The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence

by Gavin De Becker

  A man who was obsessed with becoming famous shaved off one eyebrow, half his head and half his beard, then traveled cross-country in pursuit of a famous actor. He arrived in the actor’s hometown and went directly to a sporting goods store, where he priced a rifle and scope. He was arrested the night before our client made a major public appearance. When I interviewed the stalker, he told me that “whoever kills Caesar becomes a great man.”

  A man sent a famous singer a picture of a heart pierced by a knife. Six months later, he was at her gate to “serenade her to kingdom come.”

  And then there were those who committed terrible crimes against others, influenced by delusions involving some distant public figure:

  A man attacked a teenage girl with a knife because he thought she was the famous model he was obsessed with.

  A teenage girl killed her parents and said she was ordered to do it by a movie star.

  In one case that became very public, a man named Ralph Nau had sinister delusions involving four different famous women, all clients of our office. He focused primarily on one whom he believed was an evil impostor. He killed a dog and sent the teeth to one of our clients. Later he traveled more than thirty thousand miles to destinations around the world in search of her. (He knew where the “impostor” lived but didn’t go there.) Once, he attended a concert given by the “impostor,” unaware that all the seats around him were occupied by TAM agents. We investigated ways to get him incarcerated or hospitalized, but he went to work reliably and never broke the law. He worked at a veterinary clinic, so even the killing of the dog could not be proven to be criminal. We monitored him closely every day for three years, after which he returned to his family home. I notified his father that references in some of his six hundred letters convinced us he would likely be dangerous to someone in his family. Within a few months he had killed his eight-year-old half-brother with an ax. The boy was preventing him from watching something very important on television: a signal about my client which he felt was being sent to him. (Even though he confessed to the killing, Nau was acquitted on a technicality. Every few months he is able to petition the court to release him from a mental hospital, and every few months we stand ready to testify against him.)

  Given the number of cases evaluated by our TAM office—a virtual assembly line of madness and danger—I have had to be mindful of the need to keep a human connection between protector and pursuer, for only then are predictions likely to be accurate. Members of my staff who work on assessments put together a profile on each case. At some point, we began to refer to individuals under assessment as “profiles.” This became part of a growing terminology unique to our work, some of which I’ve shared with you in this book. For example, those people who believe they are the Messiah, Captain Kirk, or Marilyn Monroe are described as DEL-ID cases (for delusions of identity). Those who believe they are married to one of our clients are called SPOUSE-DEL (for spousal delusion). Those who feel they are acting under the direction of God or voices or devices installed in their brains are known as OUTCON cases (short for Outside Control).

  I used to be concerned that this vernacular would dehumanize and depersonalize our assessments, but as we met more and more pursuers, came to know their lives more closely and understand their torment and the tragedy for their families, this concern evaporated. One can’t help being profoundly affected by close involvement with people whose lives are a twisted chain of police encounters, hospitalization, relentless pursuit by imagined enemies, perceived betrayal by their loved ones, restlessness that moves them to new places, only to be restless there and move again, and above all, loneliness.

  No, there is no chance that my office will get too far from the human side of our assessment work. We can’t forget the young man who broke out of a mental hospital, mailed a final letter to a distant public figure he “loved,” and then committed suicide. We can’t forget those who killed others and somehow involved a media figure in their crime. Above all, we cannot and will not forget those who might try to harm our clients.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  In their search for attention and identity, most assassins go, as Park Dietz has put it, “to the people who have the most identity to spare: famous people.” Assassins know that when someone kills or attempts to kill a famous person in America, it is the grandest of all media events. A television reporter will stand with his camera crew just a few feet from another reporter standing with his camera crew, and invariably they will each call the crime “a senseless act.”

  But assassination is anything but senseless to the perpetrator, and those reporters are part of the sense it makes. The literally millions of dollars spent videotaping every single walk a president takes to and from a car or helicopter makes sense too. Some call it “the assassination watch,” and electronic news organizations have obviously concluded that the cost of all those crews and all those satellite-dish vans, all that equipment and all that wasted videotape, is worth the images they’ll get if somebody starts firing a gun. Thus, television and the assassin have invested in the same crime, and every few years they together collect the profit from it.

  Remember Arthur Bremer, who set out to assassinate President Nixon but later settled on presidential candidate George Wallace? He weighed his act in terms that would make Neilsen proud. In his journal (which he always intended to publish after he became famous), Bremer worried about his ratings: “If something big in Nam flares up, [my attack] won’t get more than three minutes on network T.V. news.”

  These senseless acts make perfect sense.

  ▪ CHAPTER FOURTEEN ▪

  EXTREME HAZARDS

  “In ourselves our safety must be sought.

  By our own right hand it must be wrought.”

