Fiend (42 page)

The great state which gave the lyceum its birth and its first real purpose, the state which wept over the sins of black slavery in the South, the state which morally gagged every time the word “bondage” was mentioned, has for forty years maintained a worse form of slavery than ever existed in South Carolina.

—Fred High,
Prison Problems

O
n June 28, 1914—just a few months before the thirty-eighth anniversary of Jesse’s incarceration in Charlestown—a bullet fired by a young Serbian nationalist set off a conflagration that would engulf the world and create unimaginable desolation and suffering. From all available evidence, however, it appears that the start of the Great War made little or no impact on Jesse’s awareness. Not one of the many letters he wrote during the following year contains even a single reference to it. For him, the world was a nine-by-sixteen-foot cell, and the only suffering that mattered was his own.

Though he stuck to his pledge to forego any further escape attempts, he continued to churn out a steady stream of petitions, appeals, and complaints. On September 5, 1914, for example, he sent a letter to Frank L. Randall, chairman of the Massacusetts Prison Commission. As a mere boy of fourteen, Jesse wrote, he had been condemned to a sentence of “unmeasured inhumanity—‘Solitary imprisonment at hard labor for life’—and in these almost 40 yrs. since, nothing has been done to uplift this life, to hold before me any incentive, inducement, or privilege which might tend to bring me upon the road of reformation, to be a law-abiding citizen. I have been left to my own devices, and you will not find another 14 yr. old boy in that condition.”

Far from seeking to rehabilitate him, Jesse charged, the state
had engaged in an active campaign to demonize him as a way of justifying the “unheard-of sentence.” “If half the effort which is made to distort the truth about me should be made to do something in my behalf,” he averred, “a great change and improvement would follow.” Urging the chairman to help him “in my effort to be something more than a degenerate (which I am not),” Jesse concluded by praying that “there may be for this friendless prisoner something beyond perpetual hard labor in solitary, pointing out that there are limits to human endurance, even if I have been outside the pale of human sympathy to this date.”

In point of fact, Jesse was not completely “beyond the pale of human sympathy.” By 1914, his situation had attracted the attention of various individuals, who agreed that—by condemning him to a lifetime in solitary—the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had committed an act of “unmeasured inhumanity.”

Besides his mother, Jesse’s most ardent supporter was a Chicago man named Fred High, publisher of a magazine called
The Platform.
In 1913, High brought out a volume called
Prison Problems,
an anthology of essays and poems whose high-minded purpose, as expressed in its preface, was to rouse public sentiment against the “barbarism of the present penal system . . . so that our penitentiaries shall cease to be criminal factories and become reform institutions.” High saw himself as a stalwart Christian reformer, one of the “soldiers of the common good” who were doing “our little mite towards bringing about a better day . . . for our fellows who have stumbled on the rough journey and have stepped aside from the straight and narrow path.”

As it happened, he was also a deep-dyed bigot and anti-Semite. In an April 1914 letter to the chairman of the Massacusetts Prison Commission, High compared Pomeroy’s situation to that of Leo Frank—the Jewish factory superintendent wrongfully accused of the murder of a thirteen-year-old girl named Mary Phagan in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1913. Frank’s conviction was widely denounced as a flagrant case of homegrown anti-Semitism—“the American counterpart of the Dreyfus affair” (as the
Baltimore Sun
put it). To High, however, Frank’s defenders were nothing but a “great army of Jews trying to save the neck of a Jew.” By contrast, he insisted, poor, friendless Jesse Pomeroy remained locked up in prison simply because
he “does not happen to be Jewish, Irish, Geman, or any other nation that sticks up for their own.”

High’s most impassioned defense of Pomeroy appeared in the volume
Prison Problems.
The essay (the only one in the anthology written by High himself) begins with a bitter denunciation of the state of Massachusetts and, more specifically, of the Charlestown penitentiary. “The New Orleans slave market which stirred the soul of Abraham Lincoln to righteous wrath,” wrote High, “was an altar of justice as compared to the den of gloom where this human being, made in the image of his Creator, has been confined for forty long years. To me, Simon Legree was a merciful benefactor as compared to Warden Russell, who for twenty-one years has carried out the blind verdict of a jury, perhaps long since dead.”

