Fiend (10 page)

“Come back by lunchtime,” she called as he hurried out the front door.

Though her children were newcomers to the neighborhood,
Mrs. Millen allowed them to go off unaccompanied, so long as she knew exactly where they were headed and when they would be home. Before returning to her housework, she made sure to check the clock. The time was 10:20
A.M.

*  *  *

About fifteen minutes later, a neighbor of the Millens—a woman named Sarah Hunting—encountered little Horace near the lamppost on Dorchester Street. He was in the company of a bigger boy. Mrs. Hunting didn’t take a close look at the latter, though he struck her as “lop-shouldered.”

When she asked Horace where he was off to, he exclaimed, “The bakery!” Holding up his right hand, he uncurled his fingers and showed her the coins he had clutched in his palm. Then Horace and the older boy headed down the street.

*  *  *

Mrs. Eleanor Fosdick was sitting by her bedroom window at around eleven o’clock when a slender boy, four or five years old, rounded the corner of Dorchester Street. He caught her attention because of his black-velvet, gold-braided cap. Her own five-year-old son had been hankering after just such a cap for weeks.

All at once, Mrs. Fosdick became aware of something else: a second, older boy following the younger one around the corner.

As the little boy in the velvet cap headed for the bakery down the block, the older boy retreated to a nearby doorway and took a quick look around him. From her vantage point across the street, Mrs. Fosdick could clearly see his expression. It struck her as so odd—so strangely
excited
—that she went to fetch her spectacles.

When she returned to her window seat, she saw the little boy emerge from the bakery with a drop cake in his hand. At that moment, the older boy emerged from the doorway and—after speaking briefly to the younger one—took away the drop cake, broke it in two, gave one part back to the little boy, and devoured the rest himself.

Then, taking the little boy by the hand, he led him away along Dorchester Street, in the direction of the bay.

*  *  *

About forty minutes later, a man named Elias Ashcroft spotted two boys walking along the Old Colony Railroad tracks toward McCay’s Wharf. The older of the two was leading the
smaller one by the hand. He assumed that they were brothers out for some fun.

*  *  *

Fifteen-year-old Robert Benson had been digging clams in the bay for several hours. He was returning home with his haul at around noon when he encountered a couple of boys, who were heading toward a strip of marshland locally known as the “cow pasture.” As the older of the two boys helped his little companion across a ditch, gunfire resounded in the distance.

“What’re they shooting?” the older boy asked Benson.

“Wild ducks,” he replied.

Without another word, the older boy led the smaller one away. Benson continued in the opposite direction, wondering idly about the little boy’s outfit. The fancy clothing—knee breeches with a checkered waist, velvet-trimmed shirt, black velvet cap—seemed totally inappropriate for an outing to the marsh.

*  *  *

About twenty minutes later, a man named Edward Harrington, who had also spent the morning clamming, was washing his haul in a little creek when, glancing up, he spotted a teenaged boy sprinting toward the railroad tracks, away from the marsh. As he ran, the boy kept casting nervous looks over his shoulder.

Curious, Benson paused and looked back in the direction of the marsh to see if someone was chasing the boy. But no one was there.

15

It’s like a lion at the door;

And when the door begins to crack,

It’s like a stick across your back;

And when your back begins to smart,

It’s like a penknife in your heart;

And when your heart begins to bleed,

You’re dead, and dead, and dead, indeed.

—Nursery rhyme

B
y the time they arrived at Savin Hill Beach at around 3:45
P.M.
, the tide was in and the water too high for clamming, so the two Power brothers—eleven-year-old George and his older brother, James—decided to do a little beachcombing instead. George, as he always did, quickly took the lead. Striding along the shoreline, he kept his gaze fixed on the sand for any treasures that might have washed up with the tide. He had gone about a hundred yards when he stopped and let out a piercing yell.

Deaf since birth, thirteen-year-old James didn’t hear his brother’s cry. But when he glanced up, he saw George waving to him frantically and took off at a run. The sight that struck him when he reached his brother’s side made him gape in confusion.

A few feet away in the sand, surrounded by a circle of charred stones, lay a little clambake pit, empty shells scattered all around. Something resembling a doll was stretched out inside the pit. Looking closer, James saw that it was the half-naked body of a little boy. He lay stiffly on his back, britches and drawers pulled down around his ankles. There was caked blood all over his face, hands, and upper thighs. His shirtfront was covered with gore.

Glancing around for help, George spotted two men about fifty yards away. They were moving cautiously through the tall
grass, rifles cradled in their arms. Leaving his older brother with the body, George ran across the marshland and alerted the pair—a couple of duck-hunters named Obed Goodspeed and Patrick Wise—who hurried back to the little stone-ringed pit. A few moments later, they were joined by another man, a fellow named H. F. Harrington, who had noticed the commotion and come over to investigate.

Kneeling by the body, Goodspeed took note of its condition—the blood issuing from the mouth and right eye, the stab wounds on the hands, the punctured shirt, the mutilated groin. Then—leaving the others to stand watch over the dead child—Goodspeed headed toward Washington Village in search of a policeman, while the thirteen-year-old deaf-mute, James, took off in the opposite direction.

*  *  *

At around 5:15
P.M.
, Officer Roswell M. Lyons of the Ninth Police Station was patrolling his beat near the Old Colony Railroad line when a breathless young boy came running up to him and began motioning frantically in the direction of the bay.

“What’s the matter, lad?” asked Lyons. The boy—who looked to be about thirteen—was so deeply agitated that he seemed incapable of intelligible speech. It took Lyons a moment to realize that he was a deaf-mute.

