Henry Allison refuted Perry's charges, insisting that attendants were never permitted to use unnecessary force, except in self-defence. Perry, he claimed, was 'subject to uncontrollable maniacal excitement, during which he is extremely noisy and defiant, so that he disturbs the whole ward, refuses to listen to reason, and is extremely threatening in language and manner . . .' He also denied that the ability of Perry and his companions' to plot the escape was proof of sanity: 'It is a trade with them, the same as the carpenter's trade or any other trade a man learns. They are criminals and it is their business to conspire.'
Inside the jail, Perry was proving very popular with his fellow prisoners, including the depressed Genz, who surprised everyone by washing and bandaging his new cellmate's feet. He and other inmates, including Thomas McLaren, who had murdered his mistress, and George Armstrong, a wealthy 'green-goods' man or confidence trickster, almost came to blows as they tried to outdo one another and the guards in looking after their famous companion. But while Perry enjoyed the attention, he seemed increasingly agitated. Repeatedly advised to sit so that his feet might heal, he kept standing up, as if unable to stay still. Bystanders noticed him pulling his weight off his feet by grasping the bars of the cell tightly behind him.
Although he was no longer in the grip of a debilitating breakdown, his behaviour suggests that he was still in a fragile condition, distressed by confinement and increasingly anxious about being sent back to an asylum whose keepers and doctors he had publicly denounced. He admitted to his cellmates that he was worried about retribution, and said that, if only he had the hidden fortune he was rumoured to have, he would do anything, pay anyone, even to delay his return. Given a chance, he told them, he would fight for his liberty 'inch by inch'.
Meanwhile, the battle over the reward for his capture had intensified. Chief Kelly called on Governor George Werts of New Jersey, on the day after Perry's arrival in Jersey City, to ask him not to endorse the requisition papers until the reward had been paid to the Weehawken detective and policeman whose claims were being challenged by the former's boss. Werts agreed. Then a second man asked for a delay. But Alexander Simpson, a local lawyer, was not acting on behalf of any of the reward chasers. George Armstrong, the 'green-goods' man, had hired him to work for Perry. It seems an extraordinary act of generosity. Perhaps Perry had hinted that he could pay him back, perhaps Armstrong, like Kelly, hoped to make something from his association with the star criminal, or perhaps he just liked him.
The following day Perry was to appear in court, but there was a problem. His feet were so painful that he said he was unable to walk the 200 feet from the jail to the courthouse. So, followed by a large crowd, an under-sheriff and a constable made a basket of their hands and, with his arms around their necks, carried him to the courthouse, up two flights of stairs and into the hearing. It made a striking scene, emphasizing Perry's broken condition. Simpson immediately asked for a writ of habeas corpus. He had decided to challenge Perry's identification by exploiting the vagueness of the commitment papers. Justice Lippincott, following the letter of the law, agreed and ordered that Perry be held until proper evidence of his identity had been produced. While the move was exploiting a legal technicality, it offered Perry some hope of delaying his return to Matteawan and a chance to air his grievances in open court.
Henry Allison, who had assumed he would be taking Perry back to Matteawan, issued a statement to waiting reporters, insisting that Perry was both insane and 'untrustworthy', and went home. His mood can hardly have been improved by the atmosphere in the jail, where Perry was being treated like a hero. Like so many celebrities today, Perry had even been commissioned by a newspaper to write his own story. The World printed his own version of his life and crimes, complete with a reproduction of his signature. Sub-headings provided a safe moral framework for the sensational story but the appeal was clearly the 'voice' of the star.
'I do not consider myself a great criminal or a cold-blooded desperado. Many a man who sits in his office in Wall Street is as much a robber as I am. It is simply a difference in methods . . . I had no ambition to be a dime-novel hero. . . . I did not want this notoriety. I am not proud of it.' He reiterated his allegations of institutional corruption and brutality and defended his friends, Frank Davis, 'a man who had forgotten more than I ever knew', and Amelia Haswell: 'She has been like a mother to me . . . They said she was something more to me than that, and tried to bring scandal on her good name . . . and I have been driven almost wild, knowing I was powerless to protect her and that she suffered through her friendship to me.'
