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crimes—one of his former schoolmates would recall the days, shortly after the Pomeroy family moved to South Boston, when the neighborhood boys would gather to play. The schoolmate’s name was George Thompson, and his reminiscences appeared in a Boston Globe article headlined “Pomeroy’s Evil Eye.”
    “He would never kick football with the other boys,” Thompson wrote. “When it came to ‘choosing up sides’ for agame of baseball, Jesse would never consent to be on either side—nor would he consent to umpire.” Instead he would sit on the grass “with his eyes cast down, sticking his knife into the sod, absently.”
    He was equally indifferent to the other kinds of recreation available to young boys growing up around South Boston bay. “When it came to swimming and jumping off cross-trees of schooners and coal stagings into the bay,” Thompson went on, “Jesse wasn’t interested. He would sit on the wharf, or on the side of the schooner, legs dangling over, quiet and furtive. . . . Sometimes, we wouldn’t see him for days and days. Then, suddenly, he would slope onto our playground and get away by himself to resume his old occupation of sticking his knife into the greensward.”
    The only time Jesse came alive “was when we played ‘Scouts and Indians.’ ” Of course, there was nothing unusual about that—all the boys loved to run around the neighborhood, engaging in raucous games of frontier make-believe. What distinguished Jesse from the others was his preference for villainous roles. While the rest of the boys pretended to be Western heroes, Jesse liked to imagine he was the infamous eighteenth-century renegade, Simon Girty, leading Shawnee Indians on the warpath against white settlers. What seemed especially appealing to him was all “the fun he’d have with the prisoners of war. The running of the gauntlet, and the different modes of putting captives to death”—skinning them alive, roasting them at the stake, slicing off bits of their flesh and making them eat their own bodies.
    Not that the other boys were uninterested in bloodshed and gore (Thompson’s own personal favorite was Wild Bill Hickock “because he had killed thirty-nine men”). Still, all Jesse’s talk about Indian torture seemed slightly excessive, even by the violence-crazed standards of preadolescent boys. Even so, no one imagined that Jesse Pomeroy had any connection to the series of outrages that had churned all of Boston into “a sea of excitement.”
    Thompson recalled one occasion in September 1872 when he and his chums were talking excitedly about the latest atrocity committed by the “boy torturer,” who had already assumed the status of a local bogeyman, a being of almost supernatural evil. Supposed sightings of this diabolical figure had grown so common that, according to Thompson, “the number of boys who hadbeen chased and escaped by the enamel of their teeth at this time was legion.”
    One of the boys in their group, a strapping fifteen-year-old named Ollie Whitman, claimed that, a few days earlier, he had fallen into the clutches of the fiend and managed to escape only because he had “fought like a tiger and run like a comet.” Listening to his tale, the other boys stared at him in awe. Jesse alone had a big smirk on his face.
    Noticing this expression, Whitman took a threatening step toward Jesse. “What are you smilin’ about, you white-eyed freak,” he demanded.
    Jesse flushed but said nothing. He was a big boy for his age but still puny compared to the hulking fifteen-year-old. When Whitman, his hands balled into fists, repeated his question, Jesse wordlessly slunk away, while the other boys hooted and shouted catcalls at his receding back.
    For as long as Jesse could remember, people had made fun of his appearance—not just his pallid eye but his massive head, his heavy jaw, and the oversized mouth that seemed fixed in a permanent scowl. Even his own father had often muttered comments about