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

by Gavin De Becker

  Tom Brown had authored more than a dozen books on tracking and on nature, and he had been called in to search for dangerous men before. He was not anxious to do it again, but in an hour-long phone call, I convinced the wary and reluctant tracker to fly to Los Angeles and help us find Michael Perry. I picked him up at the airport, a wiry man with the quiet seriousness of Clint Eastwood. As I drove him to a waiting helicopter, he asked me questions about Perry: What kind of food does he like? Does he eat meat? Does he smoke? Tell me about his shoes. What kind of clothes does he wear? Tell me what his hair is like.

  Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, Brown was high above the Malibu hills surrounding my client’s home, looking for any sign of Perry. Some firemen who had been shown a picture of Perry told us about a makeshift camp where they’d seen him some months before, and Tom over-flew the area, pointing out spots that PSD agents then checked out on foot or horseback. When he searched on the ground, he was accompanied by armed PSD agents, and during the few days they spent together, he taught them some of what he knew about tracking. Brown was an absolute marvel. He could tell you where a person had walked, slept, even paused. His intuition was informed by a subtle and sometimes odd series of signals: bent weeds, unsettled pebbles, shadows in the dust, and other details most people would look right past.

  Brown explained to me that “When somebody moves something in your house, you notice it. When somebody moves something in the woods, I notice it.”

  In a backpack, one of the PSD agents carried a plaster cast of a shoe-print taken from the dirt outside the murder scene. Occasionally Brown would ask to have it brought out and he’d compare it to some small ridge or depression in the dust.

  One afternoon after I dropped Brown back at his hotel for a brief rest, I was told by radio that a Malibu resident a mile or so from my client’s home had reported that a strange man had knocked on the door and asked questions about “the magic movie star.” He had headed up the hill on foot. I sped back to my client’s house, knowing I’d get there before someone who was walking. When I arrived, several sheriff’s deputies had joined two PSD people. We waited for about thirty minutes, and then the dogs began barking and running up the side of a hill.

  Everyone followed the dogs, and soon we could clearly see a man crawling through the brush. Some sheriff’s deputies ran around behind him, and a police helicopter descended on him from above. In a flash of everyone’s adrenaline, the intruder was on the ground, handcuffed and scuffling. I rushed up the hill to identify him for the deputies, hoping the search for Michael Perry had just ended. He was lifted up and seated on the dirt looking right at me, and I recognized him immediately—but he wasn’t Michael Perry. He was Warren P., another mentally ill pursuer, whom we had interviewed years before, and heard from occasionally. He was a lovesick man who hoped to marry my client.

  Though worthy of assessment, Warren was without sinister intent; he was more of a tragic figure than a dangerous one. His bad luck had carried him through years of effort and across thousands of miles, finally getting him to my client’s home, the mecca of his romantic delusions, but on the worst possible afternoon for a visit. As he was walked to one of the sheriff’s cars, he just kept repeating, “I had no idea the security would be this tight.”

  Late the next night, three PSD agents searching the area around my client’s property using some of Tom Brown’s techniques found a suspicious-looking trail. They took me there, and shone their flashlights parallel to the ground, showing me the patters in the dust. I confess I didn’t see what they saw, but we all followed along, through a gully and into the dark brush. We were silent, hoping to find Perry and on some level hoping not to. Ahead of us we saw what even I could tell was a shelter built of gathered wood and twigs. We moved toward it, and as we got closer we could see that nobody was there.

  Inside we found evidence that it was indeed the home of someone pursuing my client: Amid the filthy clothes we found the sleeve of one of her record albums. There was also a fork, some matches, and a crude weapon called a bola, made from two rocks tied to the end of a length of rope. As we crawled out of the hut, we could see through a clearing directly to where my client drove by each day on her way to and from home. If Michael Perry lived here, he likely surveilled her from this spot.

  It did not take long before we heard the sounds of someone moving toward us through the brush. In the moonlight, we held our breath and watched a man approach. He had a mess of dark hair, more than I thought Perry could have grown in the time he’d been at large. The man was wearing a crown on his head made of twigs and leaves. Pounced on from all sides, he yelled out, “I’m the king, I’m the King!” as he was handcuffed. It wasn’t Perry, but still another mentally ill pursuer. This one was here to watch over my client, his “queen.”

  (Those two obsessed men living in my client’s orbit during the Perry case make clear just how menacing public life can be. The next time you see one of those frequent tabloid reports about some star’s being stalked by a “crazed fan,” you’ll know how silly the hype is—you could choose almost any star almost any day and that story would be true. All that makes it “news” is that a tabloid needed a headline.)

  Just as we might come upon Michael Perry in Malibu at any moment, Walt Risler and our investigator might find him in the reeds along the marshy waterways around Jennings County. Some lucky (or, if not careful, unlucky) State trooper might find him speeding in Chester Perry’s Oldsmobile down the highway, or the U.S. Supreme Court police might find him wandering the halls of the historic building in search of Sandra Day O’Connor.

