[The Boston Globe Online][Boston.com] [Boston Globe Online / Living | Arts] [ Send this story to a friend | Easy-print version [Holiday Gift Guide] ] [TreeClassic.com] [Onset] Into the heart of darkness [Image] [NSIChristmas.com] By Diane White, Globe Staff, 12/12/2000 [Pine Street Inn] [Image]n a cold, wet morning in late November, [Advertising@boston.com] Harold Schechter traced the route that 14-year-old Jesse Pomeroy took on another raw morning, April 22, 1874, as he lured 4-year-old Horace Millen to his death. Pomeroy lived with his mother and older brother at 327 Broadway in South Boston. The Millen family had recently moved to a house on nearby Dorchester Street. The two boys were seen together that day in April, walking down Dorchester Street, then along the Old Colony Railroad tracks in the direction of Savin Hill. A few hours later, two young brothers who were out beachcombing found Millen's horribly savaged half-naked little body on Savin Hill Beach. For more than half a century Pomeroy, the Boston Boy Fiend - as he was characterized by the press of his day - was Boston's most infamous murderer. More recently he was all but forgotten, until Schechter decided to tell his story in his new book, ''Fiend: The Shocking True Story of America's Youngest Serial Killer.'' A professor who specializes in 19th-century American Literature at Queens College of the City University of New York, Schechter is also the author of a number of books about serial killers, well-known to what he calls ''a small but devoted group of readers who share my really strange interests.'' He's written novels and nonfiction books on other subjects, but he keeps coming back to the subject of serial murder because it fascinates him, as it fascinates many people. In his academic life, he's found a way to combine his two interests, American literature and serial killers, in a course called ''The American Nightmare.'' It's a popular elective at Queens. ''The registrar tells me it fills up in about 38 seconds,'' he said with a smile. Schechter wanted to write a book about Pomeroy to make the point that children committing murder is not a new phenomenon. He has no patience with moralizers who condemn popular culture as an instigator of juvenile crime. His research into serial killers persuades him that extreme abuse in childhood is more likely than violent entertainment to produce psychopathic killers. Perhaps understandably, Schechter has a somewhat macabre sense of humor and takes a decidedly nonacademic delight in giving his books lurid one-word titles such as ''Deranged,'' ''Depraved,'' and ''Bestial.'' ''Deviant,'' his first and probably best-known work in the genre, was the story of Ed Gein, the necrophiliac murderer who was the prototype for the character Norman Bates in the movie ''Psycho.'' He also co-edited, with David Everitt, the ''The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.'' He's currently researching his next book, about Jane Toppan, a Massachusetts nurse who around the turn of the last century admitted to poisoning 31 people. Exploring the Savin Hill Beach murder scene, Schechter was the picture of an academic: bearded, bespectacled, wrapped in a gray topcoat and carrying a black umbrella, a gray baseball cap atop his thick graying hair. His books are compulsively readable, combining serious research and nonacademic, some might even say juicy, prose. His conversation has a similar appeal. One minute he's talking about the movie version of ''American Psycho,'' the next he's quoting D. H. Lawrence. Into the forest ''D.H. Lawrence wrote a series of classic studies on American literature,'' he said, ''and in one of them he wrote, `The soul of man is a dark forest.' We law-abiding, moral people walk a very straight and narrow path in our lives, but we have the sense that there is this dark forest out there populated by all these scary creatures. These stories allow us to go into that forest a little bit. That's what I do when I write these books, and I hope people get that when they read them.'' Pomeroy is not the most prolific serial killer Schechter has profiled, just the youngest. He murdered Millen and 10-year-old Katie Curran, and he abducted, tortured, mutilated, and savagely beat many other younger boys during a three-year period before he started killing. His story horrified the city and the nation. Then, as now, debate raged about what to do with a child who commits ''adult'' crimes. The facts alone were sensational, but Pomeroy's crimes also played into fears, widespread at the time, that youth had never before been so violent. Schechter said that after the Civil War, there was a general feeling that young people's morals and values were in decline. The same fears would surface again in the 1920s, in the 1950s, and today. ''There is so much hysteria about juvenile crime in this country,'' Schechter said. ''One of the things I try to make clear in my books is that all these phenomena that people get so worked up about now are perennial realities. Juvenile crime is nothing new; it's something inherent in human nature.'' In Pomeroy's day, as now, there was a great deal of public debate and private speculation about what influences may have turned the boy into a murderer. Excessive masturbation was blamed, as were the facts that his parents were divorced, that his mother was overworked, that he was left on his own, free to revel in the thrills of violent dime novels with their lurid