it is as if something had broken inside of me; as if I could never be joyous again . . .' Osborne's reaction was tempered by his knowledge that he would be released. The real victims of the dungeon, like Perry, would have had no such sense of control. A prisoner in the dungeon was stripped of all the simple features of human society; he was reduced to a blind, bare creature, sustained on a starvation diet, locked in a lonely world from which he might never escape.
In this world present fears or guilt about the past could be magnified to the point of inducing severe depression and even temporary psychosis. The nightmares and hallucinations of many prisoners would gradually become their reality. At the end of their punishment many appeared docile, but this was rarely contrition, whatever the authorities claimed. Exhausted and desperate men would say anything to get out, but even then the punishment was not over. Some prisoners were so disturbed they were declared insane, some attempted suicide or self-harm. Men from the dungeons were also condemned to seek out the shadows even when they were returned to the light. After days or weeks of gloom, even pale winter sunlight through a barred window could cause intense pain. For those trying to control unruly prisoners, the dungeon was also a double-edged weapon. It offered at best a deterrent and a temporary control; at its worst it turned the difficult into the truly dangerous. In the long hours and days of isolation, dislike and distrust of the system and its representatives often turned to implacable hatred.
The horrors of the dungeon were confirmed by the least liberal of commentators. At an 1892 meeting of the National Prison Association, it was condemned by those urging a return to corporal punishment. One physician declared that although public sentiment condemned the flogging and paddling (the beating of prisoners with a flat wooden or leather paddle) that had been the norm until outlawed by the state legislature, the dungeon, or dark cell, was far more damaging. Corporal punishment was widely viewed as 'a relic of the dark ages', he argued, but the dungeon was a 'refinement of torture': 'It is a system of punishment which strikes not only at the physical power, it is a mental and moral degradation. It is not the confinement which produces a seeming submission, but it is the starvation and you have only inflicted a punishment when you have deprived the body of its rightful supply and this cannot be done without injury.'
Perry appeared to have submitted when he was released after nine days, but the authorities took no chances. They placed him in a brick-built cell in the centre of a row in the basement and he was not returned to work. The men who occupied the cells either side of his spent each day in the prison workshops, but he was locked up alone, twenty-four hours a day. The cell had a wire grating in front of the bars to prevent anyone from slipping him a knife or other implement with which to attack or escape, and a keeper prevented communication when other prisoners filed past on their way to work or eat. The keepers themselves were under strict instruction not to speak with the prisoner. So the young man who thrived on conversation and story-telling was isolated yet again.
Whatever the adverse psychological effects of such continuing isolation and lack of stimulation might have been, the keepers were pleased with its results. Over the next few months they reported that Perry was quite docile, and there were suggestions that he might eventually be returned to hard labour. But once again, Perry deceived his keepers. The brutal regime of the dungeon had certainly had an impact on him, but it had not broken his spirit or his resolve. With nobody to talk to and nothing to distract him, he turned his mind to the one thing that he still wanted above everything else: freedom.
On 23 October Oliver Perry escaped. The day before, when a keeper delivered his supper just after 4 o'clock, he saw nothing unusual although he commented later that Perry seemed to be in good spirits. But when the prisoners returned from work an hour later, the man who occupied a neighbouring cell called out that there was a hole in the dividing wall. The keepers ran to inspect it and found a large hole in the twelve-inch-thick wall. Perry must have dug when the other men were at work and concealed the hole with a towel. To their surprise, the keepers saw Perry was in his cot, sleeping through the commotion. But when they shook him, they found that the sleeping convict was really a bundle of clothes. He had waited until the keeper left, after seeing the other prisoners off to work, then wriggled through the hole and walked out of the open door of the neighbouring cell into the corridor. During the day only one keeper patrolled the wing, so he had no trouble in evading him and getting out into the yard. There he could hide in an outhouse until darkness fell to cover his final escape over the perimeter wall. The alarm was sounded and hours went by while guards searched every inch of the prison but to no avail.
Some time later a keeper saw someone walking swiftly across the prison yard from the foundry towards the collar shop. He shouted to him to stop but the man started running. Assuming it was Perry, the keeper fired a shot from his Winchester over his head and brought him to a halt near the pearl button shop, where another keeper jumped out of the shadows and struck him on the head with a heavy night stick. The blow was so powerful that the night stick broke in two. Perry fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding heavily, and was carried into the Keeper's Hall. His head wound was washed but not judged serious enough for dressing, and he was then sentenced to twenty-five nights in the dungeon, to begin immediately.
To the embarrassment of his keepers, the story was swiftly leaked to the press. How could a man kept under such close surveillance have managed to dupe them so thoroughly? It seemed to have been only his own haste that was Perry's undoing. If he had paused to conceal the hole in the neighbouring cell after climbing through it, his absence might not have been noticed until after lock-up time. Then the guards on the perimeter wall came off duty, and he would most likely have been able to scale it to freedom. The mistake was uncharacteristic of his usually careful planning - the rest of the preparations suggest that he was as meticulous as ever. He was almost certainly disturbed at the last minute.
