Fiend (8 page)

—From the trial of Leavitt Alley (1873)

W
ith the perpetrator safely consigned to reform school—presumably for the term of his minority—the case of the notorious “boy torturer” quickly faded from the papers. But Bostonians who craved sensational crime stories didn’t have to wait long for a new one.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 6, 1872—less than two months after Jesse Pomeroy was sent away to Westborough—an employee of the Cambridge Gas Works named Stephen McFadden spotted a pair of barrels bobbing along the Charles River. As they floated toward shore, McFadden noticed something strange sticking out of the larger one. Making his way down to the river’s edge, he took a closer look—then let out a startled cry.

The thing protruding from the barrel was a human hand.

With the help of several coworkers, McFadden retrieved the barrels, then summoned the police, who took one look at the contents and immediately sent for the coroner, Dr. W. W. Wellington. By the time Wellington arrived, a large, excited crowd had gathered around the barrels, whose staves enclosed a ghastly trove.

Inside the larger one, packed among a load of horse manure and sawdust, was a man’s decapitated trunk, both legs chopped off at the thighs. Whoever had butchered and disposed of the body had taken few precautions to conceal the victim’s identity. The torso was still clothed in a suit, the pockets of which were full of personal items—keys, pieces of scrip, an engraved pocket
watch. The smaller barrel contained the missing head, its features perfectly recognizable. The murdered man—who had died from an axe-blow to the back of his skull—turned out to be a prosperous merchant and landlord named Abijah Ellis, missing since the previous night.

A more thorough search of the barrels turned up a vital clue—a piece of brown paper with the words
P. Schouller, No. 1049 Washington Street
printed on it. Questioned by the police, Schouller—a reputable manufacturer of billiard tables—revealed that the sweepings from his factory were generally carted away by a local teamster named Leavitt Alley, who used the sawdust to carpet the floor of his stable.

Alley, it turned out, had a direct link to the murdered man. Not only was he one of Ellis’s tenants; he was in arrears to Ellis for one hundred dollars—two months’ rent.

An investigation of Alley’s home and stable on Hunneman Street turned up a spate of evidence. The boards of one horse-stall were spattered with blood, concealed by a pile of dry manure, which—from the looks of it—had been hastily shoveled into the compartment sometime within the last twenty-four hours. Inside Alley’s bedroom, police found several articles of bloodstained clothing. Alley’s own son would later testify that, on the morning after the murder, he had noticed a large patch of dried blood on his father’s shirtfront. When he asked where it came from, Alley had mumbled something about a horse’s nosebleed.

And there was other damning evidence, too: A witness who had seen the two men arguing on the night of the murder. A neighbor who had heard Alley cursing at someone in his barn. A merchant who swore that he had sold an axe to Alley shortly before the killing. A man who spotted Alley’s wagon carting the two barrels toward the mill-dam bridge. When he passed the wagon again a little while later, the barrels were missing.

Alley was immediately indicted for the crime.

For Bostonians, the slaying of Abijah Ellis became a major front-page story—the most sensational murder case in a quarter-century. Not since 1849—when Professor John Webster of Harvard killed his colleague, George Parkman, and incinerated the corpse in a lab furnace—had the public been so riveted by a crime. The story dominated the front pages for days, until it was supplanted by another, far more calamitous event—a huge conflagration
that erupted in the wholesale district on Saturday evening, November 9, and raged unabated until the following noon, laying waste to more than sixty-five city acres.

When Alley was brought to trial in February 1873, however, the case exploded back into the headlines. His case seemed so hopeless that his own attorney, Gustavus Somerby, appeared visibly dispirited at the start of the proceedings. But as the trial progressed, Somerby grew increasingly confident, summoning expert witnesses who seriously undermined the prosecution’s case. A particular blow was struck by Dr. Charles Jackson, a graduate of Harvard, who testified that—contrary to the assertions of the prosecution’s “expert” (a self-styled physician who had never formally studied medicine)—it was scientifically impossible to determine whether dried blood came from humans or horses.

In the end, Somerby managed to sow enough reasonable doubt to reap a victory. In spite of the overwhelming circumstantial evidence against the defendant—and a closing argument by Attorney General Charles Train characterized by observers as “one of the ablest ever made in a capital case in Massachusetts”—Alley was acquitted.

*  *  *

On February 12, 1872—the day the trial ended—Jesse Pomeroy had been locked away for five months, long enough to be forgotten by everyone except those most directly involved in his case: his victims, their parents, and his own brother and mother. (As for Jesse’s father—estranged from the family and working as a meat porter in Quincey Market—there is no way of telling what he thought of his son’s notoriety, history having left no record of his reactions.)

Ruth Ann Pomeroy was a familiar type: the mother of a frighteningly dangerous criminal who maintains to her dying day that her darling boy is a victim of false charges—a good, dutiful son who, whatever his flaws, couldn’t possibly have done the terrible things he’s been accused of. Virtually from the moment of Jesse’s incarceration, she had begun petitioning for his release. In letter after letter to the board of trustees at Westborough, she insisted that her son was innocent. “He could not be the one who whipped the boys in Chelsea, for he was far too young at that time,” she declared in one letter. The police had picked on Jesse because he had drawn attention to himself by
impulsively taking a look inside the station house on his way home from school.

