Born dirt poor in a Boston slum and cursed with limited intelligence, a hairlip, and a blind, milky white right eye, it's no huge suprise that Jesse Pomeroy became a cold-blooded killer. The suprise was that he became one before his fifteenth birthday. Pomeroy is perhaps the youngest serial murderer on record.

The "boy fiend" (as he was sometimes known) was first identified as a severely twisted individual when he was just twelve years old. Police investigating a series of crimes in which young boys had been abducted and tortured were shocked when the trail led to twelve-year-old Pomeroy, who was easily identified by his victims due to his unique appearance. That a boy of that age (he began assaulting other boys when he was only ten) would be so twisted as to tortue younger boys sexually with knives and whips was almost unbelievable, expecially at the time. Pomeroy was sent to a reform school where he got along fairly well and earned his release about two years later.

Less than a month after his release Pomeroy killed for the first time. It was a March day in 1874 when ten-year-old Rita Curran came walking into Pomeroy's mothers store while the boy sadist was working there alone. He lured Curran into the cellar of the building and cut her throat, hiding the body in a corner under a pile of ash. Her body would remain there undiscovered despite a thorough probing of the area during which the store's cellar was searched, evidently not very well, on two seperate occasions. Later aked why he had murdered Curran, Pomeroy coldly replied, "I wanted to see how she would act."

Even though Curran had last been seen after being sent sent to the store where a known sexual sadist was working, Pomeroy did not seem to come under particularly close scrutiny from police investigating the girl's disappearance. Pomeroy was known to prefer boys to girls and the seach for Curran's body had turned up nothing suspicious. The teenaged slayer was free to kill again and he did just that on April 22, 1874, luring four-year-old Horace Millen away while the little boy made an unescorted trip to a neighborhood bakery to buy sweets. Once Pomeroy had the boy in a secluded spot on a nearby beach he launched his attack, viciously stabbing the child to death. Millen's body was found later in the day, blood issuing from numerous stab and slash wounds, including one to his right eye. The poor little boy had also been hideously mutilated in his groin area by his murderer.

This time the similarities between Millen's killing and the assaults on Pomeroy's previous surviving victims were obvious and he was soon arrested. A more thorough search of the Pomeroy store's cellar turned up the decomposing remains of Rita Curran and soon enough Pomeroy confessed to both crimes. Tried, convicted, and sentenced to die, the boy slayer appeared to get lucky when his punishment was quickly changed to life in prison. The idea of putting a boy that young to death apparently was too repulsive.

Pomeroy probably often wished the courts had left his original sentence in place because few prisoners have ever endured a more grueling experience behind bars. He was sent to the Massachusetts State Prison at Charlestown in September of 1876 and remained there until 1929; an astounding forty-one years of that time in solitary confinement. The first ten years in Charlestown he tolerated in a 7 x 9 unheated and rat-infested granite cell. For most of his time he had no human contact whatsoever. He retaliated against the conditions by making a pain of himself as often as possible, usually by cutting the bars or digging into the walls of his cell in what he probably knew were impossible escape attempts. Eventually Pomeroy was transferred in 1929 to a prison farm where he died of heart disease on September 29, 1932.