On the afternoon of November 27, 1874, Aaron P Barnes went, with his business assistant, John W. Ganie, to a lodging house Barnes owned on Gouch Street in Boston. One of the lodgers had left, and they wanted to ensure the room was ready for the next tenant. They went upstairs and found three young ruffians, somewhat intoxicated, lounging in the furnished but otherwise vacated room.

The men, Richard Nealon, James McCall, and George Watson (alias Jeremiah Cummings), appeared ready for a permanent stay. Barnes told them to leave, and they refused. An argument ensued.

McCall stepped up and said, “Shut your mouth; I’ll shoot you.”

This fired Ganie’s wrath, and he proposed to his boss that they “go for them.” Instead, Barnes told him to go and fetch a police officer. Gaine went to the 3rd Police Stationhouse. The officer in charge heard his story but decided that, as the men had performed no act of actual violence, he had no jurisdiction in the matter. 

While Ganie was gone, Nealon and McCall left the building. They saw Ganie returning on the other side of the street, so they crossed over. Nealon confronted Ganie and struck a heavy blow to his face. A fierce struggle ensued, and Ganie drew a large sheath knife and plunged it into Nealon’s chest. He dropped the weapon and fled into the house.

Officer Thomas Lynch, who was in the vicinity, not in uniform, witnessed the fight instigated by Nealon, but did not see the stabbing. He ran to the scene to arrest Nealon but was surprised when Nealon said, “I am stabbed.” When Lynch saw the blood flowing from the wound, he assisted Nealon to a nearby doorway. McCall went for a doctor.

When Dr. Crilly arrived and saw the severity of the wound, he commandeered a passing wagon, loaded Nealon into the wagon, and told the driver to rush to Massachusetts General Hospital. As they rode, the doctor reached into the wound and grasped the severed artery with his fingers to stop the bleeding. However, at the hospital, they discovered that the damage was even worse than it appeared, and Nealon died within five minutes of arriving. 

A group of police officers searched for Ganie on Gouch Street. They found the weapon. It was a large knife, six to eight inches long with a broad, keen blade, “being altogether an ugly-looking affair.” They found Ganie in a dark room in a different building on Gouch Street. He offered no resistance and was soon behind bars in the Third Stationhouse.

Richard Nealon, the victim, was 22 years old. He was the least intoxicated of the three, but was known to have a wild disposition. At the time of the murder, Boston detectives had a warrant for his arrest for some earlier crime.

John W. Ganie, the murderer, was 26 years old, born in Canada, dark-complexioned, and had Indian blood. He was an eccentric individual, and some who knew him doubted his sanity. He was considered more intelligent than average, but investigated spiritualism, “and many other of the ‘isms’ of the day.” He would sometimes go an entire day without food while poring over some book. He had roomed with Aaron Barnes for upwards of ten years and was employed by Barnes as an assistant in his business.

The coroner’s jury concluded that Richard F. Nealon died as a result of a stab in the left breast inflicted by a knife in the hands of John W. Ganie. Although it was not stated in the verdict, the jury were of the opinion that Ganie acted in self-defense. When the case went to trial the following February, the trial jury agreed with the coroner’s jury and found Ganie not guilty.

As Police Officers Henry Johnson and Eli Veazie were leaving the Chelsea, Massachusetts City Marshal’s office on the evening of February 17, 1872, they were approached by a man, intoxicated and in a state of agitation.

“I have had my revenge. I want you to go with me,” he said, “I suppose I have killed him and shall have to suffer for it.”

Dr. Henry Clark of Boston was summoned to 11 Hamilton Place at around 7:00 the morning of December 30, 1879. A woman had been shot and needed urgent care. When he got there, she was nearly gone, and there was nothing he could do. 

A policeman and a medical examiner arrived soon after and determined that the woman, Mrs. Helen J. Ward, had been shot twice in the head. One shot entered her temple and went through her head, the other fractured her skull without entering. 