Raising his chin, the boy ran a hand across his windpipe in a throat-slitting gesture. Lyons interpreted this pantomime to mean that someone was dead. Pulling out a notebook and pencil, he flipped to an empty page and printed the words, “Is anyone drowned?” The boy quickly scanned the query, then snatched the pencil from the policeman’s hand and, on the bottom of the same page, wrote: “One murdered.”

Frowning, Lyons gestured for the boy to lead the way. They had gone about half a mile in the direction of Savin Hill Beach when Lyons saw three men and another, smaller boy huddled around a circle of stone just a few yards from the shoreline. As he drew closer to this solemn little group, he noticed the stricken look on the faces of the men. Then he glanced down into the pit, and felt his own features grow taut with dismay.

Lyons would later testify that, in all his years of police work, he had never confronted a more appalling sight. It was clear at a glance that the little victim in the pit—who looked barely older
than a toddler—had been subjected to an agonizing ordeal. The writhing of his limbs had caused his heels to gouge deep furrows in the sand, and his fists were so tightly clenched in pain that his fingernails were embedded in his palms. There were ugly lacerations on the back of his hands that Lyons immediately recognized as defensive wounds, inflicted when the child had tried to ward off his attacker. The boy had been stabbed in the chest at least half-a-dozen times, and his throat was gashed so deeply that his head was nearly severed from the body. Bloody fluid oozed from one punctured eyeball. He had also been partially castrated. Looking down at the child’s exposed groin, Lyons saw one testicle hanging loose from the mutilated scrotum.

After rearranging the dead boy’s undergarments and pants, Lyons carefully took the little corpse in his arms and—with the help of Wise, Harrington, and Goodspeed (who had returned to the crime scene after his own futile search for a policeman)—carried it to the Crescent Avenue railroad station, where he quickly secured a carriage. Then he conveyed the body to Police Station Nine, where it lay for an hour or so before being transferred to Waterman’s undertaking parlor at 1912 Washington Street to await the arrival of Coroner Ira Allen.

*  *  *

At first, Leonora Millen had assumed that her son was simply dawdling. But when Horace still wasn’t home by 11:30
A.M.
, she became worried enough to throw on a shawl and go looking for him.

The bakery owner, a woman named Moulton, confirmed that she had sold a penny drop cake to a four-year-old boy in a black velvet cap about a half-hour earlier. But she had no idea what had become of the child once he left the store.

After searching the neighborhood streets without finding her son, Mrs. Millen felt sufficiently alarmed to seek out her husband. After months of unemployment, John Millen had just secured a job at John Clark’s cabinet manufactory on Newman Street, and his wife was reluctant to disturb him. But by then, she had worked herself into a state and did not know where else to turn.

Her husband tried to soothe her fears. Horace had probably encountered some chums on his way home from the bakery and, ignoring his mother’s instructions, had decided to go off and
have fun. The boy was due for a licking; he was becoming more disobedient by the day. Turning back to his work, John advised Leonora to go straight home. Horace was probably already there, wondering where his mother was.

When John arrived home later that afternoon, however, he found his wife sobbing at the kitchen table. Horace had never come back. Now, it was the father’s turn to become alarmed. Turning on his heels, he hurried from the house and scoured the neighborhood.

At approximately 5:30
P.M.
, after failing to turn up any trace of Horace, he bent his steps toward Police Station Six, to report that his four-year-old son was missing.

*  *  *

It was approximately 7:30
P.M.
when Coroner Allen arrived at Waterman’s undertaking parlor. By then, word of the gruesome discovery on Savin Hill Beach had spread throughout the neighborhood, and the street outside the funeral home was packed with curiosity-seekers. When a number of people tried to force their way inside the building to get a glimpse of the victim’s remains, the undertaker summoned the police, who promptly dispersed the morbid crowd and cordoned off the block.

Allen’s examination of the body—conducted in the embalming room with a six-man coroner’s jury in attendance—revealed two distinct wounds to the child’s throat, inflicted with a sharp, small-bladed implement like a pocketknife. One of the incisions had exposed the boy’s windpipe; the other had severed his jugular vein. In Allen’s estimation, either of these wounds would have been “necessarily fatal, as there was no one about who could staunch the flow of blood.”

The postmortem made it horribly clear that the “poor little victim” (as the newspapers would invariably describe the murdered boy in the coming days) had been subjected to an attack of unspeakable savagery. His right eyeball had been punctured through the lid, his hands had been slashed more than a dozen times, there were no less than eighteen stab wounds in his chest, and—in the words of the coroner’s official report—“an attempt had apparently been made to sever the whole of his private parts. The scrotum was opened so much that the left testicle had fallen out and was lying in that condition.”

The examination lasted until nearly 9:00
P.M.
, by which time
reporters from every newspaper in Boston were crammed into the outer rooms of the mortuary, waiting to learn the results. At a few minutes after nine, a police sergeant named Hood—who had observed the postmortem along with the coroner’s jury—emerged from the embalming room and supplied the clamoring newsmen with a graphic description of the crime. Then, while the reporters hurried off to make their midnight deadlines, Hood proceeded to Police Station Nine to transmit a bulletin to other precincts around the city in the hope of identifying the still-unknown victim.

Police news traveled fast in 1874. Though the telephone would not be invented for another two years, all the station houses in Boston were connected by an ingenious communication system known as a “patent-writing telegraph.” Using an electromagnetic pen, an officer would write out a message that, within seconds, was transcribed in facsimile by a matching apparatus on the receiving end.