  Walt Risler, swimming deepest in the waters of Perry’s delusions, concluded that Washington, D.C. and Malibu were a Perry-esque Sodom and Gomorrah. Weighing everything he’d learned about the case, Risler predicted that Perry was on his way to the nation’s capitol to kill Justice O’Connor. Based on this, I made contact with a seasoned Washington, D.C. homicide investigator named Tom Kilcullen and filled him in on the case and Risler’s opinion. Kilcullen was a creative thinker who followed up on several leads in the Washington area.

  Our efforts in Malibu continued with daily interviews of people who might have seen Perry. We asked local shopkeepers to keep us informed of anyone inquiring about my client, and we urged special attentiveness at the Malibu library. That’s because a search of Grace and Chester Perry’s phone records had revealed that their son had called them collect from there a few times during one of his visits to California. Another call on those records was more chilling. Six months earlier, there’d been a small newspaper report about my client’s frequenting a particular Beverly Hills shop. The phone records revealed that Perry had called his parents from the phone booth right outside that shop. We were dealing with a capable stalker.

  To learn what Perry might know about his own manhunt, I reviewed newspaper stories about the case. Scanning USA TODAY during those weeks was interesting because I would come to a headline like “Suspect in Five Murders…,” and it wouldn’t be Perry; “Mass Killer Still at Large…,” and it wouldn’t be Perry; “Man Wanted for Family Slayings…,” and it wouldn’t be Perry. Only in America.

  For eleven days, teams in different parts of the country looked for a man who hated to be looked at, until July 31, when Risler’s prediction proved correct. Police in Washington, D.C., received a call from a sleazy hotel: A guest had reportedly stolen a radio from another guest. An officer was dispatched to question the two derelict oddballs who’d been annoying each other, and he concluded that nothing illegal had happened. The minor dispute call would be over once the officer completed the routine step of checking each man for any arrest warrants. He asked them to wait a moment while the results of the computer search came over his radio. The unimportant matter became the most important of that officer’s career because standing patiently in front of him was mass-murderer, Michael Perry.

  Within an hour, Detective Kilcullen called me and offered to let me talk to Perry, who was now in his custody. Just that qu
ickly, the murderous stalker who had dominated my thoughts every moment for almost two weeks was on the other end of the phone, ready to chat.

  Without preparation, I stumbled into an interview with the nation’s most wanted killer. We knew he’d been to my client’s home, so I first asked him about that. He lied without hesitation, sounding like a fast-talking, street-wise con man.

  Perry: I don’t think I’ve ever been to her house, sir. I don’t think so. I really don’t.

  GdeB: Really?

  Perry: Right. I really don’t.

  GdeB: Have you ever been to California at all?

  Perry: Well, I just went swimming at the beach, you know, and did some camping; that’s all.

  Then, without my even asking, he told me how my client fit in to his reasons for killing.

  Perry: When she was in that movie, and whenever she turned around, she had quite a different face, you know. She looked like my mother back in 1961, you know, the face that my mother had. It was 1961, my mother walked into the room, and I was up way before anyone else. And my mother walked in and she had this ugly-looking face, and I looked at this, and she turned her head and rubbed her shoulder. And that face in that movie reminded me of 1961. It ruined the whole thing, you know.

  Perhaps he was recalling the day of the heater incident, burned into his memory as it was burned into his skin. He then quickly changed the subject and again denied ever having been to my client’s home. It’s common for criminals to avoid giving information someone wants, often precisely because it’s wanted, but then he just gave up the lie and described the entrance to my client’s home exactly.

  Perry: You know they had like a little drive-in theater deal [the gate intercom], you know, you push the button. And a red light [part of the security program]. And I had the impression that the house might have had an underground shelter, and it’s a big place. And I rang the bell, and there was a camera out in front and everything. I didn’t get that girl’s attention, and she didn’t get mine, either. I just said, ‘This can’t be the place,’ you know, due to respect that this was such an ancient place. That’s a strong, strong feeling.

  Perry became quiet. When he next spoke, it was about the nature of obsession itself. In his unsophisticated way, he described the inside of his experience as accurately as any psychiatrist could hope to.

  Perry: I really don’t want to bring it up. It passed my mind. She kind of creeped up, and nothing, nothing had ever stuck to my mind like that. And even, you know, even today, even today, even today…

  He drifted off into silence, and I waited quietly for him to speak again.

  Perry: On her special, on HBO, I saw her eyes change color. Her eyes change color a lot.

  GdeB: What was that like?

  Perry: I didn’t like it at all. That girl might be a witch, you know. She may do some damage to me if she hears me saying this. I’m saying what I saw. It did look like my mother. I don’t want to mess with it because I know it was a relief whenever I forgot about it. I weighed the fact that she was a movie star, and realistically speaking, her address being in a magazine is not right. So I’m kind of scared of this girl if I met her. Of course, I don’t know what it would be like. I know it’s a touchy situation with this girl. I’ve stayed up many nights thinking about it.