Whatever his feelings for the missionary, he revealed that he could no longer claim to be a believer. 'I have received letters from religious friends, exhorting me to turn from evil and serve God in prison. I may disappoint them, because I can't see things quite as they do. Their religion is enough for their lives but I have had other experiences. I am not a fanatic like some. I can't believe everything I read in the Bible, nor that I have heard in churches. I do believe in the religion of doing right, however far I have been from living up to it.' Those who thought his religiosity was a clever ploy to manipulate gullible do-gooders must have been taken aback. Even a teller of tall tales may speak the truth. If Perry had rejected Christianity, he had clearly not replaced it, as Amelia Haswell had feared, with a radical political creed, although he did joke, 'I do not know anything about Socialism or Anarchism, but I know that when a man takes it on himself to equalize unjustly distributed wealth by robbing express trains, he makes a mistake.'
He gave brief stories of both his train robberies, then turned to his own character. 'I realize that society will not tolerate men of the stamp I proved myself. I realize that when a man once steps outside the law, every hand is raised against him, and he is hunted down like a wild beast.' But, he continued, 'I don't think I have vicious instincts. I'm not any better than I might be and during my imprisonment I have been so brutalized by association with the most degraded men; I have been so knocked about, sworn at, drugged and beaten that I have lost, perhaps, a good share of what refinement I ever had.
'The newspapers have called me a "gentleman desperado" and have spoken of my hands and slender fingers, the hands of a man who has never done hard work. Right here I want to correct that. I am an uneducated country boy. I grew up without schooling. Whatever I have learned I have learned by experience . . .'
But if he was proud of his humble origins, he was also keen to show that he had good taste, even if it differed from that shown by those who followed his adventures so avidly. 'I enjoy a good book and I like to read American history. I never had any taste for sensational literature, dime novels and detective stories, even as a boy.' He complained that all he could get hold of at Matteawan were 'Irish newspapers of Nationalist proclivities', and expressed a particular liking for the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. He claimed that his favourite was, appropriately enough, The House of the Seven Gables, which tells the story of a man released from a long and unjust prison sentence. He also revealed that the diary he kept in Lyons had been just the start of a writing habit that was becoming a passion. 'I used to spend some of my long nights of sleeplessness during my imprisonment making rhymes. I'm nothing of a poet, but I can jingle words, and in the long night watches it helped to pass the time when I could not sleep.'
Books duly started arriving at the jail for Perry, along with flowers, cigars, boxes of fruit and candies, sent or brought by well-wishers. 'Why, what a nice little fellow,' said one female visitor, 'he does't look bloodthirsty at all, does he?' Recovering from the indignities of dressing as a tramp, he regained his old sartorial style when a local clothier delivered a new suit to the jail. Perry promptly sent a note back, which the clothier published in the local newspapers. It read: 'Kind Sir, If clothes make the man and gentleman, then I am sure, for I feel more respectful [sic] since receiving your kind gift. May the success that follows all just men be with you. Yours, O.C. Perry. N.B. Please excuse the chirography, for the drugs
have caused it.' In fact the $15 suit had been paid for by Chief Kelly, but the clothier saw his opportunity for some free publicity, while Perry evidently saw a chance to remind the public in his carefully worded postscript of the effects of the 'black medicine'.
This mutually beneficial relationship continued when Perry, clearly still aware of his 'market value', offered the clothier a deal. In return for a set of underclothes and a shirt he would sit for a photograph that the shopkeeper could use in future publicity. Astonishingly, the Sheriff did not object. Perry asked for three or four dozen copies of the picture, hoping to sell them as souvenirs to the men and women who visited the jail to see him. His fame was soon confirmed by a visit, staged by a newspaper, of one of America's other most notorious criminals, George Bi dwell, who, twenty-five years earlier, had stolen nearly $5 million from the Bank of England.
Perry's evident enjoyment of his renewed celebrity gradually began to worry even those editors who took his allegations of abuses at Matteawan seriously. His rather too adept manipulation of public feeling through the press was beginning to make him a less attractive figure to those who had sympathized with his situation. And the legal battles to keep him out of Matteawan were beginning to have a farcical aspect that threatened to make not only the asylum authorities but also the law look foolish.
