Fiend (20 page)

The response to Dyer’s ouster was positively jubilant. A typical headline in Tuesday’s
Boston Herald
crowed: “Off Goes His Head!”

Though every bit as culpable as his boss, Officer Thomas Adams—the man who had actually conducted the bungled search of the Pomeroys’ cellar—somehow managed to elude the axe. Like Dyer, he was approached by reporters and given the chance to present his side of the story to the public.

Adams explained that—although he was a “regular patrol officer”—he was frequently employed in detective work and was “given the duty of finding Katie Curran.” He insisted that he had “worked on the case zealously and did his best to discover her whereabouts, but was misled by the stories of different persons who stated positively that they had seen the girl taken into a carriage.” Adams had done “all he could to keep up Mrs. Curran’s hopes, because he did not think her child had been foully dealt with. He was at her house two, three, and even four times a week, and—along with an officer named Griggs—had searched the cellar under Mrs. Pomeroy’s store a few days after Mrs. Curran told him her suspicions.”

As for the most critical issue—how he could have possibly missed the little girl’s remains—Adams offered the following, highly questionable excuse:

Officer Griggs and I searched the cellar, as we thought, thoroughly. There were no indications that the ground of the cellar had been upturned, nor was there any offensive smell to be perceived. The ground where the body was finally found was, at the time of the search, as hard and as solid as any other part of the cellar. We did our best, and it is unfortunate that we did not succeed. The body may have been deeper in the ground when we searched than when it was discovered, as the heavy rain which came down a day or two previous poured into the cellar and washed away some of the dirt which covered the body.

In spite of its flaws (Adams’s suggestion that “the body may have been deeper in the ground” at the time of his search was disingenuous at best, since the corpse had not been buried in the
ground at all, but rather dumped in an ash heap), the mayor and Chief Savage evidently chose to accept this explanation. Or perhaps the public’s demand for accountability had been sufficiently appeased by Captain Dyer’s removal. Whatever the case, Adams avoided his superior’s fate and was allowed to remain on the force.

*  *  *

In our own time, the sites of sensational murders—John Wayne Gacy’s suburban “house of horrors,” for example, or the squalid little apartment where Jeffrey Dahmer committed his unspeakable crimes—have become such morbid attractions that they have had to be demolished just to keep the crowds away. The situation was no different back in 1874. For days after the discovery of Katie Curran’s body, hordes of curiosity-seekers would congregate outside Mrs. Pomeroy’s former shop and (as the
Boston Herald
reported) “gaze with apparent awe through the cellar windows, as though expecting to see the original tragedy enacted before their eyes.”

As it happened, the cellar was already in the process of being torn up by workmen—a circumstance that allowed the ghoulish sightseers to collect macabre souvenirs: small bits of masonry from the depths of the cellar, or pieces of excavated rubbish that were often rumored to possess a particular, grisly significance.

At one point on Tuesday, for example, the workmen turned up a few tattered old copies of the
Boston Herald,
discolored with reddish stains. In a flash, the story spread throughout the neighborhood that the papers had been used by young Pomeroy to wipe the gore from his bloody hands and knife blade. After examining this supposedly damning evidence of Jesse’s guilt, however, Coroner Ingalls concluded that the reddish marks were probably cherry stains and chucked the mildewed papers in the trash.

Later that same day, a reporter for the
Herald
managed to sneak down into the cellar for a quick, furtive look around the murder site. No sooner did he emerge than he announced to the world that he had discovered convincing “proof of the truth of Jesse’s story that he cut his victim’s throat.”

Remarkably, the reporter’s “proof” hinged on the fact that he had
not
been able to find any evidence of bloodstains in the cellar. Instead—conducting his search “by the fleeting light of burning matches” (as he described it)—he had perceived a bunch of
nicks on one of the grimy brick walls. Considering that two workmen had been wielding pickaxes in the basement for nearly three weeks, the fact that there were gouges on the walls should not have been terribly surprising. To the reporter, however, the marks indicated only one thing—that, in an effort to obliterate all traces of his crime, Jesse had taken his pocketknife and methodically “chipped off every spot of blood that had accidentally become spattered upon the wall when he cut his victim’s throat.” Needless to say, this theory was exceptionally dubious, if not completely far-fetched. But it was precisely the sort of lurid speculation that helped to sell papers to a public that couldn’t seem to get enough of the Pomeroy story.

