Maguire had then apparently slipped the key to the bottom lock through the small aperture in the cell door to one of these milder prisoners, Frank Davis, as he walked along the corridor. On the day of the escape, Davis unlocked the bottom lock of Maguire's cell on his way to supper. When the watchman came to inspect the ward soon afterwards everything seemed quiet. Although he was officially supposed to check every single lock, he rarely did so. After he had gone, Maguire used his improvised saw to cut through two strands of the heavy wire mesh that covered the peephole in his cell door. This allowed him to bend down the mesh, stick his arm through and turn his key in the upper lock. He swung the door open quietly and crept to Davis's cell. Davis passed the other key through to Maguire who released him. Next they released Perry. Then all three returned to their own cells, pulled the doors to and waited for the watchman's next round.
Isolation Block in Matteawan State Hospital.
While Quigley settled back into the relative security of confinement, it seemed that Perry had also returned to familiar territory. A number of storekeepers reported seeing him in Troy, a not unlikely place for him to seek sanctuary. The city's press was, on the whole, still sympathetic to Perry, one reporter summing up the general feeling that his recent escape proved that his 'courage, persistence and ingenuity are qualities which would have made him successful in an honest career'. Sympathetic as Troy might be, sightings of Perry were also reported across the state in any place where a connection with his past could be made. A mysterious man in a sombrero appeared in several villages, leading to rumours that the expert in disguise had adopted a new image. A woman asking questions about him was assumed to be a past lover and a confused man even confessed to being Perry. Perry was everywhere and nowhere to be seen. As one editor succinctly explained, 'Oliver Curtis Perry is a criminal who in two senses is literally out of sight.' In an attempt to hasten his capture Governor Levi P. Morton took the unusual and dramatic step of proclaiming that the State of New York would offer a $1,000 reward for his arrest. Together with the rewards offered by American Express, this put a bounty of $2,250 on Perry's head. The sum was quite astonishing. Dr Allison's generous annual salary was $3,000, and the reward was much more than most men could hope to earn in a year. In contrast, the reward for each of the other men was $250. Once again, railroad detectives, Pinkerton agents and the press rushed to outdo each other in the hunt for this most wanted man.
Patrick Maguire and Michael O'Donnell were captured soon after Quigley, about forty miles from the asylum. Like Quigley they were weakened by hunger and exposure in the cold spring nights. Now only Perry and Davis, who was regarded as the most dangerous of the other fugitives, were at large. A rumour spread that they might be travelling together, disguised as tramps. This made life even harder than usual for innocent men who were living on the road, some of whom were harassed and even arrested. But Frank Davis was caught alone, after five days on the run. He put up more of a fight than the others, running until shots were fired. Perhaps out of some sort of respect, or pity, his cap-turers plied him with whisky and took him back to Matteawan roaring drunk.
Now only Perry was free. Dr Allison announced that he was confident he would be back in custody within twenty-four hours. Sure enough, on 16 April a newspaper headline declared 'Perry Caught'. But the item continued 'Buying velvet capes at $6.50 and $7 at the New York Cloak and Fur Coats Store, No. 49 east Main Street, on easy payments of $1 or 50c weekly. No collectors.' As the initial fears about escaped lunatics subsided, and recollections of the earlier, charming Perry filled the papers, his capture had become a joke. Perry's escape was remarkable, not just in his ingenuity in getting out of a specially designed double prison, but also because he was still officially considered a 'madman'. It was clear that Perry had planned the escape with as much intelligence and care as his earlier attempts and executed it with more success. And he had obviously built up strong enough relationships with the other men to earn, and return, their trust. Oliver Perry might be certified insane, but what was his real condition?
Patrick Maguire.
Michael O'Donnell.
Frank Davis.
1895 Reward poster (Reproduced from the collection of the Library of Congress).
CHAPTER 13
'A man always has hopes when he is free'
EDWARD CLIFFORD, a railroad detective, patrolled Wee-hawken on the New Jersey shoreline, across the Hudson River from New York City. In the early hours of the morning on the day after Frank Davis was caught he spotted a fire near the riverside railroad tracks. They were close to the palisades and cliffside where tramps often sheltered, so he decided to check them out. As he approached, he saw a group of men huddled over the fire and one standing alone, further away. The man's face was covered in dirt, but Clifford was suspicious. He walked away and called a police officer.
When Oliver Perry spotted the officer, he scrambled up the cliff to a narrow path on a ledge in the rock. He got about a hundred yards along it before losing his footing and falling on to the rocks below. His ankle badly sprained, he could barely walk and within minutes he was pinned to the ground.
Perry limped painfully as they walked him to the police station in Weehawken and reportedly begged, Til do anything for you.
I'll cut wood or do any honest work. Don't send me back there again.' But in custody, questioned by the Chief of Police, Simon Kelly, he insisted that he was a labourer who had fallen on hard times and did not want his family to know he was destitute. He was, in short, just one of the many tramps who hung around the industrial shoreline of the Hudson. He certainly looked the part. He was wearing a short black sack coat tucked into worn, torn trousers, held up by suspenders worn over the jacket, a battered hat and shoes split along the sides. In the pocket of the coat was an old newspaper but not a single cent.