His capture was as controversial as his escape was shocking. Although the keepers insisted they had warned Perry before knocking him down, anonymous sources claimed this was untrue. Although he had been judged fit for immediate punishment, all the reports stressed the severity of the blow that felled him and some claimed he might die. The most damning report was from an Englishman called Edgar Moulton who was visiting Auburn on behalf of the Prison Reform Society and claimed to have witnessed the capture: 'The assault on the prisoner seemed to me to be entirely uncalled for and unprovoked. I have visited the prisons of the czar. Much as they are to be condemned, I have never seen or heard of a single brutality which equalled the attack made on the prisoner in Auburn last Sunday.'
The prison authorities issued a denial, but Moulton's story struck a chord with a growing number of New Yorkers who feared that the closed worlds of the prisons concealed terrible abuses. Perry was now an object both of admiration, for his daring, and of pity, for his treatment. A local newspaper editor, defending the prison, feared that Perry would gain new admirers because of the escape and roundly denounced his supporters: 'Is it not about time that Oliver Curtis Perry be treated like the outlaw and desperado he is and not like a hero of the Jesse James stripe of a man?'
Perry was, in fact, doubly punished. As he faced the darkness, silence and starvation of the dungeon for over three weeks, he also knew that his failure had condemned him to serve many more years in prison. For the escape attempt he lost nine years, eleven months and four days of 'good time'. Even if he behaved like a lamb from now on, he would serve at least forty years. A calmer man might have realized that the real battle now was to survive and submit to the regime in the hope of a quieter life, however limited. But Perry was a fighter and was set on a course that would lead to continuous conflict with his keepers.
Over the next few months he was sentenced twice more to spells in the dungeon, for 'insolence and threats to Night Guard', then 'striking keeper, insolence and threats'. Just as he had become increasingly desperate and
unruly in Lyons when he realized he could not escape, so now he made life as difficult for his keepers, and for himself, as he could. The perpetual conflict, punctuated by sensory deprivation and near-starvation that weakened his physical condition, took a heavy toll. Perry was not obviously broken, as so many others had been, but the damage had been done. His hostility to authority became ever more extreme and he lost any sense of perspective in his understanding of his own situation. Oliver Perry was under extreme psychological pressure.
There was, briefly, a glimmer of hope by the spring of 1893, when he was sent back to work in the foundry and found what he called 'a little gleam of happiness'. But one violent attack extinguished it. Perry had gradually become convinced that Principal Keeper James Shaw, who had first sent him to the dungeon and ordered most, if not all, of his subsequent punishments, had a serious grudge against him. He believed that Shaw, apart from singling him out for rebuke, was reducing his food rations out of spite. Shaw was a big man with a tough style and, although there is no evidence to suggest he was maliciously inclined towards his prisoner, Perry's fears were not unusual. In the crowded conditions of a prison, fears multiply like germs, and withholding or contaminating food, with saliva or worse, was, and is, an easy way of unofficially punishing a prisoner. A man who, like Perry, had been on starvation rations in the dungeon for long periods might well be particularly anxious about having his fair share of food. But Perry's fear turned to panic.
Isolated from anyone, friends or family, who might help him keep a sense of proportion, he decided that Shaw was out to kill him and resolved to fight back. So he got hold of a file from a workshop and hid it in his uniform until one day he broke ranks and lunged at Shaw. He was immediately overpowered by other keepers and dragged to a dungeon where he was blasted with a high-pressure fire hose until he was subdued. On 11 May 1893, he was judged guilty of 'threats to kill officer and refusal to come out of cell', and was returned to the dungeon. This time he was given a little longer than usual. His sentence was forty-four days, over six weeks.
When he emerged from this terrible punishment it was clear that he had suffered a total breakdown. The anxiety that Shaw was trying to starve him had been magnified into a total paranoia that his keepers had been bribed by a vengeful American Express to starve or poison him. In the isolation of the dungeon, the 'normal' prisoner's obsession with food had been fed by memories of the constant harassing of his family and friends by detectives. The story-teller had spun a new tale that made complete sense to his damaged mind and on his release from the dungeon he was determined to put a stop to the detectives' agents by any means he could.
Eventually, worried about his increasingly violent behaviour, the Warden called for a formal medical examination by Dr Conant Sawyer, the prison physician, and a specialist in 'brain diseases', Dr Frederick Sefton, who confirmed that Perry had 'hallucinations', evidence of an 'unsound mind'. Such was Perry's reputation as a would-be escaper that some observers insisted that he was feigning madness to get a transfer to a less secure institution. The authorities took no notice. On 27 December 1893, after twenty months in Auburn, Perry was officially declared insane and an order was drawn up to transfer him to the Matteawan Asylum for Insane Criminals.
CHAPTER 9
'God forgive us all . . .'
THE PERSONALITY traits and psychological characteristics that contributed to Perry's trauma were quite likely the same ones that had brought him to prison in the first place. In line with the thinking of the day, the doctor who certified him looked for mental illness in his family, citing the fact that his paternal grandmother had been insane. But if his family history had something to reveal, it was a troubled childhood, not a genetic inheritance, which would eventually lead Oliver Perry to the dungeon and despair.
