Fiend (5 page)

—Anonymous,
The Life of Jesse H. Pomeroy, the Boy Fiend
(1875)

O
n August 17, 1872, a child named George Pratt became the fifth known victim of the “boy torturer.” This time, however, the outrage did not take place in Chelsea. It happened in South Boston—not far from the neighborhood that Ruth Ann Pomeroy and her two young sons had moved into a few weeks earlier.

Shortly before ten on that sultry Saturday morning, the Pratt boy—a frail, pallid seven-year-old who had recently recovered from a bout of the German measles—was walking on the beach along South Boston bay, searching for any treasures that might have washed up onto the sand. All at once, he became aware that he was no longer alone—someone had come up beside him.

It was an older boy, who told George that he needed help with an errand and would reward him with the impressive sum of twenty-five cents. When George agreed, the stranger led him to an abandoned boathouse. Once inside, the older boy struck George a powerful blow on the side of the head, then—after forcing a filthy handkerchief into the stunned child’s mouth—stripped him naked and tightly bound his wrists and ankles with two pieces of cord.

“You have told three lies,” the older boy said cryptically, his
voice trembling with a strange excitation. “And I am going to lick you three times.”

In spite of the stifling air inside the little building, the seven-year-old was shivering with terror. But his fear only seemed to make his attacker more aroused. In the dimness, George could not make out the older boy’s features. But he could hear him panting with excitement.

Very suddenly, the older boy tore off his leather belt and—dancing about in a kind of frenzy—began flogging George with the buckle. After a while, he started to kick the boy savagely—in the head, in the stomach, between the legs. He dug his dirt-caked fingernails into the boy’s upper body and raked deep, ragged furrows across his abdomen and chest. At one point, he bent his head to the seven-year-old’s face and—like a scavenger battening on fresh kill—bit a chunk of flesh from his cheek.

When the little boy began to lose consciousness, his tormentor slapped him awake. The child’s eyes fluttered open and—through his tears—he saw the big boy’s hand only inches away, holding something slender and shiny.

“Know what I’m going to do now?” the big boy said.

George made a high-pitched, imploring sound deep in his throat. The thing in the big boy’s hand was a long sewing needle.

“Little bastard,” the big boy hissed and jabbed George in the arm with the needle. The seven-year-old shrieked, but his cry was muffled by the gag.

The big boy jabbed George in the chest. Then in his wounded cheek. Then he pulled the writhing boy’s legs apart and thrust the needle into his groin.

George’s eyes were squeezed tight with the pain. The older boy started fumbling with George’s right eyelids, trying to pry them apart. Finally, he managed to expose the white of the eyeball. But the little boy’s face was so slippery—with tears, blood, and perspiration—that his tormentor’s fingers lost their purchase on his skin, and George was able to clamp his lids shut again. He twisted his head and pressed his face against the floor of the outhouse so that his tormentor couldn’t get at his eyes.

Suddenly he felt a sharp, tearing pain in the right cheek of his buttocks and realized that the other boy had bitten off another piece of his flesh.

*  *  *

The outrage committed against little George Pratt (who was discovered several hours after the attack by a local fisherman and immediately rushed to the City Marshal’s office) caused a panic among the parents of Boston and its environs. “The public began to lose patience with the upholders of law and order,” wrote one contemporary journalist. “There were many grumblings. People favored the creation of a vigilance committee in Boston. Mothers hardly allowed their children off their door-steps. An atmosphere of terrified suspense settled down over the neighborhoods.”

Assuming that only a child suffering from a severe mental deficiency could commit such dreadful crimes, the police rounded up “every half-witted boy in Greater Boston” (in the words of one newspaper story) and brought him in for questioning. But the actual perpetrator was far from “half-witted.” On the contrary, he had an unusually cunning mind. It was precisely this quality that made him so dangerous—that and the deeply malevolent passions which, at the age of twelve, already had possession of his soul.

7

My prayer is,

“UTINAM DEUS AUX ILIRIAT BOSTONIAM.”

Oh that God would come to the rescue of Boston!

—Rev. Henry Morgan,
Boston Turned Inside Out!
(1880)

T
hree months had elapsed between the assault on Tracy Hayden and the attack on Robert Maier. Between the latter incident and the torture of Johnny Balch less than two months had gone by. And it was only three weeks later that the “boy torturer” brutalized George Pratt.

This kind of pattern is characteristic of sociopathic behavior. For example, a hiatus of several months separated the first two killings committed by Earle Leonard Nelson—the so-called “Gorilla Murderer” who strangled more than two dozen women during a cross-country spree in the mid-1920s. By contrast, his last two victims were killed within twenty-four hours of each other. The same was true of Ted Bundy, who began his unspeakable career by murdering four young women in the course of four months, and ended it by savagely attacking a quartet of coeds in the span of a few hours.

The “boy torturer” who terrorized Chelsea and South Boston in 1872 was not a serial killer—not yet, at any rate. But he was already a budding sexual psychopath with the sadistic drives (if not yet the physical capabilities) of a classic lust-murderer. Criminals of this ilk typically possess an appetite that (to paraphrase Hamlet) grows by what it feeds on, becoming more urgent—even frenzied—with each new atrocity. And this would prove to be the case with the Boston “boy torturer,” whose attacks on little children would grow increasingly frequent—and increasingly savage.