If Perry's outfit resembled a parody of Dickens's Artful Dodger, his physical condition was no laughing matter. His face was pinched and weather-beaten and he had clearly had little to eat for some time. And when his shoes were removed, it was clear that the fall from the cliff was not the only reason for his halting gait. His feet were so badly swollen, blistered and cut that it was surprising he had managed to walk at all. They also seemed to have been badly burnt by lime, almost certainly from walking barefoot in brickyards near Matteawan.
His pathetic condition appeared to arouse Chief Kelly's sympathy. It is possible, of course, that the policeman was using his head rather than being all heart, hoping to gain his prisoner's trust. Whatever prompted him, he treated his prisoner with kindness. He sent out for breakfast, which Perry ate ravenously, and had his feet bathed and bandaged. But if Perry was exhausted and battered, he seemed, remarkably, to be displaying all his old coolness under pressure. When he was free he displayed an ability to make the best of even a bad situation as consistently as in prison he made it worse. As he had in Lyons, he initially resisted admitting his identity, but eventually, after a detective from the Mulberry Street police headquarters in New York City had arrived with a photograph, he called for Kelly and offered to give him a full confession.
Once again, Perry tried to take charge of the situation, rather than waiting to be pushed. It seems that he also had no illusions about Kelly's possible motives. The man who had once calculated the value of his own image knew exactly what rewards his reflected celebrity could bestow on someone else.
Kelly, who would soon become Mayor of Weehawken, wasted no time in displaying his famous prisoner. Outside, word of his capture had spread and hordes of people were arriving in the small town. Among them were reporters who had raced up from New York City, eager to get an interview and ready to reward the man who gave it and the man who allowed it. As soon as Perry's questioning ended, he was given a chair in the jail corridor and the waiting reporters were admitted. They had come prepared, remembering his taste for cigars as well as for attention. It was his first interview for three years.
Perry seemed relaxed, almost his old self, sometimes laug
hing as he recalled particular events, sometimes becoming more thoughtful, stroking his bruised feet and staring into the distance. The listening reporters, who had warned the public about this ruthless man's violent tendencies and claimed he would not be captured alive, waxed lyrical about his clear, frank gaze and fluent conversation. The interview itself, however, was not an entirely sedate exercise. Every few minutes policemen, brandishing clubs, rushed outside to drive crowds away from the windows where they were climbing on to one another's shoulders to catch a glimpse of Perry.
Inside, Perry described his first night on the run. 'I followed the east star. The moon rose early. But the moon travelled so fast that to follow it one goes around in a circle. I selected that star because I know it is a fixed star.' He had not lost his knack of appealing to the press as one positively rhapsodic account of his journey revealed: 'This man of crime went forth under the stars, with the soft light of the moon bathing him in its splendour. . . . What thoughts, what fancies spread through his distorted mind no one knows.' The romantic vision of the vulnerable man blessed by the lights of heaven was not cluttered by facts. After giving them his best image, Perry flatly refused to provide any information about his first few days on the run, although he insisted, almost in tears, that he had not stolen anything and was ashamed of the way he looked in his ragged clothes.
He eventually said that he had made his way to New York City, refusing to say where he had stayed. Instead he told a long story of how he had been repeatedly turned away from charitable hospitals before eventually being given perfunctory treatment for his wounded feet. 'If I have a mania,' he commented, 'it is the exposing of the cruel manner in which unfortunates are treated in public institutions.' The statement was undoubtedly heartfelt but he would also, conveniently, strike a chord with the liberal New Yorkers who were beginning to protest about the treatment of the poor and needy and who might, in turn, be sympathetic to his own cause. It was the first hint that Perry might say something controversial about his experiences in the asylum or in prison.
He gave only a vague account of how he ended up on the Weehawken shoreline, and no reason for heading there, but hinted that he had been helped by a number of women who took pity on a stranger down on his luck. The Perry charm had clearly not deserted him even if his condition was less than glamorous. But for all his bravado, and whatever spin he might put on it after the event, his time on the run was not easy. Touchingly, he seems to have been caught because he craved not only the warmth of the tramps' fire, but also their company; 'I was cold and the fire looked bright and cheerful. The company of the tramps, too, was not unwelcome, for I was lonesome.'
The man who had admitted to being lonely also seemed, underneath the swagger and wit, to be preoccupied and even rather frightened. When someone suggested he would have been caught eventually anyway, he replied thoughtfully, 'A man always has hopes when he is free, and I had a heavy, long sentence before me.' Then, The World's man observed, 'this man of nerve paused, and his grey eyes seemed to be looking far away. They are fascinating eyes, that suggest sinister things.' Perry was clearly worried about returning to the asylum but, with characteristic bravado, issued a warning: 'If they abuse me as they have in the past I'll take any means to attract the attention of the world to myself. God knows I've suffered enough there already. I'm an American, and, although a criminal, I'm not a bad man.'
