Fiend (9 page)

*  *  *

Early on the morning of Wednesday, March 18, 1874—just six weeks after Jesse was released from reform school—a ten-year-old girl named Katie Curran remembered that she needed a new notebook for school. Her mother—who was busy dressing Katie’s younger sister, Celia Abby—told the girl to take some coins from her purse and hurry over to Tobin’s, a neighborhood store not far from the Currans’ South Boston home.

Katie, who was wearing a black-and-green-plaid dress, threw on an old jacket, tied a scarf about her neck, and made for the front door. Just before she stepped outside, she turned back to
her mother and called: “Have Celia Abby ready when I get back. We’ve got a new teacher, and I don’t want to be late.”

As Katie disappeared down the front steps, Mrs. Curran glanced at the mantelpiece clock. The time was precisely 8:05
A.M.

*  *  *

On Wednesday, March 18, it was Jesse’s turn to open the shop, a chore he and Charles performed on alternating days. The shop—located on the street-level floor of a little two-story house owned by a family named Margerson—stood directly across from the Pomeroys’ flat. Arriving at approximately 7:30
A.M.
, Jesse—still groggy with sleep—unlocked the door, stripped off his jacket, grabbed a broom, and began to tidy up the place.

He had just finished sweeping the floor when a neighborhood boy named Rudolph Kohr—who earned a little pocket change by running errands for the Pomeroys and assisting with the newspaper deliveries—showed up. The time was a few minutes past 8:00.

As Kohr stood chatting with Jesse, a little girl—wearing a threadbare jacket over a black-and-green-plaid dress—entered the shop. She needed a notebook for school, she explained. She had been to Tobin’s, but hadn’t found the kind she was looking for. Did Jesse have any for sale?

Jesse nodded. He had one notebook left, though it was slightly damaged. “There’s an ink spot on the cover,” he explained. If she wanted it, he’d let her have it at a discount—three cents instead of the customary nickel.

Katie Curran eagerly agreed.

Just then, the Pomeroys’ old tabby emerged from the cellar, mewing for food. Jesse asked Rudolph if he would mind running over to the butcher’s for a few scraps of meat. The Kohr boy left at once.

He came back about ten minutes later. When he entered the store, the little girl was gone.

*  *  *

When her daughter wasn’t back by 8:35, Mary Curran grew anxious. By 9:00
A.M.
, she was almost beside herself with worry. Mrs. Curran had always kept a watchful eye on her children. Except during school hours—or when Katie and her friends were skipping rope or playing hopscotch on the block—her ten-year-old girl had never been out of her sight for more than half an hour.

Throwing on her shawl, she rushed to Tobin’s. The proprietor, Thomas Tobin, confirmed that a little girl had come in earlier. He had shown her a few notebooks, but none of them had been been to her liking. The last he’d seen of her, she was headed up Broadway, looking for another store that carried stationer’s goods.

Thanking Mr. Tobin, Mrs. Curran hurried away. She asked at another neighborhood shop called Gill’s, but no one there had seen her daughter. As the frantic woman made her way through the neighborhood, she encountered a girl named Lee, who said she had spotted Katie entering the Pomeroys’ shop at 327 Broadway earlier that morning.

The news sent a pang of alarm through Mrs. Curran’s breast. Like everyone else in the neighborhood, she had heard the stories about Jesse Pomeroy. She went immediately to Police Station Six.

Both Captain Dyer and an officer named Adams listened to her story and did their best to reassure her. They doubted that Jesse Pomeroy had anything to do with her daughter’s disappearance. By all accounts, the boy had undergone a complete rehabilitation in reform school. And even at his worst, Jesse had never been known to attack little girls. Katie had probably gotten lost in her search for a notebook. Captain Dyer told Mrs. Curran to go back home and wait. His men would bring her daughter back safe and sound.

Twenty-four hours later, however, there was still no sign of the ten-year-old child.

By then the whole neighborhood was abuzz with news of the missing girl. Sometime that afternoon, Mrs. Curran received a message from the Kohr boy, who said that he had some information about Katie. Mrs. Curran immediately proceeded to the Kohr home, where Rudolph informed her that he had seen her daughter with Jesse in the Pomeroys’ shop early the previous morning.

Mrs. Curran lost no time in conveying this intelligence to the police. Once again, however, Dyer and Adams pooh-poohed her suspicions. The Kohr boy was a known liar, they said. But if it would make Mrs. Curran feel better, Detective Adams himself would pay a visit to the Pomeroys’ shop.

When Mary Curran returned to the station the following day, Adams assured her that he had made a thorough search of the premises and—as expected—turned up nothing. He had also interviewed
Rudolph Kohr and come away more convinced than ever that the boy was lying.

*  *  *

The disappearance of Katie Curran caused a considerable stir in South Boston. Over the next few weeks, the police continued to investigate every lead. Newspapers ran regular stories headlined “Where Is Katie Curran?” The mayor offered a reward of five hundred dollars for information about the missing child.

Eventually, an ostensible witness came forward, who claimed that he had seen the weeping child being lured into a covered carriage on the morning of her disappearance. The police concluded that she had been kidnapped.

Because Katie’s father was Catholic (a fact the newspapers never failed to point out), others chose to believe that he had abducted his own daughter and shipped her off to a convent—a rumor that struck a responsive chord in a Puritan city during an anti-Catholic age, when lurid tracts like
Secrets of the Black Nunnery, Slaves of the Priestcraft, Confessions of a Nun,
and
America’s Menace, or the Politics of Popery
were popular sellers.