The history has been hard to uncover. The lives of the nineteenth-century rural poor are often elusive. Sometimes names appear in census returns, in church or institutional records, but the lives behind the citations are rarely visible. Perry's boyhood was doubly obscured. When he was a wanted man in the 1890s, detectives had to overcome his family and friends' efforts to cover his traces, but within a matter of decades he was almost entirely expunged from his family's memory. No stories seem to have been told in the Perry family about their black sheep. Even more painfully, while many families have obscured the traces of a bad or mad relative after their deaths, Perry had been repeatedly disowned by his family since birth.
Perry told the same brief story of his early boyhood all his life. His parents, who lived on a farm, separated just a few years after his birth, when his mother left. He said he was born on 17 September, but gave the year as 1865 and 1866 in different accounts. His father, the outwardly respectable but slippery Oliver H. Perry, was a native New Yorker, one of thirteen children born to a farmer. In January 1865, at the age of nineteen, he married a fifteen-year-old called Mary Allen. She was the daughter of a widowed farmer who had married Oliver's own, equally young sister, Sarah Emily. They lived in what was known as the 'Irish Settlement', near a Mohawk Valley township named Ephratah after the biblical land of plenty. There, just over eight months later, Oliver Curtis Perry was born.
The only fact about his mother that Oliver Perry ever recalled was that when he was a very small boy she left him and his father and never came back. No one knows why she left or where she went. She simply disappeared from public, and private, records; she may have married again or, as some reports hinted, died soon afterwards, but she left no traces. Oliver H. Perry soon married again. His new wife, Sarah, was, like Mary and his sister, fifteen years old at the time of her marriage and first pregnancy. Blanche, Oliver's half-sister, was born in 1872.
When her own child was born, Sarah wanted a home of her own and insisted that there would be no place in it for her stepson. No reason was ever given. Perhaps she was insecure about her husband's feelings for his first wife and took it out on their son. In adulthood Perry would poignantly stress that his father had 'insisted' on keeping him, but in fact he offered little resistance to his wife's plan. Perry's grandmother looked after him for a while but when she died he had nobody to turn to. The little boy was effectively alone in the world.
A signpost still points the way to the Irish Settlement. When Perry was born it was a community of small farms worked mainly, as the name suggests, by those of Irish descent. The poor soil offered only a basic living, and when competition came from the opening up of western farmlands, many were forced to seek a second income at the nearby timber mills. Today the tarmac road soon dwindles to a dirt track, with woods thickening and closing in on either side. But there is no sign of farms or houses.
All that remains of the settlement where dozens of families worked the land, and where Perry spent the first years of his life, is a few barely visible walls, none more than a few stones high, overgrown with ivy and brambles. Looking closer, it is possible to see the broken outlines of houses spaced alongside the road. Within a few decades, the Irish Settlement, a living community, had been reclaimed by the woods that once provided its timber. The speed with which human attempts to make a home can be undone, not by war or demolition but by the gradual, relentless reclamation of nature, is both surprising and moving.
The Irish Settlement today.
The wild wood, one of the most abiding and unsettling locations of childhood fantasies and terrors, is a fitting symbol of Perry's earliest years. In fairytales it is the testing ground for children who roam too far and find themselves alone and frightened by the unknown. Traditionally, in the end, lost children learn their lessons and return safely home to their family. In Perry's case, the wood has overwhelmed the home, as once the tangled relationships of his family left him lost and rejected. Unable to find a place where he felt at home, he would spend the rest of his childhood wandering.
His aunt Mary wrote about her family's guilt in a letter to a newspaper when Perry was awaiting trial: 'God forgive us all for our negligence in not taking care of him in his helpless
ness. . . . He was turned out on the charity of the world, when, if we had taken him in, all would have been well with him.' But none of his family would take him in, so before he was ten years old, he was almost certainly left in what was known as an 'orphan asylum', although he had both a father and a stepmother living. The impact on a little boy is hard to measure. Intriguingly, in the Depression years Louis Berg, whose Confessions of a Prison Doctor argued passionately for reform in the treatment of offenders and for an understanding of the impact of broken homes on young children, would call those who turned to crime because of being unwanted, 'stepchildren of society'.
Perry later referred to working on a farm from the age of eleven. He was probably left in an orphanage or refuge and 'adopted', as so many children were, to provide slave labour. Nobody is sure where Perry was left, although a newspaper report in 1892 identified a likely place in upstate New York where names he later supposedly used as aliases were popular. He soon ran away from his adopted home, as resentful of working for nothing as he would later be in prison.
By the summer of 1880 he had travelled to Minnesota and was staying with his aunt Mary. She and her husband Edward had moved from New York to the sparsely populated Otter Tail County where they farmed and ran a small general store in a village called Luce. His aunt described a sensitive, kind boy: 'He was naturally kind and tender-hearted, but, as I said before, circumstances made him what he is. He has been known to give his last ten cents to a little beggar girl . . . who was (as he thought) in more need than he was, although he had no place to lay his head.'
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