Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers (2 page)

Desperate to be the victimiser rather than the victim, Jesse kept searching for small animals to mutilate. But it wasn’t enough and he began to fantasise about
hurting
a human, someone he could verbally taunt during the abuse just as his father always taunted him. He therefore joined in a game in the schoolyard where cowboys were tortured by Indians. Jesse insisted on being one of the torturers and became so elated that his playmates regarded him with distaste. He couldn’t forge any camaraderie with these boys excepting the torture games so remained apart from them, lost in his own lonely world.

When he was ten, his mother left his father as she couldn’t stand to see Jesse suffer any more abuse. But by then the damage had been done, and Jesse’s sadism was firmly rooted. He looked for sadistic scenes in novels and in boyhood conversations and eagerly
thought about the day when a helpless victim would be his to extensively hurt and verbally torment.

Charles was constantly battering Jesse and though Jesse now fought back, he was still on the losing end of these vicious encounters. He needed a smaller boy that he could control.

On Boxing Day 1871 Jesse seized his chance. He was now twelve and tall for his age. He found a three-
year-old
boy called Billy Paine playing unattended and made up a story to get the toddler to follow him. He led Billy into a disused building. Now he could make his sadistic fantasies a reality.

Jesse undressed the uncomprehending child then tied him to a roof beam by his wrists. By now the child was terrified – exactly the response that the boy
torturer
wanted. He beat the boy’s back with a stick again and again. Jesse himself had often been punished in this way by his brutal father but now he was the one in charge and he was going to make the most of it. It’s likely that the sadism continued until Jesse orgasmed but this is conjecture as Billy was too young to explain.

Eventually Jesse ran off, leaving the child swinging from the roof beams. A passer-by heard his semi-
conscious
whimpers, investigated, and cut him free. The three-year-old was too traumatised to explain exactly what had happened to him or to fully describe his captor so Jesse remained at liberty to torture again.

Two months later, on 21st February 1872, Jesse met up with a seven-year-old boy called Tracy Hayden and took him to an abandoned outhouse. There he undressed the younger child and gagged him with a handkerchief. Jesse was already learning from
experience
, having feared discovery when Billy shrieked during his beating. This time he would only hear his captive’s muffled groans.

Jesse tied the seven-year-old’s feet together before roping his hands to an overhead beam. He thrashed the boy with a stick just as he had with his previous victim. But this time the violence was even more extreme and Jesse reigned blows upon the child that blackened his eyes and knocked out some of his teeth. He swore and laughed as he attacked his
tightly-bound
victim and was clearly overwhelmed by a sadistic glee. He also added a particularly terrifying verbal threat, saying that he was about to emasculate the helpless child.

Tracy was found by passers-by and taken to his
parents
who immediately called the police. The child was able to give them a reasonable description of the ‘big boy’ who had harmed him, but unfortunately this did not include the fact that his attacker had a clouded-over eye.

Three months later the bloodlust had rekindled in Jesse and he struck again, asking an eight-year-old boy called Robert Maier if he would like to accompany him to the circus. Instead he led the child to a pond and attempted to drown him but the terrified victim managed to
struggle
free. Jesse then partially knocked the boy out and dragged him to an outhouse where he undressed him and tied him to a post. He whipped the boy with a stick, forcing him to use sexual (and, for the time, shocking) words like prick. Jesse masturbated during this taunting and quickly orgasmed. This sexual release apparently drained him of all tension for he released the child, ordered him to dress then let him leave.

Seven-year-old Johnny Balch was the next
neighbourhood
boy to be enticed to an abandoned outhouse by the boy torturer. It was July 1872, a mere two months since the last attack, yet Jesse’s sadistic frenzy had increased so much that he actually tore off the boy’s clothes rather than unbuttoning them. Then he hung him by his wrists from a beam and flogged him with his belt. The abuse was the most ferocious so far, the belt lashing into every part of the helpless child’s anatomy. Again, it was Jesse’s orgasm that ended the assault. Thereafter he untied the brutalised boy and hurried away. The traumatised Johnny lay on the floor
of the building for hours until he was discovered by a horrified stranger. A week after this assault, Ruth moved Jesse and Charles to a different part of Boston which offered cheaper rents.

