In April 1875, well-known Boston publisher and editor, James Ticknor Fields, visited a Boston jail cell where a fifteen-year-old boy was waiting to learn whether he would be executed or spend the rest of his life in the state penitentiary. When he was twelve, Jesse Pomeroy had tortured seven small boys. Upon his release from reform school, he brutally murdered two other children in South Boston. Perhaps because Pomeroy was unable to explain his violent behavior, repeating only that he couldn't help it and that he “had to do it,”Footnote ¹ theories about his crimes monopolized the local newspapers for close to two years. Fields was spurred to visit Pomeroy because he was convinced by one of the most widely held of those theories: he believed that Pomeroy had been incited to violence by his reading of dime novels. In his talk with the boy, Fields elicited the confession that, from the age of nine, Pomeroy had read about sixty dime novels – mostly Beadle's westerns, for which he had a “passion.” Moreover, when Fields asked him, “Do you think those books were an injury to you, and excited you to commit the acts you have done?” Pomeroy agreed. “[I]t seems to me now they did,” he replied.Footnote ²

Dubbed by the newspapers “the boy fiend,” Jesse Pomeroy entered the public consciousness in December 1871 and early 1872, just after he turned twelve, after several small boys in Chelsea and South Boston told of a bigger boy who had lured them to relatively isolated places, stripped them, and then beaten and cut them. Finally apprehended by local police, Pomeroy was remanded to the Westborough State Reform School, supposedly until he turned eighteen. By almost all accounts, however, his behavior was exemplary, so he was thus released after only sixteen months into the care of his mother, in February of 1874. Within two months of that fateful release, Pomeroy had killed two children – Katie Curran and Horace Millen. At the time, Pomeroy was only fourteen. Arrested the night that the mutilated body of five-year-old Millen was found on the marsh at Dorchester Bay, Jesse languished in the local jail until December, as the commonwealth vainly waited for the public fury to die down so he could get a fair trial. At that trial, Pomeroy's lawyers mounted a controversial and ultimately unsuccessful insanity defense, arguing that the boy suffered from a devastating lack of moral sensibility – indeed, of any human feeling at all. Pomeroy had been driven by this deficiency, his lawyers argued, to commit murder. In legal terms, he was afflicted with an irresistible impulse to torture and kill. The jurors didn't buy the insanity defense, however, and they found Pomeroy guilty of willful murder, leaving the judge little alternative but to sentence him to death. Jesse Pomeroy would have been the youngest person executed in Massachusetts, but the sitting governor proved unwilling to sign the death warrant and, finally, after a year of still more heated public debate, a newly elected governor commuted Pomeroy's sentence to life imprisonment in solitary confinement. In the end, Pomeroy spent longer than any person ever has in solitary – over forty years – and he died in 1932, still in prison. From the moment he entered the Charlestown State Prison, moreover, Pomeroy never willingly referred to his crimes and never uttered a single word of explanation.Footnote ³

While his contemporaries offered numerous explanations for what the boy did – moral insanity, epilepsy, the dire effects of his mother's having regularly visited a slaughterhouse when he was in utero, plain evil, and even possession by demonic spirits – it is as the most notorious reader of dime novels that Jesse Pomeroy has made his numerous, albeit fleeting, appearances in twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural history. Later writers, however, have been more skeptical about dime novels' purported ill effects.Footnote ⁴ In his history of popular culture in the gilded age, for instance, Joel Shrock positions Pomeroy, with his “alleged insatiable appetite for dime novels” and his “unhealthy connection with Indians … and their use of torture,” at the center of his chapter on late nineteenth-century anxieties about the social problems bred by cheap literature: “It is rather unlikely,” however, Shrock opines, “that dime novels or sensational literature actually caused any of these problems.”Footnote ⁵ Indeed, the majority of historians and cultural critics advert to the Pomeroy case only because it seems to have served as opportune fodder for what Michael Denning calls the “vice ideologues” of the 1870s and 1880s, as they fomented a veritable moral panic about a mounting, mass-produced, cheap literature that augured the increasing cultural power of the working classes (and Denning himself cites the Pomeroy case in this context).Footnote ⁶ Shrock, for instance, proclaims that “[g]enteel critics' shrill denunciations of sensational literature revealed more about their fears of working-class youth than the perceived dangers of these stories” (174).Footnote ⁷ In their insistence that the panic over dime novels was a class struggle, scholars have evaded the issue of whether cheap literature may in fact have been bad for some of the boys who voraciously consumed it.Footnote ⁸ They have also raised the question whether Jesse Pomeroy, in particular, was incited to torture and kill by dime novel westerns.

The competing claims about the purported dire effects of dime novels can best be adjudicated by historical case studies of the practices of readers: what and how did people read? How might readers have been shaped by the particular narrative forms that absorbed them? The case of Jesse Pomeroy and his violent, allegedly imitative crimes – so central to the late nineteenth-century panic over the dime novel – can test both his contemporaries' belief that dime novels were an injury to their young readers and the twentieth- and twenty-first-century dismissal of such claims as merely the self-serving pronouncements of middle-class reformers. The question whether dime novels damaged Jesse Pomeroy, moreover, speaks quite directly to current critical debates about the ethical effects of reading. If fiction does indeed foster empathy, for instance, as many literary critics have claimed, might it not also encourage a pathological identification with morally vicious characters?Footnote ⁹ The Pomeroy case thus engages the debate over the ill effects of the media, and the extent to which children in particular are shaped by what they read and watch. Pomeroy has been called the first media “copycat” killer, and an analysis of what he read might illuminate the kinds of narrative form that are particularly harmful to youthful consumers.Footnote ¹⁰

