Jesse Pomeroy
Wikimedia Commons
Between 1871 and 1872, reports surfaced in Charlestown, Massachusetts, that a number of young boys had been lured away from where they were playing and assaulted in the woods.
The crimes were brutal. All of the boys were badly beaten, and most reported being struck repeatedly with a belt. Two were stabbed. Nobody was ever positively identified in these attacks, but just two years later, 14-year-old Jesse Pomeroy was arrested for brutally beating younger boys in the South Boston neighborhood to which his family had just moved. The court found him mentally deficient and released him from reform school after just a few months.
Almost immediately after Pomeroy got home to the dressmaker’s shop his mother owned and raised her family in, ten-year-old Boston native Katie Curran disappeared.
A short time later, the naked, mutilated body of four-year-old Horace Millen was left in a marsh. The police, many of whom had earlier protested Pomeroy’s light sentence, didn’t waste any time; they went right to his home and searched the shop. There, in a heap of rubbish, they dug up the decomposing body of Katie Curran.
Wikimedia CommonsJesse’s mother, Ruth, swore he would never have hurt anyone and worked to get him released from the reformatory, despite knowing that he killed the family pets.
The details of the case horrified the public. Despite Pomeroy’s youth, the prosecution asked for a conviction of first-degree murder “with extreme atrocity,” which carried the death penalty.
The jury didn’t deliberate long — the girl was found in his family’s garbage heap, after all — but they added a suggestion of mercy to their guilty verdict on account of Pomeroy’s age. The judge wasn’t having it and sentenced Pomeroy to death by hanging.
In the state of Massachusetts, every death warrant had to be signed by the governor. This was almost always a formality, but in this case the governor refused his assent.
The state’s executive council met three times to debate the matter and twice voted to uphold the sentence. Both times the governor refused to sign off on the hanging. Finally, the council voted for life imprisonment in solitary confinement. The governor agreed.
Pomeroy occupied his time in prison by becoming the single biggest pain his jailers had ever seen.
Locked in a cell 24 hours a day, he read up on the law and filed multiple lawsuits against the facility and staff. He wrote poetry and demanded to have it published at prison expense. He made weapons and tools out of whatever he could find or steal, and then he staged at least a dozen serious escape attempts. The most serious involved blasting through a wall with a redirected gas pipe — an attempt that backfired and cost him an eye.
After several decades of this, Pomeroy’s sentence was partially commuted to allow him to mingle with the other prisoners. He refused and demanded a pardon instead. Eventually, he moved into the general population and spent the rest of his life organizing minstrel shows for the other inmates.
Jesse Pomeroy eventually died in 1932, aged 73 years, after nearly six decades behind bars.
Next, unravel the mystery behind another young murderer, Lizzie Borden. Then, hear the grisly tale of the twenty-something Moors murderers. Finally, read about infamous serial killers who will chill you to the bone.