Was Perry undermining his own case by enjoying his brief spell of pleasure and control too much? Could his desire for attention, admiration and the brief pleasures of winning a battle of wits be as compulsive as his need to escape? While the liberal press still called for an investigation, the conservative press bristled at his easy life in jail, condemning the 'rising tide of swash' caused by his 'hair-raising tales of Torquemada-like atrocities' and mocking his protestor's credentials as well as his popularity: 'if the people admire his type of citizenship, let him be canonized, pardoned by the Governor and sent to the State Senate as a Lexow Reformer'. Lexow had produced a shocking report on police corruption that was clearly not to the editor's liking. Even he stopped short of recommending one exasperated editor's solution to the problem of Perry: execution.
Ironically, it was Henry Allison who gave the liberal press the ammunition they needed to renew their attacks on the state's penal institutions through Perry's allegations. If he hoped to quash Perry's claims, he was badly misguided. He gave a detailed description of the use of drugs in Matteawan that merely sup ported Perry's case. He admitted that the drug hyoscin, with which Perry had been treated four or five times, caused drying of the body's mucous membranes and the tongue, and impaired vision, but said these side effects were easily counteracted by stimulants and caused no long-term damage. One reporter challenged Allison to say what the effects would have been on a man who 'was already thirsty and sane', arguing that such drugs should not be part of 'the modern enlightened method of treating insane patients'.
Dr Carlos MacDonald, President of the State Lunacy Commission, swiftly issued a vehement defence of the system, Matteawan and its Superintendent. His assessment of Perry was clear: 'Perry is a type of lunatic that is found in all criminal asylums in which desperate and criminal tendencies are interwoven with insanity. Such persons also have a morbid love of notoriety and enjoy immensely being the central figure of a public sensation or scandal. Such persons usually excite the sympathies of the morbid curiosity seekers who, actuated by maudlin sentiment, visit prisons and jails and bestow attention upon notorious criminals.' Those who agreed had ready evidence of Perry's impact on at least one such person. After the hearing he was visited by Amelia Haswell. 'There goes my best friend in the east,' he said as she left.
The legal process of extraditing Perry seemed to be spinning out almost indefinitely, much to his relief and the pleasure of the hotel and saloon keepers who were catering to the press. Writs and warrants piled up until eventually, after a week, Governor Werts stepped in and signed the requisition papers without waiting for Justice Lippincott's judgment. Relations between neighbouring states had to be protected. Lippincott tried to muster as much dignity as he could and announced that Perry would have his day in court.
When it came, the courtroom was crowded as everyone waited for the final act in the legal drama. Perry's lawyer made one last attempt to stop the extradition, insisting that as only sane men could testify in court, and as Perry could not be denied a hearing before being extradited, he would have to stay in New Jersey until he was either proved to be sane or had regained his sanity. But Lippincott was firm, in decision if not tone. 'I do not see, in view of the evidence, that I can do anything but refuse the defendant the discharge asked for, and order that he be remanded to the custody of the sheriff to await action on the requisition from the governor of New York.' The battle was over.
Perry was taken from the court, handcuffed to a keeper and still walking with difficulty. He was to be accompanied back to Matteawan by Dr Lamb and Chief Kelly. Suddenly, to everyone's
amazement, he turned to his lawyer, swore and slapped him across the face. Perry was pulled away and the party moved on. Simpson said nothing. Instead he ran to the Justice's office to demand that a warrant be issued against Perry for assault and battery. Two police constables were given the warrant and set off to arrest and detain Perry. Perry had not lashed out in anger but was enacting a scripted final scene in the legal farce. He had been told by his lawyer to hit him so that he could be arrested and kept in New Jersey while new legal manoeuvres were planned.
