Making a Monster

Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston

Dawn Keetley

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781625342737
• eBook ISBN: 9781613765159
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Literature

When twelve-year-old Jesse Pomeroy tortured seven small boys in the Boston area and then went on to brutally murder two other children, one of the most striking aspects of his case was his inability ever to answer the question of why he did what he did. Whether in court or in the newspapers, many experts tried to explain his horrible acts—and distance the rest of society from them. Despite those efforts, and attempts since, the mystery remains.

In this book, Dawn Keetley details the story of Pomeroy's crimes and the intense public outcry. She explores the two reigning theories at the time—that he was shaped before birth when his pregnant mother visited a slaughterhouse and that he imitated brutal acts found in popular dime novels. Keetley then thoughtfully offers a new theory: that Pomeroy suffered a devastating reaction to a smallpox vaccination which altered his brain, creating a psychopath who revealed the human potential for brutality. The reaction to Pomeroy's acts, then and now, demonstrates the struggle to account for exactly those aspects of human nature that remain beyond our ability to understand.

1

Crimes

Who was Jesse Harding Pomeroy in those fourteen short years before he entered the prison system in which he would die? He himself describes wandering down to the Navy Yard in Charlestown where his father worked, an idyllic summer of fishing and playing ball with relatives in Maine, and delivering newspapers in downtown Boston for his brother.1 Someone who claimed to know him in those days, however, described a sullen, taciturn boy who was always engrossed in dime novels and, while others played games, would ferociously stab the ground with a knife. His mother insisted until her death in 1915 that he was a good boy, incapable of committing the brutal crime of which a jury convicted him. And police reports describe a predator who lured a four-year-old boy to the marshes of Dorchester Bay and stabbed him countless times and who enticed a ten-year-old girl into a cellar in order to slit her throat. For the newspaper reporters who avidly covered his case, he was a “child monster” and a “boy fiend,” prototype and exemplar of the many boy fiends who would follow in his footsteps, although none quite as spectacularly bad as the original. The real Jesse Pomeroy, if there is such a thing, slips into and between these versions—ever elusive, just out of reach.

First and foremost, like all notorious criminals, Jesse Pomeroy was defined by the ferocious acts that emblazoned his name on the front page of newspapers across the nation. Whoever he was before his crimes lurks largely in the shadows. He became the crimes he committed, his identity defined by his love of torture, of murder, of blood. His name, in fact, became a veritable catchword for inexplicable youthful cruelty. In the end, everything but his brutality vanishes.

Early Days

Many of Jesse Pomeroy’s immediate forebears moved to Charlestown (which would later become part of Boston) from Maine, traveling the path from rural to urban world that characterized the lives of so many Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. Jesse’s mother, Ruth, who would stand steadfastly by her vilified son until her death at the age of seventy-two from bronchial pneumonia, was born on February 17, 1842, in the coastal Maine town of Camden in Knox County. Her parents, John Snowman and Susan McFadden Snowman, were born just one county over, in Sagadahoc County.2 In the summer of 1871, Jesse and his older brother, Charles, took a memorable trip to Maine to stay with their mother’s family—a proliferation of aunts and uncles, as Pomeroy recalled four years later in an autobiography written for the Boston Sunday Times. Pomeroy described that summer as an all too brief period of happiness that was preceded by a bout of pneumonia that rendered him “crazy for nearly a week” and that would be followed by his early experiments in torture—what he ambiguously called his “troubles.”3

Like many in his mother’s family, Jesse’s paternal grandfather, Thomas J. Pomeroy (who went by Jesse), also hailed from Maine, where he was born in the town of Hampden around 1807. He most likely moved to Hingham, Massachusetts, in his early twenties, where he met the significantly younger Ruth T. Penny, a native of Massachusetts born either in nearby Scituate or Hingham in 1817. A Boston Daily Globe article would later report that Jesse’s grandfather was working in Hingham and renting a room in the home of Ruth’s father, which is likely where he met her. Jesse Sr. and Ruth were married on November 17, 1833, and at some point after their marriage relocated from Hingham to Charlestown.4 Jesse’s father, also Thomas J. Pomeroy, was born in Massachusetts (in either Hingham or Charlestown) in 1834 or 1835.5 The Charlestown census of 1850 identifies forty-three-year-old Jesse Sr. as a ship carpenter and his wife, Ruth, as thirty-three. Their oldest son, Thomas, was fifteen or sixteen, and his younger brother, Uriah, was eight; a twenty-year-old girl born in Ireland, Mary O’Brien, also lived with them. It appears the family lived by the Navy Yard since their neighbors included two sailors and a sea captain, as well as a laborer, a carpenter, two painters, and a beef packer. It was clearly a working-class community, and the twelve families, who hailed mostly from New England, Ireland, and Sweden, lived in a stretch of eight dwellings.6

