This is a true crime list about 10 children who committed murders.
DISCLAIMER AND WARNING: Some of the contents are graphic and very disturbing, especially because many of the victims were children themselves. Reader discretion is advised.
11/24/20...
Dubbed the "Boy Fiend" by the press, Jesse Harding Pomeroy stood out for not only having been one of the youngest serial killers ever known, but also the youngest person convicted for first-degree murder in the history of Massachusetts.
South Boston, Massachusetts, April 21, 1874. 4-year-old Horace Millen, dark brown eyes and shiny blonde locks of hair, convinced his mother to let him go to the local bakery to buy some sweets, which he loved. Mrs Millen dressed him fancily, gave him a couple of pennies and that was the last time she saw him alive. She and her husband John had been searching for him for hours before they decided to report his missing to police that very evening. Little did they know that Horace's corpse was already being exanimated by the coroner.
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At 4 pm that day, two brothers were playing along the beach at Dorchester Bay, near Boston, and spotted what looked like a rag doll at the bottom of the small valley. It was Horace. The little boy had been tortured and viciously slashed with a knife to his death. He was nearly decapitated because of numerous stabs to the neck, it appeared that he had tried to defend himself, as his body showed dozen defense wounds, but he also had to suffer 18 stabs to the torso, an eyeball being punctured and the mutilation of his genitals. He had died an excruciating death, as his tightly clenched fists proved. Whoever did this was a monster.
The body was unidentified at first and the police issued a bulletin to all stations for help in identifying him and shortly after 9 pm a police officer of the South Boston precinct was dispatched to the Millen home in Dorchester Street with awful news.
There was only a suspect: Jesse Pomeroy.
The first 14 years of his life (1859-1874) were made of violence. Not much is known about his early childhood, besides that he was the second son of a lower middle class family in the Chelsea section of Boston, and that his father used to savagely beat him. He looked different from other children, mostly because of the cataract in his right eye, that was almost pure white, giving him an evil aura. Like many future killers, Jesse enjoyed torturing animals, but soon grew weary of it and in winter 1871 began to look for human targets.
At least seven boys, aged 4 to 8, had been lured to secluded places to be severely beaten, tortured and, in some cases, nearly killed by someone they could only describe only as "a teenage boy with brown hair". In spite of a massive manhunt by police, the "inhuman scamp", as the papers called the unknown pervert, managed to spread fear in the Chelsea and South Boston areas between 1871 and 1872.
The last victim, 5-year-old Robert Gould, gave police their first good lead in the case, describing his attacker as a "large boy with an eye like a white marble". On September 21, 1872, police brought one of the other victims, 7-year- old Joseph Kennedy, to a classroom-by-classroom search in Jesse Pomeroy's school and they arrested him hours later just outside the South Boston police station, after he inexplicably showed up there and was recognized by Joseph.
Being the sociopath he was, he did it because he probably felt powerless to stop himself and wanted to be caught.
Upon questioning he claimed his innocence, but police insisted on trying to force him to confess his crimes, which he eventually did. He was brought before a magistrate, to whom he said "I couldn't help myself" and was ordered to be held in the House of Reformation in Westborough, Massachusetts, until he was 18.
