Fiend (46 page)

His one-hour-and-forty-three-minute ride was tracked by a caravan of reporters. The following day, newspapers from Maine to California ran major stories on Jesse’s “remarkable journey”—“probably among the most unusual ever taken by man,” as one newsman proclaimed. Headline after headline trumpeted his supposedly wonderstruck reaction to a world that had “changed more in the last 50 years than in the preceding 500.” “POMEROY HELD ALMOST SPEECHLESS AS HE SEES FOR FIRST TIME TWENTIETH-CENTURY INVENTIONS.” “POMEROY AWED BY WONDERS SEEN ON RIDE TO PRISON FARM.” “POMEROY MARVELS AT MODERN PROGRESS.” “POMEROY AMAZED AT MODERN WORLD.”

According to all these accounts, every sight Jesse glimpsed had filled him with rapt fascination—an airplane, a steam roller, an elevated train, a string of high-tension power lines. “Where have all the horses gone?” he plaintively asked at one point. At another, his car stopped at Randolph, where one of his guards ran into a drugstore and bought Jesse a bottle of ginger ale and a
vanilla ice cream cone—the first time the old man had ever tasted such treats. The portrait that emerges from almost every one of these newspaper stories is of a man almost stupefied by awe—“struck dumb, eyes bulging from his head, mouth agape.”

In truth, there was no real way of knowing how Jesse reacted to his trip, since—apart from his question about the horses and a favorable word about the ginger ale—he said almost nothing during the drive. Nor (in spite of the colorful descriptions of his bulging eyes and gaping mouth) did his expression betray much excitement. Only one journalist, a writer for the
Waterbury American,
acknowledged this fact, offering a perspective that—though considerably less dramatic than the countless stories comparing Jesse to a “modern Rip Van Winkle”—was probably closer to the truth:

The story of the automobile ride of the famous “lifer,” Jesse H. Pomeroy . . . is not a story of the real impressions upon the mind of Pomeroy but of the imagination of writers.

This prison inmate who began his life sentence at 17 years of age and spent 41 years of his prison life in solitary confinement, is a deadened creature gazing with lusterless eyes upon a world that means nothing to him. He does not show the quick, excited reaction to an amazingly progressing world that an alert boy would evidence. It is notable that the newspaper reports do not quote any animated conversation from him with comments upon automobiles, high tension wires, aeroplanes, and all the other things of the modern world upon which his eyes were gazing for the first time.

Immediately the reporter thinks, as the reader thinks, “I wonder how this new world would appear to me if I were suddenly to gaze upon it for the first time after being removed from it for 50 years?” The answer to that speculation does not give the correct answer to what the effect would be upon a mind like Pomeroy. . . . Pomeroy is not a normal human being. That he should look upon whatever the world had to show with dullness of perception is to be expected. What the world has been doing has meant nothing to him, even though he might have read about it. Why should he be stirred at reading that radios had been invented or that motor cars capable of speeding a man along paved highways at 50 miles an hour had supplanted horses? He could not use them. Nor is he to be able to enjoy them even now that he has gazed upon them in this change in his status. He is still a prisoner. And if he were to be released, he would not know what to do with life. Death would probably come to him all the more quickly, as it usually does to those who have been released after years of prison life.

For the first few days after his arrival at the prison farm, Jesse—still deeply resentful over his forced removal from Charlestown—maintained an obstinate silence. When reporters interviewed Bridgewater’s superintendent, Henry G. Strann—who had been introduced to Pomeroy several years earlier during a visit to the state prison—Strann remarked: “He was surly, reticent, and unsmiling then, and he is surly, reticent, and unsmiling now. As far as I know he has told no one whether he likes this place or not. He only answers when he feels like it.”

Gradually, Jesse seemed to adjust to his new circumstances. One year later, however, in June, 1930, he was back in the headlines after a guard discovered a cache of getaway tools—a hand drill, a crude saw, several pieces of heavy wire, a screwdriver, and a short length of bent iron—stashed in his room. Not that Superintendent Strann or anyone else at Bridgewater seriously believed that the incapacitated seventy-one-year-old man was capable of escaping.

“He would have collapsed after hobbling for half a mile,” a prison doctor told reporters.

“He just didn’t want Lindbergh hogging all the news,” said Strann. “You know, Jesse hasn’t had much publicity since he was compelled to leave the state prison, and he doesn’t like an environment that keeps him out of the newspapers.”

*  *  *

Two years later, on September 29, 1932—exactly two months shy of his seventy-third birthday—Jesse Harding
Pomeroy died of coronary heart disease at the Bridgewater prison farm.

His passing was universally unlamented. “If one were to seek for the most friendless man in the world,” the
Springfield Republican
noted, “Jesse Pomeroy would have been the man finally designated.”

“He was a psychopath,” the
New York Times
said flatly.

Perhaps the bitterest obituary notice appeared in the October 2, 1932, edition of the
Boston Sunday Globe.
Written by a reporter named Louis Lyons, the piece was an outpouring of unmitigated bile, denouncing Pomeroy as a “mean, scheming criminal with an inflated idea of his own importance” and heaping scorn on the “bleeding hearts” who had expended years of misplaced sympathy on him. “His was the greatest case of miscarriage of sentiment in the annals of American crime. . . . There was nothing in his personality to commend him to the sympathy that was slobbered over him in lugubrious gobs of maudlin sentiment year after year.”

In accordance with Jesse’s final wishes, his body was cremated. Having already been entombed for what must have seemed like an eternity, he had no desire to be buried again.

Fifty-eight years after he was first jailed for the most heinous crimes ever committed by a juvenile, Jesse Harding Pomeroy was free at last.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

M
y thanks, first and foremost, go to David Bates, researcher and friend, who not only provided me with a mountain of material but—even more invaluably—shared his own ideas and opinions on the case, particularly on Pomeroy’s extraordinary term in Charlestown (“the greatest prison story never told,” in David’s view). Without his help, this book would have been infinitely more difficult to complete, and I owe him a great debt of thanks.

William Milhomme and Elizabeth Bouvier of the Massachusetts State Archives gave unstintingly of their time and expertise, and I am deeply grateful to them both.

Many other people, in Boston and elsewhere, assisted me during the research and writing of this book. For their kindness and support I wish to thank: Peter Bartis, Library of Congress; Edgar Bellfontaine, Social Law Library; Anthony Carnevale, Massachusetts Department of Corrections; Mike Como, Massachusetts State Archives; Jaymie Derderian, Massachusetts Department of Corrections; Brian Greenspan; Brian Harkins, Social Law Library; James Krasnoo; John Marr; Mary McLaughlin, Bridgewater State Hospital; Professor Alan Rogers, Boston College; Henry Scannell, Boston Public Library; Evelyn Silverman, Queens College Library; Patterson Smith; Virginia Smith, Massachusetts Historical Society; David Sonnenschein; Doug Southard, Boston Historical Society; Charles E. Stearns; June Strojny, Social Law Library; Walter Walden, Library of Congress; David Warrington, Harvard Law Library; and Jim Woodman, Boston Atheneum.

An engraved portrait of Jesse Harding Pomeroy, based on a photograph taken at the time of his arrest for the Millen murder, 1874.

Illustration from the 1875 crime pamphlet
The Life of Jesse H. Pomeroy, The Boy Fiend. (Rare Books Division/New York Public Library/Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

Jesse’s mother, Ruth Ann Pomeroy.
(Corbis Images)

One of the penciled notes written by Jesse to his young jail-mate, Willie Baxter, in 1875.