americanpsyko:

Jesse Pomeroy.

At 14 he was arrested in 1874 for the horrific murder of a four-year-old boy. He was quickly labeled “The Boston Boy Fiend.” His horrible trek had begun three years earlier with the sexual torture of seven other boys. For those crimes, Pomeroy was sentenced to a children’s reform school but was released early. Not long after, he mutilated and killed a 10-year-old girl who came into his mother’s store. A month later, he kidnapped 4-year-old Horace Mullen, took him to a swamp outside town and slashed him so savagely with a knife that he nearly decapitated him. Because of his strange appearance (he had a milky white eye) and his previous abhorrent behavior, he was under suspicion. When he was shown the body and asked if he’d done it, he responded with a nonchalant, “I suppose I did.” Then the girl was found buried in his mother’s cellar and he confessed to that murder, as well. He was convicted and sentenced to death. Following a public outcry against condemning children to death, his sentence was commuted to forty years of solitary confinement.