  —William Wordsworth

  All of us will encounter people in our lives who alarm us or might pose some hazard, but as you’ve seen, a prominent public figure can have literally hundreds of people seeking unwanted encounters. I am not talking about fans; I am talking about people who feel they are under orders from God to harm a famous person, or who believe they are destined to marry a particular star, or who believe some media figure is being held hostage, and on and on. These cases have lessons any of us can benefit from. I want to present one which will demonstrate that even the most extreme safety hazards are manageable.

  This book has explored obsessions, death threats, stalking, mental illness, child abuse, multiple shootings, and children who kill their parents. Amazingly, there is one case that brings all these elements together, a virtual hall of fame of American violence.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  At about four P.M.on July 20th, 1983, I was at a hotel in Los Angeles to meet with a client who was finishing a public appearance event. As I crossed the lobby, I was waved over by one of several people assigned to my client from my company’s Protective Security Division (PSD). He told me about an important radio call from our office that he suggested I take in one of our cars. As always, I found the cars lined up, drivers at the ready, fully prepared for an “unscheduled departure,” our euphemism for an emergency.

  The report I received was an alarming one; it would clear my schedule for that day and for the thirty days that followed: “Police in Jennings County, Louisiana, have discovered the bodies of five people brutally murdered. The lead suspect is Michael Perry.”

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  It was not the first time I’d heard that name. Michael Perry was among thousands of mentally ill pursuers my office had under assessment, but one of the very few we placed in the highest hazard category. The radio call was personal to me because the public figure Perry was obsessed with was not only a long time client, she was also a dear friend.

  The client Perry was obsessed with is an internationally known recording artist and film actress. She already had a team of PSD agents who’d been assigned to her home for about a year. The precaution of full-time bodyguards had been undertaken in part because we predicted that Perry might show up and in part because of a
nother murderous stalker (Ralph Nau). The radio crackled with bulletins between my office and the security personnel at my client’s house in Malibu. Someone from our Threat Assessment and Management division (TAM) was already speaking with local police, and a meeting was scheduled for me at the FBI field office.

  Alarming reports are not uncommon for major media figures, but usually the more you learn about a situation the less serious it turns out to be. The exact opposite happened in the Michael Perry case. While one person from TAM reviewed our files on Perry, another gathered information from police in Jennings County, Louisiana.

  To insulate clients from the routine management of safety issues, I maintain a policy of not telling them about particular cases unless there is something they must personally do. The Perry matter had reached that point and here is what I intended to tell my client: Perry had been obsessed with her for about two years. He was an accomplished survivalist who had been to Los Angeles several times in pursuit of her. Perry’s parents were among the homicide victims, and a high-powered rifle and at least two handguns were missing from their home. Perry had had more than enough time to reach Los Angeles. He had recently told a psychiatrist that my client was “evil and should be killed.”

  Before making that call, however, I was informed of one more detail that changed everything. Based on what I learned about a few words Perry had written on a sheet of paper found at the murder scene, I did something I’d never done before and haven’t done since, even though clients have faced very serious hazards. I called my client and asked her to pack for a few days because I’d be there within a half hour to pick her up and take her to a hotel. Given what I now knew, I didn’t feel we could adequately protect her at her home, even with a team of bodyguards.

  By the time I got to my client’s neighborhood, the street had been closed by police, and a sheriff’s helicopter was buzzing loudly overhead. Within minutes, I was answering my client’s anxious questions as we drove away from her home followed closely by a PSD backup car. We’d be met at the hotel by two more PSD people. We would enter through a loading dock and be taken upstairs via a service elevator. A room near my client’s suite was being modified to serve as a security command center.

  Two people from my office had already left Los Angeles bound for Louisiana. By the time they got to the murder scene the next morning, the bodies had been removed, but photos revealed a gruesome aspect of the homicides: Perry had shot out his parents’ eyes with a shotgun. He also killed an infant nephew in the same house, and then broke into another house and killed two more people.

  In the living room, we saw that he’d fired several shotgun blasts into a wall heater. The damaged heater was a mystery we’d solve the next day, along with why he had shot out the eyes of his victims, but at that point, we were looking past these details in search of a single sheet of paper.

  Near where the bodies were found was a small pad printed up as a promotion for a local dry-cleaner. On the top page was a collection of names, some crossed out then re-written, some intersected by lines that connected them to other names, some circled, some underlined, some in a column, others separated into groups of three or four. The names and lines were Perry’s efforts to narrow down to ten the number of people he intended to kill. Some were in Louisiana, one in Texas, one in Washington, D.C., and one in Malibu (the one that concerned me most). Little could any of these people have known that they were part of a bizarre contest between the enemies of Michael Perry. Little could they have known that in a small, dingy house in Louisiana, a man sitting with the bodies of three relatives he’d just shot was calmly and studiously weighing whether they would live or die.

  Perry wrote the word sky near the names of those he’d killed already, and he crossed out some others that didn’t make his top ten. When he was done, my client’s name remained. Now I had to find Michael Perry.

