Popular.com

September 24th, 1872.

A most remarkable specimen of youthful brutality has just been arrested at Boston in the person

of Jesse Pomeroy, a boy 14 years of age, who was taken into custody Thursday on the charge

of mutilating Robert Gould, a boy of five years. Pomeroy enticed the boy away from home on Tuesday afternoon, and by threats compelled

him to go with him to an obscure place on the line of the Boston-Hartford and Erie Railroad,

where he made Robert strip himself of his clothing, when Pomeroy tied him to a telegraph pole and cut him with a knife

about the head. Soon after the arrest was made, Harry Austin, another youth residing in South

Boston, was taken to the station house and immediately identified Pomeroy as the party who stripped him on the 4th of August

and inflicted three wounds in his back and one in his groin.

Jesse Pomeroy's eyes are peculiar.

The left one is a light steely blue, while the right eye is nearly white, and its pupil turns in towards the nose.

He may have had this white eye from birth, but it appears rather the result of some childish injury.

The sight is perfect.

It is hard to describe the expression of Pomeroy's eyes, for he aims to make them

expressionless. This very effort, however, gives the blue eye a look of animal cunning, and

the wide eye seems always following the cue given it by the blue. This enhances the look of slow, animal cunning and gives a shifting

uneasy appearance to what otherwise would be a bold eye. These disclosures at once led the officers

to suppose that Pomeroy had committed the assaults in Chelsea, Somerville,

and Charlestown, which so excited the people of these cities some months ago on account of the

brutality exhibited, and learning that until within a few weeks he had lived in the latter city,

the suspicions of the officers were strengthened further

...