  GdeB: What if you had seen her at the house?

  Perry: I never did, and anyway, she has a boyfriend. But you know, she asked of me and so I did, so that’s about it, but I don’t want to get too personal. I’m under arrest right now, I just want you to know that. They called the folks back home, and there’s been some sort of big accident, some theft or something like that, which I didn’t do.

  Perry got quiet again. It was clear that the man who’d tried to exorcise one of his demons by shooting his mother in the face still wasn’t free of it.

  GdeB: You don’t like this whole subject, do you?

  Perry: No, I don’t. The bad thing about it was that she turned around and had that ugly face. The face was completely different from the one she had had. I mean, it was a disaster that she looked like her. It was terrible, you know, and I turned off the TV and I left. I don’t want to talk too much about it because man, it took a lot of my time after I saw that. I said, ‘This is too much.’ It took a lot of my time, and I didn’t want it anymore.

  His voice drifted off and then he hung up. I sat at my desk in disbelief. The emergency that had consumed nearly every hour of every person in my company had just ended, not with a stakeout or a gunfight or a SWAT team, but with a phone call. The man I had tried to know and understand through every means I could find had just told me outright why he had stalked my client and why he wanted to kill her. I walked into the TAM office, which was bustling with activity regarding the case, and said, “I just got off the phone with Michael Perry.” That didn’t make sense to anybody, but it wasn’t funny enough to be a joke.

  I flew to D.C. the next morning to learn anything of relevance to the case and to gain information that would help with the prosecution. Since our next job would be to help ensure that Perry was convicted, I’d been in regular touch with the Jennings County prosecutor, who was meeting me in D.C..

  When I arrived, Kilcullen told me Perry’s car had been found and was being held at a nearby tow yard. We drove over together to look at it and see what evidence it held.

  Chester Perry’s green Oldsmobile was dusty from its long drive. An officer looked in the window at the front seat and then recoiled a bit. “It’s covered in blood,” he said. Sure enough, there was a dark, pulpy liquid sticking to the fabric upholstery. As we opened the door, I saw watermelon seeds on the floor; it wasn’t blood on the seat, it was watermelon juice. Rather than pause to eat somewhere, Perry had bought a watermelon and eaten it with his right hand as he sped along the highway toward D.C..

  Perry had chosen to stay at a cheap little place called the Annex Hotel, which was about a mile and a half from the Supreme Court. When we went there, it became clear what he had spent most of his money on. He had turned Room 136 into something that stunned us all, a bizarre museum of the media age, a work of pop-art that connected violence and madness and television. Into that tiny room, Perry had crammed nine television sets, all plugged in, all tuned to static. On one, he had scrawled the words “My Body” in red marker. Several of the sets had giant eyes drawn on the screens. One had my client’s name written boldly along the side.

  The Louisiana detective in charge of the Perry homicides, Irwin Trahan, came to D.C. to transport Perry back home for trial. Often, such prisoners are flown on commercial planes or on “Con Air”—the nick-name for the U.S. Marshals’ jet fleet—but Trahan and his partner had decided to drive Perry back to Louisiana. This unusual trio sped along the same highways Perry had driven to get to D.C.. Checking into motels along the way, the detectives took turns staying awake to watch Perry, who didn’t sleep at all. At the close of their two-day trip, Perry asked them to pass a message to me. It was about my client: “You better keep an eye on her twenty-four hours a day.”

  In an irony I wouldn’t recognize for many years, Perry also told the detectives that if his case ever went before the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Sandra Day O’Connor, “I wouldn’t have a chance then, because that’s a woman.” (His case did eventually go before the Supreme Court.)

  A while after Perry was back in Louisiana, we arranged for Walt Risler to interview him in jail to follow up on his sinister warnings about my client. An agitated Perry explained to him, “Tell her to stay away from Greece. That’s all I want to say to you now, man. I’m feeling sick, so sick; my head is just filled with vomit.”

  To keep the interview from ending, Risler asked about one of Perry’s favorite topics: television. Perry responded: “Man, TV is really fucked up lately. I don’t know what it means. After a while it got so that the only sense I could make of television was by watching channels with nothing on. I could read them and make more sense than what was happening on the programs.”


  He then asked his attorney to leave so he could speak with Risler in private. He took Risler’s hands in his and explained that if he didn’t get out of jail, there would be hell to pay. If he was executed, it would trigger the explosion of an atomic missile hidden in the swamps near town. “So you see, getting me out of here is important to everyone. I’m just trying to save lives.”

  Perry stood up to end the interview: “Oh, man, my head is filled with vomit. You can just see how fucked up my head is, can’t you, from the things I think?”

  Perry was not faking insanity—this was the real thing.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  When I got back to Los Angeles, there was a kind letter from Justice O’Connor thanking me for my help and lamenting the fact that “there are people in this country who are sufficiently unstable to constitute genuine threats to others.”