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True-Crime Websites, You Frustrate Me
Nov. 25th, 2013 08:05 pmI can't recall exactly how I stumbled across the Jesse Pomeroy 1870s murder case earlier today, but I keep trying to look it up, and keep getting the same account of it cut-and-pasted without question:
Nutshell version -- Pomeroy had been convicted as a twelve-year-old of a series of brutal but non-fatal attacks on younger boys (aged four to eight years old); he was sent to a reform school but was let out early for good behavior after eighteen months. About a month and a half later Katie Curran, a ten-year-old girl went missing after going to Pomeroy's brother's newsstand to buy notebooks -- nobody but her mother appears to have suspected Pomeroy at first, but the police eventually searched his mother's shop, despite noting that that all his previous victims had been boys, and found nothing. Some months later a little boy was murdered and this time they brought Pomeroy in on suspicion and questioned him until he confessed. They then kept him in custody. Another month or two passed, his mother sold her shop (business having fallen off), and workmen found the girl's body in the cellar. Pomeroy was questioned again until he confessed to having killed her, but it sounds as though some of the details he gave of the crime didn't quite match the state of the body (although decay also confused the issue.) Nonetheless he was charged with both murders and his lawyers saw no hope for him except an insanity plea. It failed, and he was convicted, but due to his youth the sentence was commuted from death to life in solitary confinement.
Somehow this all leaves me feeling that the kid was very probably guilty of the initial series of attacks (the victims were all alive to identify him, and did) and also of the murder of the little boy, but the police of the time had a point -- Katie Murran didn't fit his pattern, and it also seems weird that her body turned up in the shop several months after they'd searched it and while he was in jail for the other crime. There also seem to have been alternate theories about Murran's disappearance (such as a statement she'd been seen getting into a carriage, mentioned on one of the few sites with some useful documentation, the City of Boston Archives) floating around up until the time her body was discovered, which were then dropped. But every site that mentions the case just goes blah blah blah America's Youngest Serial Killer! blah blah the Boy Fiend of Boston!
Nutshell version -- Pomeroy had been convicted as a twelve-year-old of a series of brutal but non-fatal attacks on younger boys (aged four to eight years old); he was sent to a reform school but was let out early for good behavior after eighteen months. About a month and a half later Katie Curran, a ten-year-old girl went missing after going to Pomeroy's brother's newsstand to buy notebooks -- nobody but her mother appears to have suspected Pomeroy at first, but the police eventually searched his mother's shop, despite noting that that all his previous victims had been boys, and found nothing. Some months later a little boy was murdered and this time they brought Pomeroy in on suspicion and questioned him until he confessed. They then kept him in custody. Another month or two passed, his mother sold her shop (business having fallen off), and workmen found the girl's body in the cellar. Pomeroy was questioned again until he confessed to having killed her, but it sounds as though some of the details he gave of the crime didn't quite match the state of the body (although decay also confused the issue.) Nonetheless he was charged with both murders and his lawyers saw no hope for him except an insanity plea. It failed, and he was convicted, but due to his youth the sentence was commuted from death to life in solitary confinement.
Somehow this all leaves me feeling that the kid was very probably guilty of the initial series of attacks (the victims were all alive to identify him, and did) and also of the murder of the little boy, but the police of the time had a point -- Katie Murran didn't fit his pattern, and it also seems weird that her body turned up in the shop several months after they'd searched it and while he was in jail for the other crime. There also seem to have been alternate theories about Murran's disappearance (such as a statement she'd been seen getting into a carriage, mentioned on one of the few sites with some useful documentation, the City of Boston Archives) floating around up until the time her body was discovered, which were then dropped. But every site that mentions the case just goes blah blah blah America's Youngest Serial Killer! blah blah the Boy Fiend of Boston!