The Pomeroy family underwent an upheaval two years later, on November 3, 1852, when Thomas’s mother, Ruth, died of consumption. She was thirty-five and her son was about seventeen.7 Shortly afterward, Thomas found himself living in a very different kind of family. The 1855 census reveals that the household was now headed by Thomas’s sixty-four-year-old maternal grandmother, Temperance C. Penny, who was caring for her grandsons Thomas, now twenty and working as a laborer, and Uriah, thirteen.8 Thomas’s father must have left his family at some point between 1850 and 1855; whether he left before or after his wife died is unclear—but he does appear to have abandoned his two sons, leaving them with his wife’s mother.

If there is any trouble to be found in Jesse Pomeroy’s extended family before his own career of torture and murder, it is to be found with his paternal grandfather, a man whose name he shared. According to an account of (the younger) Jesse’s antecedents published in the Boston Globe as he awaited trial, the union of his paternal grandfather and grandmother had never been a “happy one,” and the fault, reportedly, “was with the man.” The Globe noted that in “some subsequent divorce proceedings it appeared that Pomeroy ill-treated his wife in various harsh ways. The woman afterwards died and he married again in New York, this time a woman who is said to be equal to the emergency and maintains her position as mistress of the situation.”9 While Jesse Sr.’s alleged abuse of his wife and the ensuing divorce proceedings seem a matter of speculation, it is clear that he left his family, including two teenage sons, in order to begin a new life in New York.

Thomas must have met his future wife, Jesse’s mother, not too long after his own mother died and his father left: he and Ruth Ann Snowman were married in Charlestown on September 12, 1857. Thomas, a “laborer,” was listed on the marriage record as twenty-two and living in Charlestown at the time. Ruth lived in Boston, and her age on the marriage certificate was given as seventeen. If she was indeed born in February 1842, however, as her death record showed, she may have lied about her age and been only fifteen on the day she married Thomas. It seems, though, that neither Ruth nor Thomas was entirely sure about when they were born; the birthdates and ages they offered when asked by officials vacillated within a roughly two-year range. And in census records, the birth dates each of them gives is typically preceded with an “abt.,” indicating their inability to name the precise date.10

Thomas and Ruth’s first child, Charles J. Pomeroy, was born in Charlestown on November 6, 1858. The small family then lived at 4 Tremont Street, and Thomas was now apparently working as a fireman, rather than (or as well as) a laborer.11 The couple’s ill-fated second son, Jesse Harding Pomeroy, was born in Charlestown just over a year later, on November 29, 1859, and Thomas was still listed on the birth record as a fireman.12 He may, however, have held more than one job, since Ruth would later recall that from four years before Jesse was born until six years after (from about 1855 to 1865 or 1866), her husband worked in the Navy Yard at Charlestown.13

There is scant information about the Pomeroy family between Jesse’s birth and the publicity that swirled around his torture and murder of small boys twelve years later. In the 1860 census, the year after Jesse was born, life seemed much as it was the year before, except Thomas’s occupation was no longer fireman but just “laborer,” no doubt indicating the job at the Navy Yard that his wife recalled him holding. The Pomeroy family lived in a dwelling with at least one other family, a machinist/journeyman in his forties, his wife, and their eleven-year-old daughter, as well as a twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher from Maine. Of their neighbors—some twelve families living in five separate dwellings—eleven out of forty came from Ireland and the rest were native born.14

Thomas’s work at the Navy Yard was interrupted in 1862 by the Civil War, an event Jesse does not mention in his autobiography—not surprising since he would have been only around three years old when his father left to serve in the Union army. Thomas was a private with Company H of the Fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, and his headstone would be provided by an organization recognizing deceased Civil War veterans who fought for the Union.15 Thomas served for nine months with Company H, from September 1862 to July 1863, and he almost certainly volunteered, since the draft was not instituted until July 1863, right after Company H returned to Boston. Thomas Pomeroy may not have enlisted for entirely noble reasons, however. As Alfred S. Roe points out in his history of the Fifth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, late 1862 saw “the opening days of bounty giving,” since “while many men were willing to go, there were as many, or more, quite content to stay at home.” The initial war fervor had worn off, and the $13 per month the government paid was not much incentive to confront hardship, disease, and death. So during the period when Thomas joined up, towns were offering “bounties” to lure volunteers, anything from $100 to $200, surely an enticing amount to a man who worked as a laborer his entire life.16

Filled mostly with men from Charlestown, Company H was sworn in on September 16, 1862, and went to training camp at Wenham, Massachusetts. About a month later they set off for Newburn, North Carolina, and most of the company’s nine months of service were spent in North Carolina, with at least one foray to Washington, DC. Soon after getting back to Boston, in July 1863, Company H was called on to police a violent draft riot erupting in Boston’s North End; one wonders if Thomas Pomeroy answered the call, or if he had had his fill of the army by then.17