Aside from their salience to the media-effects debate, Jesse Pomeroy's crimes are a critical part of the history of homicide in the US. By all accounts, by the early 1870s the explosion of violence that had marked the first decades of the nineteenth century (largely attributable to conflict over slavery and its aftermath, as well as to mass immigration) was on the wane, both nationally and in Boston specifically.Footnote ¹¹ Yet the same period saw the emergence of the modern, urban serial killer. While the occasional writer will posit the Harpe brothers, notorious frontier killers of the 1790s, as America's first serial killers, most agree that the dubious honor belongs to H. H. Holmes, who entrapped countless women in his labyrinthine Chicago mansion during the 1893 World's Fair.Footnote ¹² Pomeroy, of course, preceded Holmes, but while Harold Schechter calls Pomeroy “America's youngest serial killer” in his true-crime account of the boy, Pomeroy failed to accrue the numbers demanded by seriality. He was, however, a serial torturer by the age of twelve, and the ferocity of his attacks, along with their rapid escalation, leaves little doubt that he would have become America's first, and youngest, serial killer if he had not been caught. What made a Jesse Pomeroy or an H. H. Holmes at a time when overall murder rates were declining, especially in cities?Footnote ¹³

The reasons for America's high rate of serial murder, and for its particular emergence in the late nineteenth century, have been the subject of much debate and few definitive answers. Broad trends in homicide are inevitably determined by multiple causes – and the appearance of the serial killer in the late nineteenth century is no exception. Historians have convincingly argued that the increase in mobility, rootlessness, and anonymity, as well as political, social and economic alienation, are historical conditions that underlie high rates of serial homicide in the US.Footnote ¹⁴ But what seems particularly germane in the case of Jesse Pomeroy is Norbert Elias's “theory of civilizing processes,” which, as Pieter Spierenburg points out in his recent A History of Murder, has achieved wide acceptance among scholars as an explanation for the long-term decline in homicide rates.Footnote ¹⁵ It may also, however, contribute to the emergence of the utterly deviant “serial killer”: acts that were previously relatively invisible became increasingly visible as they stood out ever more starkly against a background of increased civility.Footnote ¹⁶ The work of historian Roger Lane supports the civilizing theory in the particular case of Massachusetts. Studying rates of crime in the commonwealth between 1835 and the end of the nineteenth century, Lane found that serious crime steadily dropped – indeed, the more serious the crime, the more marked its decline. He attributes this decline in large part to the fact that the majority of the populace of Massachusetts moved from rural areas to the city during the course of the century, and that “the move to the cities had produced, for better and worse, a more tractable, more ‘civilized,’ more socialized generation than its predecessors.”Footnote ¹⁷ As the nation became increasingly “civilized,” then, and its citizens more disciplined, the legitimate outlets for aggression (such as those the Harpe brothers enjoyed on the frontier) disappeared, shaping less violent crime in general but – and this is crucial – more, increasingly pathologized, outsiders. While the Harpe brothers were, by all accounts, extremely and sadistically violent, they may not have been recognizable as “serial killers” until the early twentieth century precisely because they were, on the lawless and violent frontier, somewhat unexceptional.Footnote ¹⁸ What Pomeroy read, then, was doubly significant. He consumed dime novels set on a routinely savage frontier at a time when the conditions of urban modernity were exerting a downward pressure on homicide rates, demanding more self-control and expecting greater civility. Violent cultural representations thus became increasingly important, serving, for most consumers, as a legitimate outlet for aggression, a safety valve. For some, however, especially those with pathological propensities, violent fictions could serve as veritable training manuals.

While it is impossible to reconstruct exactly which dime novels Jesse Pomeroy read, there are clues. To Fields he confessed that he started reading dime novels when he was nine, at the end of 1868. He also told Fields that he particularly liked Beadle's westerns, a preference confirmed in another important source of information about Pomeroy's reading habits, an article published in 1891 in the Boston Globe called “Pomeroy's Evil Eye,” allegedly written by a former “schoolmate” of Jesse's. The writer notes Jesse's predilection for Indians and renegades, notorious perpetrators of “scalping” and “savage atrocities”: “He seemed to think more of the Indians than he did of the scouts,” the writer adds.Footnote ¹⁹ Two physicians who interviewed Pomeroy also spoke of the boy's avowed pleasure in the violence of western dime novels. George Choate, who testified for the prosecution at Pomeroy's trial, claimed that the boy “took great delight in reading Indian tales where cruelties were described,” continuing that Pomeroy confessed to him (as he had to Fields) that his “uncontrollable desire to commit torture on boys” may indeed “have come from reading cheap novels, which he had done a great many times.”Footnote ²⁰ Boston physician Theodore Fisher interviewed Pomeroy after his trial and declared that Pomeroy was “fond of reading stories of savage warfare” and that the “impressions” made by these stories “passed uncontrolled into the horrible acts of torture and murder which have startled the community.”Footnote ²¹ Pomeroy would certainly have had readier access than most to Beadle's frontier stories. His brother ran a newsstand out of their family store at 327 Broadway in South Boston, and part of Jesse's job involved picking up newspapers from the New England News Company, one of Beadle's distribution outlets.Footnote ²²

