But by the age of fourteen he had left Minnesota. It is not clear whether he was sent away or left of his own accord. His aunt's sense of guilt may suggest that he was sent away, but he may have been simply restless and homesick. As he later commented, 'I was a headstrong boy, and have had a blot on my whole life.'
By the winter of 1881 he was back in upstate New York, sleeping rough. His father lived in a village called Amboy in Oswego County with his second family, including eight-year-old Blanche and a six-year-old son, Claude. Neighbours remembered his elder son visiting occasionally, but never staying long. Perry clearly wanted to belong, but his family's relative indifference and his own restlessness left him perpetually unsettled. His stepmother had made it clear he was not part of her family, and his father, with the responsibility of his new family, had little time for his first-born son.
Oliver Perry was forced to be a man when he was still a little boy and he had no reason to trust anyone. His mother had abandoned him, his grandmother had died, and what could he expect from a father whose love and protection were so unreliable? Little wonder that as a grown man he would have such troubled relationships and see betrayal even before it happened. Or that he would grow up determined to prove himself, to win the acceptance and admiration, if not affection, that he had been denied. Underneath the clever robber and slick self-inventor who charmed the press and public was a deeply insecure little boy.
Unwanted, he took to a life of what he later called 'roving'. He learned early how to handle a gun, as many country boys did. He travelled alone, around the Mohawk valley where he would one day hide from his pursuers, and further afield. To survive, he learned how to live by his wits, if not always within the law.
CHAPTER 10
A Bad Boy's Career
ONE COLD November day in 1881 Oliver Perry was arrested in the city of Amsterdam in the eastern Mohawk valley. Two boys had reported him to the police for stealing a new suit of clothes from a man at the railroad depot. He was alone, homeless and had to pay for shelter. He was held in the lock-up over the weekend, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to an institution that was called, with bitter irony, the Western House of Refuge.
It was located in Rochester, the city just south of Lake Ontario where the adult Perry would one day appear in wax. Today the gleaming new towers of Rochester's optical and photographic industries dwarf its older buildings, creating an impression of bland modernity and affluence. But right through its heart runs the deep gorge of the Genessee River, a reminder of a rugged, ancient landscape.
The House of Refuge was itself originally established as a progressive institution, but by 1881 it was at best an overcrowded, ill-disciplined prison, at worst a hellish place where young children were subjected to physical, psychological and sexual abuse by their fellow inmates and, all too frequently, by their keepers.
Newspaper reports from the years when Perry was an inmate make shocking reading. Time and again the Board of Managers, comprising eminent local citizens, condemned the institution. In 1883 it was denounced as 'brutal in the extreme', and a year later the New York Times noted that 'the most cruel and inhuman treatment has been inflicted upon the boys'. An official investigation found that brutality was widespread and possibly systematic. Witnesses reported beatings with rulers, paddles, strops and sticks, as well as a key used to twist children's noses and ears. Even when 'properly' administered, punishment was harsh. Children found guilty of rule-breaking, including whispering or failing to meet work targets, were punished by beating or starvation rations of bread and water. If Perry had experienced hardship as a roving boy, the privations in the Refuge were worse. One eleven-year-old boy was put on a bread-and-water diet for four weeks.
Boys who tried to escape or were insubordinate would be stripped and locked up in dark cells, not unlike the dungeons in Auburn, with boarded-up windows and a heavy door with a few ventilation holes. The existence of the rat-infested cells was initially concealed from the Board of Managers, but was eventually revealed by witnesses, including a boy who had been held in one for six months. An investigator who entered a dark cell had to leave immediately, driven out by the stench from the waste bucket that served as the boy's lavatory and would be emptied only once a day, if the keeper was diligent. In these dreadful cells boys slept naked, except for a blanket, on the floor. Conditions were little better in the regular dormitories, with open waste buckets and no lavatory paper. Unsurprisingly, the Board worried that boys were 'acquiring the most filthy personal habits without fault on their part'. Could this be why Perry was so fastidious in later life, when many reporters commented on his almost obsessive need to keep his hands clean?
