Sons of Cain Illustrations

SONS OF CAIN BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS
[Warning:  Graphic Images that some may find disturbing.]

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SERIAL KILLERS BEFORE JACK THE RIPPER - PART 2
THE AMERICANS

Jesse Pomeroy, the “Boy Fiend”— Boston, 1874.
 
The earliest serial killers on the record in the United States appear nearly 15 years before Jack the Ripper made his appearance in 1888.  Many of the known American serial killers from this era were women,  pathological predatory or profit-​hedonist female serial killer poisoners—like Lydia Sherman, the “American Borgia” (10 victims: 1864–71); Sarah Jane Robinson, the “Poison Fiend” (8 victims: 1881–86); and Jane Toppan, “Jolly Jane” (31 victims: 1885–1901)—or organized outlaw profit killers preying on frontier settlers and travelers, like the Harpe Brothers in Tennessee in the 1790s or the Bloody Benders and their “murder inn” in Kansas, 1869–72.

If we accept the FBI’s new 2005 San Antonio Serial Murder Symposium definition of a  minimum two-victims, then it can be argued that America’s first pathological sex serial killer on the record, and perhaps the youngest, was fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy in Boston, arrested in 1874 for the brutal torture-mutilation murders of two children--a ten-year-old girl Katie Curran in March 1874 and four-year-old Horace Millen in April.

Jesse Pomeroy

(Above)  When Jesse Pomeroy was twelve years-old he was arrested for a series of brutal abduction-tortures of small boys.  Sentenced to six-years in a reformatory, he was paroled two years later in February 1874 into his mother's custody because he appeared to have reformed.  He went to work in his mother's neighborhood store.

Jesse Pomeroy

(Above)  On an early morning in March 1874 while Pomeroy was opening his mother's store, ten-year-old girl Katie Curran came in on her way to school to buy a notebook.  On a sudden impulse Pomeroy dragged her into the cellar and after mutilating her with a knife and killing her, buried her in the loose earth.  Her body would not be found until after Pomeroy was arrested for his second murder.  

Millen Shrine 

(Above)  In April Pomeroy came upon four-year-old Horace Millen on a beach in Boston and mutilated and murdered him.  Boston police officers familiar with his previous abduction-tortures when he was twelve-years-old turned their attention to Pomeroy as a suspect.

Pomeroy

(Above)  Pomeroy was sentenced to life imprisonment.  He served forty-one years in solitary confinement before he was transferred into the regular prison population in 1917, where he remained until his death in 1932 at the age of seventy-two, after a total of fifty-six years in prison.   Pomeroy remained a controversial prisoner throughout his sentence, making attempted escapes and launching lawsuits and bids for a pardon. 


(Below) For decades afterwards whenever a juvenile was charged with a pathological or brutal act of sadistic violence, newspapers would run "ANOTHER JESSE POMEROY" headlines.

Another Jesse PomeroyAnother Jesse Pomeroy 

Another Jesse Pomeroy
Female Jesse Pomeroy

Thomas W. Piper, the “Boston Belfry Murderer” or the “Bat”—Boston, 1875.
 
 Thomas W. Piper is also a Boston serial killer, appearing the year after the Pomeroy killings.  Piper was a “perfect storm” of serial killer psychopathy. On the surface he wore a mask of sanity: the dutiful, hardworking son; the gracefully elegant young gentleman, eligible bachelor, pious churchgoer and Sunday-school volunteer. Beneath the surface, however, he was addicted to opium tincture— laudanum— which he would mix into whiskey as “treatment” for his kidney disorder. With a strength of 1 percent morphine, laudanum was an over-the-counter drugstore product, completely legal and unregulated. But it was highly addictive and, when mixed with whiskey, potentially hallucinogenic.  He also was harboring raging fantasies of raping unconscious women and girls.  He targeted prostitutes and women walking home at night in Boston, battering them into unconsciousness, sometimes to death, with a hammer or other blunt object.

In April 1874, he would be hired as a church sexton and given the keys to the Warren Avenue Baptist Church, a massive building with a five story tall bell tower in the Columbus district of Boston (on the current site of James Hayes Park at Warren Avenue and West Canton Street.)  On Sunday, May 23, 1875, during Sunday school classes in the afternoon, he lured five-year-old Mabel Young into the church belfry and battered her to death with a cricket bat, intending to later rape her unconscious body.  The hue and cry raised by the missing girls family in the church foiled his plans when the parishioners heard the little girl's moans in the belfry.  She was rescued but died soon from her head wounds.  Piper's suspicious behavior during the search of the church for the girl brought him to the attention of the police.

Thomas Piper

At his trial Piper claimed Mabel died accidentally when he took her up to the tower to “see the birdies” and the trapdoor, which he said he had propped open with the cricket bat, slipped and struck the girl on the head.

The case made forensic history when the prosecution brought in as their expert witness Dr. B. E. Cotting, a physician from Harvard Medical School, who presented one of the earliest weapon to cranial-injury comparisons, proving that the injuries were caused by a blow from the cricket bat and not the trapdoor.  Piper confessed to an additional two unsolved murders of women, and a murder attempt, in Boston 1873-1875.  Thomas W. Piper was executed on May 26, 1876.

(Illustrations)  Warren Street Baptist Church in Boston, the scene of Mabel Young's murder;  Mabel Young's skull entered into evidence and showing injuries indicative of a blow from a cricket bat, not a falling trapdoor. 

Warner Ave Baptist Church Boston
Mabel Young head wound

Joseph LaPage, the “French Monster”—Vermont and New Hampshire, 1875.
 
(Below) Joseph LaPage (LaPagette) was a Quebec French-Canadian who after perpetrating a number of rapes including of his own daughters and sister-in-law, fled across the border to Vermont and New Hampshire.  There he committed at least two rape mutilation murders. Although traditionally we defined a serial killer as somebody who kills three or more victims in separate incidents with a so-called "cooling off" period in between, since the San Antonio Symposium of 2005, the FBI defines a serial killer as anybody who kills two or more victims in separate incidents for any reason.  By that definition, LaPage, like Pomeroy and Piper, can too be considered as one of the early pre-Jack the Ripper serial killers in the USA.   On July 24, 1874, in Vermont he ambushed Marietta Ball, a young schoolteacher, bashed in her head with a rock, raped her and horrifically mutilated her.  After being questioned by police as a suspect, LaPage fled to New Hampshire.  On October 4, 1875 near the town of Pembroke, NH, LaPage raped, murdered, mutilated and beheaded a 17-year-old girl on her way to school, Josie Langmaid.   Her vagina had been excised and her head was found about four-hundred yards away.  Alerted by Vermont police to the similar murder of Marietta Ball, New Hampshire police had no problems in 1875 of "linkage blindness" and immediately connected the two murders to LaPage.  He was convicted and executed in 1878.   A bizarre dual monument stands today on the site of Langmaid's murder-mutilation and where her severed head had been found.

Joseph Lapage 

Josie Langmaid

Jose Langmaid Monument

Photos of Josie Langmaid monument by Dave Rondinone

Jose Langmaid Monument

Photos of Josie Lanmaid monument by Dave Rondinone


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SONS OF CAIN
A History of Serial Killers From the Stone Age to the Present

PETER VRONSKY