Fiend (34 page)

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Sunday school at the Warren Avenue Baptist Church was dismissed at around half past three that balmy afternoon, May 23, 1875. Emerging from the Reverend George F. Pentecost’s classroom, little Mabel found her aunt—a woman named Hobbs—waiting to escort her home. After greeting her niece, Mrs. Hobbs turned back to the woman she’d been chatting with, the mother of one of Mabel’s classmates. Their conversation lasted another ten minutes or so. When the two women were finished talking, Mrs. Hobbs glanced around the vestibule for her niece. But the little girl was nowhere to be seen.

After a quick, fruitless search of the premises, Mrs. Hobbs went outside, assuming that Mabel was waiting on the sidewalk, perhaps playing with some friends. A dozen or so people were
milling on the sun-washed street. Her niece, however, wasn’t among them.

Thinking that the little girl had grown impatient and started off without her, Mrs. Hobbs was about to head for home when a ghastly sound caused her heart to quail. It was the agonized cry of a child, emanating from the belfry of the church. Three male passersby, startled by the noise, dashed into the church, broke down a locked door leading to the tower, then quickly mounted the steep, narrow staircase. Arrived at the first landing, they immediately spotted a puddle of fresh blood and—poorly concealed under a loose floorboard—an object that proved to be a cricket bat, its wide, flat blade spattered with gore.

Proceeding up the long, ladderlike stairway that ascended to the next level of the tower, the men came to a heavy trapdoor. Grunting with the effort, the young man in the lead shoved it open and scrambled up into the belfry, followed by his companions. Dozens of pigeons, who made the belfry their roost, fluttered and cooed in an apparent state of agitation. On the floor lay a terrible sight—a grievously wounded little girl, emitting pitiful moans. One hand held tight to her Sabbath school books; the other was clutched to her cheek. The bridge of her nose was smashed flat, and the lower part of her face had turned a deep purple. Her yellow hair and white dress were drenched with blood. Her glassy eyes were open and unseeing.

As gently as possible, the men carried her down to the street. At the first sight of her niece, Mrs. Hobbs fainted. Bleeding and groaning, the child was carried to the nearby home of Mr. William Chesley, where she was promptly attended by a neighborhood doctor named Cotting. Palpating the scalp above her left ear, Dr. Cotting could feel the child’s brains oozing through the shattered skull. There was clearly no hope for the little girl. As it happened, she clung to life longer than anyone expected, dying shortly after 8:00
P.M.
on Monday, May 24, without ever having regained full consciousness.

By then, a suspect was already under arrest. Thomas W. Piper, the sexton of the church, was a reclusive young bachelor in his mid-twenties—a small, stoutly built man with wavy black hair, a curling moustache, and an unhealthy complexion. He had secured his position seventeen months earlier through the influence of his brother, Erastus, a pew-owner and regular attendant
of the church. For the most part, Piper performed his duties reliably, keeping the premises nicely maintained and ringing the bell at the requisite hours. Still, his behavior had raised the eyebrows of more than one congregant. In recent months, he had been seen reading lurid novels during the Reverend Pentecost’s sermons and engaging in inappropriate banter with some of the more nubile church members. According to rumor, he also had a fondness for the bottle. Had his respected older brother, Erastus, not vouched so emphatically for him, Piper might well have been fired long before the Mabel Young tragedy came to pass.

Certainly, the members of the Warren Avenue Baptist Church would have insisted on his dismissal had they known another fact about their sexton. In December, 1873—shortly before he was hired—Piper had been arrested as a suspect in the vicious murder of a servant girl named Bridget Landregan, whose skull had been crushed with a makeshift club during an attempted rape. Piper had ultimately been released for lack of evidence. But the Boston police had continued to keep him under scrutiny.

