Fiend (7 page)

After a brief consultation with Officer Bragdon and City Marshal W. P. Drury of Chelsea, the judge—William G. Forsaith, recently appointed to handle cases involving juvenile offenders—handed down his sentence. Jesse was to be confined to the House of Reformation at Westborough “for the term of his minority”—a period of six years. Hearing the verdict, all three members of the Pomeroy family—Jesse, his brother, Charles, and their heartbroken mother—broke into bitter tears.

As Jesse was led from the courtroom, the mothers of several
of his victims approached Ruth Pomeroy to express their sympathy—a remarkable act of Christian compassion, considering the horrors that Mrs. Pomeroy’s boy had inflicted on their own sons. As the
New York Times
reported, several of the victims present at the arraignment had suffered permanent mutilation at the hands of their attacker, who had deliberately “cut small holes under each of their eyes, so as to leave them disfigured for life.”

10

I hope you will behave up there, for if you do you will get out soon. If you don’t you will get a good flogging every time you don’t do right.

—Letter from Jesse Pomeroy to a friend

E
stablished in the town of Westborough in 1847, the Massachusetts House of Reformation—like other institutions of its kind—combined the features of a prison, sweatshop, and vocational school. Overseen by a board of trustees appointed by the governor, it was designed to turn incorrigible boys into industrious ones through a regimen of forced labor, firm discipline, and practical education—to achieve (in the words of its official charter) “reform through instruction and employment, so that when discharged the boys could enter a normal relationship with society.”

Any boy between the ages of ten and sixteen convicted of a crime against the Commonwealth could be sentenced to a term at Westborough. It was also possible for the parents of particularly unmanageable boys to have their sons committed, in the hope that a stint at reform school would straighten them out before it was too late. (One typical industrial school of the era urged the parents of “bad boys” to “send them to us at eight. Then maybe we can reform them in time.”) An inmate could be discharged, according to the charter, for only three reasons: “if his term had expired, or he had reached the age of twenty-one, or he was reformed.”

Daily life in the school consisted of a stringent routine. The boys arose at 5:00
A.M.
, made their beds, washed up in the communal washroom. They then trudged off to their morning classes, remaining in school until 7:30, when they proceeded to the dining room for their unvarying breakfast of bread and coffee.

At 8:00, the work-whistle blew, and the boys marched off to their various jobs: in the chair shop, shoe shop, sewing room, laundry, kitchen, or farmhouse. They worked until noon, with a fifteen-minute break at 10:30, then broke for their dinner: mush on Monday, hash on Tuesday, beans on Wednesday, fish chowder on Thursday, meat soup on Friday, beans again on Saturday, and leftovers on Sunday.

The boys were given a half hour to eat and another half hour to play. Then it was back to their jobs until 4:30
P.M.
, when it was time for their afternoon classes. School was dismissed at 5:30. At 6:30, dinner was served—more bread and coffee. After their meal, the boys were allowed to play for about forty-five minutes until bedtime. The lights were doused at 7:45. Altogether, the average day at Westborough consisted of nearly eight hours of work, three hours of school, and about an hour and a half for “amusement,” which—according to accounts of former inmates—more than one boy devoted to intense, yearning daydreams of escape.

Of course, there were other features of reform school life not specified in any official charter: The floggings for even the smallest infractions. The “dungeons” where the most intractable inmates were locked for prolonged stretches of solitary confinement. The brutal persecutions that smaller boys suffered at the hands of bigger ones. And the frantic, furtive, and often coercive sex.

*  *  *

Every time a new boy was admitted to the reform school, the salient facts of his case were recorded in a massive, leatherbound volume titled
History of Boys.
This volume—still preserved in the vaults of the Massachusetts State Archives—offers striking confirmation of the claim made by the
New York Times:
that the case of the Boston “boy torturer” was “one of the most remarkable on record.”

On the day Jesse Pomeroy arrived at Westborough—September 21, 1872—there were slightly more than 250 boys at the reform school. Most of them had been sent there for crimes ranging from shoplifting to breaking-and-entering. A significant number had been committed by their own fed-up parents for what the official registry calls “stubbornness.” The
History of Boys
is full of cases like that of “William Fitzgerald, 13 yrs., admitted
Sept. 13, 1872, because he will not attend school and plays with bad boys against his parents’ wishes.” Another typical entry reads: “John O’Neill, 14 yrs., admitted Sept. 2, 1872, because he stole two boxes of cigars from a store on Hanover Street.” Only one inmate in the entire population—an eighteen-year-old named Richard Moore—had been sentenced to the school for a violent assault on another person.

All of these cases, even Moore’s, appear positively trivial in comparison to that of Jesse Pomeroy, whose crimes were of a shockingly different order from those of any other boy in the history of the institution. His official entry in the reform school register—recorded on the day of his admission, when Jesse was still two months shy of his thirteenth birthday—reads as follows:

The boy pleaded guilty to the several assaults. . . . The statement given at the hearing by the Austin boy was that the Def. met him on a street in South Boston and induced him by offering a small sum of money to go with him under a Rail Road bridge in So. Boston, and when they arrived there the Def. stripped all the clothing off the Austin boy, and with the blade of a pocketknife stabbed him several times between the shoulder blades, under each arm, and in other places. The Dr. stated that “he examined the Austin boy Sept. 5—the day the assault was alleged to have been committed—and found wounds like stabs made by some sharp instrument between the Austin boy’s shoulders, under each arm, and penis nearly half cut off.”