13

A violent man enticeth his neighbour, and leadeth him into the way that is not good.

—Proverbs 16:29

I
n the weeks immediately following the disappearance of Katie Curran, a number of children were accosted by an adolescent boy who tried to entice them away from their South Boston neighborhoods. Several of the young ones were tempted to accompany the stranger, who promised to treat them to the circus, take them to a parade, or give them small sums of money to help with an errand. In the end, however, nearly all the little boys resisted.

One who didn’t was named Harry Field. During the first week of April, the five-year-old was standing at the gate of his parents’ house at No. 1027 Shawmut Avenue, when a big boy with a funny-looking eye approached, an old broom handle clutched in one hand. Harry assumed that he was on his way to play stickball.

“Know where Vernon Street is?” asked the big boy.

When Harry nodded, the stranger said, “I’ll give you five cents if you will take me there.”

The little boy readily agreed and the two set off side by side. As soon as they reached their destination, Harry asked for his nickel—but instead of paying up, the stranger grabbed the younger boy by the collar, dragged him into a doorway, and threatened to beat him with the stick unless he obeyed.

“What do you want?” whimpered Harry.

“Come with me,” snarled the older boy. “And keep your flytrap shut.”

Grabbing Harry by one hand, the big boy began to lead him rapidly through the streets, every step carrying the terrified child farther from his home.

All at once, as they rounded the corner of Eustis Street, they passed another older boy, who recognized Harry’s captor and called out angrily to him. As the two adolescents stopped to exchange words, Harry yanked his hand free, spun on his heels, and fled. Halfway down the block, he paused to cast one quick look over his shoulder and saw the two adolescents engaged in a violent altercation. Harry didn’t slow down again until he burst through the front door of his house and threw himself into his mother’s arms. Through his sobs, he explained what had happened.

Her son was so upset that Mrs. Field didn’t have the heart to scold him too harshly for going off with a stranger—something she had warned him against many times. Still, she could not entirely refrain from admonishing him.

“Who knows what might have happened to you if that other lad hadn’t happened along,” she declared. “You were a very lucky boy.”

It wasn’t until two weeks later—after the Horace Millen story broke—that Mary Field realized just
how
lucky her child had been.

14

The wicked flee when no man pursueth.

—Proverbs 28:1

T
he Panic of 1873 began on Thursday, September 18, with the failure of two of New York’s leading banking houses—those of Jay Cooke and George Opdyke. Stock prices fell so precipitously on the following day—“Black Friday,” September 19—that the Stock Exchange was closed for the rest of the month. The resulting depression was the worst since 1837 and did not abate for five years. Bankruptcies increased by the month, hitting their peak in 1878 when nearly 11,000 businesses failed.

One melancholy sign of the depression was the sharp rise in the number of paupers. There were no homeless shelters
per se
in the 1870s. In New York and other big cities, people without a roof over their heads sought shelter in police stations. The accommodations were rudimentary: a rough wooden plank to sleep on (generally in an unventilated cellar) and, occasionally, a meager breakfast in the morning. But for many vagrants—particularly women—even this bare-bones hospitality was preferable to an unprotected night on the streets.

According to statistics maintained by the New York City Police Department, there were just over 136,000 of these so-called “station-house lodgers” in 1871. By 1875, that number had risen to nearly a quarter-million.

*  *  *

Though the depression hadn’t reduced him to beggary, John Anderson Millen—a thirty-one-year-old cabinetmaker with a dusty little shop in Charlestown—had been hit hard by the crisis. His business had fallen off so drastically that he could no longer afford the rent on his house. And so, during the second
week of April, 1874, he and his family—his wife, Leonora, and their two small boys, Sidney and Horace—packed their scant belongings and moved to cheaper lodgings, a rundown frame house on Dorchester Street in South Boston.

As it happened, their new dwelling was located almost directly across the street from the home of John and Katherine Curran, whose ten-year-old girl, Katie, had vanished without a trace just a few weeks earlier. Every now and then, Mrs. Millen would glance out her kitchen window and see one or the other of the missing girl’s parents emerge from their front door, shoulders bowed, faces haggard with grief.

The sight of her care-ravaged neighbors never failed to fill Mrs. Millen’s heart with pity and make her count her own blessings. Her own family may have fallen on hard times. But nothing could possibly be harder than the ordeal of the Currans, whose little child had left home on a simple errand one morning and was never seen again.

*  *  *

Mrs. Millen’s own younger child, four-year-old Horace, had features of such extreme delicacy—porcelain skin, large dark eyes, rosebud mouth, silky blond hair—that he was frequently mistaken for a girl. Mrs. Millen did her best to emphasize his beauty by dressing him in the prettiest clothes the family could afford. On the morning of April 22, 1874—a raw, overcast Wednesday, precisely five weeks after Katie Curran’s disappearance—his outfit consisted of knee breeches with a checkered waist; a red-and-white-checked shirt trimmed with black velvet; a white and black jacket; white woolen socks and high-laced boots; and a black velvet cap trimmed with gold braid and a tassel.

Slender as Horace was, there was nothing especially dainty about his appetite, particularly his craving for sweets. Shortly before 10:00
A.M.
—just a few hours after he had polished off a substantial breakfast—he began nagging his mother for money to visit the bakery. Though the family was hard-pressed for cash, Mrs. Millen—whose husband regularly accused her of spoiling their sons—could not resist Horace’s demands and finally handed him a few pennies.