Fiend (40 page)

Cut-and-dried as they are, these notations serve as an eloquent testimony to one of Jesse Pomeroy’s most remarkable qualities—the trait that kept him in the public spotlight throughout his lifetime, and that has earned him a special place in American penal history. For fifty years—with a persistence that was either insane or undaunted (depending on your point of view)—Pomeroy never gave up his efforts to dig, cut, detonate, or bore his way out of his cell. Even the
Boston Globe
—a paper that never failed to portray him in the most fiendish light imaginable—seemed perversely proud of the fact that, in the person of Jesse Pomeroy, New England had produced “the most ingenious . . . and utterly tireless worker for freedom who ever occupied a cell.”

*  *  *

According to prison records, the first of Jesse’s more than two-dozen jailbreak attempts occured in November 1877, slightly more than a year after he was first locked up in Charlestown. Patrolling the arch of the west wing—the section of the prison where Jesse was initially housed—a guard heard a faint scraping sound emanating from Pomeroy’s cell. Throwing open the door, he found the prisoner kneeling by a wall, working away at one of the stones with a little digging tool made from a bit of wire. Apparently, Jesse had been engaged in this enterprise for months. When the guard took a closer look, he discovered that—by painstakingly removing the surrounding mortar, a grain at a time—Jesse had actually managed to loosen the stone.

Five months later, Jesse was caught sawing at the iron bars of his cell door with a piece of sharpened tin. For this attempt, he
was shut up in the dark, nearly airless “strong room” for a week. But nothing—no amount of time locked in a dungeon, no beatings administered with a brass-tipped cane, no efforts at reinforcing his cell—discouraged Jesse for long. When plates of boiler-iron were bolted to his walls to keep him from digging at the stones, he set to work prying loose the bolts. When the walls were painted with a white preparation that would make even a pin-scratch conspicuous, he turned his attention to the floor, cutting loose one of the heavy boards, then digging at the ground underneath.

The singleminded tenacity Jesse displayed as a jailbreaker was matched by his mechanical ingenuity. Over the course of fifty years, virtually everything that fell into his hands became a potential implement of escape: eating utensils, drinking cups, writing implements, slop pails, bits of tin, wire, and string. When he was finally permitted a few hours of solitary exercise every week in a small, enclosed yard, he would scour the ground for anything useable—a rusty nail, a metal scrap, a piece of wood. With these and other objects (including the occasional knife blade or steel spike smuggled to him by a sympathetic fellow prisoner) he managed, over the decades, to fashion an amazing assortment of tools: awls, chisels, saws, drills, files, pry bars.

One of his most spectacular escape attempts occurred in November 1887, just two months after he was caught in an attempt to saw through the iron bars of his cell window. At around 1:00
P.M.
on Thursday, November 10, an enormous explosion rocked the west wing of the prison. Revolvers drawn, guards rushed to the scene. Outside Jesse’s cell, the corridor was thick with smoke, plaster dust, and the smell of escaping gas. Throwing open the door, they found Pomeroy crumpled in a corner, his face badly singed. A huge block of granite, dislodged from the ceiling, lay in the center of the floor—vivid testimony to the power of the blast.

Transported to the prison hospital, Pomeroy remained unconscious for nearly an hour until the physician, Dr. Charles Sawin, managed to revive him. Jesse’s eyebows and eyelashes were entirely burned off and his lids badly swollen. Early reports declared that he had been “totally blinded,” though he soon recovered the full use of his one good eye. Eventually, he supplied his captors with the full details of his latest and most audacious plan.

By that point in his sentence, Jesse was allowed to leave his cell for forty-five minutes of exercise three times a week. Always vigilant
for anything he might turn to his advantage, he had noted that the dim gas-lights in the corridor were fed by a pipe that ran along the upper wall just outside his cell. Day by day for the next several months—working with nothing but a sharpened scrap of tin and infinite patience—he had dug a little opening through the mortar in his cell wall, concealing each day’s progress with a paste made of soap. Eventually, he had broken through to the other side at a spot directly beside the gas pipe. Then, with a piece of wire sharpened to a fine point, he had bored a little hole in the pipe, releasing the gas through the opening in the wall and into his cell. Working quickly, he had taken a makeshift length of tubing, constructed of water-soaked newspapers mixed with bread, and piped the gas to another portion of the cell, where he had loosened several blocks after months of painstaking toil. His idea was to feed the gas through the crevices he had created in the stonework and blast a hole in the wall.

In the end, this elaborate—if wildly ill-conceived—scheme had no other effect than to injure Jesse, damage the floor of the prison hospital (located directly above his cell), and trigger a fresh burst of public outrage. Jesse’s jailbreak attempt—his second in as many months—was reported in newspapers throughout the country, though it created the greatest sensation, of course, in Massachusetts. One Boston man voiced a common sentiment when, in a letter to the
Herald,
he expressed his “regret that the ‘boy fiend’ didn’t get his body through the wall so that the keeper might have had an excuse to shoot him and forever rid the world of him.”

This letter is striking for several reasons. It reveals not only the deep, abiding antipathy toward Pomeroy among the citizenry of Boston, but also the extent to which he had achieved a kind of mythic status. In the perception of the public, Jesse Pomeroy was still—and would remain for many years—the monstrous “boy fiend.” (Indeed, several generations of New England children would grow up hearing bedtime spook-stories about this legendary, juvenile bogeyman.)