woodcuts. Dime novels were the 19th-century equivalent of today's slice-and-splatter videos. It emerged that Pomeroy had never read a dime novel, but then, as now, there were many who were eager to blame his crimes on the influence of violent entertainment. Schechter takes an opposing position. He contends that popular representations of sensational violence actually serve as a kind of safety valve. Releasing taboos ''Popular art has always been extraordinarily violent. That is one of its main functions, to allow the mass audience a way of releasing forbidden, taboo, transgressive impulses that they would never act out in their lives.'' A few years ago, Schechter wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times taking issue with those who blamed a movie, ''Money Train,'' for the firebombing of a New York subway booth that left an attendant critically injured. In the movie - which was based on a series of real robberies in the 1980s - a nearly identical assault occurs. Schechter was invited to debate Senator Joseph Lieberman, whose views on the direct link between violent images and violent crime are well known. Preparing for the debate, Schechter remembered being ''inundated with violence'' when he was growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s. ''I did some research and found that there were something like 31 westerns on prime-time TV, with levels of violence they'd never get away with today. About three-quarters of them had a gun in the title. `Have Gun, Will Travel.' `The Rifleman.' `Gunsmoke.' We were bombarded with violence and the effect was to produce a generation of people who thought they could end the Vietnam War by surrounding the Pentagon and chanting `om.''' The problem, Schechter said, isn't violence in popular culture but the unpredictability of the psychopathic personality. ''You never know what's going to set psychopaths off,'' he said. ''Charles Manson ordered the killings of Sharon Tate and her friends after listening to the Beatles' `White Album.' The guy who shot John Lennon did it because he thought he was Holden Caulfield. If you're going to start banning works that have an effect on psychopaths, you have to start with the Bible.'' He cited a case from the 1950s in which a German serial killer claimed Cecil B. DeMille's movie ''The Ten Commandments'' convinced him that all women were immoral and deserved to die, inspiring him to commit a series of four rape-murders. Extreme abuse in childhood is the one common factor in the personal histories of serial killers, Schechter said. ''Either physically, sexually, emotionally, psychologically, these people are subject to abuse to the point of being tortured. It makes them feel terribly humiliated. They suffer feelings of being totally worthless, like nothing. There is this tremendous sense of self-loathing.'' Schechter says he thinks it's likely that Jesse Pomeroy's father was violent. ''You have to wonder why [Jesse's mother] divorced her husband at a time when divorce was almost unheard of,'' he said. Jesse Pomeroy was an intelligent boy who was sensitive about being ''different'' because of his odd appearance. His head was described as being too large for his body, shaped ''like a giant mushroom.'' He had a strange, milky cast over his right eye. Before, during, and after Pomeroy's trial, medical and legal experts, and the public, argued about whether the young killer was insane. Schechter writes that he had all the signs of a sociopathic murderer, the kind of ''human monsters'' we now call serial killers: ''What makes the psychology of these beings so hard to understand is precisely their bewildering combination of rationality and madness - their terrifyingly cool and cunning ability to plan, execute, and cover up the most hideous crimes imaginable.'' Life in prison The jury found Pomeroy sane, and guilty of first-degree murder. The crime carried a mandatory death sentence, but all 12 members of the jury urged that, because of his age, Pomeroy be sentenced instead to life imprisonment. The verdict didn't end the debate about whether Pomeroy should be put to death. For a while it seemed likely that he would be executed. In the end, he was sentenced to ''solitary confinement for the remainder of his life'' at the state prison in Charlestown. Pomeroy spent 41 years in solitary, the second longest such stretch in US prison history, a year short of the 42 years endured by Robert Stroud, ''The Birdman of Alcatraz.'' It was an extraordinarily harsh sentence that would break most men, but not Pomeroy. During those 41 years in solitary, and for years after when he'd joined the general prison population, he never gave up protesting his innocence. He read every law book he could lay his hands on and wrote hundreds of letters to various authorities, including each of the 22 Massachusetts governors who held office during his term of imprisonment. He also made more than two dozen jailbreak attempts and was, Schechter writes, ''a persistent, rankling, irredeemable source of trouble for his captors.'' Even when he was an old man, transferred to the prison farm at Bridgewater, guards found a cache of jailbreak tools stashed in his room. The Boy Fiend never gave up. But he never got out. He died at Bridgewater on Sept. 29, 1932. This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on 12/12/2000. © Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company. [ Send this story to a friend | Easy-print version ]