There may have been another, more disturbing, trigger for his need to cleanse himself. Apart from the hard labour, locked fire-escapes, poor food, filth and summary punishments, the boys faced another threat: sexual abuse. One employee made extensive, albeit coyly worded, accusations of 'immoral practices' on the part not only of boys but also of their keepers. Perry, even as a grown man, was delicate in stature and looks, described by the Pinkertons as 'effeminate'. When he was admitted to the refuge he was small for his age. He was fifteen or even sixteen, depending on his real birth year, but as records show, he was only 4 feet 11% inches tall and weighed 91% pounds, and so a likely target for sexual predators. Years later, he would complain bitterly of how young men were systematically sexually abused by older convicts, but in his youth there was nobody to turn to. So he concentrated on gaining some weight and building up his strength. This was clearly designed to help him defend himself, to turn a slight boy who might be treated as a girl into a man. He certainly learned a style of fighting scratching and biting - that would stay with him all his life. Whenever he felt overpowered, particularly by a bigger man, Oliver Perry would fight frantically, almost hysterically, like a little boy.
The exact nature of Perry's experiences in the House of Refuge will never be known but they certainly shaped his character and established a pattern of response to prison that would last a lifetime. He must have found the institution almost unendurable, even without the additional torments of punishment and abuse. Used to a life on the road that, despite its hardships, was free, the confinement alone would have been wretched. Living rough as a boy-man he had learned to conceal his vulnerability beneath a tough, clever manner that seemed like impudence and brought out the worst in his keepers. When chastised he resorted to running away, as he had done as a child. Escape was almost a compulsion for a boy who had no reason to believe that there was any other way of learning to live within the rules in an unfair system. In his desperate plotting to escape he demonstrated, even at this early stage, two defining characteristics that would be seen again and again in his adult life: the extraordinary intelligence and ingenuity that would make his crimes and escapes so remarkable, and the charismatic charm that would allow him to exert an almost mesmerizing influence over fellow prisoners, hardened reporters and ordinary Americans.
His keepers, infuriated by his conduct, wanted him moved to an adult prison. In 1883 one wrote to the Superintendent:
The boy has always been a vulgar and low dispositioned boy, and of late his disregard of all advice makes me call your especial attention to his case. He has never cared for his studies and his whole general deportment has been low and vulgar. He is constantly reported for disorder, quarrelling, impudence and vulgar actions and language. . . . Lately he has been engaged in altering and picking locks and in attempting to escape till his example and acts are so bold and defiant that his removal from this institution is quite a necessity. Quite recently he secured false keys with which he let himself out of his dormitory in the night time and broke his way through the shop, stealing therefrom knives and weapons of defence but was unable to scale the walls. Certainly his low and vile disposition with no intention to reform exerts a very dangerous and pernicious influence over the other inmates.
Intriguingly, the expertise with making false keys that would emerge in Lyons seems to
have been evident while he was still a boy.
To his keepers Perry was simply a bad lot, but an investigation into the institution revealed that some of his accusers were guilty of worse. One was dismissed for cruelty and incompetence, and another was reported by a witness to have given a newly admitted boy fifty strokes with a rattan cane. Yet another later became an officer in the police force and joined in the hunt for Perry after his second train robbery. After his capture Perry was anxious to show he had not intended to hurt anyone, but he made one exception. He swore publicly that if he had been able to get a clear shot at the ex-keeper he would have killed him.
The keepers' request to have Perry transferred was granted. On 7 March 1883 he was sent to the Monroe County penitentiary 'for correction during the pleasure of the Board of Managers for a period not exceeding two years'. There his behaviour followed the same pattern as in the Refuge, but one dramatic incident revealed a particular facet of his personality that would later become almost as defining as his need to escape.
