Twelve-year-old Jesse Pomeroy, from a working-class native-born Boston family, tortured, brutalized and disfigured seven younger boys in 1871–72 and spent sixteen months in the state reform school for these crimes. Within weeks of his release from the reform school – an institution that underscored the inadequacies of mid-nineteenth-century juvenile justice generally and which dealt mainly with young thieves and street fighters rather than killers – he brutally murdered a four-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl.
This study methodically moves through the details of the crimes, the murder trial in 1874, conviction and the sentence of death, extensive debates over capital punishment and whether this was appropriate for Pomeroy, and the controversial decision by the Massachusetts governor and executive board in 1876 to commute Pomeroy's death sentence to solitary confinement for life. Keetley's quest to understand Pomeroy's actions, particularly as he could/would provide no motive or satisfactory explanation for either the tortures or the murders, forms the core of the study. To understand the “why,” and to illuminate the mystery of Pomeroy the enigmatic child killer, she draws on medical, literary, press, criminological, neuroscientific and social-science sources to interrogate nineteenth-century medical, press, and popular explanations, as well as twenty-first-century theoretical interventions. The social, cultural and gendered meanings of these explanations are also analysed in detail.
Keetley therefore exposes the extensive misremembering of the details of the Pomeroy case and identifies the many inaccuracies that were repeated in nineteenth-century and more recent accounts of the case and its perpetrator. As a result, this is an important archivally grounded and comprehensively researched study that dissects moral insanity, maternal transmission and dime-novel westerns, for example, and explores ideas of hybrid animality and the problematic binary between the “monster” and the so-called “normal” human being. In every chapter, Keetley uses twenty-first-century theoretical approaches and neuroscience findings to consider the explanations for Pomeroy's actions that were offered in the 1870s. For example, nineteenth-century debates over maternal impressions or the transmission of anomalies from mother to unborn baby are linked to twenty-first-century studies of “minor physical anomalies” and violent behaviour. These links are intriguing but not always wholly convincing.
Recent studies of the Pomeroy case generally link Pomeroy's crimes to a familial history of child abuse, and Keetley very effectively counters this, particularly as it seems to be based on questionable primary evidence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she concludes that Pomeroy was a psychopath – an offender without empathy, conscience or remorse – but offers an intriguing medical explanation for this, namely Pomeroy's debilitating reaction to a smallpox vaccination when he was four weeks old.
The focus of Making a Monster is 1860s–1870s Boston, Pomeroy's crimes, and debates over his fate. The continuous retelling of Pomeroy's biography, details of the crimes, and explanations offered does become repetitive at times, but this is a minor issue. Further, as Keetley points out, Pomeroy spent over forty years in prison and in solitary confinement until a 1917 commutation to life imprisonment at hard labour. He died in prison in 1932. Aside from a lengthy list of Pomeroy's prison offences and escape attempts (146), and occasional mention of the escapes elsewhere, the study provides few insights into Pomeroy the prisoner and the inevitable transformation from boy murderer to institutionalized adult lifer (who was still psychopathic?) who became a rather different object of criminological study in the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, this is a well-written and impressively presented study.