Within days of arriving in his new South Boston home, Jesse went out hunting for prey. On 17th August 1872 he found seven-year-old George Pratt near the beach. Jesse took him to a nearby boathouse where he stripped, gagged and bound him with a rope. As usual, he employed his favourite act of thrashing the child all over, only this time he used the buckle end of a belt. Jesse was becoming increasingly crazed during these assaults. He bit George’s face and one of his buttocks. This might have been a result of the atavistic urge that surfaces in some sexual sadists or it may have been learned behaviour, as some abusive parents bite their children as a punishment. Thomas Pomeroy might well have fallen on little Jesse in a drunken rage,
battering
and biting him in turn.

But even this sadistic biting didn’t satisfy Jesse’s increasing lust for blood. Now he produced a needle and stabbed the boy in the armpits and shoulders. Again, each act was accompanied by verbal taunting and Jesse clearly took great pleasure in telling the child what he was going to do to him next. His childhood experiences had turned him into a remorseless
psychopath
– yet he was still only twelve years old.

A fortnight later memories of the previous attacks were no longer enough to sustain him and he struck again. This assault took place on Thursday 5th September, underneath a shadowy railroad bridge. Jesse led six-year-old Harry Austin there, stripped and battered him, the violence escalating by the second as Jesse produced a knife. He cut the screaming child in the back and under his armpits. Then, carrying out the threat he’d used on a previous victim, he tried to
emasculate
him. The hugely shocked child was found with cuts to his scrotum and numerous bruises. He was lucky to survive.

Jesse maintained an appearance of normality (or what passes for normality in such an isolated and unhappy boy) and his mother saw nothing different about him after these torture sessions. He continued to attend school and go to Sunday school and have
interminable
fights with his brother Charles.

The next week, on Wednesday 11th September, Jesse struck up a conversation with seven-year-old Joseph Kennedy on the beach and lured him to a vacant
outhouse
. There he stripped and flogged the terrified child. Again the violence was increasing for he broke the little boy’s nose and dislodged several of his teeth. He laughed wildly as he produced his beloved penknife
and slashed the younger boy on the face and thighs. Eventually he untied him, threw him into the salt marshes and ran away. It was clear to the police, and to the public who read about each new assault, that the torturer’s blood lust was escalating and that he’d soon kill if he wasn’t caught.

And indeed, on Tuesday 17th September, the next
victim
almost lost his life. Five-year-old Robert Gould was led to a quiet stretch of the railway by the
scheming
Jesse. There the youth tore off Robert’s clothes and tied him to a pole. He slashed at the child’s head with his knife, alternately laughing and swearing. As the blood spurted, he showed a strange, frenzied joy. He held the knife in the air to watch the blood drip from it and was clearly transfixed at the sight.

Seeking yet further sadistic excess, he told the
five-year
-old that he was going to kill him and was about to cut his throat when railwaymen approached. Jesse ran away, doubtless congratulating himself that he’d once again evaded detection. He was wrong, for his victim had noticed that his torturer had a rare deformity – a milky eye.

There was only one boy in the locale with a milky eye – Jesse Pomeroy. He was arrested and every one of his tortured victims identified him. He admitted his crimes to the authorities, saying vaguely that ‘
something
’ had made him do it but within hours had retracted his confession and thereafter pleaded his innocence. He was sent to a reform school for boys, most of whom had been convicted of theft. They were terrified to find that the boy torturer now lived amongst them and they tried to keep out of his way.