It was for this reason that—as soon as he heard about the attack on Mabel Young—Chief of Police Savage (who lived just a few blocks away from the church) ordered one of his men to take Piper into custody. Questioned at Police Station Five, the sexton stoutly denied his guilt and insisted that he did not even possess a key to the tower. When asked to empty his pockets, however, he produced a large bunch of keys—one of which turned out to fit the lock on the tower door. In the meantime, investigators conducted a search of his room. Besides several half-empty bottles of whiskey (at least one of which had been spiked with the opium-based nostrum, laudanum), they discovered a bloody handkerchief and collar stuffed inside a bureau drawer.

Over the course of the next few hours, Piper offered various, conflicting accounts of his whereabout at the time of the murder and seemed inordinately agitated for a man with nothing to hide. At one point in the interrogation, Savage asked him point-blank: “Piper, how could you find it in your heart to murder that innocent little child?” Piper made no reply. Suddenly, his lower lip began to tremble violently and he burst into tears.

Within twenty-four hours, the evidence against him continued to pile up. Several church members told police that they had noticed Piper unlocking the door to the tower shortly before the
murder took place. Another highly reliable witness testified that—at around 3:45
P.M.
on Sunday—he had seen a man resembling Piper leap from a window in the church tower, drop ten feet to the sidewalk, then dash along Warren Avenue and disappear into the sexton’s house.

At least three little girls came forward to say that, during the past two weeks, Piper had tried to lure them into the belfry by offering to show them the pigeons. The murder weapon, moreover—a cricket bat used by the little boys of the congregation during church picnics—was routinely stored in the sexton’s quarters.

Eventually, Piper would confess not only to the killings of Mabel Young and Bridget Landregan but to two other unsolved homicides as well: the December 1873 rape-murder of a young woman named Sullivan, who had been savagely bludgeoned with a club, and a nearly identical assault seven months later on a young prostitute named Mary Tynam.

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From the moment it occurred, the Piper atrocity drew comparisons with the Pomeroy case. On the morning after the attack, for example, the
Boston Globe
described it as an example of what we now call “copycat” crime. The vicious assault on the five-year-old child, said the paper, “appears to be of an entirely Jesse Pomeroy character. It is a well-known fact in the history of crime that after the commission of a terrible deed, others of a similar character frequently follow, the actors in which appear to have no other motive actuating them than that of imitation, induced by a sort of maniacal impulse. To such a species of insanity the present crime might be attributed.”

To many Bostonians, the murder of Mabel Young, coming so soon after the Pomeroy slayings, meant nothing less than that their city was in the midst of a “criminal epidemic” (as the
Globe
called it)—an outbreak of violence against children that could only be fought with the most Draconian measures. The public—roused to such a pitch of fury that there was open talk of lynching Piper—was in no mood for leniency. Within a week of Mabel Young’s death, even people who were formerly opposed to Jesse Pomeroy’s execution had done an abrupt about-face. the
New York Times,
in an editorial on the subject, took note of this shift:

Suddenly, the tone of public opinion has changed. It is said by one Boston paper, which undoubtedly reflects the general sentiment in the city, that “the feeling in favor of the execution of POMEROY has had an accession of intensity from the tragedy of a week ago that no one can fail to recognize.” That is to say, people who were not before in favor of hanging the boy are now in favor of it because there has been another brutal child-murder. . . . A community, or at least a goodly portion of it, is shocked by a tragedy of uncommon wickedness, and it demands blood.

In the end, the editorial concluded, Pomeroy “may not be executed for the murder of HORACE MILLEN, though he was convicted of it, but for the killing of MABEL YOUNG, with which he had nothing to do.”

And indeed, the outrage over the “Belfry Tragedy”—as the Piper case was quickly tagged—had an immediate impact on the Pomeroy debate. Within days of Mabel Young’s death, letters like the following (from a gentleman named Ezra Farnsworth) began pouring into the governor’s office: “The extreme necessity of executing justice in a case like that of the young fiend Pomeroy is made more clear, if possible, on account of the hideous murder perpetrated so recently upon the innocent little child, Mabel Young. Delay in the punishment of crime is one of the reasons—it may indeed be the most important one—for the increase of it. If there was more
certainty
that punishment would follow the commission of crime—and follow
speedily
—probably fewer crimes would be committed.”