One thing that is immediately clear about the western dime novels that Pomeroy would have read from late 1868 to late September 1872 (and for a brief time between February and April 1874) is that they were replete with stories of Indian atrocities. From the earliest of captivity narratives published over two hundred years before, images of Indian torture, scalping, and general malignity had been continuously and widely disseminated in American literature. From the mid-1860s through the 1890s, dime novels came to serve as the principal repository of such representations. One Beadle novel, originally published in 1866 and reprinted in 1869, articulates the stereotype that pervades them all, the stereotype of “ruthless savages,” “actuated by an insatiable thirst for human blood” and drawn especially to torture: “Their savage spirits gloried, in exhibitions of this nature, and they could behold the writhings of the body of the doomed wretch under the merciless torments, and listen to the lamentations of his spirit, with fiendish delight.”Footnote ²³ Since the writers of dime novels tended to repeat available tropes rather than to innovate, dime novels were filled with, indeed constituted by, reiterations of this stereotype. As Roger Nichols writes, dime novel writers tended to “copy” earlier representations of Indians, to “popularize existing views of Indians,” leading to characterizations that were “predictable.” He adds that “before the end of the century nearly everything which might have been said about the Native Americans had been said, so usually the later novels repeated ideas.”Footnote ²⁴ Dime novels did not just purvey stereotypes, then; they purveyed, repeatedly, the same stereotypes – and the stereotype at the center of western dime novels was the cruel Indian and his consummately sadistic white ally.

The plots of western dime novels are typically structured around the capture of a beautiful girl or heroic white male by Indians and white renegades. The large middle of the novel involves scouts and frontiersmen (with an occasional “noble” Indian) tracking down the prisoners. Numerous scuffles ensue, involving shooting and often scalping, until the final conflict and the rescue of the girl and the other imprisoned characters. While the arc of each plot is (as Beadle often defensively claimed) relentlessly moralistic (good always wins out), they are all, at the same time, broken by sudden and persistent bursts of explicit violence that is much more viscerally compelling than the conventional carryings-on of the rather insipid good characters. In The Backwoodsmen, for example, an Indian “whipped out his scalping-knife, passed it rapidly around the unresisting head of the savage, and tore the scalp loose from the bleeding skull.”Footnote ²⁵ In The Wood Rangers, the white renegade seized a man by the hair and then “ran the keen point of the knife, in his right hand, round the crown, and with a coarse laugh, jerked the scalp from his head.”Footnote ²⁶ In The Border Renegade, the protagonists see “gory scalps” hanging from Indian girdles and watch a “young white girl” scalped: “there came a glittering flash – a dull, sickening thud, followed by a heavy fall upon the earth!”Footnote ²⁷ Good may win out, but only after repeated sensational forays into the savage side of frontier life.

Although shootings and scalpings periodically erupt in Beadle's westerns, torture stands at the center of the plot, and the elements that compose the torture scene are ritualized, like other aspects of the dime novel, through endless repetition. Inaugurating the ritual torture of the dime novel, the victims are typically stripped and bound to a tree or post. In The Mink Coat, for instance, the Indians “were rudely tearing the garments from Ward and Ellis” as they prepared “their victims for the fiery sacrifice.”Footnote ²⁸ The victims are then taunted remorselessly. In The Wolf-Queen, once the victim is bound, renegade Jim Girty “insulted Hewitt in every way that suggested itself to his devilish mind” – including repeatedly striking him.Footnote ²⁹ Dancing, as well as abuse, often precedes more violent torture. In The Mink Coat, scouts who are attempting to save the prisoners see “the forms of the half-nude Indians dancing around the glade in drunken glee, screeching and yelling in diabolical tones!”Footnote ³⁰ In The Black Princess, the Indians do the “scalp dance” (94) for at least an hour while their victim is tied to a stake, and the writer even comments that “dancing is a favorite amusement” among savages.Footnote ³¹

The relentless scenes of torture in Beadle's westerns are strikingly similar to what Jesse Pomeroy inflicted on his victims.Footnote ³² Pomeroy stripped all his victims and bound them to some kind of stake, and then he typically beat them with a rope or a board. Pomeroy stripped his third victim, Johnny Balch, for instance, and then tied him to a beam and whipped him.Footnote ³³ He also danced around his victims and engaged in other kinds of taunting behavior. After tying up Robert Maies, his first victim, Pomeroy “ran around him, jumped up and down and laughed”;Footnote ³⁴ or, as another account put it, Pomeroy “whipped him and danced around him in a strange manner.”Footnote ³⁵ As the Boston Herald described Pomeroy's behavior while he tortured his fourth victim, George Pratt, “the young savage [was] at the same time dancing in great glee at seeing the blood flow.”Footnote ³⁶ The Herald adduced “the published fact that the boy would dance around his victims, real Indian fashion, and seemingly delight himself as he saw the blood flowing from the wounds of the tortured captives.”Footnote ³⁷ In a refinement of his taunting, Pomeroy forced one victim, while sitting naked on a rock, to say a prayer and then utter an oath.Footnote ³⁸