Indeed, the fascination with the Boston “boy fiend” (as the papers had taken to calling Jesse) was so intense that it struck most news commentators as unprecedented. Searching for parallels, a few editorialists compared it to the uproar over the Abijah Ellis murder in 1872. Others looked even farther back, to another grisly child-slaying that had transfixed the city a decade earlier. This was the appalling murder of the Joyce siblings in the summer of 1865.

On Monday, June 12, of that year, twelve-year-old John S. Joyce and his fifteen-year-old sister, Isabella, were visiting their grandmother in Boston. At around 11:30 in the morning, they expressed a desire to explore a forested area known as May’s Woods in nearby Roxbury. After some initial reluctance, the grandmother finally relented. She packed them a lunch, gave them ten cents each for trolley fare, and told them to return no later than 2:00
P.M.
She never saw them again.

When the children failed to return, their grandmother became frantic. For the next five days, search parties scoured the woods around Roxbury. It wasn’t until Sunday, June 18, however, that two men, John Sawtelle and J. F. Jameson—while hiking across the wooded estate of the Bussey family in West Roxbury—stumbled upon the remains of the missing children.

From the evidence, it seemed clear that Isabella and her brother had been playing happily in the woods—creating a little hillock of moss and fashioning hatbands out of oak leaves and twigs—when they were unexpectedly set upon. Their assailant—a “fiend in human shape,” as the newspapers called him—attacked the girl first, savaging her body with a dagger, then tearing off her undergarments and raping her. There were
twenty-seven stab wounds on her torso, and another sixteen on her neck. The ground all around her corpse was clotted with blood. She had apparently put up a desperate fight, grabbing the long blade of the dagger and attempting to wrest it from her killer. The index finger of her right hand was completely severed, and the rest nearly cut off. Her clothes were soaked in blood, and clumps of grass had been shoved into her mouth to stifle her cries.

Apparently, her brother had stood paralyzed for a few moments with terror. When he finally turned to run, it was too late. He was found lying facedown, having evidently tripped over a tree root while attempting to escape. His killer had pounced on the prostrate boy and stabbed him through the back a half-dozen times. The wounds were so deep that, in several instances, the blade had gone all the way through the little victim’s body, coming out the skin in front.

There were two houses within a few hundred yards of the scene. But the inhabitants were so accustomed to shouts, laughter, and yells from picnic and excursion groups that, as the newspapers noted, “they would not have paid any attention even if they had heard screams on this occasion.”

The appalling savagery of the Joyce murders provoked a citywide furor. From their pulpits, ministers decried the murders as a sign of the growing degeneracy of the age—of the country’s deplorable descent into vice, immorality, and crime. An enormous manhunt was undertaken to track down the “inhuman wretch” who had committed the “fiendish deed.” But—though the police issued many confident pronouncements, assuring the public that the culprit could not possibly get away with his crime—no one was ever arrested. The ghastly deaths of the Joyce children would remain forever unsolved.

*  *  *

The Millen-Curran slayings were undoubtedly the most sensational Boston child-murders since the Joyce atrocities. But there was one significant difference between the two cases: in the former, the public knew exactly whom to blame. Indeed, they had not one but
two
targets for their outrage: the “boy fiend” himself and his grim, unrepentent mother.

The public’s antipathy toward Mrs. Pomeroy was vividly demonstrated early Tuesday morning, when a large, noisy
crowd gathered outside Station Six to denounce the police for their mishandling of the Curran affair. All at once, several of the protestors spotted Ruth Pomeroy staring down at them from an open second-story window. One glimpse of her face was all it took to send the crowd into a frenzy. They began screaming, hooting, demanding that the police remove the hated woman from their sight.