The drive for Jesse’s execution also intensified within Governor Gaston’s own circle. Lieutenant Governor Knight, who had been lobbying against clemency all along, became even more emphatic in his demands for Pomeroy’s death. When Thomas Piper was ultimately convicted and sentenced to be hanged, Knight urged the governor to schedule Pomeroy’s execution for the very same day.

The enormous pressure brought to bear on Gaston in the wake of the “Belfry Tragedy” finally forced him to take action. On the afternoon of Friday, July 2, 1875, he brought the
Executive Council together for a formal vote on the question of commutation. After a debate lasting more than four hours, the council members decided, by a vote of five to four, that Pomeroy’s death sentence should stand.

Only one thing now stood between Jesse and the gallows: Governor William Gaston’s signature on his death warrant.

39

Let us write good long letters to each other and so beguile our captivity.

—Jesse Pomeroy, letter to Willie Baxter

W
hile the outrage over Mabel Young’s murder swirled about him, Jesse continued to languish in the Suffolk County jail. Each of his days consisted of the same, unvarying routine. A guard would bang on his cell door at 6:00
A.M.
and bring him a meager breakfast of coffee and bread. For the next few hours, Jesse would peruse the inspirational volumes supplied by an elderly spinster named Burnham, whose life was devoted to various charitable causes.

Dinner—the only substantial meal of the day—arrived at 11:30
A.M.
Except for Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, when his menu was varied slightly, Jesse was given the same food day after day: boiled meat and potatoes (along with an occasional treat delivered by his mother).

After a brief, postprandial nap, he would return to his reading and studying. At 4:30
P.M.,
a light supper was served. Like his breakfast, this meal consisted entirely of bread and coffee. Shortly afterward, the seventy-year-old chaplain, “Uncle” Cook, would make his daily visit, followed by the kindly Miss Burnham. An hour or so after sundown, Jesse settled back on his bunk and went to sleep.

Given the extreme tedium of this existence, it is no wonder that Jesse reacted so excitedly when a former playmate of his ended up in jail. It happened in the third week of June, not long after the “Belfry Tragedy” occurred. The boy’s name was Willie Baxter. Arrested for petty thievery after pilfering a few bottles of whiskey from a railroad boxcar, he was placed in the cell directly adjacent to his notorious acquaintance. And his presence there
over the next few weeks provided a welcome diversion for Pomeroy.

It is possible to document Jesse’s feelings at this time thanks to a series of remarkable notes he exchanged with Willie Baxter during the latter’s brief incarceration. For more than a century, these fading, fragile letters lay hidden in an old file box, and are reprinted here for the first time (with misspellings and punctuation errors intact). As absolutely direct, unvarnished expressions of the “boy fiend’s” voice, they shed invaluable light not only on Jesse’s general intelligence but—even more significantly—on his twisted inner life. Indeed—apart from the crimes themselves—they offer the most provocative clues we have to the nature, extent, and even ultimate source of his extreme psychopathology.

The letters were written with a stubby lead pencil on sheets of unlined paper ripped from a school notebook that had been given to Jesse by Miss Burnham. Jesse’s script is perfectly legible, if strikingly inelegant—the handwriting of a schoolboy who has laboriously mastered the basic elements of cursive. (It is easy to imagine him composing his letters with the tip of his tongue protruding from a corner of his mouth.) His style of expression is also fairly rudimentary and even childish at times, though he was capable of turning a surprisingly sophisticated phrase. (The dime novels beloved by Jesse and his contemporaries might have been full of sensationalistic violence, but—in contrast to the high-tech pastimes of modern-day teens—they at least promoted literacy.)