As the dime novels' scenes of torture progress, the captors typically stab the victim with an assortment of accessible sharp objects. In The Indian Spy, the prisoner is bound to a stump and “surrounded by a pack of mischievous children, who were emulating the deeds of their fathers, with tiny bows and arrows, sticks, stones, and such missiles as lay to their hands.” A little later we are told that the savages were “preparing splinters or instruments with which to add to the prisoner's tortures.”Footnote ³⁹ In The Black Princess, an Indian “prepared splinters with which to puncture his flesh; another sharpened a knife which was to gash his limbs.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The violence typically escalates, moving from elaborate preparation to more violent cutting, scalping and burning. In The Wolf Demon, the renegade tells Harvey Winthrop in loving details what will happen to him: “The tomahawks of the Indians will cut your flesh from your bones, even while you are a living man.”Footnote ⁴¹ The Prophet of the Manitou, in The Wolf-Queen, pronounces that the doom of the three prisoners is to be flayed alive and then burned. In the same novel, the renegade tells the prisoner whom he loathes the most that he looks forward to “sawing” off his skin and, later, that he will “skin” him alive.Footnote ⁴²

After limiting himself to binding, whipping, and beating his first three victims, Pomeroy, too, progressed to these more violent methods of assault, and in his later attacks he carried “a large butcher-knife stuck in his belt, Indian fashion.”Footnote ⁴³ In August of 1872, Pomeroy enticed his fourth victim, George Pratt, onto an old boat at South Boston Point and engaged in “beating his naked limbs with a strap, sticking pins in his face, limbs and private parts, biting and other methods of torture.”Footnote ⁴⁴ A fifth victim, Harry Austin, the only victim who did not testify at Pomeroy's trial, was allegedly cut on the back and the groin.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In the case of Pratt and Austin, Pomeroy also began attacking the genitals – with pins and then a knife – an escalation in violence that culminated with the murdered Katie Curran, whose throat was cut and who was slashed violently around the genitals, and with his other murder victim, Horace Millen, whose penis was almost entirely severed from his body. Explicitly detailing the mutilation of genitals was certainly beyond the pale for Beadle, with his aspirations for a family readership, but in at least one novel the Indians are described as cutting unspecified body parts off their naked victim: “To show what human nature can endure, we must mention that his ears, fingers and other parts had been cut off.”Footnote ⁴⁶ After attacking his fifth victim, Harry Austin, it was only six days before Pomeroy sought his next victim. On 11 September Jesse took Joseph Kennedy to Shepard's boat house in South Boston, tied him up, and cut him three times with a knife. Six days after that, Pomeroy tortured his last victim, and the details are the most brutal, suggesting still further intensifying violence. As seven-year-old Charles A. Gould testified at trial, Pomeroy

Gould's testimony suggests that Pomeroy may have been attempting a scalping, but the boy was saved by the fact that a man passed by, frightening Pomeroy away.

If Pomeroy's practices of torture were influenced by his reading of dime novel westerns, a striking absence is fire, since almost every torture scene in western dime novels is meant to terminate in the immolation of the victim at the stake. Newspaper accounts suggest, however, that he may have tried to burn Katie Curran's body, which was discovered in the basement of the Pomeroy family store four months after she went missing. Reports in the Boston Daily Globe and the Boston Post of the July 1874 inquest into Curran's death indicate that witnesses at the inquest were asked repeatedly whether they had seen a pile of burnt papers in the basement of the Pomeroys' store. According to the Post, four people testified to seeing burnt paper in the basement – in the water closet and under the stairs. One man, Mr. Mitchell (who owned the store next door and who shared the basement with the Pomeroys), not only testified that he “found a lot of paper in the vault” but also that “I found him [Jesse] at one time burning paper under the stairs.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The trial transcript, unfortunately, does not explain why the judge or the lawyers thought the burnt paper was significant, but it does seem possible that they thought that Pomeroy had tried to burn Katie Curran's body. Certainly, from the time Katie disappeared, Pomeroy became inordinately fond of the basement of his family's store. According to the owner of the store next door, Mr. Mitchell, Jesse's brother said at one point, when asked where Jesse was, “he might be in the water-closet … He is the greatest fellow I ever saw: he is always in the water-closet.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Given the fact that his crimes were becoming increasingly violent and much less tentative, and that they followed the arc of torture described in western dime novels (progressing to what is undoubtedly an attempted scalping, for instance), one of the things Jesse may well have been doing in the basement was experimenting with burning human flesh.

It wasn't necessarily only the Indians, however, with whom Pomeroy may well have identified. In fact, the evidence suggests that Jesse Pomeroy identified still more strongly with a figure even more detested than the Indians – the white renegade Simon Girty. According to the writer of “Pomeroy's Evil Eye,” while the other boys clamored to be the heroic Wild Bill, Buffalo Bill, Simon Kenton, or Daniel Boone, Jesse's “hero” was a man whose name “became synonymous with savagery and monstrosity.”Footnote ⁵⁰ “Jesse used to think that it was a fine thing to be a renegade like Girty,” wrote Jesse's former schoolmate, “to be the one white man in a great Indian tribe like the Shawnees.”Footnote ⁵¹ The New York Times notice of Pomeroy's death in 1932 averred that “his hero was Simon Girty, the renegade who lived with a Shawnee tribe.”Footnote ⁵² Simon Girty was routinely depicted in dime novels as the embodiment of savage cruelty – much worse even than the Indians. In fact, he and his almost as notorious brothers (George and Jim) are frequently represented as the instigators of Indian depravity. In The Wolf-Queen, for instance, Jim Girty leads a “destroying band” of Indians against a white family and murders all but one of them.Footnote ⁵³ This is not a lone example, and historian Daniel Barr claims that nineteenth-century writers often “asserted that the presence of [Simon] Girty and other renegade whites among the essentially docile Indians empowered them with the ability to overcome their racially superior antagonists.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In identifying with those who committed torture in dime novels, then, Pomeroy may not have had to cross the racial divide: at the bottom of it all was an all-powerful white man.

