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| Jesse Pomeroy, age 12 |
The “boy with the white eye that stuck
out” dominated the headlines around Boston in 1872. He beat and mutilated six
young children between February and September, disappearing into thin air after
each attack.
His first victim, Tracy Hayden, age 10, told
Marshal Drury that “a boy with a white eye that stuck out” enticed him to
follow him up Powder Horn Hill on February 21, 1872. When they got to the top,
he locked him in an outhouse.
“Strip at once, or I’ll kill you,” he screamed.
Once the boy’s clothes were off, the attacker
took off his belt, lifted his victim to the rafters, and made him cross his
wrists while pinning him there. And then, while the boy dangled in midair, he
beat him across the back with a fence post.
“If you cry, make any noise, or kick,” the boy
cautioned him, “I’ll kill you.”
The attacker untied the boy and let him fall to
the ground when he finished. “Stop inside here all night,” he said. “If you
move out, I’ll kill you.”
John Balch (10) stood gazing at all the goodies
in a store window when the boy with the white eye approached him. “Wouldn’t you
like something good?” he said. “If you come with me, I will take you to a man
who will give you twenty-five cents to go on an errand for him.”
They walked toward Powder Horn Hill, talking
about everything Balch could buy with the money. When they got to the outhouse
on the side of the hill, the boy pushed Balch inside and stripped him, saying
if he made any noise, he’d kill him.
The attacker laid a rope on the floor next to
his victim, saying, “That is to flog you with.” He took off his belt and told
Balch, “This is to fasten you up with.” Then he tied him to the same beam he
fastened the Hayden boy to and whipped him at least twenty times. The welts
were as big as a man’s finger, and the dripping blood mingled with the dust on
the floor.
The police did what they could to catch the
attacker. Marshal Drury walked the victims to all the schools and had the
children lined up, but nothing. They found no trace of the boy with the white
eye.
The boy with the white eye met seven-year-old
George Pratt near City Point on August 17, 1872. He told the boy that he knew a
man who would pay him ten cents to carry a bundle to the Horse Guards.
“The mouse looked right at the cheese,”
reported the New York Sun, “and walked right into the trap.”
After they had traveled about half a mile,
George asked where the man was.
“Inside that boat,” said the boy, pointing to a
nearby scowl. “He’s waiting in the cabin and has the bundle and the ten cents
already.”
He shoved Pratt into the cabin and down on the
floor.
“Do you see that knife?” The attacker waved the
blade in George’s face. “If you cry, wiggle about, or make any noise, I’ll jab
this into you until you’re dead. Now strip!”
The attacker kicked and slapped George’s naked
body. Then, he pulled a large pin from his pocket and stuck George in the face,
arms, back, and breast. He cut a gash in the boy’s back and watched the blood
drip to the floor.
When he had his fill, the boy with the white
eye left George tied up and bleeding. As he walked out the door, he warned him
not to leave or say anything, or he would kill him.
On September 5, the boy with the white eye met
Harry Austin and asked if he wanted to make some quick money. He knew a man who
would pay them a quarter for carrying a package a short distance.
He led Austin about a mile out of Boston along
the Boston, Hartford, and Erie Railroad tracks. He stopped at a secluded spot
near the water where no one could see them, then pulled a knife.
“Strip, or I’ll kill you and pitch you into the
river.”
He tied the naked boy’s hands to a telegraph
pole, threatening to stab him to death if he didn’t keep quiet.
Next, “he slashed the child on each side of the
neck, just under the ear. Then he cut a gash under each nipple,” and “cut a
gash in the back between the shoulders, almost severing the spine.” And then,
he slashed him somewhere that “cannot be told,” most likely in the groin.
Like the other boys, the attacker left Harry
naked and bleeding, still tied to the pole.
Two days later, on September 7, the boy with
the white eye chalked up another seven-year-old victim, Joseph Kennedy. He
offered Kennedy ten cents to help carry a bundle. They walked along the Old
Colony Railroad tracks until they reached an abandoned boathouse, where he
began to punch and kick the boy.
When someone walked along the track, the
attacker dragged his victim out into the swamp. He made him lie face down in
the mud, tied his arms and legs together, and then rolled him over.
The boy with the white eye opened a knife. He
“laid open each cheek, from the eye to the jawbone, and gashed the back of the
neck.” He would have inflicted more damage, but a bigger boy came along, and he
beat it out of there.
The boy with the white eye forced five-year-old
Robert Gould to walk to an obscure part of the Boston, Hartford, and Erie
Railroad. Once there, he stripped him down and tied him to a telegraph pole,
where he cut a half-inch deep gash in his head and continued to stab him all
over.
The New York Times told its readers the
boy with the white eye “seemed to delight in torturing his victims.” The Boston
Globe, at a loss for words and unsure what to say, suggested he was a “very
bad boy.”
After the attack on Robert Gould, police
renewed their search for the boy with the white eye, arresting over 100 boys
during their investigation. The City of Chelsea offered a $1,000 reward for his
capture but found no takers.
