And then, in the depths of another depression, she called “the friend,” and figured it “might be healthier to move to New York or California.”
The man asked her to marry him over the phone. She blurted out an acceptance and they eloped in the summer.
It was a practical decision for her.
“Marrying him would mean better quarters and my choice of schools. I wouldn’t be bothered with a haphazard courtship and ugly scenes.
“I think there are these reasons why women get married: Ideology, economics, and politics. I had married for ideological reasons.”
These don’t seem like hidden agendas, or taking advantage of someone, in Sherry Perisho’s mind and heart. Everything was logical, everything out in the open. Everything was thought out so it might lead uninterruptedly to her field of study. Except in this particular case, things did not go as she wished.
Again she narrates objectively, as if she weren’t in the picture:
“Our first months together didn’t turn out well. I was depressed and stayed home while looking for a job. Our sex life dribbled down to a forced performance. I was frigid and after a couple months gave up having sex at all. The Americans landed on the moon.” She attaches the same important to her sex life as to hearing about the astronauts landing on the moon.
Sherry writes that she “took a drive to Ball State,” the university, took the exam for advanced placement, and re-enrolled as a pre-med student. She started in December of 1970.
However, “Between school, l5-20 hours of part-time work, a husband and a seven-room home I was hustling.”
And then she began to study Eastern philosophy, and about reincarnation she ponders: “I felt reincarnation is only a feeling gotten from prerecorded genetic material filtering through the subconscious.”
Then, more importantly:
“I felt that God and the Holy Spirit are a phenomena of consciousness and enlightenment. The Devil was the embodiment of the unconsciousness.”
Consciousness and enlightenment and the embodiment of the unconsciousness. Sherry Perisho had only begun to tap what made her and Charlie Brandt polar opposites.
And then, once again, her marriage end. She writes about it in disparate yet connected sentences that evidence the same detachment as before.
“I was depressed and suicidal. I wanted a divorce. I masturbated. I hated Ken for not being a good sexual partner. I wished I had more money. I wanted to run away. I didn’t know what sex and romance was if I had it. Watergate hit the news. I wanted a baby.”
She took a new course offered by the university. “Death and Violence.”
Almost prophetically, she later writes: “Spiritual death could occur as a strangulation, drowning or beheading. I had choked on society, drowned on emotionalism, and needed strong identification to survive crises.”
There is no way, or is there, that Sherry Perisho would have known where her physical, or spiritual death, would occur, but it is possible that some people sense, preternaturally in some way, the manner in which they will leave this earth.
By this time, Sherry had separated from her then husband at the age of twenty-one, and she writes:
“Dr. Timothy Leary of California had made news with his experience in the use of mind-altering drugs. Several members of major rock groups had been arrested for possession of marihuana. Abbie Hoffman had been arrested in Chicago.” Hoffman was a founder of the self-titled “Yippies,” and accused of being an anti-government revolutionary.
A friend at Ball State University asks her if she wants to move to New York.
“Medical school could wait. I was free and unhandicapped by children or a spouse. New York could be fun.”
She shares an apartment on the Upper East Side. She starts an interior decorating business. She makes money. She collects and studies art.
And then, from her rich artist friends who had a lot of very rich patrons, she began to experiment with psychedelic drugs. This could have led to the breakdown that eventually took her to Big Pine Key.
“I learned to drink champagne and smoked a little grass. Poppers, amyl nitrate, had us on the floor on our hands and knees giggling uncontrollably.
I did acid and Quaaludes, peyote and Digoxin, THC and cocaine.
I took speed and worked continuously for three days.”
In her quest for self-knowledge and to know the universe around her, Sherry studied parapsychology in New York, began to subscribe more to Eastern philosophies like Buddhism, and read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, in which Huxley chronicles his experience with psychedelic drugs. It was also the source of the name Jim Morrison took for his band, “The Doors.”
As she studied and read, she writes, “evil began to creep into my life.” Perisho never fully explains what this “evil” is, but she does qualify it by writing: “It was difficult to maintain what Easterners refer to as the cloud state.”
