Fiend (25 page)

Accounts of other shocking crimes filled the New York and Boston dailies. Within the course of a few weeks in fall of 1874, the front pages were packed with blaring headlines: “ATROCIOUS MURDER IN HACKENSACK, N.J.,” “DOUBLE MURDER AT NEW ROCHELLE,” “MURDER AND LYNCH LAW IN TENNESSEE,” “A WOMAN BRUTALLY MURDERED BY HER HUSBAND,” “A CONDEMNED MURDERER KILLS HIS KEEPER,” “AN ENTIRE FAMILY MURDERED AND BURNED,” “MORE WHOLESALE MURDER AND CREMATION,” and others. One of the more shocking stories came from Topeka, Kansas, where a teenaged grocery clerk named Fred Olds—after arguing with his employer over a checkers game—shot the older man with a carbine, finished him off with a cheese knife, then buried his corpse in the cellar. The next morning, Olds calmly reopened the store, telling customers that his boss had suddenly been called East on personal business.

Most appalling of all, however, was the case of the Colorado man-eater, Alfred (aka “Alferd”) Packer. Though his crimes had first come to light in the spring of 1874, it wasn’t until mid-October—when
Harper’s Weekly
ran a gruesomely illustrated, front-page account—that the case gained nationwide notoriety.

Born in 1842, Packer had started his career as a shoemaker, a
trade he abandoned for good after enlisting in the Union army during the Civil War. (It was during his military stint that he began to be known as “Alferd,” supposedly after a semiliterate tattoo artist etched the misspelling onto Packer’s forearm.) Following his disability discharge (for epilepsy), Packer headed out West to try his hand at gold mining. By 1873, he was working as a wilderness guide in Utah and Colorado.

On November 17 of that year, he set out from Provo, Utah, as the leader of a twenty-one-man prospecting party headed for the gold fields near Breckenridge, Colorado. Two months later—after an arduous trek during which they were reduced to subsisting on their horses’ feed—the exhausted band straggled into a camp of Ute Indians near the confluence of the Gunnison and Uncompaghre Rivers. They were welcomed by Chief Ouray—widely known throughout the West for his friendly relations with whites—who advised them to wait until spring before attempting to negotiate the snow-covered mountains. After a few restless weeks, however, Packer and five of his companions—Shannon Bell, James Humphreys, Frank Miller, George Noon, and Israel Swan—decided to risk the journey. On a mild day in early February, 1874, the six men bid farewell to their Indian hosts and headed off into the mountains.

Only one of them was ever seen alive again. Sixty-six days after leaving the Ute camp—on April 17, 1874—Packer alone appeared at the Los Pinos Indian Agency. When questioned about the fate of his five comrades, he initially claimed that—after becoming too footsore and snow-blind to travel—he had been abandoned by the others, who had gone off in search of food and shelter. When it became clear that they had no intention of returning for him, he had somehow managed to fight his way out of the mountains.

This story was greeted with a good deal of skepticism. Among other things, Packer looked suspiciously fit for a man who had supposedly suffered near-starvation; he was also equipped with Frank Miller’s hunting knife and Israel Swan’s rifle, and had a pocketful of money that he began spending freely at a frontier saloon. Subjected to a second, far more grueling interrogation, he related a grisly tale of bloodshed and cannibalism.

According to Packer’s confession, he and his five companions had become snowbound in the mountains not long after leaving the camp of Chief Ouray. Within two weeks, their food supplies
had run out. When Israel Swan, the oldest of the group, perished of hunger and exposure, the others—Packer included—had feasted on his flesh. Humphreys died next, then Miller. Their bodies, too, served to keep the survivors alive. George Noon was the fourth to go—killed, according to Packer, by Bell. When the two survivors had picked Noon’s body clean of meat, Bell tried to murder Packer, who slew his attacker in self-defense, then cannibalized his corpse.

Several months later, in early August, a magazine illustrator named J. A. Randolph—working on a story about the ill-fated expedition for
Harper’s Weekly
—stumbled on the remains of Packer’s five companions. The article—complete with Randolph’s graphic engravings of the decomposed corpses—appeared in the October 17, 1874, issue, sending shockwaves of horror throughout the country.