It was during his next attack—committed on Thursday, September 5, 1872—that the “boy torturer” first used a knife.

His victim was a six-year-old child named Harry Austin, who was taken to a spot beneath a railroad bridge in South Boston. There, his tormentor stripped off his clothes, beat him black-and-blue, then pulled out a pocket knife and stabbed the shrieking child under each arm and between the shoulder blades. Raising the bloody knife high in the air, the older boy capered about his victim, laughing and cursing.

Then, squatting on his haunches, he forced the Austin boy’s legs apart, took hold of his penis, and tried to cut it off.

*  *  *

The seventh attack occured less than one week later, on Wednesday, September 11. This time, the “boy torturer” lured a seven-year-old named Joseph Kennedy to a vacant boathouse near the salt marshes of South Boston bay. Once inside the building, he slammed his victim’s head against the wall, stripped him naked, and administered a ferocious beating, breaking the little’s boy’s nose and knocking out several of his teeth. Then, pulling out his pocketknife, he forced the seven-year-old to kneel and ordered him to recite a profane travesty of the Lord’s Prayer, in which obscenities were substituted for Scripture.

When young Joseph refused to commit this blasphemy, his tormentor slashed him on his face, his back, his thighs. Then he dragged the bleeding child down to the marsh and—laughing delightedly at the little boy’s suffering—doused his wounds with salt water.

*  *  *

Just six days later, on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 17, three railroad workers, walking along a remote stretch of the Hartford and Erie line in South Boston, found the limp and naked body of a five-year-old boy, lashed to a telegraph pole beside the tracks. The boy’s scalp had been slashed and his face was drenched in blood. He was carried to Police Station Six, where a physician was called. Eventually, the boy—whose name was Robert Gould—was able to give a coherent account of what had befallen him.

He had been playing near his house when a bigger boy approached and asked Robert if he wanted to go see some soldiers
marching in a parade. Robert, who had never seen a parade before, eagerly agreed.

Leading Robert to the railroad line, the bigger boy had marched him along the tracks a considerable distance. Eventually, Robert began to grow tired and confused. He couldn’t see any soldiers. In fact, he couldn’t see anybody else at all; he seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. He was just about to ask his companion how much farther they had to go, when—with a startling cry—the big boy set upon Robert, stripping off all his clothes and tying him to a pole.

Pulling out two knives, one much larger than the other, the older boy had danced gleefully around the boy, spouting filthy words and slashing his victim on the head, under the eyes, and behind each ear. Then he had placed the blade of the bigger knife against Robert’s throat and said, “You will never see your mother and father anymore, you stinking little bastard, for I am going to kill you.”

Robert could feel the sharp edge of the blade pressing against his windpipe. All at once, however, his tormentor cursed, dropped his knife, and ran—evidently scared away by the approaching railroad workers, who came upon the bound and bleeding child just a few moments later.

That Robert Gould had become the eighth victim of the diabolical “boy torturer” seemed indisputable. Everything about the crime paralleled the previous outrages. There was, however, a single and very significant difference between this case and the others. Unlike all the preceding victims—who had been too terrorized, traumatized, or simply unobservant to recall any distinguishing features of the culprit—Robert had noticed a peculiar physical detail. Questioned by an officer named Bragdon, the five-year-old described his assailant as a “big bad boy with a funny eye.”

“Funny in what way?” Officer Bragdon asked gently.

Robert—who, like other children, loved to play marbles—explained that his attacker had an eye like a “milkie.”

“A milkie?” asked Bragdon.

A marble that was all white, the little boy explained, like the color of milk.

Robert Gould’s observation would prove to be a breakthrough. For the first time, the authorities possessed a critical
clue to the identity of the bloodthirsty juvenile who had been terrorizing Boston for the better part of a year. By the following day, some newspapers were already referring to this shadowy figure by a new and unsettling nickname. He was no longer the “boy torturer. He was the “boy with the marble eye.”

8

If thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.

—Matthew 6:23

T
he precise cause of Jesse Pomeroy’s disfigurement is hard to determine, since contemporary accounts differ. According to one source, he developed cataracts soon after his birth. Another states that he suffered from a severe childhood illness that left him with corneal scars. A third insists that his eye became ulcerated from a virulent facial infection. And several claim that a violent reaction to a smallpox vaccination left him half-blind.

All that can be said with certainty is that, from a very young age, his right pupil was covered with a pale, lustreless film, as though (in the words of one boyhood acquaintance) there was “a white lace curtain” pulled over it. It is also the case that this albino eye rarely failed to have a powerful effect on others. Many people (including, according to certain accounts, his own father) could barely look at it without a shudder. To others—primarily the bigger, crueler boys in the neighborhood—his “marble eye” made him an object of ridicule and contempt.

Of course, it was not only Jesse’s unsettling appearance that made him seem so peculiar to his peers. It was his eccentric behavior, too. Years later—after Jesse had achieved such notoriety that the newspapers never tired of running stories about his life and crimes—one of his former schoolmates would recall the days, shortly after the Pomeroy family moved to South Boston, when the neighborhood boys would gather to play. The schoolmate’s name was George Thompson, and his reminiscences appeared in a
Boston Globe
article headlined “Pomeroy’s Evil Eye.”