The hyperbolic language used to describe the cruelty of Jesse Pomeroy was already a staple of dime novel rhetoric about Simon Girty, and both figures – Jesse Pomeroy and Simon Girty – not only echo each other but also anticipate the “psychopath” (pitiless, without conscience), a designation that first appeared in 1885 but would not become widely familiar until the mid-twentieth century. Several recent scholars have identified Pomeroy as a psychopath, but, before Pomeroy, there was the equally psychopathic hero of the fiction Jesse devoured.Footnote ⁵⁵ In The Wood Rangers, for instance, Simon Girty is called a “white imp,”Footnote ⁵⁶ and in Queen of the Woods the narrator declares that no Indian or renegade “ever came near in wickedness, monstrous villainy and delight in the torture of his fellow-creatures to Simon Girty.”Footnote ⁵⁷ This exaggerated rhetoric was not confined to dime novels. In an 1840 speech, quoted by Barr as paradigmatic of the Girty myth that flourished through the end of the century, the governor of Kentucky asserted that Simon Girty “was a monster. No famished tiger ever sought the blood of a victim with more unrelenting rapacity, than Girty sought the blood of the white man.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Girty was not just a rapacious “tiger” but also a “wolf.” In The Wolf Demon, a prospective victim of Girty's accuses him of having no pity, and he replies, “‘Pity? No! … Can pity dwell in the heart of the wolf?”Footnote ⁵⁹ As shorthand for remorseless depravity, “wolf” and “tiger” were, not surprisingly, both terms leveled at Jesse Pomeroy. Psychologist George Dawson, for instance, wrote that Pomeroy was like a “tiger that drags to the earth the antelope, gorges itself upon its flesh, and then passes on indifferently.”Footnote ⁶⁰ And a writer for the American Law Review asked, “how does he differ from a wolf, except that he has intelligence of a man, and is therefore more dangerous?”Footnote ⁶¹ These comparisons to wolf and tiger serve to mark Girty's and Pomeroy's lack of pity and of compassion – of humanity itself, shaping a devastating emptiness that is the classic mark of the psychopath.Footnote ⁶²

Pomeroy's contemporaries, furthermore, frequently represented him in ways that underscored the pleasure he took in inflicting pain: “he wantonly tortured no less than seven small boys for no apparent reason but a morbid delight in their sufferings,”Footnote ⁶³ he would “delight in the writhings of his helpless victims beneath the stab of the knife,”Footnote ⁶⁴ and he “seems to have committed his murderous acts for the pleasure which they afforded him.”Footnote ⁶⁵ A torture scene in Queen of the Woods (serialized in late 1868 and then published as a pamphlet in March 1869) epitomizes Simon Girty's similar sadism and provides a strikingly specific anticipation of Pomeroy's own acts of torture. Girty has taken a prisoner, Edward Harris, for whom he has contracted an irrational yet burning hatred. Talking to his Indian friends, he tells them that he wants to invent some new torture and he says he'd like to see something he's heard of but never seen – “that's cutting off toes, ears, and fingers, and then skinnin’ alive.” As in other scenes of torture, Girty enjoys the anticipation: “with a fiendish delight, [he] gloated over the prospective agony of his prisoner.” Ensuring that his captive must anticipate his fate with dread, he assures him that “it will be many bloody hours before you will see the end … Oh, when I hear ye howl, when the red hot tire-brands are stuck into yer flesh, won't I laugh.” Just as Pomeroy did to his victims, Girty then proceeds to whip Harris's back until it “was crimsoned with the flowing tide.” He also, in a twist of sadistic cruelty that seems peculiar to Girty, douses his back in brine. Girty “went to a barrel, which stood near the door, and stooping, lifted a little of the contents in his hands and threw it on the bleeding back of the young man.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In a compelling parallel, Pomeroy, too, took one of his victims to a salt creek and washed off his wounds with brine.Footnote ⁶⁷ He also sluiced the wounds of his penultimate torture victim (Joseph Kennedy) with salt water.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the novel, Girty then threatens his victim with the culminating act – skinning him with hot knives. With Girty as witness, his Indian accomplice “made an incision in the shoulder of the young hunter, at the base of the neck; the muscles shrunk, and the flesh seemed to shrivel up, under the infliction.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Pomeroy also progressed to cutting his victims (particularly his last victim) in the same place, around the head, neck and shoulders – and he may have been attempting, like Girty, to skin them.

It is the lack of ambiguity in Girty's malignancy that may well have made him such an attractive point of identification for Jesse Pomeroy. In 1879, W. H. Bishop astutely commented that the villain of cheap fiction “has no redeeming traits.” “The idea of mixed motives,” he continues, “still less the Bret Harte idea of moral grandeur illuminating lives of continuous iniquity … has not penetrated here.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Such unadulterated depravity would no doubt constitute a problem of identification for most readers. But the evidence suggests that Jesse Pomeroy had violent, sadistic tendencies from a young age,Footnote ⁷¹ and those tendencies may have been intensified by the starkly predatory nature of dime novels' white renegade villains. Those characters, I argue, may have both evoked unbearable dread and then, in their ruthless impenetrability, been a means for Pomeroy to contain that dread.

