Fiend (4 page)

*  *  *

By the following morning, word of the most recent assault had spread throughout Chelsea. Over the next few weeks, hundreds of boys were questioned by the police. At some point, a rumor sprang up that the attacker was a young man with fiery red hair, pale skin, arched eyebrows, and a pointy chin adorned with a wispy, red beard. Parents began to warn their children to watch out for this red-haired stranger—never realizing that this Mephistophelean figure was a figment of communal fears: a description, not of the actual perpetrator, but of a devil.

4

Fathers began to tell their boys to be careful of a man with red hair and beard, and mothers were anxious if their boys were out of sight for half-a-day.

—
Boston Globe,
September 21, 1872

I
t had been, for the seven-year-old boy, a fine summer day: his favorite pancake breakfast, followed by several intensely gratifying hours playing street games—shinny, old cat, kick-the-can—with his friends. Now, he was wending his way home. The weather was perfect—cloudless and balmy. In spite of the tempting dinner that awaited him—the roast joint of mutton with mashed potatoes and flour gravy that his mother fixed every weekend—he was in no particular hurry as he ambled along the empty streets on that sleepy afternoon, July 22, 1872.

Though there were shorter ways home, he chose the route that led past Polley’s Toy Shop on Park Street. Arrived at the store, he cupped his hands on either side of his eyes and put his face close to the display window. He knew its contents by heart—the tin soldiers, clockwork acrobats, cast-iron locomotives, wooden circus animals, repeating cap pistols, Crandall building blocks, kaleidoscopes, mechanical banks, and soap-bubble blowers.

But as he surveyed these treasures, his gaze fell on something he had never seen before—a miniature wooden castle, complete with moat, drawbridge, a crew of wooden pirates, and a working toy cannon that fired marble-sized balls. Directly beneath the battlement of the colorfully painted façade were the stenciled words: “Kaptain Kidd’s Kastle.” It was a plaything guaranteed to produce a covetous pang in the breast of any seven-year-old
boy. But its price—two dollars—placed it completely beyond his reach.

Suddenly, he gave a start. Someone had tapped him roughly on the shoulder. He turned and squinted up at the person, whose face—backlit by the bright midday sun—was hard for him to see.

“What’s your name?” the stranger said gruffly.

“Johnny,” the boy replied. “Johnny Balch.”

“How’d you like to make two bits, Johnny?”

Ever since the spring, Johnny’s parents had warned him to beware of a bearded, redheaded stranger. But this person didn’t have red hair or a beard. He wasn’t even a grown-up man, but an older boy—maybe fifteen or sixteen.

“I guess I would,” said Johnny.

“Then come with me,” said the strange boy. “I will take you to the man.”

“What man?” Johnny asked.

“The one with the money. He wants you to do an errand—to carry a small bundle.”

Johnny hesitated—but only for a moment. Twenty-five cents wouldn’t buy him the toy castle that had just become his heart’s most avid desire. But it would purchase a plentiful supply of penny candy.

“Sure,” he said.

Without another word, the older boy turned and began to walk toward Powder Horn Hill, Johnny following a few paces behind.

There was a brickyard at the top of the hill. Leading the little boy toward an outhouse at the far end of the yard, the older boy came to a halt. Johnny looked around for the man they were supposed to meet—but there was no one else in sight.

Very suddenly, the older boy grabbed Johnny by the shirt collar, yanked him into the outhouse, and slammed the door shut.

“If you make a sound,” he growled to the startled boy, “I will kill you.”

A whimper rose in Johnny’s throat, but—with an effort that made his eyes tear—he swallowed it back.

Very quickly, the older boy tore off all of Johnny’s clothes. Then—in a series of swift, practiced movements—he drew a
length of rope from his pants pocket, lashed together the little boy’s wrists, tossed the opposite end of the rope over an exposed roofbeam, and hauled Johhny into the air of the stinking little outbuilding.

“Now I will flog you!” cried the older boy, his voice quivering with a terrible excitement.

Pulling off his belt, he began to beat the dangling boy all over the body, beginning with his back, then his chest and belly, his thighs, his buttocks. He saved the child’s genitals for last. The torture lasted for nearly ten minutes.

All at once, the older boy let out a long, tremulous moan. His frenzy subsided. He stood in the murk of the outhouse, panting heavily, as though he had just run a great distance. Then he lowered the sobbing boy to the ground, undid the rope from his wrists, and hissed: “If you leave this place, I will come back and slit your throat.”

Coiling up the rope, he slipped it back into his pocket, threw open the outhouse door, and vanished.

For the next two hours, Johnny Balch—his body mottled with black-and-blue welts—lay naked on the floor of the outhouse. It wasn’t until nearly five o’clock that a passerby named Frank Kane heard his muffled cries and—after helping the half-conscious boy back into his clothes—carried him all the way to the City Marshal’s office. A physician was called, a statement taken, and an officer sent to notify Johnny’s parents, who—fearing that some terrible mishap had befallen their missing son—had begun their own frantic search of the neighborhood.

