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contemporaries weren’t inclined to attribute his atrocities to childhood trauma. To them, he was simply a natural-born fiend.
    Little is known about Pomeroy’s early life until he reached the age ofeleven—at which point, he began preying on other children. Between the winter of 1871 and the following fall, he attacked seven little boys, luring them to a secluded spot, then stripping, binding, and torturing them. His first victims were subjected to savage beatings. Later, Pomeroy took to slashing his victims with a pocketknife or stabbing them with needles.
    Arrested at the end of 1872, Pomeroy was sentenced to ten years in a reformatory but managed to win probation after only eighteen months by putting on a convincing show of rehabilitation. No sooner had he been released, however, than he reverted to his former ways. But by this time, the teenage psychopath wasn’t content merely to inflict injury. At this point, he was homicidal.
    In March 1874 he kidnapped ten-year-old Mary Curran, then mutilated and killed her. A month later, he abducted four-year-old Horace Mullen, took him to a remote stretch of marshland, and slashed him so savagely with a pocketknife that the boy was nearly decapitated.
    When Mullen’s body was found, suspicion immediately lighted on Pomeroy, who was picked up with the bloody weapon in his pocket and mud on his boots that matched the soggy ground of the murder site. When police showed Pomeroy the victim’s horribly mutilated body and asked if he had killed the little boy, Pomeroy simply said, “I suppose I did.” It wasn’t until July that Mary Curran’s corpse was found, when laborers uncovered her decomposed remains while excavating the earthen cellar of the Pomeroys’ house.
    Pomeroy’s 1874 trial was a nationwide sensation. Moral reformers blamed his crimes on the lurid “dime novels” of the day (very much like those modern-day bluenoses who attribute the current crime rate to gangsta rap and violent videogames). Unfortunately, their position was undermined by Pomeroy’s insistence that he had never read a book in his life.
    In spite of his age, Pomeroy was condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment with a harsh proviso: the so-called boy-fiend would serve out his sentence in solitary. And indeed, it wasn’t until forty-one years later that he was finally allowed limited contact with other inmates. He died in confinement in 1932, at the age of seventy-two.
    Pomeroy makes a brief but memorable appearance in Caleb Carr’s bestselling 1994 novel, The Alienist, when the titular hero—seeking insight into the mind of an unknown serial killer—travels to Sing Sing to interview the former boy-fiend and finds him locked in a punishment cell, his head encased in a cagelike “collar cap.”
    During the late 1990s—a century after Pomeroy’s crimes—America was shocked by a rash of horrendous killings committed by juvenile sociopaths. In Pearl, Mississippi, sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham killed three schoolmates and wounded seven others after knifing his own mother to death. In West Paducah, Kentucky, fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal gunned down three fellow students and wounded five others at an early-morning prayer meeting. In Springfield, Oregon, fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel murdered his parents, then shot twenty-seven students, killing two. In Jonesboro, Arkansas, Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson—ages eleven and thirteen—set off a fire alarm to draw their classmates outside, then opened fire, killing four students and a teacher.
    The most notorious of these incidents occurred in April 1999, when seventeen-year-old Dylan Klebold and eighteen-year-old Eric Harris massacred their schoolmates and teachers at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, leaving thirteen dead and twenty-five wounded. Like others of their ilk, however, Klebold and Harris were not serial killers but Mass Murderers : suicidal rampage killers so full of rage and despair