In his book What Evil Means to Us, political theorist C. Fred Alford draws on interviews with a large group of both criminals and noncriminals to identify what evil is and how art can either intensify or contain it. The conclusion Alford draws from his interviews is that evil is dread – dread of mortality, pain, abandonment, and hopelessness; more specifically, evil is the inability to live with this dread – it is being driven to inflict it on others to save oneself. “Evil inflicts pain, abandonment, and helplessness on others, so that the evildoer will not have to experience them himself,” Alford writes – and thus torture, he claims, is “the paradigm of evil.” The evil act, or what Alford elsewhere calls the “psychopathic moment,” is rooted in a person's persecution of others, or in an identification with a persecutor, in order to use the bodies of others “to give shape to our own formless dread.” The greater a person's “terror of dissolution,” the more complete, according to Alford, will be his identification with the persecutor, as if “only perfect identification can protect against total annihilation.”Footnote ⁷² Pomeroy's escape into dime novels, his apparent identification with the savage Indian and even more savage white renegade, and his seeming imitation of their torture of others' bodies, can suggestively be read through Alford's paradigm: perhaps Pomeroy became the predator to avoid becoming the victim.Footnote ⁷³

Alford notes that the origins of dread can lie in childhood experience – a dynamic that would direct attention to what Pomeroy underwent as a child, before he started reading – a dynamic, in other words, that would most likely involve the search for evidence that Pomeroy was himself victimized. In this model, Pomeroy may have ended up identifying with the persecutor because he was first a victim, desperate to find ways of protecting himself. The theory that violent predators are evacuating their own childhood abuse on the bodies of others – that people, in short, tend to defend against the violence done to them by repeating it on others – is a familiar paradigm in the twentieth and twenty-first century for understanding the origins of violent crime. It is a model that has guided criminological writing on Pomeroy, and has been propelled in no small part by Harold Schechter's true-crime book Fiend: The Shocking True Story of America's Youngest Serial Killer. Schechter asserts that Pomeroy was stripped naked and beaten repeatedly by his alcoholic father, beatings that Pomeroy in turn inflicted on other small boys. Schechter bases this claim on a series of letters Pomeroy allegedly wrote to another boy while he was in jail, letters that I have been unable to locate.Footnote ⁷⁴ His argument has nonetheless been repeated by a wide variety of commentators on the case, not least, I suggest, because such a theory fits so perfectly with how we now understand crime. People who torture and kill, we believe, are exorcising the terror that was inflicted on them; they identify with the persecutor to escape being persecuted. While Schechter's claim that Pomeroy was routinely whipped by his sadistic father is not substantiated, it is also not out of the realm of possibility. Indeed, Thomas Pomeroy was clearly an alcoholic. He would ultimately die of cirrhosis of the liver, and when Pomeroy's mother, Ruth, filed for divorce in 1878, she did so on the grounds of “drunkenness,” saying she had left him in August 1871 because of his “intemperance” – adding that he had not been supporting her for the last year and that she had been supporting herself and their family. There is no mention of abuse in her petition, however.Footnote ⁷⁵ Scholars have also raised the possibility that Pomeroy was bullied as a child,Footnote ⁷⁶ which indeed seems likely given the boy's apparently malformed head and milky-white eye.Footnote ⁷⁷ Pomeroy's reading, then, might well have activated his prior traumatic experiences and led him to identify, in a compensatory and defensive way, with the predator.

Dread does not necessarily only precede the experience of reading, however. It can also be activated by reading. Alford claims that presuming that people first feel dread and then identify with consummate predators is “not the whole story.” He continues that the “terror stems from the identification with the aggressor, his aggression suddenly our own.”Footnote ⁷⁸ This idea obviously gives more efficacy to the literary form, which can actively provoke identification with persecutors and thus produce dread. The idea is, not surprisingly, at odds with those who would see childhood experience, not cultural forms, as the cause of violence. Schechter, for instance, who is adamant that the roots of Pomeroy's pathology lie in childhood abuse, utterly dismisses the theory that dime novels played a part in Pomeroy's crimes – that art, in short, had any causative role.Footnote ⁷⁹ But Alford argues that a significant way to incite evil is indeed through art, and he condemns art that does “little more than revivify” terror, mimicking its readers' fears “in a narrative that lacks the form and meaning to contain them.” Culture, he writes, “is of no value when it mirrors the experiences that terrify us.” A “meaningful culture,” on the other hand, “stands at a distance, connecting with our experiences but not becoming them.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Dangerous art only reflects back uncontained experiences of dread – reinforcing, mirroring, the fear that already inhabits all readers to some degree, and thus shaping those readers in its own terrifyingly unmediated form. Simon Girty, I suggest, was precisely such a dangerous character – the embodiment of evil, ruthless and invulnerable, the consummate psychopath with no hint of ambiguity or of any emotion besides cruelty. He was the perfect locus of identification for a reader struggling more than most to contain his own dread – for a reader prone to desire fantasies of perfect cruelty and perfect impermeability. Alford argues passionately that “the availability of complex and developed roles will make a difference in how we give form to our dread, and so limit our evil.”Footnote ⁸¹ Pomeroy gravitated toward – indeed became obsessed by – the most simple, unambiguous figure of malignancy his culture had to offer. Certainly he must already have had tendencies that pushed him toward identifying with this kind of character, but the figure he found in dime novel westerns did nothing more than mirror, and thus intensify, those psychopathic tendencies.Footnote ⁸²