Her 18-year-old daughter, also named Helen, did her best to explain what happened. Mother and daughter shared a bed. They worried about burglars, so they kept a revolver on a chair beside the bed. Miss Ward believed she had been in a somnambulant state and fired at a moving object that she thought was a burglar. Alternatively, she thought the gun may have discharged accidentally. This took place around 4:00 am, raising the question of why she didn’t contact someone sooner. Miss Ward was considered cold and unfeeling because she did not seem overly affected by her mother’s death.

On May 23, 1875, Thomas W. Piper lured five-year-old Mabel Young to the belfry of the Warren Avenue Baptist Church on the pretext of viewing pigeons. There he beat her to death with a cricket bat, then escaped by leaping from the belfry window.

Read the full story here: The Boston Belfry Tragedy.

Nellie and Fanny.

Nelly Dalton and Fanny Coburn, two young Boston women, were out on the town one autumn afternoon in 1855. They met and flirted with William Sumner and Josiah Porter, two promising young college graduates. Though both women were married, they arranged to see the boys again.

Nelly and William embarked on a heartfelt correspondence. Their amorous letters sometimes included romantic poetry. Everything was fine until Mr. Dalton found the letters.

Benjamin Dalton told Edward Coburn about Nellie's dalliance with William Sumner and Coburn's wife's flirtation with Josiah Porter. The husbands enticed the boys to Dalton's home, where they severely beat them. When they were satisfied, they kicked them out the back door.

Porter lived to file charges against Dalton and Coburn, but William Sumner died a few days later. A victim of the femmes fatales. 

Read the full story here: Erring Wives and Jealous Husbands.

- The Boston Herald’s vivid description of the murder of Josephine Brown on Christmas Eve, 1891.

Read the full story here: Two Shots, A Shriek.

Read the full story here: Jesse Pomeroy - "Boston Boy Fiend." 

Read the full story here: The Sleepwalking Defense.

A pair of attractive young ladies sat down at the table next to them. Nelly Dalton and Fanny Coburn were sisters, the daughters of John Gove, who owned a clothing store in Boston. Fanny recognized Mr. Porter and reminded him they had been introduced at a ball for the City Guards the previous February. The four struck up a conversation, and although both ladies were married, they became quite flirtatious. Before they left, they told the men that they often came to Vinton’s and hoped they would see them there again.

This week we have a guest post from Donna Wells, a former employee of the Boston Police Department who made a rare discovery—a previously unknown photograph of “The Boston Boy Fiend,” Jesse Pomeroy.

Discovery of Previously Unknown Photograph of America’s Youngest Serial Killer, Jesse Pomeroy

I have a very strange story to tell you. I call it my strange little serial killer story… My name is Donna Wells. I graduated in 1997 from Simmons College in Boston with a master’s degree in library and information science. Several months later, I accepted a position with the Boston Police Department as their first records manager and archivist. I was tasked with establishing and managing the Department’s records management program and also with the day-to-day running of the Department’s records center and archives. I served in this position until 2007 when I took early retirement due to health and personal reasons.

Jesse Pomeroy Carte de Visite

During the time that I was with the Department, I read everything I could get my hands on regarding the history of the Department and Boston crimes. 

I now live in Central Maine with my husband. I am disabled, but I buy jewelry, buttons, and other items at auctions, flea markets, and thrift stores and sell them on eBay.  

One day, some time ago, I grabbed a tin of buttons from the shelf and took it downstairs to sort. I opened the tin and, lying on top of the buttons, was an old envelope, all folded up. There was nothing written on the envelope, so I opened it and inside there was an old photograph (a carte de visite) of a young boy. He was kind of creepy looking because the irises of his eyes appeared to be without color – they were a dead white. I put the photograph aside and continued with the buttons. Over the next several days, I was drawn back to the photograph over and over again. It just seemed like I should know who this was – that I had seen a similar image somewhere. And there was something tickling my brain, something about a white eye. 

