Customer Reviews

Fiend: The Shocking True Story Of Americas Youngest Serial Killer

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A great tale of the youngest serial killer in American history. I don't really know how to say this without sounding really twisted but I love books like this. I'm a huge fan of abnormal psyche and I love to get into people's heads to try to find out why they do such things as these. This is the story of a young boy, Jesse, who starts torturing little boys (ages ranging from about 5-9) by leading them to a secluded place, stripping them naked and beating them and cutting them with his knife. He does this in the fashion that his father beat him and disfigures them so that they will be ugly like he is. Eventually, he starts to want more, and at 14 he commits his first murder. He is caught after he commits his second murder and is the youngest person to ever be on trial in Maryland for murder and everyone wants to see him hanged yet no one really wants to be the one to say the word. It's a good look at justice and the legal system of the late 1800's and how an unfortunate boy deals with beatings by his father, torture from boys at school for his strange eye, and all the events that lead up to the murders. I would say to anyone interested in Serial Murder or abnormal psychology to read this book. Harold Schechter is a master of true crime books and he does a great job on this one.
The only reason I don't give this book five stars is because no one compares to the killer I find most interesting, H. H. Holmes.

From 1871-1872 Jesse Pomeroy attacked, tortured, and sexually assaulted eight younger boys. Shipped off to reform school (he was positively idenified by his victims because of his "milky eye") he was released after less than seventeen months since he made excellent progress while in custody.

Six weeks later, he abducted and murdered a ten-year-old girl; her remains were found later buried in his mother's cellar. Two weeks after that, a four-year-old boy was found murdered, whose blood was found on Pomeroy's pocketknife.

Beacause of his youth, the governor wouldn't sign his death warrant, but instead remanded him to life in solitary confinement. In 1929, at age seventy-one, he was transferred to a prison farm where he died three years later.

In light of teen homicides today, this is still quite shocking. By the time he was fourteen, he attacked eight children and killed two more. "I couldn't help myself", he said. This seems to be common explanation amongst children who kill, such as in the 1993 case of two Liverpool ten-year-olds who tortured and murdered a three-year old. This was only one of the many incidents of juvenile murder in the 1990's, and even as Jesse Pomeroy has faded from the minds of many, the murders commited by children continue.

It's nice to know that youthful murderers are not just a recent phenomenon. Jesse Pomeroy makes Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold seem like choirboys. Since Jesse was only fourteen, the governor commuted his sentence from death to life in solitary without parole. Doesn't sound like much of a commutation, does it? Harold Schechter's descriptions of Jesse's crimes were haunting. I particularly liked the last two sections -- Jesse's letters to Willie Baxter, and the account of his life in prison and many escape attempts. (Not that I blame him for trying.) I like learning about lesser-known murderers instead of everything Ted Bundy all the time. Yet another good book from Harold Schechter!

It's no scholarly look at juvenile crime, and the cover is a design atrocity, but this account of a little-known member of the confraternity of youthful murderers does fill in an unfortunate gap in the public's collective memory.

The negatives: very little by way of footnotes, or indeed any other means by which the interested researcher can check up on the author's facts. An intrusive tendency (noted in another review below) to ascribe feelings and thoughts that could not possibly be known to characters who are long dead.

The positives: a fascintating and timely (without being faddish) subject, a writing style that transcends the cruder illiteracies often encountered in popular nonfiction, and tantalizing hints of context (including the murders of the Joyce siblings and Mabel Young) that are extremely helpful.

If you like well researched true crime, read this. I hung on every word and was not disappointed.

Before this book I had no idea who the infamous 'boy-fiend' and 'lifer' was... and now that my eyes have been opened I am very grateful for it.

The writing style is excellent, and the story is one to be remembered. Perhaps the most intriguing part about reading the novel is the fact that Jesse is such a young boy, and yet he could commit such heinous acts.

Jesse was a very sadistic torturer and eventual killer. He was smart for his age, and possesed a hideous (as most said) milky eye. Maybe it was his looks that made others hate him and turned him into a hard criminal. Perhaps the lack of parental care, or even the dime novels he read. Most likely his mind was already butchered from birth.

You can find your own opinion and insight into this killer's mind, and decide... was he really insane?

Here's the latest in a series of books by Prof. Schecter on "psycho killers." I had vaguely heard of Jesse Pomeroy before, but knew nothing about him. If you expect an explicitly scholarly work, complete with footnotes and bibliography, Schechter's books are not for you! But his research seems very thorough, even though Pomeroy's crimes began in 1871, when Pomeroy was only 11, and culminated in him being convicted of murder and sentenced to death at age 14!

One of Schechter's main themes here, to which he returns over and over, is that none of the current media, public and private reactions to child murderers are in any way new--- everything we have heard lately was rehashed endlessly in the Pomeroy case. Schechter shows ample and depressing quotes from 1870s newspapers, speeches and letters to document this. Nor are child murderers themselves a recent phenomenon; nor do they seem to have become increasingly common of late. Our inability to place this phenomenon in any kind of context in 2001 is sadly as complete as the inability of Bostonites in 1870 - 74 to think usefully about Pomeroy and his ilk.