This is when she began to experiment with extra-sensory perception and out-of-body experiences by delving “into Body in Pain and the imagination. From 1977 to the present I virtually lived on the street, experiencing starvation, over-exertion and exposure to the elements. Overexertion seemed to be the primary key to any extra-sensory powers concerning the climate.”
Sherry read Carlos Castaneda, who wrote about extra-sensory perception from psychedelic experiences, Native American “guides,” and his reclusive, mind-opening trips with peyote into the primeval jungles.
She concludes: “I managed to come through the vulgar experience of becoming aware, both from drug and non-drug-related experiences.”
“Vulgar?” Did she long for more?
“From Eastern books describing the anima and animus I sorted through voices and sensations, choosing the path to spiritual freedom.”
Freedom is what she sought to attain, why she went through such extremes of mind and body. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” Janis Joplin had sung.
Then Sherry read the most romantic “outsider,” as Colin Wilson, the English writer, dubbed the German novelist Herman Hesse.
“I read Herman Hesse, titles like ‘Siddhartha,’ ‘Steppenwolf’ and ‘Damian,’ books describing man’s struggle with the soul in crisis. Since moving to New York my sleep had become the background for several occult experiences.”
And then, some experiences occur:
“While practicing meditation and mindfulness at a yoga club upstate I had several visionary experiences. One rather pleasant one occurred in the afternoon. I had fallen asleep and woke up with the sensation I was floating several feet above the ground. The roof to the little cabin had disappeared and my instructor had appeared at the door and spoke to me.
“I had witnessed a “floating” after-death experience once while lying in bed in my apartment in New York. I awoke from sleep one evening to find a ‘man’ or ‘warlock’ attempting to strangle me. Telling myself I was still dreaming and had ‘summoned’ the assassin. Although my experiences are due to what Indians called the ‘third eye,’ westerners know it as the subconscious and imagination. They happened so rarely I regarded them as a thanatopic experience and kept track of them as a register of good health. I feel the pre-recorded messages stored in the gene were a plausible source for all powers.”
One wonders if she felt her real murder and dismemberment, inside her dinghy and lying on the bottom of the little boat, as one of those nightmares.
At this point, her regimen to overcome human wants and sensations became more rigorous and earnest. She was certainly headed downward at this point.
“I returned to New York in the fall of 1979, and continued an exercise program combined with dance. I managed to earn a few dollars with this method. In my resting hours I meditated and tried to transcend lesser wants and feelings. Much had happened to me. Short of amputation I had felt more intensive pain than could be endured by the human mind or body. No one and nothing existed. I was no longer cold, no longer hungry, the outside world no lo
nger mattered…as spring came I took occasional walks, but the spontaneous ability to react had been erased from life.
“The world was full of a stillness. If it just remained the same, that seemed satisfaction enough. I had no more energy to fight any more ‘devils.’”
Did Sherry fight Charlie Brandt under the Big Pine Key Bridge in 1989? Had her “ability to react” been “erased from life?” Was she unable, or unwilling, to fight the Devil himself?
But at this point she met another man, another “outsider” to accompany her in her travels to the outer limits.
“Ken Hall was a tall platinum blonde of Swedish descent. His iceblue eyes looked over an aquiline nose and thin-lipped curved mouth. He played classical guitar and worked as a carpenter. We spent the summer out-of-doors, eating the food and smoking the cigarettes people gave to us. I smoked a little now and then, a leftover from a lack of stimulants. As we trailed through New York, we set destinations at least a hundred blocks away; such as, Let’s walk to Harlem, or Let’s do all of Central Park today. We carefully pushed our bodies to the limit.
“Social Security had granted a check for $2300 and a small monthly check of $370.”
Still, like most outsiders, she was not happy, although she had some small resources to live on. “I was alone, a hapless scientist, with no equipment, no computer, no expert to explain the details…I was steeled for a future world of space travel and super powers likened only to Star Trek: “world of interplanetary travel at the wink of an eye.”