When he arrived he was put to work as a heel trimmer in a workshop where convicts laboured for a shoe-making company.
He struck up a relationship with the keeper in charge of the workshop, a man called Kelly, who felt sorry for a boy stuck in a men's prison and sometimes shared his lunch with Perry. But when Perry was transferred to work on a machine rather than with the trimming knife, he was discovered sabotaging it, presumably because he had hoped to use the knife in an escape attempt. Publicly reprimanded by Kelly, he grabbed up a skiving knife, used for trimming leather, and lunged at the keeper as he would later lunge at Shaw in Auburn.
When his punishment was complete, he was transferred to another workshop but took the chance, when sent to Kelly on an errand, to attack the man who had frustrated his plans. This time he created a diversion by shouting to the other prisoners to get out and creating a stampede. In the chaos he seemed torn between trying to escape and getting his own back on Kelly. When the panic subsided Kelly had a cut on his arm and Perry a stab wound in the stomach, described in official reports as accidentally self-inflicted. He was taken to the prison infirmary and then into solitary confinement for the remainder of his sentence.
When he left the penitentiary on 15 March 1885, at the age of nineteen, Perry had acquired a range of skills, in shoe-making, lock-picking, improvising weapons and fighting. He had learned that he could influence and manipulate others, but could also find himself at their mercy. An intelligent but volatile young man, he could be charming and aggressive by turns. He had entered the House of Refuge as an unruly boy who longed for affection and belonging but chafed against restrictions; three-and-a-half years later he left the penitentiary as a young man with a deep hatred of authority and confinement. And he had clearly decided that the best response to both was to fight, with whatever resources he had. He had also developed a pattern of behaviour that would mark the rest of his life and involved a series of men who might be seen as father figures.
The testimony of the Monroe keepers suggests that he forged a number of close relationships with keepers. These were men in authority whose approval and affection he craved but whom, ultimately, he could not trust and whose attempts to discipline him provoked his most extreme reactions. Another workshop overseer claimed, like Kelly, to have liked the difficult prisoner.
He told reporters that 'young Perry had a particular liking for me and would do almost anything to please me', and that the young man had come to his house for dinner after his release. It is quite possible that there was a sexual dimension to the relationships, and the men's descriptions of their relations with the young boy sound very like those given by men who 'groom' children as potential sexual partners. They may have been genuinely sympathetic, but, whatever their motives, Perry was almost certainly unconsciously trying to re-create his relationship with his own father. Later, in Lyons, the gentle Sheriff Thornton and tougher Deputy Collins embodied different aspects of the father, one offering support, the other punishment. His own father had alternately owned and disowned him, leaving his son locked in a perpetual battle with authority. Again and again, he would turn to a keeper, a lawman or a doctor for support and understanding, only to feel betrayed and abandoned. This would lead, in turn, to intolerably disruptive behaviour that ultimately would become self-destructive.
Oliver H. Perry was still ambivalent about his son. He claimed later that he tried to secure Perry's release from Monroe and although he had not fought for him in childhood, it seems he sometimes intervened in emergencies, as he would again in 1892, when he concealed his fugitive son and later tried to help him escape from jail. Like many badly behaved children, Perry must have unconsciously known that breaking the rules brought him the rewards of parental attention. As he grew up, did the same impulse lie behind the ever greater risks he took and the ever more daring crimes he committed?
Initially Perry tried to settle down to an honest life, getting a job as a clerk in a Rochester shoe store. The storekeeper remembered him as a pleasant-looking young man, a 'great talker' and a bit 'fly', although generally reliable. But he soon found the settled life difficult and after three or four months gave in his notice.