Far from being intimidated by the mob, Jesse’s mother seemed intent on inciting them to even greater heights of fury. She leaned her head out the window and answered their jeers and insults with imprecations of her own. The scene turned so ugly that some observers were convinced that a riot was about to break out. It wasn’t until several police officers forced Jesse’s mother away from the window that the crowd finally quieted down.

Given the public’s feelings about Ruth Pomeroy, it’s no surprise that a story quickly sprang up linking her child’s blood-crazed behavior directly to her own presumed penchant for butchery. The story—which had already gained citywide circulation by late Monday afternoon—was summed up in Tuesday’s early edition of the
Boston Globe:

Directly after Pomeroy was first arrested after torturing a number of children in Chelsea and South Boston, three well-known physicians, who were anxious to learn all that they could about the boy, called upon his mother and had a candid interview with her. They told her their errand, and she gave them all the information in her power.

Among other things, she said that her husband was a butcher, and that during the period of her pregnancy she went daily to the the slaughterhouse to witness the killing of the animals, and that somehow she took a particular delight in seeing her husband butcher the sheep, the calves, and the cattle, and not infrequently she assisted him in this bloody work. She also said that after Jesse was born and became old enough to hold a knife in his hands, he was all the time, when opportunity offered, jabbing a knife into pieces of meat, and when still older and about his father’s market, he did the same thing.

These facts certainly explain in some measure why Jesse “could not help” committing his crimes, as he told the court. He was simply
marked
by his mother, as other children had been, only in a different way.

The theory that Jesse was “marked” by his mother—i.e., born with an innate penchant for violence because of his prenatal exposure to animal-butchering—was quickly discounted by Coronor Ingalls and other medical experts. Ingalls was especially disdainful of the idea, comparing it to the primitive folk-belief that, should a woman have a tooth extracted during her pregnancy, her infant will be born with a harelip. In his fifteen years of practice, Dr. Ingalls declared, he had “never met with such a case, and scientific research has never revealed a single instance in which some secret influence has affected offspring.”

Ruth Pomeroy herself was given an opportunity to address the issue on Tuesday morning, when—at the request of several reporters—Jesse’s lawyer, Joseph H. Cotton, paid her a visit to ask about the rumor. Mrs. Pomeroy immediately composed a reply, which—while convincingly refuting the slaughterhouse story—proposed an equally reductive theory of her own. (In its reference to the “absurd requests” she had been receiving from all over the country, her reply also makes clear that—like the psycho-killers of our own day, who invariably attract the perverse devotion of various “groupies”—Jesse Pomeroy had already achieved a macabre celebrity.)

Mrs. Pomeroy’s answer, which appeared in every major daily in Boston, as well as in the
New York Times
and other papers throughout the nation, went as follows:

Before going into the butcher business, my husband worked in the Navy Yard at Charlestown, where he was employed for a period of ten years. He was at work there four years before Jesse was born, and remained there until [Jesse] was nearly six years of age. It was after this he went into the butcher business. He did not kill cattle, but carried the carcasses about the market.
I never saw an animal of any kind slaughtered.
I do not believe in the theory of being marked.

The statement regarding the visit of the three physicians is false.
The only gentleman of science that questioned me on the subject of Jesse was a phrenologist, and he did not seem to be able to understand Jesse’s mania at all.

I have frequently received letters from persons in all parts of the country, principally in the West, asking for some of Jesse’s hair and other absurd requests that I have not paid any attention to.

The story of Jesse sticking knives into raw flesh is also false. I think his vaccination had more effect on him than anything else.
He was vaccinated when he was four weeks old, and shortly after, his face broke out and had the appearance of raw flesh, and some fluid issued from the wounds that burned my arm when it dropped on it, from which fact I judge the fluid was poison. This lasted until he was six months old, when his whole body was covered with large abscesses, one of which was over the eye and occasioned that cast or fallen appearance that it wears at present. At the time, it was thought he would die, but he recovered slowly, and Dr. Lane, who attended him, stated that the sickness was occasioned by vaccination.