Packer was ultimately sentenced to hang by Judge Melville Gerry, who—according to legend—indignantly declared: “Packer, there were only seven Democrats in all of Hinsdale County, and you ate five of them, you son of a bitch!” Three years later, defense lawyers managed to obtain a retrial. This time, the “man-eater” was sentenced to forty years in the state penitentiary. Paroled in 1901, he settled in Littleton, Colorado, just south of Denver, where he lived out his days regaling the local youngsters with colorful tales of life in the old West.

Sensational violence, of course, was only one of the topics that kept the country riveted in the fall of 1874. Intense as it was, the morbid fascination exerted by the Packer case was overshadowed by the public’s unbridled obsession with the scandalous allegations surrounding the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. Then, as now, few things sold more newspapers than lurid accounts of sexual misconduct among the nation’s most eminent men.

Beecher wasn’t merely eminent; he was a major celebrity, whose “Gospel of Love”—spread through his sermons, speeches, newspaper columns, and magazine articles—struck a powerfully responsive chord in his Gilded Age contemporaries. His weekly services at the Plymouth Church in the fashionable neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights drew admirers by the thousands. Though unremarkable in appearance—in 1874, he was a portly, moon-faced sixty-one-year-old—he possessed a charismatic appeal, particularly to women. His flowery orations, delivered
with a showman’s flair, inspired the kind of female adulation that, in future generations, would be lavished on crooners, movie idols, and rock stars.

One of his most ardent followers was thirty-five-year-old Elizabeth Tilton, whose husband, Theodore, was Beecher’s closest friend. In 1868—after turning to Beecher for solace following the death of her newborn son—Elizabeth embarked on an eighteen-month affair with the older man (whose own marriage, to an aloof and censorious woman named Eunice, had been emotionally bankrupt for years). Their illicit relationship remained a secret until 1870, when a guilt-ridden Elizabeth finally confessed to her husband, who in turn confided in a number of prominent friends. Before long, Beecher’s adultery had been exposed in the press, precipitating the greatest sex scandal of the era.

For months, accusations and denials flew back and forth, with Beecher indignantly denying the charges, and his supporters (including his famous sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe) rallying to his defense. In the fall of 1874, matters came to a head when Tilton brought suit against Beecher, charging him with adultery and demanding $100,000 in damages. Eventually (and in spite of the overwhelming evidence of his guilt), Beecher would be acquitted. His wildy sensational trial (covered by the press with a prurient zeal that made it the late-nineteenth-century equivalent of the O.J. Simpson media circus) kept the nation transfixed from January through July, 1875, a six-month span that coincided with a period of renewed furor over another sensational story—the crimes, accountability, and punishment of the Boston “boy fiend,” Jesse Harding Pomeroy.

30

Christine:
Tell me, do children ever commit murders? Or is crime something that’s learned gradually, so that only adults do really dreadful things?

Tasker:
Well, I have thought about that, and so have several authorities I’ve consulted lately. Yes, children have often committed murders, and quite clever ones, too.

—Maxwell Anderson,
The Bad Seed

F
or the three days of its duration, the trial of Jesse Harding Pomeroy for the murder of Horace H. Millen was not only front-page news in every Boston paper but also the hottest show in town. So many people clamored for admission each morning that the courthouse guards—unable to handle the crowds—had to be assisted by a special detail of police. Still, the
real
commotion wouldn’t begin until after the verdict was rendered—and it wouldn’t subside for more than a year.

With the Supreme Judicial Courtroom packed to capacity, the proceedings got underway on Tuesday, December 8, 1874, at precisely 9:30
A.M.
As Jesse was led to the dock, several hundred spectators half-rose from their seats, straining to get a better look at the notorious “boy fiend,” who hadn’t been seen in public since the previous spring. Except for his jailhouse pallor, he looked essentially the same. His preternatural composure hadn’t changed, either. Throughout the trial, he seemed coolly indifferent to—even bored by—the proceedings.

