Editor's Note: Roseanne Montillo holds an MFA from Emerson College in Massachusetts, where she teaches as a professor of literature. She is the author of The Lady and Her Monsters (2013) and most recently The Wilderness of Ruin. Roseanne has joined Biographile to share the tale of Jesse Pomeroy -- a child with a morbid preoccupation for harming his peers -- and Herman Melville, the famed author whose family's history of mental illness drew him to Pomeroy's sadism.

On a late afternoon in April 23, 1874, two brothers, George and James Power, found themselves roaming the beaches of South Boston in search of clams. Being late in the day, the tide was not to their advantage, thus instead of clams they decided to meander along the area and see what else they could find. As it happened, it was not long before they came across a ditch where a small child had been left. They knew right away that he was dead: nearly naked, his underpants rolled down to his ankles, the boy had numerous stab wounds throughout his body, one of which had nearly decapitated him. One of his eyes had been stabbed with some kind of a knife, police later revealed, and an attempt to castrate him had also been made. To add to the indignity, the body had also been set on fire.

Those who learned of the murder agreed that a highly disturbed person must have committed the crime. As the detectives searched for clues, they learned that two witnesses, Edward and Benjamin Harrington had seen a young boy rushing from the scene. Tall and wearing a cap slung low over his eyes, the two witnesses nonetheless realized that it was a boy.

How was it possible? Children were not killers, most inhabitants of Boston surmised. Yet, others realized that it was not impossible for something like this to happen. Some months earlier, there had been a rush of crimes perpetrated on young children by someone not much older than they were. Perhaps the criminal had graduated to murder, an officer told the populace.

Jesse Pomeroy was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, on November 29, 1859. He came into the world with a smudge on his right eye, which people noticed right away. They were so revolted by this defect, those who crossed his path thought that some kind of veil covered the pupil; others thought it was the sign of evil. Those people included his father, who was intent on beating his son’s demons out of his body with a leather belt. At school, the bigger boys bullied Jesse relentlessly. In turn, he bullied those who were smaller and weaker than he was.

He enjoyed his time alone, reading the cheap "dime novels" published at the time, stories full of blood and mayhem, the equivalent of today’s violent videogames. His brother, Charles, older by seventeen months, ignored him in order to concentrate on the girls in the area, and his father, Thomas Pomeroy, either ignored him or beat him. The only person in Jesse’s life who felt sorry for him was his mother, Ruth Ann Pomeroy. She believed that if schoolchildren stopped bullying him, then he would stop bullying others. In time his bullying morphed into the torturing and killing of small animals, but even then Ruth Ann saw this as merely a sign of his loneliness.

By the end of 1871, children in the city of Chelsea, just across from Charlestown, were being led away to an abandoned placed by a boy they described as bigger, taller, and stronger than they were. There, they were beaten severely, slashed with a knife, and some were even sexually assaulted. The boy had developed a pattern: he would act friendly toward them as he met them along the street, then entice then with offers of money, treats, and even visits to the circus, until he cornered them alone in an isolated place where he had his way with them. In the papers, he became known as The Boy Torturer, while others called him The Red Devil. When the Boston Globe published a description of the crimes and a rough sketch of the boy, Ruth Ann Pomeroy had a feeling of who they were talking about. Right away, she moved the family to South Boston.

In mid-August of 1872, South Boston was rocked by a terrible crime: a small child had been found tortured on the beach. Not even a month later, in September, another child was found tied up to a South Boston telephone post, bleeding from knife wounds and sexually assaulted. But unlike the rest of the victims, who had been unable to give a detailed description, this boy spoke freely of his assailant, detailing the fact that he had suffered from a peculiarity in his right eye; in fact, the boy said, the assailant’s eye resembled a marble. Jesse Pomeroy was found and arrested, and due to his youth was sent to the State Reform School at Westborough until he reached eighteen years of age.

Parents in Boston were relieved, though Ruth Ann Pomeroy could not stand the idea of her son spending a day in that facility. Through her machinations, which included affairs with police officials, Jesse was released only months later. The community was in an uproar.