  His list not only brought us to the humid bayou, but started my excavation of Perry’s history. In the weeks that followed, I would come to know his family and the people of Jennings County very well, come to know his schizophrenic sister, the doctors he’d told about his plan to kill people in “groups of ten,” the coroner who would later Fed Ex us plaster casts of Perry’s shoeprints from the murder scene, the neighbor boy who told us how Perry had decapitated his dog, the librarian who had lent Perry the books on survivalism that made him so hard to catch. I would soon know Michael Perry better than anyone else had ever wanted to know him.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  While people from my office began their second day in Louisiana, others quickly hustled my client from the hotel to a safe-house we rented out of state. Others pursued leads in California, Nevada, Texas, Washington, D.C, New York, and even Africa. In Louisiana, Jennings County’s small sheriff’s department placed all three of its investigators on the Michael Perry case; my office added another fourteen people to the search.

  Grace and Chester Perry had long ago predicted that their son would someday kill them. Whenever he was in town, his mother locked herself in the house, and he was rarely allowed in unless his father was home. They kept family guns hidden, paid Perry money to leave whenever he visited, and slept easier when he was off on one of his trips to California (looking for my client). It is unclear exactly when he got angry enough to orphan himself, but it may have been at seven years old, when, according to him, his mother pushed him against the wall heater in their home. Certainly the disfiguring and (to him) shameful burns on his legs daily reminded him of that incident. The shotgun blasts at the heater was a too-little, too-late revenge that had waited more than twenty years.

  As Michael Perry grew up, stories about him were always making the rounds, and neighbors had given up trying to figure out why he did the bizarre things he did. For example, he liked to be called by the nickname Crab, but then hired a lawyer to legally change his name to Eye. Everybody thought it was just another of his senseless ideas, but it did make sense. Michael Perry hadn’t been the only six-year-old whose father came home from work and questioned him about his various transgressions of the day, such as riding his bike in the street. He was, however, probably the only one whose father knew the details of each and every misdeed. Perry’s father had been so uncannily accurate because a neighbor we interviewed had agreed to watch the boy from her porch and then report his activities to Chester. His father told Michael: “When I go to work, I leave my eyes at home.” Perry spent twenty-eight years trying to hide from the scrutiny of those eyes; he even tried to symbolically become an Eye. Then on July 19th, 1983, he closed his father’s eyes forever.

  The Perry house was built on foot-high stilts, and a child might predictably fear what was under there, as many fear what is beneath the bed. But unlike those of most children, Perry’s fears were not soothed, and they grew into an elaborate delusion that dead bodies were rising from a chamber beneath the floor.

  With so much to occupy his pathology right at home, why did Perry’s mind wander to a famous woman who lived 1,500 miles away? Why did he believe he would find his peace by killing her? I would know soon enough.

  There was another prominent woman on his list: Sandra Day O’Connor, who’d just been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Why did she get Perry’s attention? “Because no woman should be above a man,” he later explained.

  He was used to powerful women; he’d been raised, as nearly all children are, by the most powerful woman in the world: his mother. Her power was misused, he felt, and his anger over it consumed him. Though the burns from the heater were long healed, Perry still wrapped his legs in Ace bandages and never bared them in public. After returning from one of his stalking trips to Malibu, he beat his mother so badly that he was arrested and committed to a mental hospital. He quickly escaped and went right back to her house. Sheriff’s deputies found him there, but his mother refused to let them take Perry back into custody. They persisted, but she resisted and she prevailed. The next time deputies came to her home, the strong and domineering woman would be dead.


  Within a day of the murders, sociologist Walt Risler, a pioneering thinker in the field of predicting violence and a full-time consultant to our office for more than a decade, was on his way to Louisiana. There he interviewed family members, reviewed Perry’s writings, and studied other evidence. Risler found the murder scene to be fertile ground for just the kind of madness deciphering he was so expert at. In a crib in the living room, Perry had piled an assortment of items: a crucifix, a pillow, three family photos face down, a wall plaque of the Virgin Mary, and a ceramic crab. This was a shrine of meaning to only Michael Perry until Risler began putting the pieces together.

  It was fair to assume that Perry was in one of three places or somewhere between them: still in Louisiana in pursuit of local victims on his list; in Washington, D.C. stalking Sandra Day O’Connor; or in Malibu, likely in the thousands of acres of wilderness behind my client’s home. Predicting that he might act out violently was simple; we’d done that even before the murders. The difficult questions to answer were how he would go about encountering his victims and how patient he would be.

  One late night, sitting in my office reviewing case material for the hundredth time, I noted a report indicating that a book written by expert tracker Tom Brown was missing from the Jennings County Library. We knew that Perry had once checked out another book by Brown called The Search. Did Perry use the information in these books to escape detection while he lived secretly in the hills behind my client’s home? Could he be just a few feet off a path as we walked obliviously by him? I knew whom to ask.