Fiend by Harold Schechter Read Free Book Online

why—just hours after his young victim had looked him in the face and failed to identify him—he paused on his way home from school, strolled into Police Station Six, and contrived to get himself arrested.

9

    “What was you and your Ma down at the police station for so late last night?” asked the grocery man of the bad boy, as he kicked a dog away from a basket of peaches standing on the sidewalk. “Your Ma seemed to be much affected.”
    —George W. Peck, Peck’s Bad Boy and His Pa
    T he depredations of the Boston boy torturer were by no means the only crimes involving young children in the fall of 1872, as even a cursory look at contemporary newspapers makes clear. In early September, a seven-year-old boy named William Loftus lured a five-year-old neighbor—a little girl named Jenny Chandler—into a stable. There, according to an account in the New-Albany Ledger, “he tried to get her to put her arm under the blade of a cutting machine, in order that he might cut it off.” When the little girl resisted and ran away, the Loftus boy grabbed a shotgun, pursued her into her backyard, and discharged the weapon into her body, “filling the poor little girl’s stomach with slugs.” She died at sunrise the next morning, after clinging to life for more than sixteen agonizing hours.
    Just a few days later, Boston papers reported the shooting death of a four-year-old named William Hill at the hands of a sixteen-year-old neighbor, James Duffy, who—while showing off his father’s new Colt revolver—accidentally discharged the loaded pistol into his little neighbor’s head. On the same day in New York City, another four-year-old boy, Stephen Quail of East Fourteenth Street, was slain when an elderly woman—irritated at the noise coming from the alleyway, where little Stephen and several raucous friends were playing ring-a-levio—threw a brick at the child from the roof of their tenement and fractured his skull.
    And then there was the case of the Newark, New Jersey, girlnamed Becky Holloway—also four years of age—whose parents were arrested after punishing her “by holding her mouth to the spout of a tea-kettle which was filled with boiling water” (as the New York Times reported). “The steam rushed into the child’s mouth, scalding her so severely as to threaten fatal consequences.”
    Even among these assorted tragedies and atrocities, however, the arrest of Jesse Pomeroy drew special attention in the press. For, as the New York Times proclaimed—in a piece that ran on Sunday, September 22, under the headline “A Fiendish Boy”—the case of this “mere child” who “delighted in torturing and mutilating other children” was “one of the most remarkable on record.”
    *  *  *
    When Jesse—impelled by whatever unknown motive—peered into Police Station Six that Friday afternoon, September 20, 1872, his eyes immediately lit upon the two individuals who had visited his school a few hours earlier: Officer Bragdon and little Joseph Kennedy. Without a moment’s hesitation, he turned on his heels and headed out the door. Back on the street, he bent his steps toward home—a small rented flat at 312 Broadway.
    He hadn’t gone more than a block, however, when a strong hand gripped him by the arm and pulled him to a halt. Startled, he turned and found himself staring up into the face of Officer Bragdon, who had spotted Jesse hastening from the station house.
    Keeping a tight grip on the boy’s arm, Bragdon led him back inside the station and brought him face to face with Joseph Kennedy. This time, there was no way for Jesse to keep his most conspicuous feature concealed. “That’s him!” Kennedy cried. “I know him by his eye!”
    Tearfully protesting his innocence, Jesse was locked in a cell, where Bragdon and a colleague, William Martin, subjected him to a harsh, protracted grilling. But in spite of their threats, curses, and cajolements, Jesse would not be budged. He had never hurt anyone,