Pomeroy in in prison in the late 1920s.
Over the next 50 years, Jesse Pomeroy would try to escape at least a dozen times. He nearly succeeded after rerouting the gas pipes of his cell to trigger an explosion, but the blast saw him incapacitated. In the end, he spent his time learning several languages, writing poetry, and allegedly investing in the stock market.
In 1929 he was transferred to the State Prison Farm in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to live out the rest of his days. Three years later, he died of a heart attack, just shy of his 73rd birthday, on Sept. 29, 1932.
By the time he died, America had finally invented a term for his crimes: serial killings. Although Pomeroy killed only two people, too few for some definitions of a serial killer, his crimes shared a pathology that the American Psychological Association considers the hallmark of serial killers: “a distinct pattern in the selection of victims, location, and method.”
And to this day, there is only one other person in America who could contend with Pomeroy for the title of America’s youngest serial killer: a murderer named Craig Price in Warwick, Rhode Island, who killed his first victim in 1987 at age 13, then killed two more at age 15 before he was arrested.
Over his life, Jesse Pomeroy had spent 59 years in prison and reformatories, confined as a ward of the state. It was the longest America had ever held someone behind bars. Headlines still called him the “boy slayer.”
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