Jesse Pomeroy, The 14-Year-Old Who Killed Multiple Children In 1870s Boston
Leslie Jones/Boston Public Library Digital CollectionsJesse Harding Pomeroy in his later years.
Between 1871 and 1872, reports surfaced in Charlestown, Massachusetts, that a number of young boys between the ages of four and 10 had been lured into the woods and assaulted. The crimes were brutal. All of the boys were badly beaten, and many reported being struck repeatedly with a belt. Some of them were stabbed.
Nobody was ever positively identified in these attacks, but in August 1872, similar reports started coming in from the South Boston neighborhood that 12-year-old Jesse Pomeroy had just moved to. That September, Pomeroy was arrested for the assaults when one of his victims spotted him peeking into a police station window while he was inside speaking with investigators. Pomeroy was sentenced to six years at a reform school, but he was paroled in February 1874.
Just one month later, 10-year-old Katie Curran disappeared from South Boston. And a few weeks after that, the corpse of four-year-old Horace Millen was found mutilated in a nearby marsh. The police immediately suspected Pomeroy, and when they searched his mother’s dressmaking shop, they found Curran’s body in a pile of ashes in the basement.
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” for the teenage serial killer — a charge that carried the death penalty.
Public DomainA portrait of Jesse Pomeroy as a teen.
It didn’t take the jury long to find Pomeroy guilty, but they added a suggestion of mercy to their verdict on account of his age. The judge disagreed with the assessment, however, 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 Pomeroy’s case, the governor refused his assent. Instead, Jesse Pomeroy spent the next six decades in prison, dying behind bars in 1932 at age 72.