Sherry Perisho’s very last entry in her autobiography reads: “As I am writing, I have nearly succeeded and hope to next attend law school.”
Law school was not to be, as Sherry, for some reasons unbeknownst to anyone, then moved from New York to Big Pine Key.
In retrospect, it now seems inevitable that Charlie Brandt and Sherry Perisho would meet at that fatal juncture called “the swimming hole” under the Big Pine Key Bridge. They almost seem like characters out of the analysis of the outsider in literature, from Colin Wilson’s book.
Charlie Brandt: “An Existentialist monster who rejects all thought, a Mitya Karamazov without an Ivan or an Alyosha to counterbalance him. He reaches beyond prohibitions, beyond natural instinct, beyond morality…(he) loves nothing and everything. He is primeval matter, monstrous soul form…”
Mitya Karamazov is Dimitri Karamazov in the Dostoievsky novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Mitya is primitive and hedonistic; Ivan is his intellectual brother, and Alyosha his saintly one. Charlie Brandt did not have the two latter aspects incorporated into his alter ego.
Sherry Perisho, on the other hand, is akin to the heroine of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer:
“Her social success in English society leads a very eligible English Lord to propose to her; she refuses him because she feels that life is far too full of exciting possibilities to narrow it down so soon…She too is ‘defeated by life,’ by her own inability to live at a constant intensity.”
When referring to German author Herman Hesse, whom Sherry read, Wilson states:
“He has a deep sense of the injustice of human beings having to live on such a lukewarm level of everyday triviality; he feels there should be a way of living with the intensity of the artist’s creative ecstasy all the time.”
Both Charlie Brandt and Sherry Perisho sought freedom in different ways: Charlie, by living in the present, his “glazed look” transporting him into the inner world of joy where he could satisfy his primitive instincts; Sherry, by pushing herself to the limits and surviving in the simplest way she knew how, while always reaching for the stars, or the artist’s ecstasy.
Each of them hailed from different towns in Indiana: Sherry from Terre Haute, and Charlie from Fort Wayne. Both moved to Big Pine Key, and there, under the Big Pine Key Bridge, and in the dinghy that had brought Sherry so much freedom, they were fated to collide.
Charlie Brandt was, in a word, an Existentialist interloper.
And Sherry Perisho, in her own way, summoned up the Devil himself.
This is the autopsy report from Sherry Perisho’s murder, now a case number at the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department, where she was liked by all law-enforcement officers, as well as by the residents of Big Pine Key. In 2008, the department built a memorial in honor of all Brandt’s victims, and placed flowers around Sherry Perisho’s dinghy that had beenher home:
OFFICE OF THE MEDICAL EXAMINER
DISTRICT SIXTEEN—MONROE COUNTY
FISHERMEN’S HOSPITAL* MARATHON, FLORIDA 33050
PERISHO, Sherry
ME89-128/K89-9842
DOD July 19, 1989
Found 22:20 hours
AUTOPSY REPORT
Deceased alleged to be Sherry Perisho. Autopsy begun at Fishermen’s Hospital morgue in Marathon, Florida, on July 20, 1989, at 0:57 hours. Autopsy performed by R. J. Nelms, Jr., M.D., Medical Examiner. Identification of remains by Monroe County Sheriff’s Office. Investigating officer assigned to the case is Detective Jerry Powell of Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, Key West. Remains transported from the scene by Bill Sutton, Chief Forensic Investigator. Present at the examination are Bill Sutton, Ronald Hartman (paramedic), Detective Trish Almeda, Detective Lt. Conradi, and Deputy Greenwood.