By 1865, Thomas was again working as a “fireman,” according to census records, and the family lived in Charlestown’s second ward. The Pomeroys were still living with another family: Samuel Robins, a mason, along with his wife, Abby, and their five children, who ranged in age from five months to nine years.18 In his autobiography Jesse recalled that when he was six years old (around 1865), he was sent to the public primary school on Bunker Hill Street. He would have attended the red brick school, built in 1805, at the time (between 1866 and 1867) it was being expanded from its original size of 35 by 25 feet to about 60 by 90 feet.19 Jesse remembered his father working at the Navy Yard during this period, and, according to his son, Thomas Pomeroy would pump water from the dry dock and tend the engine. At the time, Jesse noted, his family lived on Lexington Street, near the Mystic River.20

Around 1868 or 1869, when Jesse was ten, he and his brother were “promoted” to the Winthrop Grammar School, which he attended continuously until 1872. He also wrote that his father left the Navy Yard and began working in Boston, driving a horse and wagon for a Mr. Hayden. Jesse reported that the family had moved, in 1868 or 1869, from Lexington Street to 78 Bunker Hill Street, and that in 1870 they moved again, to the house next door, which was “a better house than we had ever lived in before.”21 Indeed, the 1870 census shows that, for what appears to be the first time, the Pomeroys were not sharing a house with another family. Of the families around them, nine lived in eight dwellings, and their occupations seemed more upwardly mobile than the uniformly manual occupations of the Pomeroys’ neighbors before 1870; they included a salesman, coffee dealer, school teacher, clerk, grocer, dressmaker, traveling agent, carpenter, and cabinet maker. These neighbors were all from New England, with only one Irish immigrant identified, a domestic servant working in the carpenter’s household.22

The 1870 census lists Ruth as “keeping house,” even though by at least 1871 (much earlier, by Ruth’s account) she was supporting herself and her sons by sewing, her success at which may have accounted for the family’s slight upward mobility. The 1870 census also confirms that Thomas’s job had changed: it was now listed as “porter,” which accords with Jesse’s memory of his father’s driving a wagon and Ruth’s claim that her husband became a porter in Quincy Market in Boston—a job he would still be doing when Jesse was arrested for torturing boys in September 1872 (when he was listed as a “meat porter at Quincy Market”) and when Jesse murdered Horace Millen in April 1874.23 Jesse claimed, in fact, that he was looking for his father at the market when he was actually brutally stabbing Millen to death.24

Shortly after 1870, and despite the seeming improvement in the family’s living conditions, the marriage between Ruth and Thomas clearly became untenable and they separated. It took several years, though, for Ruth to file for a divorce, which she did in 1878, on the grounds of her husband’s drunkenness. The divorce papers were served to Thomas on March 11, 1878, and the case was heard in the May 1878 term of the Supreme Judicial Court, well after Jesse had been sentenced to jail for the rest of his life.

The divorce petition, filed in March 1878 by Ruth’s attorney, claimed that Thomas “contracted gross and confirmed habits of intoxication” after his marriage to Ruth in 1857, and that he “grossly, wantonly and cruelly neglected to pay suitable maintenance for her, he being of sufficient ability to do so.” As a result, Ruth “deserted” her husband on the first day of August 1871, “and such desertion has continued to the present time.” Ruth claimed that from the day she left Thomas, “as well as for a long time before,” she had “wholly supported herself by her own labor.”25 A notice in the New York Times in May 1878 described the divorce petition, noting the details that Ruth lived with Thomas until August 1871, and that in the last year she lived with him, he “contributed nothing toward the support of either herself or her two children.” Even though she was forced to provide for herself and their children (and even pay some of his bills) with what she could make by sewing, she finally left him not because of his unwillingness to provide for her, but “on account of his habits of intemperance.” The court “did not consider that the allegations had been sustained,” however, and dismissed Ruth’s petition.26 She remained married to Thomas until his death in 1898 and is described as a “widow” on her death certificate, but there is no evidence that after 1871 they ever lived together again.

Although in her divorce petition Ruth claimed that she and Thomas separated in August 1871, it is not entirely clear how accurate this date is and whether she moved, or he did, or both. It is clear that as of August 1871, Thoma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chronology
• Introduction. Becoming Monstrous
• 1. Crimes
• 2. On Trial
• 3. “The Mark of the Meat Market”
• 4. “Dime Novel Pomeroy”
• 5. “A Moral Monster”
• 6. The Scourge of Smallpox
• Epilogue. Abused as a Child?
• Notes
• Index