By Audrey Anderson
Hometown Weekly Reporter
Christoper Daley returned to the NFPL Community Room with his True Crime series. For the second talk in the series, Daley focused on Mass Murderers: Massachusetts’ Most Infamous Murder Cases.
Daley’s first story was about Jesse Pomeroy, who first stripped, beat, and tortured the boys in an outhouse at Powderhorn Hill in Chelsea. Later, in South Boston, he attacked five-year-old Robert Gould, who said his attacker had an eye that looked like a “milky,” or a clouded marble. The police took Gould into classrooms in the Boston Public Schools to look for his attacker. Gould identified Jesse Pomeroy, who had a white membrane over his left eye.
Pomeroy was sent to the Lyman School for Boys in Westborough, a reform school, and his mother got him released. Pomeroy then progressed to murder, killing young Katie Curran in South Boston and Horace Miller at Savin Hill Beach.
In his 1874 trial, Pomeroy was found guilty of murder and sentenced to die. Later his sentence was changed to life in solitary confinement in Charleston State Prison. Eventually, he was sent to Bridgewater Farm, a state insane hospital.
Daley’s second story was about Jane Toppan, who trained as a nurse at Cambridge Hospital and Mass General. She conducted experiments with elderly patients, taking them close to death with changes in their medications, and then reviving them.
Toppan was asked to leave Mass General after she killed patients by “recklessly delivering opiates,” as her actions were officially described. She then took on private nursing duties.
Toppan worked for a family at Cataumet, MA. There she poisoned her foster sister, Elizabeth, with strychnine in mineral water. She also killed several members of the family she worked for.
At her trial, Toppan was found to be not guilty by reason of insanity and brought to Taunton State Hospital. As part of her allocution agreement, she admitted to killing 31 people, but experts think it was in truth closer to 100 people who died between the years 1895 and 1901.
Daley’s third story took place in the 1930s. Grayce Asquith, who was engaged to John Lyons, was murdered by Oscar Bartolini, a handyman who worked at her bungalow in Weymouth. Her body was found when it washed up, dismembered, in several locations in Boston.
Bartolini was convicted at trial and kept at Norfolk County Jail before his sentencing. At the jail, he leapt from a third-floor railing, shouting “Grace, here I come!” He broke an arm and was sentenced to death at the hearing. Pardoned by the Governor in 1961, Bartolini was released, and sent back to Italy.
Daley’s fourth story about Lizzie Borden was familiar territory, though the number of whacks is disputed. A detail that is not widely known is that after a preliminary autopsy of her parents’ bodies, the bodies were left on the dining table overnight. Borden was a suspect in the crime, but the evidence did not hold up, and she was released. The case remains unsolved. The Borden house is now a B&B that is considered by some to be the “most haunted house in America.”