EVIDENCE OF INJURY: The anterior neck is slashed open with a 27.0 cm incised wound and two additional incised wounds above the larger wound at each end of the larger wound measuring 9.0 cm in length on the right an 5.0 cm in length on the left. There is also a stab wound on the right upper anterior neck measuring 17.7 cm in width with the sharp end of the wound toward the right. The right carotid artery is severed with a clean cut and exposed, and white foam is noted in the trachea, which has also been severed with a clean cut as well as the underlying esophagus. There are two superficial stab wounds of the left neck and shoulders apparently angling toward the left as they enter, the one further left imbedding in shoulder bone, with the sharp edge pointing upward and measuring 2.1 cm in length. There are also cut marks on the anterior vertebral column of the neck. The chest and abdomen have been slashed open with a fairly continuous incised wound extending from the pubis up to the 1st rib with serrated marks in the mid portion of the wound, exposing bowel in the abdomen and the sternum. The right nipple has been cut off. In the addition, the sternum has been slashed open in the mid portion up to the 7th rib where the incision angles toward the left imbedding into the left 1st rib. There is an anterior laceration and opening of the pericardial sac, and the heart is absent with the aorta and pulmonary artery cut cleanly across and the right atrium mostly removed except for one small fragment. There is an estimated 1000 cc of blood present in the left pleural cavity, but none in the right pleural cavity. There is a large laceration through the diaphragm with a deep incised wound of the liver in the left lobe near the mid portion of the liver as well as smaller incised or stab wounds of the left lobe of the liver and one small stab wound of the right superior anterior mid lobe of the liver. There are multiple perforations of bowel and mesentery, small bowel. There are red colored bruises of the scalp, three in the occipital area and two in the frontal area measuring up to 3.0 cm with no underlying injury of the skull or brain.
There are two green bruises or contusions of the lower leg interiorly near the ankles and a superficial scratch of the left arm, purple contusion of the right upper arm measuring 6.0 cm, a blue contusion of the right posterior upper arm measuring 2.0 cm, and two green defensive contusions of the left forearm. There are scattered green contusions of the left lateral foot. The clothing is blood soaked, but the bikini pants and overriding white warm up pants do not have cuts. The upper bra strap has been cut, and the cup from one side of the bra is missing. There is also a cut into the upper anterior white shirt near the neck wounds. No blood is remaining in the blood vessels of the body. There is retroperitoneal hemorrhage of the right lower abdomen in the region of the inferior vena cava.
EXTERNAL EXAMINATION: The body is that of an unembalmed well-develo
ped well-nourished Caucasian female weighing approximately 130 pounds, measuring 62 inches, representing the stated age of 39 years, clad in blue bikini pants and blue bikini bra which is loose, white warm-up shirt and white warm-up pants, all wet and blood stained. There is a fishhook with ballyhoo bait hooked to the pants. In general, the skin is well tanned in a bikini distribution, body hair is normal in distribution, the hair of the legs is unshaven, the scalp is intact, and scalp hair is brown and medium long with a red beret. In general, the face is intact and uninjured. The pupils are 7.0 mm and equal and irises are blue. The ears are intact without earrings. The nose is intact, symmetrical, and both flares are patent. The mouth contains natural teeth, but the upper teeth are in poor repair, missing all upper incisors with two small caps, the right lower molar is missing. The right upper molar in the rear is capped, the left upper premolar is capped, and the left lower front molar has a yellow metal inlay. The mouth contains some foamy white to clear fluid. Lips are intact. The neck shows no fractures of dislocation of vertebral column. The chest is symmetrical and intact except for previously mentioned injuries. The back is clear with a few scattered acne scars. Axillae are clear. The abdomen has a lower mid vertical abdominal scar measuring 14.0 cm in length. The genitalia are normal adult female and the rectum is unremarkable grossly. No jewelry is noted. Buttocks, legs, and arms show normal development, and there is a 3.0 cm scar on the left dorsal foot. There is full rigor mortis of all muscle groups at 1:30 AM, but at the scene at approximately 10:30 to 11:00, no rigor mortis was noted. Minimal posterior purple lividity is present.
INTERNAL EXAMINATION: The viscera of the neck are present but disrupted. The thyroid gland is grossly normal and retracted upward with the trachea.
On examination of the thoracic cavity, the pleural surfaces are smooth and glistening, and the right pleural space is free of excess fluid. The pericardial sac is smooth and glistening and but contains no fluid. The heart is absent (see Evidence of Injury). Major vessels are devoid of blood (see Evidence of Injury).
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