The crux of High’s argument was that there was no defensible reason for subjecting Pomeroy to such punishment. “There are only two conclusions that a thinking mind can arrive at,” High declared. “First, this man, Jesse Pomeroy, is a degenerate, unsound of reason, with defective mental and moral faculties. If this is true, he should have had medical treatment, he should have been in a hospital, had fresh air, God’s sunshine, a mother’s love in more constant potions. . . . Shame on the state! Thrice shame on the officials if Jesse Pomeroy is as described!”

The second possibility was that Jesse “is sane, fully equipped, mentally.” But “if so,” then hadn’t he “suffered enough for the crimes he is supposed to have committed forty years ago? Why shouldn’t he have at least the freedom of the penitentiary the same as an ordinary criminal? Why is he even denied the privilege of attending the concerts? Even the religious services . . . are for the others but not for him. Surely he has suffered enough to merit his release.”

To stir the indignation of his readers, High reprinted a long, piteous letter sent to him by Jesse’s mother. By then, Ruth Pomeroy was a feeble, ailing woman in her early seventies who had spent the better part of her life in an unavailing effort to persuade the world of her son’s innocence. The past forty years had done nothing to change her feelings about Jesse. “I have never believed my son guilty of these crimes, NEVER!,” she proclaimed. Her son, she insisted, had been a “happy and bright boy” who was railroaded for a murder he did not commit because the South Boston police were under intense pressure to
make an arrest in the Millen case, and Jesse—having just been released from reform school and being a “stranger in the neighborhood”—made a convenient scapegoat.

“Jesse was only a boy of a little over fifteen years when he went to Charlestown State Prison,” Mrs. Pomeroy continued. “In his solitude he put himself down to study and has succeeded in educating himself. . . . He is a learned man and could do a great deal of good if out. He has already served a lifetime and ought to come home, but you see the people do not know the real ‘Jesse Pomeroy.’ No one gets to see him and he is friendless with the exception of his mother. I can do but little; I am old, over seventy, and I feel my time is short here, but through all these years I have cherished the hope that before I passed away I might have my son with me once more. . . . Thank you for your kindness and hope and pray you may be able to do something for my son.”

High concluded his essay with a heartfelt appeal (plus a dash of racist rhetoric). After leveling a few final insults at the state of Massachusetts (which had “tried for forty years to crush, torture, and brutalize Jesse H. Pomeroy”), Warden Russell of Charlestown (“this Simon Legree of cultured Boston”), and Governor Eugene Foss (a political “turncoat” and “flip-flopper” who was no better than Pontius Pilate), High urged his readers to do all they could “to prevent this disgrace from becoming a greater monstrosity and travesty of justice”:

Why can’t we try kindness, love, and patience, abolish brutality and barbarity, and see if Jesse H. Pomeroy is not a man who will respond to humane appeals? Who knows but that he may even yet take his place in the world of usefulness to comfort and cheer his faithful old mother who has stood by him through all these years, faithful and true; watching, waiting, working, and hoping against hope that her boy will yet be given back to her. . . . Do the guards, officials, and whatnots of the Massachusetts penitentiary and the yellow journals know the same Jesse Pomeroy that the faithful mother describes? How can they? You might as well hand the score of a symphony orchestra to a band of Hottentots and ask them to bring forth the same soul vibrations that were born in the brain of Mendelssohn.

As 1914 progressed, Jesse’s written appeals began to fall on more receptive ears. In March of that year, for example, he was finally permitted to file a formal petition with the governor and executive council, requesting a “pardon of my said offense and a release from further imprisonment on said sentence, either absolute or upon such conditions and under such limitations as the Governor deems proper.”

Jesse’s petition was based on the same highly dubious argument he had been making since 1876—namely, that his conviction of “murder in the first degree on the ground of atrocity” was illegal, since the prosecution had failed to prove that there was anything truly atrocious about the Millen murder. In light of the cruelties inflicted on the four-year-old boy—whose throat had been slashed, right eyeball punctured, and scrotum torn open—this assertion seems outrageous at best. Jesse’s reasoning—which reveals a great deal about his complete inability to comprehend the enormity of his crimes, even after a span of forty years—was that the victim was already unconscious (and possibly dead) by the time he had been gashed, sliced, and nearly castrated. “Hence,” Pomeroy concluded, “no torture, no aggravating circumstances.”