*  *  *

The story of the savage attack on little Johnny Balch was carried by newspapers throughout the area. Under the headline, “Unaccountable Depravity,” the
Boston Evening Transfer
of July 23, 1872, reported that “In the Common Council last night, Mr. Rogers of Ward 4, alluding to the diabolical outrage committed upon the Balch boy and to the nearly similar case of two or three months ago involving young Robert Meier, offered an order appropriating $500 as a reward for the arrest and conviction of the miscreant or miscreants. The order was unanimously adopted.”

The so-called “Boy Torturer” now had a bounty on his head. And there were plenty of people eager to collect it. Within the
week, armed vigilance committees had formed throughout Chelsea.

As the
Boston Globe
reported in a July 28 story headlined “A Fiendish Boy”: “The public are considerably excited—and it is a good thing for the inhuman scamp that his identity is unknown just now.”

5

My mother groaned! my father wept.

Into the dangerous world I leapt,

Helpless, naked, piping loud;

Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

—William Blake, “Infant Sorrow”

O
n the morning after the attack on the Balch boy, a woman named Ruth Ann Pomeroy sat at the kitchen table of the rundown little house she rented in Charlestown, reading about the incident in the local newspaper. When she looked up from the page, her face was deeply creased with concern.

The most generous of observers would have been hard-pressed to find anything complimentary to say about that face. The features—heavy jaw, jutting brow, narrow eyes, sullen mouth—had been exceptionally coarse even in her youth. Now, at the age of thirty-three, she could have easily passed for a man. A particularly dour and evil-tempered man.

Part of the harshness that suffused her face could have been traced to the tribulations of her life. She was a shrewd and industrious woman—but even so, she had always struggled bitterly to make ends meet. Now that she and her husband, Thomas, had split up, she would have to work even harder.

She had finally gotten rid of the drunken brute just a few days earlier. It happened after their younger son, Jesse, ran away from home again following a savage argument with the old man. Thomas had tracked the boy down, dragged him home, then—after ordering him upstairs—stripped off all his clothes and flogged him unmercifully with a belt. It was almost as bad as the beating he had given Jesse a few years earlier, when he had horsewhipped his son in the woodshed for playing truant.

When Ruth came home from her errands and saw her son’s back, she flew into a rage and—shrieking wildly at Thomas—went for him with a kitchen knife. Her husband had fled the house, cursing. Now she was on her own, the sole caretaker of her two young boys.

Not that Ruth herself hadn’t punished Jesse on occasion. From his earliest childhood, he had always been . . . difficult. It wasn’t that he was dim-witted. Quite the contrary. The boy had a solid head on his shoulders and always seemed to have his nose buried in a book. Still, he was constantly getting into trouble. She remembered the time, about six years back, when he was sent home from primary school for supposedly tormenting the younger children by sneaking up on them and making scary faces. And then there was that time, after they moved to Bunker Hill Street, when he’d made his teacher at the Winthrop Grammar School so angry by tossing a firecracker into a group of little boys gathered outside during recess.

And then, of course, there was the incident with the neighbor’s kitten.

For the most part, Ruth had dismissed these accusations as malicious lies. Even as a toddler, Jesse had always made an easy target for people because of his unfortunate appearance. He was a natural scapegoat, that was all.

Still, even she had to admit that he was a handful. She knew he sometimes stole small sums of money from her—money she could ill afford to spare. And he was always running away from home or playing hooky. And then there was the business with the canaries.

Ruth would have liked to brighten up their home with a songbird. But she didn’t feel easy about bringing pets into the house. Not since she had come home that afternoon a few years earlier and found the two canaries she had recently purchased on the bottom of their cage, their heads twisted completely off their bodies.

Still, she could not help feeling protective of Jesse. She was a ferociously loyal mother. And he was, after all, her baby boy.

Now, as she sat at her kitchen table, she thought about the article she had just read—about the third dreadful assault committed right across the river by the juvenile reprobate that the papers had started calling the “boy torturer.” She was worried about Jesse—and not because she was afraid that he might become another victim.

Not that she
seriously
believed he could be the culprit. Still . . . with Thomas gone and all of Chelsea in an uproar over the “boy torturer,” it might be a good time to move.

One week later, on August 2, 1872, she packed up her meager belongings and, with her two sons in tow, found a new place to live—a small frame house at 312 Broadway in South Boston.

6

These repeated cruelties on these babyish victims created a tremendous excitement all over Chelsea and South Boston. . . . Of course, the parents were half crazed, and search was made by the most skilled detectives for the ghoul-like monster who seemed to be preying on human blood. The little victims were so terrified that they could hardly give an intelligible description of the vampire who had tortured them; and for this reason, the police had very poor clues upon which to work.