedish immigrant parents in 1898, Nelson—a brilliant but deeply troubled young man—landed in reform school at the age of fifteen. In October 1920, he was arrested in Roxbury on a charge of armed robbery and sentenced to three to five years in the Massachusetts State Prison. The following May, he made a spectacular escape and remained at large for the next four months. After attending a lecture by Thomas Mott Osborne—former warden of Sing Sing and an ardent champion of prison reform—Nelson made himself known to the older man, who persuaded the young fugitive to surrender. Nelson was returned to the Massachusetts State Prison, where he spent the next two years. It was during his term in Charlestown that he became intimately acquainted with the “world-famous lifer.”

On his very first afternoon in Charlestown, Nelson—after receiving his shabby gray uniform—wandered out into the icy yard, where he was immediately accosted by “a short, thickset man with one blind eye and a scraggly moustache.”

“Hello, lad,” said the old man. “I’m Jesse Pomeroy. They call me ‘Grandpa.’ “

Nelson was struck by the self-important air of the old-timer, who looked (as he later wrote) “as proud of himself and his sordid fame as if he were a prince of men.”

Born and raised in Boston, Nelson had been hearing tales about the infamous “boy fiend” all his life. “Sure,” he said. “I know all about you.”

At this remark, Jesse “straightened his shoulders and beamed with delight.” The “way in which he responded to my recognition of his notoriety—or fame, as he regarded his prominence in
the world—astounded me,” wrote Nelson. “I was aghast at the lack of shame or consciousness of guilt the old man showed.”

As Nelson quickly learned, this way of introducing himself to new arrivals was habitual with Pomeroy. As the years progressed, however, the awed reactions Jesse was accustomed to receiving began to fade. Nelson vividly recalled one of his final glimpses of Pomeroy. It occurred on a raw December afternoon in 1923. A pair of young newcomers, recently sentenced to Charlestown for rolling drunks, were lounging in the prison yard when—“in accordance with his habit”—Jesse “approached them and introduced himself” as he had to Nelson.

“To Pomeroy’s chagrin and amazement,” Nelson later recalled, the young men were profoundly unimpressed.

“Oh yeah?” snorted one, “Who the hell is Jesse Pomeroy and what’s your racket? We never heard of you.”

This sneering rebuff was a devastating blow to Jesse’s vanity. “It was pitiful to see the crestfallen face of the old aristocrat whose claim to stardom in his own domain had been so ruthlessly belittled,” Nelson wrote.

Mortified and deflated, Jesse “lowered his head, turned on his heels, and slunk away—a dethroned monarch among the minnows.”

48

I am going to keep trying for my freedom. Only death will stop me.

—Jesse Pomeroy, August 3, 1929

T
hough Jesse Pomeroy’s name no longer inspired fear (or even recognition) in the younger generation of criminals, the world at large had not forgotten him. That fact was made strikingly clear in the summer of 1929, when stories about the “most remarkable convict in the world” appeared in countless newspapers throughout the country. The occasion was his transfer to the prison farm at Bridgewater. After more than half a century inside the grim fortress of Charlestown, Jesse Pomeroy was about to get his first glimpse of the modern world.

Though he had been struggling to get out of Charlestown for decades, the transfer was not his idea. On the contrary, he vigorously protested the move. And there were some who sympathized with Jesse’s desire to stay put. “Old people cling tenaciously to their homes, to every article of furniture, every valueless knickknack, every creaking floorboard,” observed a writer for the
Worcester Telegram
in a widely reprinted editorial. “Thus they maintain their identity in a world that has forgotten them. Transplant them and they wither and die. Jesse Pomeroy’s original crime is probably to him no more than the half-remembered dream of some former existence. But his Charlestown cell is his life, vivid to him through a hundred little habits of the daily round. One need not descend to pathos to wish that he might be permitted to die where he has lived—and where all of us want to die—at home.”

But cell space was at a premium at Charlestown, and Jesse had become what one official described as a “drone.” Old, infirm, with an enormous inguinal hernia and failing eyesight, he was perceived by officials as little more than deadwood. By placing
him in the airier, far more pleasant surroundings of Bridgewater, they could presumably perform a humanitarian act, while freeing up his cell for more practical uses—for criminals who represented a far more serious threat than a half-blind, increasingly disabled seventy-one-year-old.

And so on August 1, 1929, Jesse was compelled to pack up his belongings and leave his barred and cloistered home. Physically, he was a radically different figure from the smooth-shaven adolescent he had been when he first entered Charlestown: a shambling, hollow-cheeked, balding old man. But his temperament hadn’t undergone much of a change. According to one reporter who had known him for more than thirty years, the younger Pomeroy had been “an unlikable, harsh, sullen fellow. He was stubborn and unruly from the first. And when he left prison today, he was just about the same singular figure.”

When Warden Hogsett came by to wish him good luck, Jesse refused to say a word or shake the warden’s hand. Dressed in a rumpled business suit, his face half-hidden by a floppy, checkered golf cap, he shuffled out into the yard, stepped inside a waiting automobile, and was whisked through the gates of the prison, while spectators gawked, newsmen scribbled notes, and a horde of cameramen snapped photos.