Wilderness of Ruin : A Tale of Madness, Fire, and the Hunt for America's Youngest Serial Killer (9780062273499) by Montillo Roseanne

Author:Montillo, Roseanne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

MONTHS PASSED AND JESSE still remained in jail. There was no news about when, or if, his execution would take place. In late 1875 Governor William Gaston lost his bid for reelection. Alexander R. Rice, the governor-elect, said he was willing to hear Jesse’s appeal as a first order of business. He agreed that the “Pomeroy question” had not yet been resolved.

Rice was born in the Lower Falls village of Newton, Massachusetts, on August 30, 1818, to a very affluent family. His father had been part of the paper manufacturing business, which provided Rice with the funds for an extended and refined education at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Active in both business and politics, he became well known and well liked throughout the Boston community, due mostly to his calm yet steely determination, traits not found in his predecessor, Gaston.

By the time Rice took office and focused on the Pomeroy case, two years had gone by and the rage against the boy had abated somewhat. After hearing evidence from both sides of the debate—whether to execute or not—the new governor decided to commute Jesse’s sentence. “I do thereby grant him . . . a commutation of the punishment he is liable to endure by the aforesaid sentence and here-fore commuted to that of imprisonment in our State Prison for life.”

But that was not the end of it. Jesse would not only be kept in prison for the remainder of his days; he would be locked up in solitary confinement forever. He could now look forward to a seven-by-nine granite coffin with two portholes drilled up high, which would give him a little bit of air and light. He would bake in that room during the summer and freeze in the winter.

If those holes had been low enough, he would have been able to look out from them and glimpse the Charlestown apartment he had shared with his family before they moved to South Boston. He could have seen the old Chelsea and Charlestown bridges, and the road he had taken during his jaunts to Chelsea in search of small boys. He could have noticed the riverbanks where he had stood after his father had beaten him, and from where from time to time he had launched a line hoping to bait a fish. He could have seen the tiny canoes anchored near the banks of the river, bobbing and lulling as the water rushed toward the sea.

But instead he could see and hear nothing and would have no one to talk to. Many prisoners faced with solitary confinement, even if for only a short span of time, found the anticipation of it so daunting that they committed suicide.

On September 7, 1876, nearly three months before Jesse turned seventeen, he entered the gray walls of the Massachusetts State Prison—the Bastille, as it was known—to begin his new life. It was a gray, drizzly, depressing morning, a somewhat befitting day for the occasion that seemed to foretell the direction of the upcoming months, years, and decades.

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