To argue that Pomeroy identified with Simon Girty, repeating savage acts so often themselves repeated in the fiction he read, is to highlight the role of imitation as a significant element in the causal nexus that impelled Pomeroy to his crimes. Indeed, the parallels between the savage representations of dime novels and Pomeroy's own acts of torture and murder seem to confirm the claims of nineteenth-century medical authorities that imitation played a powerful role in Pomeroy's crimes – and those claims are, moreover, themselves confirmed by recent developments in cognitive neuroscience. Dr. William Hammond, for instance, in a lecture delivered in Boston shortly after Pomeroy was arrested, argued that “morbid impulse” – “in which the affected individual is impelled consciously to commit an act which is contrary to his natural reason and against his normal inclinations” – was generated above all else by the drive to imitate. “Closely allied to suggestion, and probably a more powerful cause of morbid impulse,” he wrote, “is imitation. Thus,” he continued, “many crimes have been committed by persons who have had this impulse excited by reading accounts of the trials of other persons, or the detailed recitals of all the particulars of offenses which the age requires the public press to contain.” People are compelled to do things they would not normally do, Hammond claimed, simply by seeing them done (or written about) elsewhere; by the force, in short, of their own imitative drive. Pomeroy was his prime example of morbid impulse.Footnote ⁸³ Hammond was drawing on a tradition in nineteenth-century medical thought that recognized the power of imitation in cases of homicidal mania and irresistible impulse (of which Hammond's “morbid impulse” was one of many variants). In his groundbreaking 1837 Treatise on Insanity, for instance, James Cowles Prichard noted “the tendency of the [homicidal] impulse to spread by imitation.”Footnote ⁸⁴ And renowned US psychologist Isaac Ray also confirmed the role of imitation in madness, arguing that there were many cases of homicidal mania “in which the most efficient agency is the propensity to imitation.”Footnote ⁸⁵ What Hammond, Prichard and Ray argued on the basis primarily of observation is supported by early twenty-first-century science, as imitation is increasingly being understood as a crucial component in human development. Several contributions to the 2005 Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience to Social Science, published by MIT Press, argue both that five decades of research shows unequivocally that media violence contributes to aggression and that one of the mechanisms that explains that effect (especially on children) is our very human impulse to imitate what we read and see.Footnote ⁸⁶ As L. Rowell Huesmann concludes: “identification with aggressive characters was a particularly potent predictor of subsequent aggression for many children.”Footnote ⁸⁷ And Susan Hurley writes, “Watching or imagining violent behavior constitutes a kind of practice for violence, a honing of the skills of violence” – a “kind of practice” grounded in “the importance of imitation in general in molding human behavioral patterns.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Literary critics are beginning to draw on developments in cognitive neuroscience to enrich their discussions of literature's effects, mostly to demonstrate literature's positive efficacy – the ways in which fiction teaches compassion and empathy, for instance – thus contributing to the project of social justice (the work of Mark Bracher is exemplary in this regard). The case of Pomeroy, however, shows that fiction may train children not just in empathy but also in brutality. Research on the very powerful role played by imitation is confirming, then, long-standing claims about the influence of culture on some of its consumers, especially the formative effects of what Elliott Leyton describes as “a dehumanizing mass culture that glorifies and legitimizes violence” on some of those who become killers.Footnote ⁸⁹

Identification and imitation are not the only mechanisms, though, by which the fiction Pomeroy read may have incited his desires to torture and kill. One of the most salient characteristics of the fictional torture scenes of Beadle's westerns is that they happen only in anticipation; the climax is ultimately thwarted. Usually at around page seventy of the hundred-page pamphlet there is the obligatory capture of the protagonists(s) by the Indians and their white renegade allies, and elaborate preparations begin for a torture that will never take place. The Indian Spy is typical. On page seventy-four, preparations for the torture and immolation of the prisoner commence: as the prisoner is bound to the stake, “biting taunts and jeers” are poured on him, children assault him with their “tiny bows and arrows, sticks, stones, and such missiles as lay to their hands,” and “savages” prepare “splinters or instruments with which to add to the prisoner's tortures.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Then, on page eighty-one, he escapes. In The Border Renegade, the torture (atypically) does actually happen, again about two-thirds of the way through the novel, but the reader does not see it. George Girty captures the heroine's father and prepares to torture him. On page seventy-one, Girty describes in loving detail what he'll do to his victim if he does not disclose where his daughter is hidden, including sticking pine splinters under his fingernails and skinning him with hot knives. Several pages later, we see the aftermath: the captive is tied to the “tree of death” and his scalp is ripped off, but we are not witness to the atrocities, which constitute a void in the reader's experience.Footnote ⁹¹ In Queen of the Woods – in which Simon Girty has whipped his victim and doused his back with brine, and is preparing to skin him alive – his victim is abruptly rescued, frustrating Girty's palpable enjoyment.Footnote ⁹² And in The White Serpent, a heroic frontiersman is captured on page sixty-one by one of the typical irredeemably cruel white renegades; is threatened with a protracted, agonizing torture (and the hero “knew what was coming and felt a terrible dread”); briefly escapes; and is then recaptured and menaced again with still worse torture (the renegade tells him he will be “spotted” – ”Y'ur face, neck, breast an’ arms – pieces cut out ’bout as big's a penny!”).Footnote ⁹³ He is then reprieved yet again by a bullet that kills one of his Shawnee tormentors, is threatened with horrible torture again by the renegade, and finally manages to effect his escape. In some novels the torture scene is promised earlier (pages thirteen and forty in The Wolf Demon) or later (page ninety-one in The Mink Coat and The Black Princess), but it nevertheless follows the same pattern: it is a promise to the reader that is not fulfilled.