Officer Bragdon was walking down the street
with Joseph Kennedy searching for the attacker when they bumped into a muscular
boy who stood about five feet three. As they got closer, they saw he had a
protruding white eye.
“That’s him!” cried Kennedy.
The boy gave his name as Jesse H. Pomeroy. He
had just moved to Boston from Charlestown with his mother three weeks before.
Jesse appeared before Justice Forsaith on
September 20 and pleaded guilty to the attacks. The judge sentenced him to the
State Reformatory at Westboro, ruling he should remain there until he turned
twenty-one. Jessie didn’t have a suitable answer when asked why he did it. All
he could say was, “He didn’t know. He couldn’t help it.”
The State Reform School pardoned Jesse on
February 6, 1874, just fifteen months after he was sent there. Laura Clarke was
the only teacher with doubts about Jesse’s quick recovery. When she asked the
boys to help her catch a snake, Jesse mangled it and jumped on it after it was
dead, “showing symptoms of a strange desire to shed blood.”
The school pronounced Jesse Pomeroy cured and
able to rejoin society.
The Boston Globe explained that the
discharge followed standard operating procedures. Jesse behaved well in school.
His mother, Ruth Pomeroy, was eager for him to return home, so the school
released him.
Things went wrong less than five weeks later.
Katie Curran left home early on the morning of
March 18, 1874. She stopped at Mrs. Pomeroy’s store to buy a new book on her
way to school, then disappeared.
At first, detectives believed one parent
kidnapped Katie because of religious differences. Her father was a Catholic,
and her mom a Protestant, so they suspected Katie’s father put her in a
convent.
While the police attempted to solve the mystery
of Katie Curran’s disappearance, four-year-old Horace Millen’s
body was found in the marshes outside Dorchester. “There were eighteen stabs in
the region of the heart, “reported the New York Times. “The hands were
cut as if in the little fellow’s attempt to ward off the blows of the murderer.
The throat was slit, and one eye was nearly cut from its socket.”
Jesse Pomeroy in later life
Finding the killer was relatively easy.
Detectives recognized the work of Jesse
Pomeroy, the boy who tortured seven victims two years back. The reform school
released him several weeks ago. Now they had a victim who displayed the
hallmarks of his handiwork.
The police arrested Jesse at his mom’s dress
shop on April 24, 1874. They found a bloodstained knife and a pair of muddy
boots that matched the plaster casts they took at the murder site on Dorchester
Bay.
The tracks found at the murder scene proved
“Pomeroy jumped off the wharf into the soft clay and then took his little
victim down.” Millen’s boots also matched the tracks found at the site.
Detective Woods took Jesse to the undertakers
to view Millen’s body at noon.
“Do you know that, little boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you kill him?”
“I suppose I did,” whispered
Jesse.
On the ride back to the police station,
Detective Woods asked Jesse what should be done with him. The boy shook his
head as if lost in thought. “Put me somewhere so I can’t do such things.” The New
York Tribune asked its readers, “Why this sensible conclusion was not
reached some time ago.” They suggested Jessie was “no more fit to be at large
than a mad dog.”
That still left the question open about what
happened to Katie Curran. Was Jesse Pomeroy involved in her disappearance?
Without a body, detectives could only
speculate.
Construction worker Charles Maguinness found
Katie Curran’s body in the basement of Ruth Pomeroy’s dress shop on Sunday,
July 19. His crew had worked in the cellar for nine or ten days when they moved
some stones and saw the body. “The head was separated from the trunk,” said
Maguinness, “and when I removed some more dirt, the skull rolled out of its
place.”
The coroner’s report said the body was in a
state of advanced decomposition. “The skull detached from the trunk; the flesh
with some exceptions rotted away from the bones, and the whole mixed with a
quantity of moist ashes, cinders, etc.”
The clothes were cut apart down the front, and
a part of the skirt was cut down the middle. They found stab wounds on the left
thigh below the groin, extending upward into the external genitals. There was a
five-inch slash across the abdomen and more on the neck and chest.
The New York Herald gave a more graphic
description. “The knife was drawn from the vagina upward with the most
frightful ferocity. Her person was literally torn asunder.”
Captain Savage asked Jesse several times in the
days after Katie’s body was discovered if he had anything to do with her
murder. Jessie denied any knowledge of her death. Then Savage took a different
approach and told Jesse that the police arrested his mother and brother for the
murder.
That loosened Jesse’s tongue.
He admitted to killing the Curran girl but told
Captain Savage, “I don’t want to tell you how.”
Savage told him he had to.
Jesse hesitated a little, then talked. Katie
came into his mom’s store shortly after 7 a.m. and asked for some papers. He
told her they had some downstairs, and she followed him into the basement.
He pointed as if motioning to the spot where
they stood and continued: “I followed her, stood face to her, put my left arm
around her neck, my hand over her mouth, and, holding my knife in my right
hand, I cut her throat.”
He dragged her body behind the water closet and
put some stones and ash on the heap. Later, he threw more ashes on her body to
cover it.
