Fiend

In FIEND's appalling portrait of a twisted teenager who preyed upon the children of nineteenth-century Boston, Schechter weighs in with his most unforgettable contribution yet to the annals of American crime. Fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy was outwardly repellent in appearance, with a gruesome 'dead' eye; inside, he was deformed beyond imagining. A sexual sadist of disturbing precocity, he satisfied his atrocious appetites by abducting and torturing his child victims. But soon, the teenager's perverse lust gave way to another obsession: murder. When Pomeroy was arrested in 1874, a spree of monstrous violence finally came to an end. The Boston Boy Fiend was imprisoned at last. But the hows and whys of vicious juvenile crime were as relevant in the so-called Age of Innocence as they are today.