(Continued)
By Katherine Ramsland
One of the earliest such offenders in America was Jesse Pomeroy, who is similar to Duncan. At the age of 14 in 1874, Pomeroy was arrested for the sadistic murder of Horace Mullen, a four-year-old boy. The townspeople already knew him from his earlier offenses: at the age of ten and eleven, he'd sexually tortured other boys. Caught, he was sentenced to reform school, where he enjoyed watching the headmaster dispense physical discipline. After his release, Pomeroy mutilated and killed a 10-year-old girl who had entered his mother's store. A month later, he snatched Mullen, taking him to a swamp outside town and nearly decapitating him with a knife. After Mullen's body was discovered, Pomeroy was taken to see it. Asked if he'd done this vile deed, he reportedly admitted, "I suppose I did." When the girl was found buried in his mother's cellar, he confessed to that murder, too. He was convicted and given life in solitary confinement.
More recently, during the 1980s, twenty-year-old John Joubert was convicted of the murders of two boys in Nebraska. He'd gotten his start in Maine at the age of thirteen when he'd stab other children with pencils, razors, and other implements and found that he enjoyed hurting others. He tried strangling a boy and then when he was 18, he killed an eleven-year-old. Then he fled the town. From a broken home, Joubert had been an angry child, and he discovered both solace and power in striking out at others and getting away with it. In Nebraska, he looked for victims while volunteering in a Boy Scout troop. For him, the torture and murder of young boys was a way to relieve sexual tension. But as with all predators, the experience did not ultimately satisfy, so he would soon plan another.
Offenders like Pomeroy, Joubert and Duncan tend to become angrier as they grow older and more likely to become abusively violent. Their fantasies involve more than just sexual pleasure with children; they also envision hurting these vulnerable victims as a symbolic way of striking back at society, and possibly at people who have hurt them. They feel fully justified — even entitled - so they continue without remorse and each successive act is often worse than the one before it. Once they've become angry, enthralled with torture, and entertained only by the thrill of murder, there's little that can be done to stop them at this point, short of lifetime incarceration or execution.
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