Unfortunately the masters at the school flogged the children – and this obviously kept Jesse’s thoughts focused on such cruelties. He would seek out the
punished
victims and ask them how often they’d been caned and how it had felt. He would become visibly excited whilst hearing these details and undoubtedly used them as a masturbatory aid.

Ruth Pomeroy possibly knew that she’d failed her youngest child by letting him be beaten for so long by his father. Whatever her motivation, she kept
petitioning
the reform school to free him, suggesting that he was innocent of the crimes.

The school was impressed by her loyalty and her hardworking nature – and by the fact that Jesse was a model prisoner who did exactly as he was told. Nowadays we know that organised offenders such as Jesse are often model prisoners, being bright enough to work the system for their own ends. But this was an unsophisticated era and they assumed that Jesse’s
good behaviour in an enclosed environment meant that he wouldn’t reoffend in the outside world. As a result, he was released to his mother in March 1874 after serving only seventeen months.

Fourteen-year-old Jesse now returned home. His
mother
had opened a small dressmaking shop and his
brother
Charles was selling newspapers from a street stall. Jesse was immediately employed by both. Outwardly he appeared industrious and helpful – but inwardly he harboured the exact same sadism as before.

A week after his release, he opened up his mother’s shop in the early morning. A ten-year-old girl called Katie Curran came in to make a purchase and Jesse told her that she’d find what she wanted downstairs. Partway there, the girl realised that she was heading towards a dark cellar – but before she could retrace her steps, Jesse grabbed her from behind and hacked at her neck with his knife.

He carried the child down the rest of the stairs and cut her clothing away from her bleeding body. Then he proceeded to stab her numerous times and mutilate her genitals. Jesse concealed the little corpse in the cellar and returned to serving in the shop.

It seems that this was a crime of opportunity rather than design, for on previous attacks he’d brought his torture kit with him – namely rope for binding the
victim
, a handkerchief to employ as a gag and a stick or
belt to carry out the flagellation. This time the victim wasn’t tied or gagged and the only weapon employed was the knife he carried with him at all times.

The police believed that Katie had been kidnapped by a stranger passing through the area, so Jesse remained free to seek further victims. He asked other children to accompany him into the empty store, but was so eager to get them on their own that they took fright and ran away.

Serial torturers and killers are incredibly single minded, so Jesse continued his search for vulnerable victims. Five weeks later he found four-year-old Horace Miller who had gone to the nearby bakery to buy himself a cake. Jesse made up a story and lured the little boy to the marshes. There he threw him to the wet ground, undressed him below the waist and brandished a knife. Little Horace put out his arms to defend himself and received cuts to both hands. The blood-crazed Jesse stabbed him again and again. The fourteen-year-old also cut his victim’s scrotum, knowing that no one was likely to hear his agonised screams. All of Jesse’s rage went into his knife-wielding arm as he lunged at the four-year-old for a final time, almost decapitating him.

Hearing or seeing other people on the horizon he raced off, taking his knife with him. Within minutes two marsh walkers found the newly-dead child.

When the constabulary saw that the victim was a
young male who had been undressed, stabbed and partially castrated, they thought of a youth who had committed such crimes before – Jesse Pomeroy. They wondered if he’d escaped from his reform school and checked to find that he’d been released. The police immediately went to Jesse’s home and arrested him. He denied everything, despite his shoeprints being found in the wet mud beside the body and dried blood being found on his knife.

At the police station, Jesse continued to invent alibis until they took him to the mortuary and showed him Horace’s mutilated corpse. For the first time he lost his composure and staggered backwards, admitting that ‘something’ had made him kill the little boy. He was referring to the compulsion to hurt and kill that every serial killer has.

This compulsion is incredibly strong – but the killer still chooses to give in to it. As such, he should be found responsible for his actions. After all, he can
control
it, in that he doesn’t give in to the compulsion when there are witnesses around. Jesse took his
victims
to comparatively remote locations and brought along the means to restrain them and muffle their shrieks and pleading. He also made sure that he didn’t get their blood on his clothes.