At least one observer, however—a reporter for the
Globe
—claimed to perceive an occasional crack in Jesse’s stolid demeanor, one that exposed the prisoner’s deep, underlying malevolence. According to this writer, “While the counsel were
relating his atrocities and the manner in which they were committed, Pomeroy found it difficult to restrain his laughter, and his face gave evidence of a secret pleasure.”

The empanelling process went briskly, and by 11:00
A.M.
, twelve jurors had been selected and sworn in: Moses H. Libby, Ira E. Sanborn, Reuben Rice, Warren J. Poor, Charles H. Joy, George D. Wise, Henry H. Chandler, Eugene T. Hosford, Samuel Mills, Otis Dudley, W. Eames Stillman, and Henry S. Linnell, who was appointed foreman by the Court. The clerk then read the indictment. Immediately afterward, District Attorney John W. May rose to deliver the opening argument for the Commonwealth.

May’s statement (which typified the entire trial) was a brisk, no-nonsense affair that wasted little energy on courtroom histrionics or sentimental appeals. He began by explaining that, in earlier ages, no distinctions were drawn between different types of homicide (which he defined as “the intentional killing of a fellow being”). Murder—“even its least aggravated form”—had invariably been punished by death.

As civilization developed, however, and the “spirit of Christianity” modified the harsh practices of former times, a “more humane view” gradually arose. “It was found,” May observed, “that there were degrees of depravity even in murder itself.” Eventually, the law had come to discriminate between killings committed in the heat of passion and those perpetrated “with deliberately premeditated malice aforethought, or with extreme atrocity or cruelty.” Only the latter crimes were defined as murder in the first degree. The evidence to be presented to the jurors, May suggested, would leave no doubt in their minds that the present case fell into that category.

May then proceeded to recount the “main facts” of the crime, beginning with the discovery of the little boy’s savaged corpse—the body still warm, the throat cut, the chest punctured with “fifteen or twenty” stab-wounds, the genitals horribly mutilated. After being removed to Police Station Nine in Roxbury and “thence to the undertaker’s,” the body was identified as that of little Horace Millen—“an infant, I might call him, four years and three months old”—whose parents had only recently moved to South Boston.

Next, May summarized the evidence against the defendant: the testimony of various witnesses who had seen the older boy
leading the younger one onto the marsh; the precise correspondence between Pomeroy’s boots and the footprints found at the murder scene; the findings of the inquest. As if all this weren’t compelling enough, the “Commonwealth will also introduce to you another and distinct species of evidence,” proclaimed the D. A. “This is a confession!” Though this confession alone was sufficient to convict Pomeroy, May continued, “it was thought the prudent and the better course to present to you, substantially, everything that was known about the matter. And it is with that view that I have detailed to you the evidence which the Commonwealth believes will satisfy you that Horace H. Millen was murdered by Jesse Harding Pomeroy!”

After appealling to the jurors to discharge “faithfully and fearlessly” the duty they had undertaken—a duty they owed to themselves, to society, and to public justice—the D.A. concluded his statement and rejoined his colleague, Attorney General Charles Train, at the prosecutor’s table.

The Commonwealth’s case began with the testimony of Horace H. Moses, a civil engineer and surveyor who had mapped out the localities involved in the case, from Mrs. Pomeroy’s shop on Broadway to the place where the victim’s body had been found. Moses’s diagram hung on the wall facing the jury box and would serve as a crucial reference chart throughout the trial.

The remainder of the morning session was taken up by a string of government witnesses who—under questioning by District Attorney May—methodically traced the events of that raw April morning, eight months earlier, when little Horace Millen had been led to his death. Referring to Moses’s map, twelve-year-old George Powers indicated the exact spot on the marshland—“about half a mile from the railroad” and “within twelve feet of the waterline”—where he and his deaf-mute brother, James, had stumbled on the body. He then told how he had alerted two older men who were out shooting on the marsh. The latter—Patrick Wise and Obed Goodspeed—corroborated Powers’s testimony, adding detailed descriptions of the conditon of the corpse: the blood issuing from the eyes, the throat slashed, the hands badly cut.