He made a suitable scapegoat, moreover, because the Pomeroys were strangers in the neighborhood, having moved to South Boston only a few months earlier. Sequestered in a cheerless cell—terrified and alone—her twelve-year-old child had been browbeaten into confessing. If he had been allowed to see a lawyer, he “would not have been sent to the reform school.” Her son, she insisted, was a “bright and happy” boy who had never given her cause for complaint.

“I have never believed him guilty of these crimes,” she proclaimed. “NEVER!”

As the months progressed and Jesse continued to be a model of upright behavior, the board began to heed his mother’s pleas. Finally, in January 1874, an investigator named Gardiner Tufts—an agent of the State Board of Charities—was dispatched to 312 Broadway to evaluate the condition of the Pomeroy household. He came away favorably impressed. Mrs. Pomeroy struck him as an honest, hardworking woman, who had opened a little dressmaking business at 327 Broadway, directly across the street from her residence. Jesse’s older brother, Charles, seemed equally commendable—a thrifty and diligent young man who ran a little newsstand in the front of the shop and had his own paper route.

True, there were some troubling aspects of the situation. Mrs. Pomeroy was bitterly separated from her husband, who had nothing to do with the family. As the product of a broken home, Jesse had clearly been without adequate parental control—“left to drift pretty much at his own will,” as Tufts reported. On the whole, however, the investigator was impressed by Mrs. Pomeroy’s obvious devotion and reassured by her promise to keep her son under close supervision.

As part of his final report, Tufts also interviewed Police Captain Dyer of Station Six in South Boston, who—expressing his belief that “it isn’t best to be down on a boy too hard or too long”—suggested that Jesse be set free on probation. “Give him a chance to redeem himself,” he urged.

On January 24, 1874, the trustees received Tufts’s report and forwarded their recommendation to the superintendent of the reform school. Two weeks later—on February 6—Jesse Harding Pomeroy was sent home.

His release went unnoted by the newspapers. As far as the people of Boston knew, their city’s most notorious juvenile offender was safely locked away for the rest of his adolescence. Eventually—and much to its outrage—the public would discover the truth: less than seventeen months after his arrest, “the boy torturer” had been turned loose on the streets.

12

A simple child

That lightly draws its breath,

And feels its life in every limb,

What should it know of death?

—William Wordsworth, “We Are Seven”

T
o secure her son’s release, Mrs. Pomeroy had promised that Jesse would be put to work right away, assisting his older brother, Charles—a strapping sixteen-year-old who earned a small but steady income by selling newspapers. More than a half-dozen papers were published in Boston during the 1870s—the
Globe,
the
Post,
the
Journal,
the
Herald,
the
Daily Advertiser,
the
Evening Traveller,
the
Evening Transcript,
and others. Charles sold them all from the little newsstand he ran in the front part of his mother’s dressmaking shop at 327 Broadway. He also had a delivery route, with more than two-hundred-and-fifty subscribers.

True to his mother’s word, Jesse was given a job as soon as he got home. Two days after his return, he was put in charge of Charles’s afternoon route. Setting off from the shop at around 3:00
P.M.
—a big canvas pouch slung over his shoulder—Jesse would deliver papers to approximately one hundred homes in the city. At other times, he helped out in the store.

Jesse approached his new responsibilities in a methodical fashion, keeping a little notebook in which he neatly listed the names and addresses of his customers and the papers they took. This notebook is still preserved in the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and anyone examining it today is bound to be struck by how exceptionally ordinary—how entirely nondescript—it seems. Written in an almost compulsively
tidy hand, it could be the ledger of any earnest, hardworking adolescent—the type of boy who, in the old days, might have tried to earn a pair of roller skates by joining the Junior Sales Club of America and peddling door-to-door greeting cards after school. The notebook stands as concrete evidence of Ruth Pomeroy’s contention that her younger son was a bright, studious, industrious boy.

Of course, Jesse’s energy and aptitude were in no way inconsistent with his extreme psychopathology. Homicidal maniacs of the type that we now call “serial killers” have often been effective, highly organized businessmen and professionals. John Wayne Gacy, for example—whose suburban crawl space contained the rotted remains of twenty-seven victims—ran a thriving contracting business. Ted Bundy distinguished himself in law school and was regarded as a rising young star of the Republican party. Other serial killers have been successful military officers, stock market speculators—even physicians.

Indeed, the disparity between the seeming normality of sociopathic sex-killers and their hidden pathology is one of the most fascinating—and frightening—things about them. In this regard, Jesse Pomeroy was typical of the breed. His rational faculties were fundamentally intact. But his human qualities—empathy, conscience, a capacity for remorse—were completely missing from his makeup. In their place, concealed beneath his “mask of sanity,” was a second, utterly ungovernable self—a being of ferocious appetite that would erupt at the right provocation: a suitable victim, an importunate need, an unforeseen opportunity.

Given Jesse’s predatory nature, it was only a matter of time before the creature he contained showed its face.