Needless to say, this argument didn’t carry much weight with Governor Foss and his councillors. Far more compelling was Jesse’s assertion that, after thirty-eight years of solitary confinement, “the ends of justice have been obtained.” Indeed, the sheer, inhuman length of Jesse’s immurement had become the most politically charged and controversial aspect of his case. Even those who recalled, with undiminished horror, the “boy fiend’s” reign of terror felt that it was time “to give Pomeroy a little freedom—a little of God’s pure air and sunshine” (as one petitioner, a man named Levi Parker, urged the governor).

In the spring of 1914, responding to growing public pressure, Governor Foss appointed a commission of four medical experts to examine Pomeroy and ascertain whether, in their opinion, “the severity of his solitary condition” might be eased. Their final report, issued on July 14, 1914, constitutes the most complete description of Pomeroy’s psychology on record and is therefore worth quoting at length.

The report begins with a survey of Jesse’s criminal history and childhood background, then continues with a brief but telling summary of his prison experiences:

Although living in solitary confinement all these years, Pomeroy has been far from idle. From the first he has been a constant reader and student and claims to have taught himself to read books in several foreign languages including Arabic. He has also spent much of his time in tireless and incessant efforts to make his escape from prison, beginning shortly after his commitment. Besides making ten or twelve determined attempts to break out which were thwarted as he was putting them into execution, tools and other cleverly devised implements have been repeatedly found in his possession. . . . A fellow prisoner reports that he seems to have a mania for anything that will cut or bore. This has been the extent of his manual labor for he has repeatedly refused to take up any of the various kinds of prison work or even to exercise regularly in the prison yard. . . .

His main employment is his determined and unremitting effort to prove that he was illegally sentenced, in order to secure pardon or discharge from custody. This is his aim in life. He has made a study of his case with the aid of law books furnished him. . . . He has written many hundreds of pages setting forth his defense which has been sent to various courts (including the United States Supreme Court), to the Secretary of State, and to His Excellency the Governor and numerous lawyers. His applications have been invariably denied and he has received no encouragement from legal sources whatever. Nevertheless, he persists in his appeals . . . and will not deny that he intends to urge his claims until he obtains his freedom.

Throughout his prison life he has been uniformly insensible to personal interest taken in him by others. . . . He takes kindnesses as a matter of course, is highly egotistical and inclined to dictate to prison authorities. His only interest in his mother is the aid she can give him in securing his release. He shows no pleasure at seeing her but begins on his case as soon as she comes and talks of nothing else. He is very unreliable on account of his untruthfulness. He thinks everyone is against him and apparently never loses his suspicions for a moment.

Turning to Pomeroy’s mental condition, the physicians agreed that the prisoner was an “extreme example” of “a moral degenerate.” Possessed of “sharp wits,” a “good memory,” and
“a desire to improve his mind,” Jesse had “no delusions whatever, the nearest approach to one being his fixed obsession that he was illegally convicted, a common one with long-sentence convicts.” He possessed a “knowledge of right and wrong in the abstract,” had acquired an impressive “knowledge of criminal law,” and had “shown indefatigable energy and considerable ability to utilize legal points.” In short, in terms of his reasoning abilities and “intellectual capacity,” Pomeroy seemed perfectly normal, even above-average.

“On the other hand,” the experts cautioned, he was “unquestionably defective on the moral side to a degree which . . . was plainly extreme and much more pronounced than in the ordinary criminal. The unusual, atrocious, and cruel nature of his criminal acts, his pursuit of crime for crime’s sake only, . . . his utter insensibility to suffering, and his gratification in torturing his victims ‘for the same reason that a cat does a mouse before killing it’ . . . are typical of the moral defective, and when taken as a whole are far different from the motives and conduct of the ordinary malefactor.” Jesse, in short, was a classic case of what later criminologists would call a sociopath: a terrifyingly depraved individual whose superior cunning and rationality were linked to—and deployed in the service of—an utterly remorseless, sadistic, and bloodthirsty nature.