After interminable debate as to whether a 14-year-old should be executed, Pomeroy was sentenced to life in prison. He spent 53 years in jail, of which an almost unimaginable 41 years were spent in solitary confinement! There he read every book in the prison library several times, and worked tirelessly at various very clever, but always unsuccessful escape attempts.

Almost every aspect of Pomeroy's saga is horrifically depressing. Tortured by his alcoholic father in the name of "discipline," he in turn tortured and disfigured and ultimately murdered other small children. The state promptly tortured him in turn, for four incredible decades.

Schechter is always able to turn up chilling documents, and in this case he has some notes passed by Pomeroy to a fellow prisoner who was also a childhood playmate, Willie Baxter. These notes, banal as they appear superficially to be, offer a deeply disturbing glimpse into the depths of Pomeroy's psychosis. They remind me of some surviving letters from Albert Fish, as complete a whacko as there has ever been, and the subject of another Schechter volume.

Recommended if you have a strong stomach and an interest in what goes to shape children who kill.

Today, a 14-year-old boy was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the death of a young girl whom he killed while practicing wrestling moves, according to his defense. This harsh sentence is strikingly similar to the one Jesse Pomeroy received over a century ago. Pomeroy spent over 50 years in prison for two heinous murders committed when he was 14. Of those years in prison, over 40 of them were in solitary confinement. To me, his survival of his punishment is more astounding than his crimes. I wish Schechter had devoted more space to Pomeroy's prison years than he did. I found the descriptions of Pomeroy's ceaseless attempts at escape both somewhat humorous and highly pathetic, as this man, hated across the US, constantly tried a variety of escape methods, even into his 70's. Where he would have gone had his attempts succeeded is an interesting question. The book, while well-written, fails in its attempt to prove that things are no different now than they were in the 1870s. Yes, Jesse's crimes were terrible, but the main difference between then and now is the number of crimes committed by children. The very reason Jesse was so hated was the unique brutality of his crimes. Today, we hear of similarly brutal acts by children every day, to the extent that we simply shake our heads and then go on with our lives. I disagree with Schechter's repeated premise that today's society has not influenced more children to violence than did the dime novels of the past. Given that, "Fiend" is still an excellent account of a crime that shocked the nation--and of a punishment that SHOULD shock people everywhere even today. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in crimes and criminals.

Although I often read "true-crime" books, the name of Harold Schechter was unfamiliar to me. The synopsis of "Fiend" seemed interesting, so I went ahead & read it, even though the title of this (as well as Schechter's many other books) seemed a bit sensationalistic. I should have taken warning from it!

The cover of "Fiend" informs you that Mr. Schechter is "renowned for his true-crime writing" & that his books are "true-crime masterpieces". Some one in the copy-writing department has a vivid imagination! Ann Rule writes true-crime masterpieces. Harold Schechter writes contemporary versions of the 19th century penny-dreadfuls.

For example, the 5th chapter of "Fiend" is a 2 page scene in which Jesse Pomeroy's mother Ruth Ann sits at her breakfast table worrying about the possibility that her beloved son might be the individual currently terrorising Boston's children. Since the scene describes a woman who never wavered in her public assertions that her boy was innocent & wrongly convicted, & since it takes place in 1872, this reader finds it highly fanciful! One wonders where Mr. Schechter got this interior monologue, since the protagonist died in 1915!

Later in the book, while Jesse awaits sentencing in the Suffolk County Jail, he exchanges letters with another youthful inmate whom he knew on the outside. Schechter quotes these letters, reproduces one of them in a photo, & claims "for more than a century, these fading, fragile letters lay hidden in an old file box, and are reprinted here for the first time". Yet how is it that he has gotten a hold of these letters? Where has this "old file box" been for the past century? How did the recipient smuggle the letters out of the prison when correspondence was forbidden? None of these questions are even asked, much less answered!

Schechter uses none of the accepted tools of the historian. We get no footnotes, no bibliography or list of source material, no names of experts in psychiatry that have been consulted. The reader is expected to take every statement the author makes at face value with no corroboration of any sort. Due to this lack of confirmation, "Fiend" belongs more to the realm of the pot-boiler dime novels it's protagonist loves than to the objective writing personified by Ann Rule.

I'm from the Boston area, and while my whole family is in Chelsea (the site of much of the action) I had only heard about Jesse Pomeroy while reading The Alienist by Caleb Carr. I was quite excited to find out about Schechter's new book (thanks Amazon!). I actually became interested in true crime after the Columbine shootings, and have been reading about children who kill. From Mary Bell to the Liverpool boys who killed a toddler, to the Florida kids who killed the local bully, this subject has been endlessly facinating to me. Ok, so maybe it is a bit gruesome too. But I will say that with this book, Schechter hits the nail on the head. Children who kill other children have been with us for a long time, and we continue to give the same lame excuses: the media (for Jesse that was dime novels, for our recent murders its the movies and video games that are blamed), single mothers, and just plain evil.

This book does not answer the question of why, but we get a glimpse into the mind of one of these child killers. It is quite chilling. Schechter's research is awesome and his writing style is engaging and his message is clear (and frightening) the next fiend could be living next door, playing in the sandbox!

If this book and subject matter are of interest to you, I also highly recommend Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill; The Story of Mary Bell.