On the morning of March 18, 1874, ten-year-old Katie Curran disappeared from her home in South Boston while on her way to buy a notebook for school. Her mother and her neighbors searched for her, and soon they discovered that the last place she had been was the Pomeroys’ shop, where Jesse worked. This was a small shop where Mrs. Pomeroy kept her stitching materials and from where Jesse’s brother, Charles, sold newspapers. Police performed a half-hazarded search of the place and questioned Jesse, but nothing came of it. Some five weeks after Katie’s disappearance, George and James Power found the dead boy on the beach, the remains of four-year-old Horace Millen. Police immediately linked this crime to the ones Jesse Pomeroy had committed on the beaches of South Boston, and when brought to the police, they found that Jesse Pomeroy had bloodstains on his clothes, scratches on his skin, and the soles of his boots matched the imprints that had been left on the sands on the beach by the boy police believed to be the killer.

Everybody wanted to know what had possessed Jesse Pomeroy to commit such atrocities; they needed a tangible reason. All the experts who were hired to work on the case -- lawyers, doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists -- had an answer. Perhaps Jesse had suffered from some kind of familial mental illness, and though efforts were made to find such a propensity in his family, no relatives with mental illness were ever found. Maybe the reason was because he came from a broken family, they said. By now his parents were separated, but during the time they’d been together there had been plenty of physical and mental abuse. They concluded that likely his being bullied had caused him to become a bully, eventually morphing him into a killer. Maybe he was jealous of the children’s beauty and loving homes, of the lives they had led, so different from his, or maybe he had been merely recreating the violence he had seen depicted in the dime novels, and the violence that had been done to him, most especially from his father. But others had a different opinion: many others believed he had simply been born bad. The truth was, all of the explanations were plausible, as no one could figure out why he had murdered and abused those children.

The trial began on December 8, 1874, in Boston. Although he was found guilty for the murder of Horace Millen (and eventually that of Katie Curran) and sentenced to death, his sentence was commuted to life in prison, to be spent in solitary confinement. On September 7, 1876, just three months shy of his seventeenth birthday, he was locked up in the Massachusetts State Prison, in Charlestown, where he grew into adulthood and old age behind the walls of solitary confinement, spending the longest stretch in such a facility, second only to the Birdman of Alcatraz.

There were a lot of people who became interested in the outcome of his case: there were those who believed that he should have died, given the brutality of his crimes, and there were those who believed he should have been placed in a mental institution and studied. He was a good case study, and much could have been learned from him should another case like it appear on the horizon. One person who advocated for Jesse becoming a case study was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose inquiry into the nature of evil and the possibility of mental disease driving people to commit unspeakable acts fascinated him.

Holmes's inquiry into this matter became of great inspiration for a younger companion of his, the writer Herman Melville. From a very young age, Melville had used the topics of mental illness and evil in his writing. This enthusiasm for the subjects was fueled not only by a creative inquiry, but also by motives that were a little more personal. During the last days of his life, Melville’s father, Allan Melvill (the e’ was added to the surname in the 1830s), passed away while in the midst of delirium. His mother, Maria, also suffered from fits of depression and neurosis. His older brother, Gansevoort, while writing to Herman once described feeling as if he were "gradually breaking up." His son, Malcolm, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, was also believed to have suffered from a momentary mental lapse. His niece, Lucy, spent most of her life in a mental asylum; and there were many others. He feared that he too, would also succumb to some kind of mental disorder.

This fear was often reflected in many of his works, most especially in Moby Dick. Of course, Ahab is the first to suffer from what he called monomania, which incidentally was the disease many doctors believed Jesse Pomeroy was also suffering from.

By the time Jesse Pomeroy went to trial, in December of 1874, Herman Melville had been working at the Custom House in New York City for several years. As it happened, the Melvilles had been in Boston just days prior to Pomeroy’s trial, celebrating Thanksgiving at the family home of Melville’s wife, Elizabeth Shaw. It was impossible for him not to have heard of the happenings, as the city was loud with chatter over the upcoming trial, and newspaper coverage of it spread across the country.

Although Melville had not been writing fiction for some time -- but some poetry -- the issues that were raised during the Pomeroy trial did make it into his last novella, Billy Budd, and not by coincidence. This short work, Melville’s last, talks about "the depravity according to nature," and raises the issues of capital punishment, mental illness, evil, where such things come from, whether a person is born with an evil or diseased seed which is ignited as time goes by, or whether such propensities occur because of what life throws at you; sanity and insanity. As Melville wrote in Billy Budd, it is a difficult thing to ascertain where the line of demarcation is, or, as he put it, "Who in the rainbow can show the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but when exactly does the first blending enter the other? So with sanity and insanity. In pronounced cases, in various degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the exact line of demarcation few will undertake."