The Boy Fiend & The Blame Game

In March of 1874, Bostoners began whispering about a missing girl. Her name was Katie Mary Curran, just ten years old, daughter of John and Mary. She'd left home one morning to buy a school notebook and never came back. Posters went up. A $500 reward was offered by the mayor for “detection and conviction” of whoever had taken her. But weeks passed, and the city had no answers.

Then, on April 22nd, two boys stumbled across a body in the marshes near Dorchester Bay. It was a child, four-year-old Horace Millen, stripped, bound, and mutilated. The scene was too gruesome to describe in polite company, but Boston papers made sure readers knew the horror: the boy’s throat had been cut, his small body punctured again and again.

Now the city had two children gone. One missing. One dead. And rumors swirled of other victims.

Because this wasn’t the first time Boston children had been attacked. Parents remembered reports stretching back three years: boys lured away by an older kid promising candy or coins, only to be stripped, beaten, tied to telegraph poles, jabbed with pins. Forced to spit obscenities as their attacker danced around them. The assaults had grown darker each time, more violent, more charged. Up to ten victims. All of them young. All of them saying the same thing: the boy who tricked them had “a bad eye.”

The attacks had stopped in 1872, when police finally arrested twelve-year-old Jesse Pomeroy, son of a South Boston dressmaker. He was sent to reform school, and parents breathed easier. But unknown to most, Pomeroy had been released early in 1874 for good behavior. Six weeks later, Katie Curran disappeared. Six weeks later, Horace Millen was found in the marsh.

When police picked up Jesse again, his boots matched the tracks in the mud. His trousers were stained with marsh water. And when they showed him Horace’s body and asked if he’d done it, the boy began to shiver and whimper before admitting his guilt.

Only later, after his arrest, did new tenants cleaning out the cellar of his mother’s dress shop discover the remains of Katie Curran beneath a pile of ashes. She had come looking for candy. He had lured her down the stairs.

Boston called him the Boy Fiend. At fourteen, Jesse Pomeroy became America’s first known serial killer, even if those weren't the words newspapers used to describe it yet. And because the idea of a child who tortured and killed for no reason was too awful to accept, the city looked for another explanation.

They found it in the dime novels and stage westerns. They found it in Texas Jack.

By the spring of 1874, William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody and John B. “Texas Jack” Omohundro were household names. They weren’t just frontier scouts who’d made good—they were the first Wild West celebrities.

Omohundro in particular stood out. Before him, the cowboy wasn’t America’s symbol. He was a hired hand: dusty, nameless, background noise in cattle country. Jack changed that. He was tall, handsome, a Virginian with a Confederate past and a talent for storytelling. On stage, in buckskins and boots, he embodied a new archetype—the cowboy as national hero. Texas Jack was the first man to make the cowboy into an icon.

And audiences ate it up. Dime novels spun tales of Jack rescuing kidnapped maidens and Buffalo Bill saving settlers from Sioux attacks. Newspapers breathlessly tracked their off-stage lives: Cody and Omohundro attending a Davy Crockett play in Boston with Wild Bill Hickok, or Texas Jack escorting his Italian prima-ballerina wife Giuseppina Morlacchi to the opera. It was as if today you could read about Spider-Man in a comic book on Monday and then go to a theater Tuesday to see Peter Parker himself swing across the stage. They blurred the line between fact and fiction in a way no one had before.

So when Jesse Pomeroy’s crimes came to light that spring—the mutilated body in the marsh, the missing girl in the dress shop cellar—reporters and prosecutors reached for the nearest cultural shorthand. His tortures looked like grotesque blood-and-thunder reenactments: children tied to posts, jabbed with pins and knives, forced to spit obscenities while their tormentor danced around them.

It was the same tableau boys had read in lurid dime novels and watched in the traveling stage shows of Buffalo Bill Cody and Texas Jack Omohundro—scenes where frontier maidens were bound to the stake, surrounded by hostile Indians, stabbed with spears as warriors circled in war dances. But in those stories and performances, the brutality was always a prelude to salvation. At the last possible moment, Texas Jack or Buffalo Bill would charge onto the scene, rifles blazing, to scatter the savages and cut the captive free.

Pomeroy’s acts were a grotesque inversion of those dramas. He replayed the set pieces but stripped them of their rescue, their release, their heroic ending. There was no cowboy galloping to the rescue in South Boston, no scout to scatter the villains. Just a fourteen-year-old boy with a “bad eye,” twisting popular fiction into a script of cruelty and death.

One Boston paper put it bluntly: Jesse’s “brain was turned” by yellow-backed literature until “his highest ambition was to be the Texas Jack of South Boston.”

Never mind that Omohundro himself was nothing like the caricature. He’d scouted for the Army, saved lives on the plains, and by all accounts was a kind and generous man. Never mind that thousands of boys read those same dime novels without ever luring another child into a cellar. To a city desperate to explain the Boy Fiend, it was easier to say Texas Jack made him do it.

That’s the strange curse of being first. Texas Jack had invented the cowboy hero in American culture, and with it came the shadow—the idea that if children turned violent, it must be because they were imitating him.

A History of Scapegoats

That move—blaming the culture instead of the killer—didn’t end in 1874. It became the playbook.

