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Jesse’s looks, cursing his son as a “goddamn jack-o’-lantern.” That was one reason Jesse was glad the old bastard wasn’t around anymore. The beatings, of course, were another.
    It was a funny thing. Though the floggings he had gotten from his father hurt worse than anything he had ever felt in his life, Jesse couldn’t stop thinking about them. He kept replaying them in his mind, almost as if he took some kind of pleasure from recollecting them. He often wondered if other boys were beaten in the same way. Sometimes, he got so absorbed in his daydreams—about the whippings and the Indian tortures and the look on the little boys’ faces when he showed them how it felt to be stripped naked and flogged without mercy—that he wasn’t even sure where he was. That happened frequently at school, particularly when the teacher, Mrs. Yeaton, started yapping about some boring subject like geography.
    *  *  *
    Given his propensity for sadomasochistic daydreaming, it is possible that Jesse was lost in one of his perverse reveries on the morning of September 21. Or it may be that he was simply trying to hide his identity. In any case, he kept his head bent low andhis gaze fixed on the desktop when the headmaster, Mr. Barnes, entered the classroom early that Friday morning, accompanied by a burly policeman and a frail, visibly nervous little boy.
    The policeman was Officer Bragdon of Station Six in South Boston; the little boy was Joseph Kennedy—the seven-year-old who, less than two weeks earlier, had been attacked on the marshes, where his assailant had flogged and cut him, commanded him to spout obscenities, then drenched his wounds with salt water. With the police under intense pressure to apprehend the “boy torturer,” Bragdon had decided to conduct a school-to-school search. Little Joseph was there to identify the suspect. Bragdon would have preferred Robert Gould, the torturer’s most recent—and observant—victim. But five-year-old Robert—whose gashed scalp had required dozens of stitches—was still recuperating from the attack, and his parents would not allow him out of bed.
    Standing in front of the classroom, Joseph was asked to take a careful look at the other boys. He surveyed the seated students, then shook his head and said: “He isn’t here.”
    All of a sudden, the teacher noticed that Jesse Pomeroy appeared to be staring at his desk. “Hold your head up, Jesse,” she commanded.
    Jesse did as he was told. But he kept his eyes downcast, so that his pale, lifeless pupil was concealed by his half-shuttered lid. The Kennedy boy took another look at Pomeroy, then shook his head again.
    Apologizing to Mrs. Yeaton for disrupting the class, Officer Bragdon and the little boy departed.
    *  *  *
    It had been a close call for Jesse, but he had managed to escape detection. And then, on the way home from school that afternoon—for reasons that will forever remain unknown—he decided to stop off at the police station and take a look inside.
    Perhaps it was his guilty conscience that impelled him to commit such a self-destructive act, though—given every known fact of Jesse Pomeroy’s long, utterly incorrigible life—that explanation seems very unlikely. Another possibility is that he was playing a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the police. Certainly, that sort of behavior is consistent with the actions of many sociopathic criminals, who—driven by a desperate need to provetheir power and superiority—frequently engage in taunting, “catch-me-if-you-can” gambits with their pursuers.
    Whatever his motives, it is doubtful that Jesse himself understood them. He was often at a loss to explain his behavior. His usual response, when asked why he had committed his dreadful crimes, was to shrug and say, “Something made me,” or “I had to,” or “A feeling came over me.”
    So it is probable that even Jesse would have been hard-pressed to say why—just hours after his young victim had looked