It’s less than an hour by train from the middle of Manhattan to the small town on the Hudson River named by an early Dutch trader for the Chinese city of Tsing-sing; but for visitors and prisoners alike, the trip to Sing Sing is usually divorced from real time, seeming at once the shortest and longest journey imaginable. Situated hard by the water and offering a commanding view of the Tappan Zee bluffs opposite, Sing Sing Prison (originally known as “Mount Pleasant”) was opened in 1827 amid claims that it embodied the most advanced ideas in penology. And indeed, in those days when prisons were, in effect, small factories where inmates manufactured everything from combs to furniture to cut stone, prisoners did seem in many ways better-off (or at least better occupied) than they were seventy years later. True, they were beaten and tormented mercilessly in those early decades of the century, but so had they always been, and so are they still; and work, most will tell you, was preferable to “penitence,” a largely idle state in which there is little to do save brood over the acts that have brought one to such a terrible place—that and plan schemes of revenge against those responsible. But prison manufacture died with the advent of organized labor, which would not tolerate wages being driven down by cheap convict workers; and for this reason more than any other, Sing Sing had degenerated, by 1896, into a horribly pointless place, where prisoners still wore their striped costumes, still obeyed the rule of silence, and still marched in lockstep, even though the jobs they’d once marched to had all but vanished.
Forbidding as the prospect of a visit to such a brutal, hopeless place was, it was overshadowed by the real apprehension I experienced when Kreizler finally told me whom we were going to see.
“I was a fool not to think of it myself,” Laszlo said, as our train clacked along next to the Hudson, giving us a lovely view of sunset beyond the lush, bulging hills to the west. “Of course, it’s been twenty years. But it never seemed likely, at that time, that I’d forget the fellow. I should have made the connection as soon as I saw the bodies.”
“Laszlo,” I said sternly, though I was pleased that he was finally becoming talkative. “Perhaps, now that you’ve impressed me into this miserable service, you’d care to dispense with all the mystery. Who are we going to see?”
“And I’m even more surprised that you didn’t think of it, Moore,” he answered, obviously a bit pleased with my discomfort. “After all, he was always one of your favorite characters.”
“
The black eyes fixed themselves unwaveringly on mine. “Jesse Pomeroy.”
At the mention of the name we both sat in silent apprehension, as if it alone might bring horror and mayhem into our near-empty train car; and when we spoke again, to review the case, it was in hushed tones. For while there’d been murderers more prolific than Jesse Pomeroy in our lifetimes, none was ever quite so unsettling. In 1872, Pomeroy had enticed a series of small children to remote spots near the small suburban village where he lived, then stripped and bound them and tortured them with knives and whips. He’d eventually been caught and locked up; but his behavior during incarceration was so exemplary that when his mother—long since abandoned by her husband—made an emotional appeal for parole just sixteen months after Jesse’s sentence began, it was granted. Almost immediately after the release a new and even more horrifying crime occurred near the Pomeroy home: a four-year-old boy was found dead on a beach, his throat cut and the rest of his body terribly mutilated. Jesse was suspected, but evidence was lacking; several weeks later, however, the body of a missing ten-year-old girl was discovered in the basement of the Pomeroy house. The girl had also been tortured and mutilated. Jesse was arrested, and in the weeks that followed, every unsolved case in the vicinity that involved a missing child was reopened. None of them was ever tied directly to Pomeroy, but the case against him for the murder of the little girl was solid. Jesse’s lawyers quite understandably decided to plead insanity for their client. The attempt, however, was doomed from the start. Pomeroy was originally condemned to hang, but the sentence was commuted to life in solitary confinement because of the villain’s age:
Jesse Pomeroy, you see, had been but twelve years old at the start of his terrible career; and when he was shut away forever in a lonely prison cell—one that he still inhabits as I write these words—he was only fourteen.
Kreizler had crossed paths with what the press took to calling “the boy-fiend” soon after Pomeroy’s lawyers entered the plea of not guilty by reason of insanity in the summer of 1874. At the time, such pleas were judged, as they are today, according to the “M’Naghten Rule,” named after an unfortunate Englishman who, in 1843, fell under the delusion that Prime Minister Robert Peel wanted to kill him. M’Naghten had tried to circumvent this fate by himself killing Peel; and though he failed to achieve that object, he did manage to murder the prime minister’s secretary. He was subsequently acquitted, however, when his lawyers successfully argued that he did not understand the nature or wrongness of his act. In such manner were the floodgates of insanity opened onto the courtrooms of the world; and thirty years later, Jesse Pomeroy’s defenders hired a battery of mental experts to assess their client and, hopefully, pronounce him as mad as M’Naghten. One of these experts was a very young Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, who, along with several other alienists, found Pomeroy quite sane. The judge in the case ultimately agreed with this group, but he took special pains to say that he had found Dr. Kreizler’s particular explanation of the boy-fiend’s behavior arcane and quite possibly obscene.
Such a statement was not surprising, given Laszlo’s heavy emphasis on Pomeroy’s family life. But it was another part of Kreizler’s twenty-year-old investigation, I suddenly realized as we neared Sing Sing, that was of particular significance with regard to our present purposes: Pomeroy had been born with a harelip, and during infancy had contracted a fever that left his face pockmarked and one of his eyes, even more portentously, ulcerated and lifeless. Even at the time it hadn’t seemed coincidental that Pomeroy had taken special care to mutilate the eyes of his victims during his vicious outings; but at the time of his trial he’d always refused to discuss that aspect of his behavior and thus prevented any solid conclusions from being drawn.
“I don’t understand, Kreizler,” I said, as our train lurched to a stop at the Sing Sing station. “You say you didn’t make the connection between Pomeroy and our case—so why are we here?”
“You can thank Adolf Meyer,” Kreizler answered, as we stepped to the station platform and were approached by an old man in a moth-eaten cap who had a rig for hire. “I was on the telephone with him for several hours today.”
“Dr. Meyer?” I asked. “How much did you tell him?”
“Everything,” Kreizler answered simply. “My trust in Meyer is absolute. Even though, in certain matters, he believes I’m off course. He quite agrees with Sara, for instance, about the role of a woman in the childhood formation of our killer. In fact, that was what brought Pomeroy to mind, along with the eyes.”
“The role of a woman?” We had gotten into the old man’s rig and were rolling away from the station toward the prison. “Kreizler, what do you mean?”
“Never mind, John,” he answered, looking out for the prison walls as the light around us began to diminish rapidly. “You’ll find out soon enough, and there are things you need to know before we go inside. First of all, the warden agreed to this visit only after I offered a fairly sizable bribe, and he will not greet us personally when we arrive. Only one other man, a guard called Lasky, knows who we are and what our purpose is. He will take the money and then guide us in and out, hopefully unnoticed. Say as little as possible, and nothing to Pomeroy.”
“Why not to Pomeroy? He’s not an official of the prison.”
“True,” Laszlo answered, as the monotonous edifice of Sing Sing’s thousand-cell main block appeared just ahead of us. “But although I believe Jesse can help us with the question of the mutilations, he’s entirely too perverse to do so if he knows what we’re up to. So, for a variety of reasons, make no mention of your name or our work at any point. I hardly need remind you”—Kreizler lowered his voice as we reached the prison’s front gate —“how very many dangers inhabit this place.”
CHAPTER 23
Sing Sing’s main block ran parallel to the Hudson, with several out-buildings, shops, and the two-hundred-cell women’s jail running perpendicular to it and toward the riverfront. A series of tall chimneys