But Dr Lamb was too fast this time. He quickly signed the receipt for his prisoner, had him bundled into a waiting coach and set off for the railroad station. Before the police could catch up to arrest Perry, the party had boarded the train and headed for New York. It is not difficult to imagine what Perry must have felt as he returned to face the men he had accused of brutality. In Jersey City the public excitement about his case and the attention of press and sympathizers had once more kept some of his fears of being incarcerated at bay. Now the reality was all too apparent.
He may privately have wondered how long it would be before Perry or one of his keepers forced another confrontation. But in June, two months after the arrest that had convinced so many that Perry was sane, Allison announced that he was sending him back to Auburn, 'free from any active mental disturbance'. The announcement sat rather oddly with Dr MacDonald's earlier confident assessment of Perry's lunacy but to those who had been impressed by Perry it was good news. His fellow fugitives had mixed fortunes. Frank Davis attempted suicide by hanging himself with a sheet and faced a lifetime in Matteawan. Patrick Maguire plotted another escape, before betraying the keeper who was helping him and earning a return to Sing-Sing to complete the four years of his sentence. John Quigley disappeared from public record.
On 2 July 1895 Perry made the long journey back to Auburn, this time overnight. He arrived at half past eight in the morning and was met by reporters who noted he was heavier than he had been before his transfer to Matteawan, but looked haggard and careworn. As he walked from the train he told reporters, 'I can see where I have erred in my life, and if I get my liberty again I will lead an honest life.' He insisted publicly that he was glad to return to Auburn, conforming to his usual pattern of trying to win sympathy. Bizarrely, given his earlier paranoia about being poisoned, he even compared the prison rations favourably with those in Matteawan. But he also declared that he had no intention of working without pay. Although he maintained a cool front, his fear of retribution by keepers was soon revealed when he privately begged the Warden for a transfer to Clinton, the prison whose reputation was so tough it had deterred him in 1891 from giving himself up.
The Warden insisted that if he conducted himself properly, he would receive fair treatment. Then he was returned to his old cell in the basement. It was reported that he would not be made to work. He might have recovered from his last breakdown, but now the conditions, dictated by the authorities and self-imposed, for mental collapse were once more in place.
CHAPTER 15
A Missionary's Work
WHILE PERRY faced life in Auburn, the investigations into his escape from Matteawan took a sensational turn. Two suspected accomplices were identified. One, predictably, was a keeper. The other was the respectable Troy City missionary, Amelia Haswell.
Amelia Haswell was the daughter of an English naval captain who moved to New York State to raise his family on a farm. She was born in 1849 and dedicated her whole life to God and those Americans who had little reason to count their blessings. Living as a single woman in an industrial city, she learned first-hand about the sufferings of ordinary Americans. As well as serving as the Troy City missionary, she supported the Women's Temperance Union, campaigning to end the social evils of drink, and the Fresh Air Fund, a charity that arranged country excursions for poor urban children. She also worked for the less obviously deserving, including prisoners and prostitutes, regularly visiting them in jail and speaking for them in court. She was on vacation in Ocean Grove, a New Jersey seaside resort run on Christian principles as a permanent camp meeting, when it was reported that her arrest was imminent and a lengthy prison sentence likely. A former keeper at Matteawan, William E. Hopkins, accused of helping Perry in his April escape, had confessed and implicated her in the crime.
Newspapers were filled with speculation about her conduct and character. Acts that had once won her the respect of fellow Christians and, at worst, the mild scorn of sceptics, were now condemned as reckless or even corrupt. The police claimed that if any criminal convinced Amelia Haswell of his or her desire to lead a better life, she would help them avoid arrest by whatever means she could, in defiance of the law. Her relationship with Perry was described as 'mysterious', and the age difference between them became a constant theme in reports that bordered on character assassination. Although he clearly saw her as a 'Mother', detectives and reporters repeatedly insinuated that she was romantically infatuated with him. The sweeping criticism extended to her 'not very prepossessing' appearance. She was described as 'taller than the average woman, inclined to stoop', with 'a sallow complexion', and as being obliged 'to wear glasses'. The Sun struggled to be more positive: 'She is an intellectual looking woman, but would hardly be considered handsome.' Whatever her answer to possible criminal charges, Amelia Haswell had already been found guilty of being less than a perfect model of femininity.
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