Butcher's Butcher

A grizzled old man of 71 walked slowly down the steps of Charlestown (Mass.) State Prison, looking neither right nor left at staring crowds. He wore a grey baggy suit, a flannel shirt, a soft cap, carried a small paper package. His face was set in hard, unhappy lines. He spoke to no one, as he climbed into a Ford sedan, cringed down in its back seat. The car carried him out of the prison yard for the first time in 43 years.

Thus last week did Jesse Harding Pomeroy, long ago killer of little children, get his first view of a modern world. He was being transferred to the State Farm at Bridgewater. Fifty-three continuous years in jail, 41 of them in solitary confinement, Convict Pomeroy has served a longer life term than any other living U. S. prisoner.

Him and two guards and two other prisoners the Ford wheeled over the 40 miles to the State Farm. His one rheumy eye (the other, albino, is blind) for the first time saw automobiles, a steamshovel, a road roller, skyscrapers, an airplane in flight. He licked his first ice cream cone, drank his first bottle of ginger ale. His only question: "Aren't there any more horses?" So violently did new sights and sounds impinge upon his prison-warped senses that he was left almost speechless.

A South Boston butcher's son, Jesse Pomeroy began a life of brief but terrible crime at 13, when he was sent to a reform school for torturing little children. Upon his release a little boy was cruelly murdered, then a little girl. On April 22, 1874 Horace Miller, 10, was found dead in an unspeakable condition. Pomeroy, then 15, was arrested, tried, sentenced to be hanged. The whole East seethed with outrage against his sadism. After many a delay Governor Rice, because of his youth, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. On Sept. 7, 1876 Pomeroy entered Charlestown Prison to pay a penalty not yet finished. A violent prisoner, always attempting escape, he was moved to Concord in 1880 in chains and handcuffs, was returned to Charlestown in 1886.

Pomeroy has a notion he deserves a pardon, that he has been punished enough. In 1925 a suffraget daughter of Lucy Stone wrote a newspaper letter against the release of Pomeroy. She charged that his crime was worse than that of Loeb and Leopold, that he was unregenerate, that in his cell he had skinned alive a kitten. From jail Pomeroy hired a lawyer, filed a $5,000 libel, was awarded damages of $1 which he never collected, preferring to hold the court order for payment as a "vindication." In his cell he learned several languages, wrote poetry, was called "Grandpa" by other convicts. In 1923 he was supposed to have speculated by mail in the stock market, plunging on Moon Motors, Ventura Oil. When he left jail last week, he carried with him the sum of $1.60. At the State Farm Pomeroy sulked in the sunshine. He was displeased at ejection from his Charlestown "home." Silent, stolid, unsmiling, he awaited an operation for hernia.