When Savage asked why he did it, Jesse said, “I
could not help it.” He “wanted to see how she would act.” The Boston Globe
noted Jesse’s response was not that unusual. They knew of an eleven-year-old
who drowned a schoolmate “just to see the little devil kick in the water.”
Jesse’s trial was quick and on point, lasting
only two days. The prosecutor dragged in the six young victims of his attacks
in 1872. The defense presented alienists to say Jesse was insane, and the
prosecution brought in experts to say he was sane.
The general outcome of the trial proved that
Jesse was a loner. He was disruptive in school, “making faces at” and
“annoying” the other children. At home, he had headaches and frequently acted
out violently.
Lucy Ann Kelly, a former neighbor in
Charlestown, told the jury how she caught Jesse torturing a cat in the backyard
when he was three. She said he stabbed it in the throat and other places before
discarding the body. Similar stories made the rounds when Jesse was in
Charlestown Prison. The papers thrilled readers with stories about how he tore
the prison cat apart with his bare hands.
West Wing of Charlestown Prison in Oregon where Jesse Pomeroy
spent over 40 years behind bars
Dr. John C. Tyler visited Jesse in his cell five or six times before the trial and talked with him on a variety of subjects. What struck him was “there was no motive for the attacks, at least no ordinary motive.”
Jesse never gave a reason for what he did,
simply saying, “I had to.” He felt a “pressure on his head.” It “started about
the region of his chest and passed through his brain.” Tyler said it was a
“strong symptom of epilepsy.”
While he believed Jesse was insane, Tyler
agreed many of his actions were “perfectly consistent with [those of] a sane
mind.” He chose secluded locations to attack his victims and did his best to
conceal the crimes. He threw away his weapons and misled victims, giving them
false names. Those actions “tended to prove mental abilities and capacities of
a high order.” Finally, Tyler concluded it might have been a love of cruelty
that caused Jesse to attack his victims.
Dr. Clement A. Walker, superintendent of the
Boston Lunatic Hospital, believed Jesse was insane when he committed the
crimes. His reasons were that the boy had “no reasonable motive,” and he “did
not show a particle of pity or remorse.” In his opinion, Jesse “was not
responsible when he committed the acts charged against him.”
Dr. George S. Choate ran a private sanitarium
in New York. He said Jesse knew he had done wrong but did not seem worried. He
“thought that he would not be hung, as they had never hung boys of fourteen in
Massachusetts yet.” He figured he would be sent to the state prison or a
lunatic asylum at worst. Choate believed Jesse was sane now, and when he
committed the crime. Rather than having a weak mind, Jesse Pomeroy had a weak
character.
Choate was convinced Jesse’s actions were “not
the result of insanity, at least of the ordinary kind.” Jesse was sane on the
day he murdered Horace Millen.
Jesse was found guilty of first-degree murder
and sentenced to the gallows. However, Governor Gaston refused to sign the
order because Jesse was so young. His replacement, Governor Rice, commuted
Jesse’s sentence to life in August 1876.
Prison life proved problematic.
Jesse spent his first 41 years in
solitary confinement at the Charlestown Prison, locked away in the “Cherry
Hill” building. The punishment cells there had no windows. Jesse’s only contact
with the outside world was with his guards and mother, who visited once a
month.
During his early years in prison, Jesse cooked
up many schemes to break out. The most notable attempt was when he diverted the
pipeline from the lights and filled his cell with gas. The scheme backfired,
and the gas line exploded when he was in his cell. All it earned him was a trip
to the prison hospital to treat his burns.
A 1913 account in the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch said Jesse “developed an ingenuity in his schemes for escape
that is nothing less than diabolical.”
One time, Jesse told the warden he had invented
a lead pencil that could be sharpened without a knife, so the warden loaned him
some tools to help perfect his invention. Jesse used them to remove mortar from
between the rocks of his cell.
Another time, he starved for 23 days, thinking
it might be easier to escape from the prison hospital. It was not.
Jesse’s cleverness and ingenuity amazed
alienists and criminologists. “Usually, a few years of such confinement breaks
down the mental faculties,” said one specialist. “In Pomeroy’s case, the
opposite has resulted. His mind has strengthened rather than weakened. He
remained a puzzle to medical science.”
Jesse mellowed as he aged and dedicated himself
to study, reading hundreds of volumes from the prison library. He mastered six
languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic. Jesse played
the stock market with what little money he had, investing $300 and making a
tidy $60 profit. However, he must have lost it in the crash because the warden
valued Jesse’s estate at 95 cents when he died.
Jesse read profusely, especially about law. In
later years, he wrote Pollyanna verse for the prison magazine under the byline
“Grandpa.” In 1920, he performed an author reading during a prison minstrel
show.
One of his poems addressed conformity:
If all the people in the land
Were of one mind, in thought, agree
With standard creeds
To square all deeds
Each tagged with one official brand
To keep in step would easy be.
Jesse died suddenly from heart disease in
January 1933 at the Bridgewater State Prison Farm for the Insane.
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