This anticipation and foreclosed consummation heightens the feelings associated with torture – feelings of either pleasure (on the part of the captor) or dread (on the part of the victim).Footnote ⁹⁴ It is perhaps not far-fetched to imagine that this dynamic, enacted in the text itself, may also continue beyond the text – that it may not merely reflect but contribute to shaping the experience of the reader. In Queen of the Woods, after two whites have just escaped their fate at the hands of Indians, the narrator comments, “They knew the awful passions which must rage within those dusky bosoms at being thus outwitted, after bringing their captives to the very gates of their village … no war or scalp-dance for them – no exquisite enjoyment of torture at the stake.”Footnote ⁹⁵ And there was no “exquisite enjoyment of torture at the stake” for the reader either. Dime novels self-consciously aroused intense emotions and then abandoned the reader, denied him the “exquisite enjoyment of torture” and then, dangerously, left him potentially to consummate his pent-up, provoked passions outside the text.

The plots of dime novels, then, doubly fed Jesse Pomeroy's fantasies – not only, as I have argued, providing Pomeroy with the details of the torture he would fatally imitate, but also reinforcing the psychic logic that characterizes those who torture and murder serially. Former FBI agent Robert K. Ressler, who coined the term “serial killer” in the early 1970s, claims that he was drawn to this term because of his experiences viewing “serial adventures” at Saturday matinees. “Each week,” he explains, “you'd be lured back to see another episode, because at the end of each one there was a cliff-hanger. In dramatic terms, this wasn't a satisfactory ending, because it increased, not lessened the tension. The same dissatisfaction,” he goes on to argue, “occurs in the minds of serial killers. The very act of killing leaves the murderer hanging, because it isn't as perfect as his fantasy.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Serial murder, according to Ressler, is fundamentally about impeded pleasure, about the continual repetitive failure of fantasy's fulfillment. Just as Ressler describes how this logic works in the cliffhangers of Saturday matinees, so it worked in dime novels – and so it could have worked in the shape of the fantasies those novels produced in Pomeroy.Footnote ⁹⁷ For, like all serial killers, Jesse Pomeroy evinced a steady escalation, a perverse refinement, in his acts, first of torture, then of murder. His intensifying violence suggests precisely the obstruction of anticipation, the failure of perfect enactment, that Ressler articulates as the central force driving the seriality of serial killers. Ressler writes that what he calls “nonfulfilled experiences” are a crucial part of the fantasies of serial killers, are what “push them on to the next killing.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Dime novels mirrored precisely what Ressler calls those “nonfulfilled experiences” crucial to the fantasies of serial killers – to both the repetition and the escalation of their violence. From dime novels, then, Pomeroy not only imbibed how to torture (evident in the likeness of his crimes to their anticipated torture scenes), but also found reinforced in their pages the logic of serial violence – the inevitable failure of anticipated pleasure, the failure of fantasy, and the compulsion to repeat.

Pomeroy's crimes seemed so nearly a repetition of Indian atrocities to his contemporaries that at least one writer declared he was quite literally possessed by the spirits of Indians. Shortly after Pomeroy was arrested for Horace Millen's murder, the Boston Herald reported “The Dreams of a Spiritual Medium,” and the headline said it all: “Pomeroy the Agent of Young Indian Devils Avenging Themselves on ‘the Whites’.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The medium claimed that Pomeroy was “defective in his mental organization” and that he had most likely exhibited “an unnatural fondness for witnessing acts of torture and cruelty, like the excessive beating of horses and the like.” Because of his mental and moral “weakness,” Pomeroy attracted the spirits of several Indian boys who “had within a few years been massacred by the whites in the far Western plains.” Pomeroy was, according to the medium, both to blame and not to blame: he would undoubtedly be held responsible by the law, but in the end he had been but “the tool of a bloodthirsty and cruel band of spirits.” While the medium held that Jesse's “weakness” drew to him the actual spirits of Indians, theories that Jesse was influenced by his reading about Indians, and his sympathy for them, made a similar although less literal claim. Instead of actual “spirits gratifying their passionate appetites through some weakness of an earthly instrument” (i.e. Pomeroy), it was the reiterated images of Indians in sensational fiction that entered, that “possessed,” Pomeroy. As physician Theodore Fisher put it, Pomeroy's “disordered and enfeebled brain” made him particularly vulnerable to the “impressions” he received from “reading stories of savage warfare.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ For Fisher, these “impressions” indeed possessed Pomeroy, circumventing his will and causing him to blindly enact what he read.

As I have argued, though, it was perhaps the white renegades of western dime novels with whom Jesse Pomeroy identified most fully. He seemed not to be able to escape the pitiless predator incarnate in the figure of Simon Girty – a character who both threatened annihilation and formed a bulwark against it. And neither could Pomeroy escape the “nonfulfilled experiences” of dime novels – their logic of anticipated and thwarted torture. He was driven on by his own compulsion, mirrored in the foreclosed consummation of dime novels' scenes of torture, to find the perfect actualization that was always awaiting him in the next act of torture. Pomeroy's imagination, along with the creative resources of his culture, failed him – and so he assimilated the characters and structures of dime novels, literalizing them on the bodies of other children, using those bodies to enact fantasies that were both his own and those of his culture.