When Dr Lamb arrived to collect Perry, he was shocked to find that his patient had gone. He had been taken to the more secure Hudson County Jail in Jersey City to wait for requisition papers. Because Perry had crossed the state line between New York and New Jersey, extradition papers signed by the Governor of New York and countersigned by the Governor of New Jersey were needed before he could be sent back to Matteawan. Perry's threatened showdown with the asylum authorities might be delayed.
CHAPTER 14
Habeas Corpus
The World's illustration of Perry,
Clifford and Kelly after his capture
(Reproduced from the collection
of the Library of Congress).
PERRY DID not wait to be taken back to Matteawan before speaking out about the abuse he claimed to have suffered there. He spent a night sharing a cell on Murderers' Row with Paul Genz, a man who had killed his wife and was convinced he deserved to die. Determined not to be sent back to Matteawan without a fight, Perry used an interview with some of the most influential reporters in the state to launch a campaign against the asylum's regime. Bathed, shaved and rested, he sat outside the cell with his now customary cigar. His manner as he described his experiences impressed his audience, and the New York Times spoke for all the press when it noted that 'there was nothing in his appearance, manner, or conversation to indicate insanity'.
Perry's account of Matteawan made, and makes, disturbing reading. He described two methods of punishment used when men were unruly, often when keepers deliberately provoked a patient into 'giving a cross word, and then they begin'. The first was a brutal assault: 'One keeper will grasp a man's neck from behind, and, after the fashion of a garrotter, will compress his windpipe and shut off the air from his lungs. He is then thrown to the ground and held there by two men, while others kick him in the stomach and side with the side of their boots. This style of kicking is used so as not to leave marks and is called "hoofing". The blood gushes from the patient's mouth until he becomes insensible, and is carried to a room, where he lies for hours before recovering consciousness.' While these beatings generally took place at night and were inflicted illicitly by the keepers, the second form of punishment was administered by the physicians, as part of the legal 'treatment' of patients: 'The other punishment is the "black medicine", which as I understand, is a decoction of opiates. It makes the patient's mind active, so that he has delusions, but paralyses the body so that he cannot move. The effect lasts five or six hours, and sometimes three doses a day are given.'
He described the process of being drugged. 'I suppose I became excited, for the doctor said I had a delusion. After I had talked to Dr Lamb, four keepers . . . threw themselves upon me and knocked me down. While these men held me Dr Lamb injected some drug into my arm, and I became unconscious. When I recovered my senses the next day I was lying completely nude on the floor of my cell. I complained to Dr Daly about being drugged. I said I wanted exercise or work, anything to keep me occupied, and from brooding over my condition.' The drugs brought unconsciousness but also hallucinations, sometimes of terrifying creatures, sometimes, as Perry recalled with bitter humour, of more mundane things, as in an incident when the floor tiles seemed to turn into pieces of pie, his favourite dessert. Visions apart, his distrust of institutional food was exacerbated by his discovery that drugs were routinely added to it. Although he did not know whether this was on the orders of the medical staff, or was a practice adopted by the keepers to make their job easier, he had experienced similar symptoms after eating to those caused by injections.
He may have escaped from Matteawan because, having recovered from his breakdown, he was gripped by the compulsive need to get away. But, having been caught, he now started to campaign against the regime he had complained about to Amelia Haswell. Once again he demonstrated his remarkable ability to appeal to particular audiences. Just as he had worked the press and public in Lyons by constructing a romantic image of himself, so now he seemed to target sections of the press and the public who were already calling for reform of penal institutions. While his protests were undoubtedly heartfelt, he also began to use reformers' terminology and references to suit his own ends and turned every interview to the subject of this new campaign.
While some of the behaviour of both attendants and physicians may have been occasioned by the frustrations of dealing with the violently insane, some was undoubtedly the result of a relative indifference to their rights, as a growing number of New Yorkers had begun to argue. Asylums, like prisons, were closed worlds where brutality and cruelty could go unnoticed and complaints by the victims unheard. U
nusually, Perry, who had every reason to be both angry and intemperate, and was still officially classed as insane, offered a rational explanation for the regime. Middle-class reformers regularly condemned the prison workers who abused patients, seeing them as brutes, almost sub-human, without attempting to examine their place in an exploitative system that showed them as little respect as they afforded their charges. Perry was no friend of guards or keepers, but he did understand the economic problem. The attendants were, he said, 'brutal, ignorant fellows' but they were 'hired at $20 a month'. How, he asked, could intelligent men be expected to apply for such posts? Perry was ambitious in his target: he wanted to attack the whole regime, not just the workers.
The press divided sharply over Perry's new role as a protestor. While he was always good copy, most newspapers followed clear party-political lines on issues like institutional reform. In an intriguing contrast to his days in Lyons, when his treatment by the Republican sheriff had been attacked by the Democrat press, now it was the latter that called for Perry's allegations to be investigated, and the Republican press that dismissed them. He won some serious supporters from the respectable press. Although his paper included a far from flattering phrenologist's 'reading' of Perry's head, the editor of the New York Times took his new stance seriously. He reserved judgment on Perry's specific claims, but called for an investigation solely on the basis that Perry was evidently sane.
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