Jesse Harding Pomeroy: The teenaged killer

Horrified vacationers stumbled across the body of four-year old Horace Millen on the beach at Dorchester Bay, near Boston, in April 1874. The child's throat had been cut and he had been savagely stabbed no fewer than 15 times. Before he died, the boy had been savagely beaten. It was the work of a monster, and police immediately launched a full scale hunt for the killer.

They were looking for a grown man, but some cross referencing in the official files produced the name of Jesse Harding Pomeroy: a boy of 14 who has been reprimanded and sent to a special reform school two years earlier for beating up young children. Fights among youngsters were commonplace, but the name of young Pomeroy, only just out of the primary school, had been remembered by the authorities because of the extraordinary amount of unnecessary force he had used.

When police called on Jesse Pomeroy, his answers to questioning immediately aroused suspicion. He was arrested, brought to court and convicted. But Pomeroy's was one of the most remarkable cases of murder ever. For, though sentenced to die, he was to live for another 58 years and the first 40 years- until he was 55- was spent in solitary confinement.

The American public refused to take a chance on someone who had already displayed the most vicious cruelty. When arrested, he had been at liberty only 60 days after spending 18 months in the Westboro Reformatory. The magistrate who sent him there remarked on the savagery of the beatings he had handled out to children younger than himself and a short while after his trial for the Millen killing, it was established that just five weeks earlier he had killed nine-year-old Katie Curaan. He had buried her body in the cellar of a shop.

At the Millen trial, Jesse Pomeroy pleaded innocence by the way of insanity but it did him no good. He was convicted and sentenced to death. There were those who, because of his age, urged that his death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment but they were shouted down by the masses who demanded a swift execution. As it turned out, Pomeroy's life was spared only because of the legal complexities governing death sentences in the state of Massachusetts.

Although a judge had passed a death sentence on him, the law required that the state governor of Massachusetts set the date of execution and sign the death warrant. Governor Gaston, in office at the time, refused possibly for political reasons to do anything at all: he would neither sign the death warrant nor commute young Pomeroy's sentence. He compromised with an order, signed and sealed, that Pomeroy must spend the rest of his natural days in solitary confinement. That order stood until long after Governor Gaston had passed away himself.

It was 1916, when Pomeroy was 54, before he was finally released from solitary and allowed to mix with other prisoners at Charlestown Prison. He had survived what must have been a superhuman ordeal by burying himself in studies. He read an immense number of books, and he wrote a lot himself.

If he had been mad at the time of the beatings, there was no longer any sign of it in the writings in these later years. One of the manuscripts he spawned was an autobiography which chronicled his early life, the crimes of which he had been convicted and an attempt he made to break out of jail.

Pomeroy died in the prison in which he had spent all his life, on 29th September, 1932. He was 73 and had spent more than 60 of those years behind bars.

References:-

1) Some books in the local library.