As I was looking at the picture one day, it just came to me about a book that told the story of a young Boston serial killer that I had read when I was with the Department about a young man who had committed some truly horrifying acts—about a young man who had at least one white eye— I couldn’t remember the name of the book or his name, but I googled “Boston serial killer 1800s,” and Jesse Pomeroy came at the top of the list.

When fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy was arrested in 1874 for the murder of Horace Millen, he was thought to have tortured at least six children and tortured and murdered two more. The two murder victims, ten-year-old Katie Curran and four-year-old Horace Millen had both been stabbed and nearly decapitated. Katie also had a fractured skull and several broken bones. Horace had also been nearly castrated, had one eyeball deeply pierced, and been set on fire. The victims that had managed to survive his attacks had suffered whippings, stabbings, beatings, which included broken noses and split lips, vicious bites to the face and buttocks, attempted castration, and attempted scalping. At the time of his arrest for Horace Millen’s murder, Jesse’s reputation in Boston as the “Boy Torturer” was firmly established. 

In the course of my research, I found out that the title and author of the book I had read was Fiend: The Shocking True Story of America’s Youngest Serial Killer by Harold Schechter. I no longer possessed a copy of the Schechter book because I had donated it to the BPD Records Center & Archives. I know my successor at the archives, Margaret Sullivan, so I called her and told her my story. I sent her a scan of the image that I had found and asked her to compare it with the drawing in the book. Margaret thought that the image could be Jesse. She pointed me to some resources, and I dove back into the internet.

On the back of my photograph, there is a partial photographer’s name. The last name is Dunshee, and there is an address given as 323 Washington Street, Boston. There is also what I assume is the date of the print – 1875 in the lower left corner. There is a very useful database online that lists Boston’s photographers and provides the dates that they would have been at a particular address. The approximate dates that this database gives for when E.S. Dunshee was at the address on the back of my photo are 1873-1874.

Back

I had ordered another copy of the Schechter book and had read it again to see if I could find anything that would help me to authenticate the photograph. On page 92, I found a quote from a journalist from the Boston Herald:

“He does not look like a youth actuated by the spirit of a fiend, and, with the exception of a peculiarity about the eyes, he has no marked expression in his face from which one might read the spirit within. The idea that he is insane is not supported, except by the extraordinary character of his conduct.” 

Contrary to what many reporters of the time of the murders claimed, the image in my photograph does not show a wild-eyed lunatic, neither is there any indication of the monster that he could become, but shows a seemingly normal, although sad and confused, boy with, admittedly, very strange eyes. Looking at my photograph, I am forced to speculate that Jesse’s very normality made it possible for him to succeed in deceiving and assaulting his victims. I mean, if he truly looked like a monster, he would not have been able to get close to his victims.

In my photograph, there does not seem to be any great differences in the visible portions of his actual eyeballs, however, because the photograph is black and white, any differences of color between his irises would not be obvious. I have examined the image under magnification, and the only difference that I can detect is a slightly more “flattish” look to the iris of his right eye. There are, however, several much more obvious external differences – his right eye is more slanted and smaller than his left. Also, there is a dark area around his right eye. It appears to be a bruise of some kind, but whatever it was, it was permanent because it remains in all of the future photographs of Jesse. In later photographs, he does appear to have developed some kind of clouding of his right eye, but in my early photograph, that is not evident.

1870s Drawing -- Found Photograph

There are some pretty striking similarities between my photograph and the drawing of Jesse that is reproduced in the Schechter book. The pose is the same. The hairstyles are identical. The costume is similar. I speculate that the artist who created the drawing might have depicted Jesse in a collar-less shirt without the bowtie of my image because he didn’t want Jesse to look too “normal.” The features, especially the shape of the ears, jaw, and nose, are alike. The eyes are very similar, except the artist had drawn Jesse’s right eye as clouded. Perhaps Jesse’s right eye had become clouded by the time that the artist drew his portrait. However, I believe that it is an inescapable conclusion that the drawing was based on another copy of my photograph. The photograph of Jesse in 1920 that is in the Schechter book is probably the best to compare with the earlier photograph. Following is the text of an email from Harold Schechter in response to my email to him: 

Dear Donna--

    My agent forwarded your email to me.