In the following spring he was in trouble again, this time for stealing from his own family. Together with some other men, he broke into his uncle's store in Minnesota and stole money from the till, some revolvers and clothes. The other men, who he said were army deserters, escaped but Perry, who stayed around assuming he would not be suspected, was followed, searched and arrested. He was sentenced to two years' hard labour in Stillwater prison. His sympathetic aunt believed that he had been harshly punished because he would not betray his 'pards', but he seemed unconcerned about betraying his own family's trust. Perhaps this was understandable, given his history. Anticipating the justification of his later robbery by condemning an exploitative system, he claimed he was just taking what was owed him for working for his uncle as a boy.
Stillwater was one of the mid-west's best-known prisons, but less for its tough regime than for its famous inmates. Here, the young man who would become the most famous train robber in the east encountered the west's most notorious living outlaws: Cole, Jim and Bob Younger who, with Frank and Jesse James, had terrorized the west in the aftermath of the Civil War, robbing trains and banks. Although Perry later remembered them, they do not seem to have impressed him much. All three were model prisoners, while Perry was as rebellious in Stillwater as he had been in Monroe.
He was released in the summer of 1888 when he was twenty-two. Then, probably fuelled by tales told by Stillwater inmates, he headed further west. The west may have been tamer in the late 1880s, but it was still a wild place where the rules of eastern society rarely applied. Here a man could move more freely, on cattle trails and railroads, and pick up casual jobs where few questions were asked, a definite help to an ex-prisoner and especially appealing to a young man who hated regulation. But the boundaries between legality and criminality, even between lawman and outlaw, were also less secure, and Perry almost certainly crossed the line.
He gave varying but always vague accounts of this period of his life, when he would have met his doomed sweetheart on a ranch in New Mexico. He certainly worked in the west, as a cowboy and ranch hand, and got into bad company. The Pinkertons believed that he learned the basics of train robbery at this time, and he later claimed to have been in a gang who operated in Texas, Nebraska and the Chicago area. He never gave any details, nor did the Pinkertons, and when he robbed the American Express Special he worked alone, using methods unlike those of any gang. It is possible that he was embellishing, just as others tried to pin unsolved crimes on him, but there may have been a gang whose story has been lost for ever. One thing is certain: in the precious months he spent in the west, Perry was a free man.
But sometime in 1888 or 1889 he decided to move back to New York. He later claimed, and Amelia Haswell believed, that this was because he had fallen in love and hoped to earn money to buy a home
for his forbidden sweetheart. But there may have been another catalyst for his decision to end his roving life and settle down.
The Perry family clearly had a strained relationship with their wayward elder son. But as 1888 drew to a close, it was his half-sister Blanche who was in the news. Just before Christmas the fifteen-year-old girl was shot dead on the snowy sidewalk outside her father's house by her estranged husband, William Crossley, who then turned the gun on himself. The couple had been childhood sweethearts, then fallen out when Crossley headed west to make a fortune but returned, broke, bitter and sure that his beautiful young wife had been unfaithful.
The murder and suicide made sensational news, especially as the funerals of husband and wife both took place on Boxing Day, with Blanche buried in the Perry family plot and William in the Crossley grave, facing each other in perpetual accusation across a narrow path in the same cemetery.
Perry was not listed as being present at his half-sister's funeral but he may well have been incognito, if he was still in trouble with the law. He may not have been in New York at the time, of course, but the date of Blanche's murder coincides intriguingly with the timing of his apparent decision to start life again in Troy after his western wildness. The coincidence certainly offers an alternative to the story of Perry's doomed New Mexican romance as the reason for his decision to return to New York. His choice of alias when arrested - William Cross, so near to William Crossley - was surely not a coincidence. Why would a young man adopt a version of the name of the killer of his own sister? Was it an act of revenge, or a sign of his guilt about his own strained relationship with his family? While he was waiting for his trial he wrote to his father: 'If anything should happen to me I want to be buried alongside of dear Blanchy.' It is hard at a distance to know if this and his other affectionate references to his little brother 'Claudy' were genuine signs of strong family feeling or displays of expected sentiment.
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