Fiend by Harold Schechter Read Free Book Online Page A

he insisted. After several relentless hours of questioning, Jesse lost control. “Go away!” he shrieked, his face reddening with fury. He would not talk to them anymore.
    Leaving him alone in his cell, the two officers proceeded to 312 Broadway, where they informed Jesse’s mother that her younger son was under arrest as a suspect in the Chelsea and South Boston child-assaults. Ruth Pomeroy was stricken. Herson could not possibly be the culprit, she cried. He was a good boy—dutiful, obedient, hardworking at school. Besides, he was only twelve years old—far too young to be guilty of such atrocities. When she asked if she could see him in his cell, the officers shook their heads and returned to the station house.
    By then, Jesse had dozed off on his cot. They let him sleep until midnight, when Bragdon shook him awake and began to curse and threaten him again. Jesse burst into tears. At that point, Martin came into the cell, took the sobbing boy onto his lap, and gently explained that unless Jesse confessed, he would end up in prison “for a hundred years.”
    Jesse finally broke down. At approximately half past midnight on Saturday, September 21, he admitted that he was the “boy torturer.”
    Early the following morning, he was transferred to the Tombs, where five of his victims were paraded before him. First in line was Johnny Balch, who took one look at Jesse’s pallid eye and began to shout, “That’s the boy who cut me!” The other little victims—Tracy Hayden, Harry Austin, George Pratt, Robert Gould—rapidly confirmed the identification.
    That same afternoon—Saturday, September 21, 1872—Jesse was arraigned in a room crammed with people: spectators, witnesses, newsmen, and family members of both the defendant and his accusers. Five of Jesse’s victims—Johnny Balch, Harry Austin, George Pratt, Joseph Kennedy, and Robert Gould—testified against him. Called upon to speak on her son’s behalf, Ruth Pomeroy repeated the same story she had told the police—that her son was a good boy who had never demonstrated the slightest tendency toward cruel behavior, etc., etc. Jesse himself—when asked why he had done such awful things—only bowed his head and said that “he could not help himself.”
    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 severalof 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