Fiend by Harold Schechter Read Free Book Online Page B

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., admittedSept. 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