    After closely studying your photograph, I think you may, in fact, have found an early portrait of Jesse Pomeroy. I base that conclusion by comparing it not only to the newspaper engraving of the adolescent Pomeroy reproduced in my book but on the photograph of the elder Jesse that served as the frontispiece of his 1920 book of poems, which I've attached. Take a close look at the right eye in both your photo and the later one: they are virtually identical--weirdly shaped, slightly slanted, distinctly different from the left, and surrounded by a strange dark shadow as if he had a permanent shiner.

    It's an exciting find, and I would certainly consider writing it up and trying to get it published somewhere. Thanks for sharing it with me, and let me know if I can be of further help. Best, Harold S.

Jesse Pomeroy, 1920

I hired Maureen Taylor, a nationally-known historical photograph expert, to assess the photograph. I told her my story and emailed her high-resolution images of the photograph. She replied, saying that it was “an 1870s image of a man in a pretty typical suit for the period [and that] the card stock used agrees with that time period.“ She added that it was “an incredible random find [and] an astonishing discovery!”   

I am still, even now, pretty freaked out about the fact that this photograph, a previously unknown photograph and the only known photograph of Jesse during the period in which he was active, ended up in my buttons, given the fact that I am probably one of the few people who might be able to recognize the subject.

Donna Wells can be reached at TonyMay2021@gmail.com for questions and comments. 

The business was doing well, and the two men got along until O’Keefe moved in. That winter they frequently argued over the way Kenney was treating O’Keefe’s sister. Kenney was a quiet man when sober, but aggressive when drunk, which became increasingly frequent. The arguments sometimes turned violent with punches thrown and bottles broken. Kenney ordered O’Keefe out of the house. O’Keefe refused to leave, and his sister took his side. O’Keefe remained but the two men barely spoke to each other.

At dinner on May 2, 1872, O’Keefe asked Kenney about the store. Kenney had been drinking heavily for several days and O’Keefe worried that it would hurt their sales. Kenney told him to mind his own business, but since the store was O’Keefe’s business, the argument escalated. When the subject of Kenney’s cruel treatment of his wife arose again, Kenney jump up and said, “Come down to the green and we will settle this matter.” Mrs. Kenney interceded then and separated them. 

Around 8:00 that night, as Kenney was waiting on a customer and O’Keefe came to the barroom door and looked in. When Kenney was through with the customer, he went outside, and the argument started up again on the sidewalk. A scuffle ensued, they clinched and fell to the ground. O’Keefe pulled a jackknife from his pocket and stabbed Kenney in the neck. Kenney exclaimed, “I am killed.” O’Keefe took off down the alley. 

Kenney managed to raise himself from the sidewalk and staggered into the store with blood streaming from his neck. Medical aid was summoned, but O’Keefe had severed Kenney’s jugular vein and he died before the doctors arrived. His wife bent over him, frantically imploring him to speak to her. “Who did this?” she asked, “What did Peter do that they should kill him.” She continued to lament over her husband’s body until someone removed her to a neighboring house.

O’Keefe entered the house through the backdoor, ran upstairs, and changed his clothes. He went back out through the barroom door where officers Dudley and Johnson were waiting for him. At the police station, O’Keefe confessed to the stabbing. The police searched his room and found the knife in his pants pocket. It was just a small penknife with a 3-inch blade, but it was long enough to kill.

Richard O’Keefe was indicted for manslaughter. 

Thomas Piper murdered three, including 5-year-old Mabel Young.  

Read the full story here: The Boston Belfrey Tragedy

Read the whole story of Alice Brown's mysterious, 1897 murder in Boston here: 15 Corning Street.

Illustrations from Boston Post, November 6, 1897.