The statement given by the Pratt boy was that the Def. induced him by the offer of money to go with him to a beach and boathouse in So. Boston, that Def. took all the Pratt boy’s clothing off, and then tortured him by sticking pins into his flesh.

The statements made by the other two boys [Kennedy and Gould] were that they were induced by Def. to go with him to some out of the way place, that he took their clothing all off and then cut them with a knife and beat them.

Another complaint was made at the same time by Mr. Drury, City Marshal of Chelsea, against this Def. alleging assaults of a similar character on two small boys [Hayden and Balch] in Chelsea in the months of Feb. and July last. Johnny Balch (about nine years old), one of the boys assaulted in Chelsea, stated that in July last, he met the Def. in the street
and was induced by Def.’s offering a small sum of money to go with him to a locality in Chelsea known as Powder Horn Hill. When they arrived there, Def. stripped all the clothing from the Balch boy, tied him to a post by the hands, and beat him with a rope. All the boys were very much younger and smaller than the Def.

In a population of 254 “bad boys,” Jesse Harding Pomeroy was easily the worst—a sexual sadist of remarkable precocity. But he was no fool. It didn’t take him long to figure out that the sooner he could prove he was “reformed,” the sooner he’d be back on the street. Or that—in Westborough as in other institutions of its kind—severe corporal punishment was swiftly meted out to the misbehaved.

Not that Jesse wasn’t intrigued to the point of raptness by the idea of corporal punishment—as long as it happened to someone else. He loved nothing better than to hear all about a flogging, particularly from the lips of a boy who had just received a good one. He would often seek out a recent victim and urge him to describe the experience in detail—exactly how many lashes had been administered, how hard they’d been applied, how much the scourging hurt. At night, Jesse would sometimes lie awake in his cot for hours and bring himself to climax over and over while picturing the torture in his mind.

During the days, he kept out of trouble. When the bigger boys taunted him because of his looks, he did his best to ignore them. The younger inmates tended to give him a wide berth, partly because of his creepy appearance, partly because of the stories they’d heard about Jesse—about the things he had done to all the little boys outside.

At first, Jesse was put to work in the chair shop, caning seats at the rate of one and a half per day. His eyes, however, proved too weak for the task, and after several months at the reform school, he was made into a kind of dormitory monitor, responsible for maintaining order in the sleeping halls. For a temperament like Jesse’s—one that derived profound satisfaction from the exercise of power—it was an ideal job. He thrived in this position of authority.

As far as his teachers and supervisors were concerned, he was a model inmate, applying himself to his studies, performing his
work with efficiency and zeal. Not that they didn’t notice a few peculiarities about Jesse. He seemed to take unusual—if not unsettling—pleasure in the sight of blood: when two boys engaged in a savage fistfight, for example, or someone punctured a finger in the shoe shop, or a child got his hand slashed in the barn. And—at least on one occasion—his teacher witnessed a degree of cruelty in Jesse that left her deeply appalled.

This latter incident occured during the fall of 1873, when his teacher, Laura Clarke, came hurrying around to the front of the school, where Jesse was enjoying a few moments of quiet. She had been tending her garden, she breathlessly explained, and had encountered a big black snake among the flowers. Would Jesse please come and kill it.

Eager to oblige, Jesse had followed her back to the garden, snatching up a stick along the way. After a brief search, he uncovered the snake and immediately began to strike it again and again, working himself up into a kind of frenzy as he reduced the writhing creature to an awful, oozing pulp. In the end, his shrieking teacher could only get him to stop by grabbing his shoulders and shaking him. At last, panting and vacant-eyed, he dropped the bloody stick and stood staring at her sightlessly, as though his mind had drifted somewhere far away. It was a look she would never forget.

Still, even Mrs. Clark had to admit that, on the whole, Jesse was a reliable, hardworking boy, who not only followed all the rules but could be counted on to make sure that others stuck to them as well. Once—when two particularly incorrigible boys engineered a breakout—it was Jesse who discovered the escape and alerted the authorities. And good luck seemed to conspire with him. On the morning of May 5, 1873, nearly one hundred boys—fully a third of the population—managed to abscond when the main gates of the reform school were accidentally left unlocked. Nearly all of the fugitives were recaptured by nightfall and subjected to severe penalties. As Jesse later admitted, he might have gone along with the escape himself, but was saved from this catastrophe—which would have left an ineradicable blot on his record—by a fortuitous illness, which had him confined to the infirmary at the time of the episode.

Altogether, his exemplary behavior made a deep and favorable impression on his superiors. As the months went by, Jesse
was given free run of the institution, and even allowed to go on several field trips—to a cattle show in Westborough village, a military parade in Framingham.

As the superintendent of the reform school noted in the register about a year after Jesse’s admission: “The boy’s conduct here has been excellent.”

11

No wonder that the workmen at the gas-house at Cambridge shrank back aghast when they found the headless trunk of a murdered man. It was a treasure trove that does not often float on tidal waters.