In reality, of course, Pomeroy was far from a boy. In November 1887, when this letter was written, he had been locked in solitary confinement for more than a decade and was already twenty-eight years old.

43

There can be no doubt that the most interesting convict in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, if not the whole country, is JESSE HARDING POMEROY. He is the only convict in the United States who is absolutely consigned to a cage, and who is looked upon by the community as a veritable fiend.

—E. Luscomb Haskell,
The Life of Jesse Harding Pomeroy
(1892)

B
y 1892—following the renovation of Charlestown—Jesse was inhabiting a larger (if equally cheerless) cell in a section of the prison known as “Cherry Hill.” He was no longer engaged in making scrub brushes—or in any other task, for that matter. All such menial labor, he claimed, was injurious to his health and therefore a violation of his constitutional rights. Since Jesse was in the habit of squirreling away little bits and pieces of his work material and using them in his endless escape attempts, the prison officials had no objection to relieving him of his duties.

With nothing but time on his hands, he devoted himself to other activities. With supplies provided by the chaplain, he tried his hand at painting, producing mawkish watercolor landscapes that he regarded as significant works of art, though at least one observer found them “hardly worth admiring.” Always mechanically inclined, he conceived of a hollow, self-sharpening lead pencil, but his efforts to construct a workable prototype came to nothing. Most of all, he spent his time reading. Since sensationalistic novels were in short supply in the prison library, he was forced to make do with more uplifting material—books on science, mathematics, language, chemistry, and religion. According to various sources, by the time he left prison, Jesse had gone through all four thousand books in the library, along with an indeterminate number of volumes supplied by the chaplain.

Though reports of his intellectual accomplishments would be greatly exaggerated (for years, stories would circulate that Jesse had proved to be a jailhouse genius, who achieved proficiency in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, taught himself geometry, algebra, and calculus, and became an expert on classical literature), he did, in fact, pick up a smattering of knowledge in several fields and gained enough mastery of several languages, particularly German, to be able to read them with a fair degree of fluency. (He was never able to speak them, since—deprived of virtually all human communication—he had no way of learning the correct pronunciation.)

He also put in a good deal of time studying law books.

As far back as 1876, when he composed his autobiography while languishing in the Suffolk County jail, Jesse had shown a certain knack for legalistic argument. Now, after immersing himself in every law book he could get his hands on, he acquired just enough knowledge of the subject to turn himself into a source of endless annoyance—an incorrigible gadfly. Next to his improvised drills, saws, and chisels, Jesse’s pen became his primary tool for making life as difficult as possible for his keepers.

For fully half a century, he generated hundreds of letters, writing to everyone from district attorneys to members of the prison board to justices of the United States Supreme Court (including Oliver Wendell Holmes). Jesse’s term in Charlestown would span the administrations of no less than twenty-two Massachusetts governors—and every one of them was bombarded with correspondence from Pomeroy. Many of these letters registered various complaints. Like other psychopaths—who tend to be full of self-pity, however incapable they are of feeling bad for their victims—Jesse constantly felt ill-treated by his jailers. In letter after letter, he griped about everything from the poor light in his cell to his lack of holiday privileges to the deplorable condition of his toothbrush.

Other letters were, in effect, fairly sophisticated legal briefs. In 1888, for example, while poring over some old law books, he discovered (as the
New York Times
reported) “an old statute which provided that no person should be sentenced to solitary confinement in a prison for a period of more than twenty days.” Jesse immediately began petitioning for his release from solitary. Dozens of these letters still exist in various archives. The following, dated October 14, 1888, is a typical example. Addressed to Henry B. Pierce, Secretary of State of Massachusetts, it was written
on lined, monogrammed notepaper and penned in the neat, even elegant handwriting that Jesse had by then developed:

Sir,

Certain laws, records, etc., necessary to my right of self-defense, and necessary to properly present the same are on file in your office, and I understand that the law permits me copies of them.

Within is an expression of my wants and I declare that I believe them to be necessary to me as above stated. I ask of your courtesy such a fulfillment, certified under your seal as the laws permit.

I ask,

    1. A copy of the revised statutes of this state in force in 1874.

    2. A copy of the acts and resolves of the Legislature in 1874.

    3. Literal copies of all the laws passed by our Legislature at any time, which regulate the punishment of close or solitary imprisonment or confinement, provided it is a punishment for crime.

    4. If this request is too vague and causes too much trouble, please give me only what was the law on the subject in 1806. 1845. 1855. 1874.

    5. Literal copies from the record of the Governors Council of all entries therein showing executive action in any way upon my case, from March 1875 to Sept. 1st, 1876.

Please observe, I want records of executive action only: nothing about trials, indictments, etc.

    6. Literal copies from the records of the Council from 1780 to 1875 inclusive, showing commutations to the penalty of solitary or close imprisonment or confinement with—or without—hard labor: and pardons or commutations of those penalties.

I declare these last two requests to be absolutely necessary to me to be granted, and I ask that all papers embraced in the 6th request be certified under seal, because I intend to lay them before the Supreme Court.

I can assure you, Mr. Secretary, that my need is great and is my only excuse for so much asked for.

Very respectfully,

Jesse H. Pomeroy

Thanks to this and scores of similar letters, Jesse eventually earned a reputation not only as a scholar of classical languages, literature, and mathematical knowledge but also as a self-educated
lawyer—a man who (as the
Boston Globe
put it) “had developed legal qualifications not possessed by some applicants for admission to the bar.”