In the 1930s, the Nazis banned Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack stories outright, labeling them trash literature. Ostensibly, it was because they promoted violence and corrupted German youth. Really, it was because they promoted American freedom and frontier swagger—ideas the Nazis didn’t want their children admiring.

In the 1950s, the United States had its own panic. This time the enemy was comic books. A Senate subcommittee hauled publishers into hearings, accusing them of spreading juvenile delinquency. It wasn’t just the grisly horror titles like Tales from the Crypt or Crime Does Not Pay—even Superman and Batman found themselves on trial for supposedly warping the morals of American youth.

One psychiatrist, Fredric Wertham, published a best-selling screed called Seduction of the Innocent in 1954, a book that became the bible of the comic book panic. In its seventh chapter—titled, without irony, “I Want to Be a Sex Maniac!”—Wertham devoted four full pages to Batman. He claimed the Caped Crusader lived not only in a homosexual relationship with Robin, but a predatory one, since Robin was his adopted ward. To Wertham, this wasn’t subtext—it was a deliberate lure aimed at children. In the same book, he insisted that Wonder Woman’s strength and independence masked a lesbian bondage fantasy, and that the lurid crime and horror comics of the day were planting seeds of sadism in young minds.

The country went berserk. Parents were told to beware of comics lurking in their children’s bedrooms like contraband. Pastors preached against them. Schools organized comic book burnings where kids tossed their four-color collections into bonfires while teachers applauded.

Publishers panicked. In 1954, the industry created the Comics Code Authority—a self-censoring body meant to clean up the medium before the government did it for them. The Code banned words like “terror” and “horror” from titles, outlawed depictions of excessive violence, and required that criminals always be punished and authority figures always shown with respect. Overnight, an art form that had thrived on pulp energy and boundary-pushing was neutered. Horror comics died. Crime comics disappeared. Even superheroes were declawed, stripped of anything that might look like moral ambiguity.

It was the same pattern Boston had followed with Jesse Pomeroy almost a century earlier: instead of facing uncomfortable truths about violence in society, Americans reached for the stack of popular entertainments on their children’s nightstands and declared them the real culprits.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the blame shifted to rock and roll. Elvis was obscene. The Beatles corrupted innocence. Charles Manson’s followers carved blood into walls and people swore it was the influence of Beatles lyrics. The Rolling Stones were hauled into courtrooms for singing about drugs and sex.

By the late ’70s and early ’80s, the panic had moved underground—literally. Parents became convinced that Dungeons & Dragons was a gateway to Satanism. Preachers warned that rolling dice in a basement was practically an invitation for demonic possession. The made-for-TV movie Mazes and Monsters (1982) starred a young Tom Hanks as a college kid who loses his grip on reality, convinced he really is his wizard character, wandering sewers in search of dragons that existed only in his mind. Evangelical pamphlets claimed that D&D players were being lured into black masses, ritual murders, even suicide. For a few surreal years, people were more afraid of Gary Gygax than they were of inflation, nuclear war, or the scourge of disco.

In the 1980s, it was heavy metal and rap. Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center pushed warning labels onto albums. Judas Priest was sued in court, accused of embedding subliminal suicide messages in their records. N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton was targeted by police and politicians for “inciting violence.”

In Britain, they called them “video nasties”—cheap horror VHS tapes accused of corrupting young minds with gore. Titles like Cannibal Holocaust were banned outright.

In the 1990s, it was video games. After Columbine, senators stood at microphones railing against Doom, Quake, Mortal Kombat, insisting pixels on a screen were responsible for real bullets in a school hallway. The trench coat became a symbol, as if clothing could explain why two teenagers murdered their classmates.

And today? The cycle keeps spinning. TikTok challenges. YouTube rabbit holes. Discord servers. Always something new, always some corner of youth culture demonized as the incubator of violence.

Why We Keep Doing This

The truth is harder to face: sometimes violence blooms from within. Jesse Pomeroy said simply, “I can’t help it.” No amount of confiscated dime novels would have stopped him. But parents, politicians, and preachers have always reached for scapegoats that feel manageable. Ban the books, burn the comics, label the records, regulate the games. Pretend that’s the fix.

Because the alternative—that evil doesn’t always come with a cause you can ban—is unbearable.

Jesse Pomeroy spent sixty years in prison, most of it in solitary. He learned Arabic, wrote poetry, signed his verses “Grandpa.” But nothing erased the truth: he was a boy who killed children because he wanted to.

Dime novels didn’t make him do it. Texas Jack didn't make him do it. But blaming Texas Jack and dime novels and stage westerns was easier than looking at the Boy Fiend himself.

And we’ve been following that script ever since. Every generation finds its Texas Jack to blame, its dime novel to burn. Like the citizens of Boston blaming America’s first serial killer on America’s first cowboy hero, we’d rather find an excuse than a reason. Rather than face the evil in front of us, we look for something we can censor, something we can ban. We call it vigilance, but really it’s denial. Because as long as we point the finger at paperbacks, records, or video games, we can pretend that evil comes from stories and songs, not from inside us—eyes closed to the Jesse Pomeroys still walking among us.