Wanted Man

by Tamsin Spargo

  Two months later he snapped again. But it was not a doctor or keeper that he attacked. Once again he tried to destroy his own eyes. This time he got hold of a small piece of broken glass, about the size of a 10-cent piece, placed it under the eyelid of his sighted eye, and rubbed until it was past saving. He had completed the terrible work begun in Auburn and would never see again. It was evidently the act of someone who was seriously disturbed, but why would a man who had only weeks before been planning an escape decide to destroy his own eyes?

  Perry's first explanation, some time later, of why he had blinded himself was that he had been trying to win his freedom. He argued, in conversations leaked to the press, that because a blind man could pose no threat to society, the Governor might be merciful and set him free. It was, in other words, a logical, if terrible, extension of his compulsion to escape, to be free, at any cost. Was this the reason he did it? The trauma of prolonged sensory deprivation had clearly triggered a psychological collapse that made blinding himself seem a logical, if desperate, answer to his problems. If so, it did not work. Far from winning the Governor's sympathy, his act condemned him as hopelessly insane. And while he may have believed, at the time or in its aftermath, that he might gain something from his self-mutilation, the impulse behind it was certainly a distorted response to trauma.

  There were undoubtedly other subconscious catalysts. Amelia Haswell, his 'Mother', was being tried, harassed and ridiculed for being in love with him. The analogy with Oedipus who blinded himself when he discovered that he had been incestuously involved with his own mother seems all too obvious. Haswell certainly believed that he had been affected by her situation, but it was probably part of a context of mounting pressure and increasing isolation that contributed to Perry slipping into another breakdown where his destructive logic of escape took control. Although it is often overlooked, Oedipus was marked for tragedy not just by his incestuous relationship with his mother but by his murder of his own father. It was not Amelia Haswell's love that Perry longed for, but his father's. The man who had rejected him in childhood continued to dominate his life. If he had once hoped to win his father's attention, even admiration, by robbing trains, now he had brought shame on him.

  There may have been yet another catalyst. Self-blinding is almost totally confined to Christian cultures, and is associated with expiating sexual guilt by following, all too literally, scriptural commands to pluck out the offending eye. Predictably, it is Christian men in traditional communities who are racked with guilt about homosexuality who have most often destroyed their eyes. Could Perry have been reacting to guilt or shame about sexual relationships or encounters, either voluntary or forced, in his boyhood or more recently?

  As always with Perry, the truth is elusive. His persistence in completing the blinding months later suggests that he was in the grip of a combination of guilt, self-loathing, fear and hope. It is quite possible that he was so desperate for freedom that he was ready to sacrifice his sight, and the blinding was, in one sense, an ironic victory. He had obliterated the sight of bars, uniforms and guards, and the men in power would never again be able to deprive him of daylight as a punishment. The dungeon would hold one less horror.

  In the end, all the reasons for Perry's act will never be known. Throughout his life, he and others would reinvent that terrible moment to suit new purposes and arguments. The simplest and most convincing explanation was in a letter he wrote to Conant Sawyer. It suggests an extraordinary desire to exert control over his life, even at the most terrible cost, a desire that would define the rest of his life: T was born into the light of day, against my will of course. I now claim the right to put out that light.' As his relationships with his 'Mother' and father were threatened, Oliver Perry returned to the darkness of the womb to be reborn. And, most moving of all, he did so on his own birthday.

  Today the Matteawan Asylum buildings are part of Fishkill prison, a medium-security institution surrounded by high fences whose razor-wire catches the light. The Superintendent's turreted quarters are boarded up, judged unsound, but some of the old wards and guards' quarters are still accessible. There are few objects left from the old asylum days, although correction officers remember finding strange medical instruments that were swiftly discarded or dispatched to museums. But one original feature is being recycled: the stained-glass windows that once decorated the Superintendent's rooms are being removed by inmates, under supervision, and placed in their dormitories. 'So the men can have a better view,' an officer remarked. Fishkill is also pioneering a new scheme called 'Puppies in Prison', and inmates can be seen walking dogs in the yard. In an ironic twist of history, the men in Perry's old 'home' are training seeing-eye dogs for the blind.

  When Perry's blinding was leaked to the press, the reporters who had been mesmerized by Perry in the past thrilled their readers with accounts of his degeneration into madness. One insisted that 'sensible people are tired of Perry, and wish him to sink into oblivion where he belongs'. His shocking transformation seemed complete and as he struggled to cope with life as a blind man in an asylum, he was consigned not quite to oblivion but to near obscurity. The daring, debonair robber was forgotten and the blind 'lunatic' soon began to disappear as well.

  In July 1896 Edward Clifford, who had captured Perry on the shore of the Hudson River, fell victim to his success. Clifford was popular, a decent, hard-working ex-policeman who had quit the force rather than get involved in corrupt politics. But he could not cope with the new prosperity and celebrity he acquired by capturing Perry. He lost his job because of excessive drinking and then shocked everyone by shooting the man who sacked him. Clifford was tried, found guilty of murder in the first degree, and sentenced to death by a familiar figure from the Jersey City legal farce, Justice Lippincott. His attorney, who had acted for Perry, tried once more to exploit loopholes in the law but the verdict was confirmed.

  But there would be a long wait in jail for Edward Clifford, as appeals on the basis of temporary insanity continued, funded by popular benefits organized by none other than Chief Kelly. Clifford was finally hanged on 8 May 1900. If the four-year delay was long by the standards of the time, his execution was certainly cruel and unusual punishment: the drop failed to break Clifford's neck and it took him eighteen minutes to die of slow strangulation.

  Perry also seems to have had a lasting impact on one of his Jersey cellmates. Paul Genz had finally been given the death sentence he had hoped for before Perry's arrival in the jail, but had rediscovered the will to live. Had his encounter with a man who fought so hard for freedom encouraged him not to give up so easily on life? His lawyers certainly used some of the same techniques as Perry's to get a reprieve, but it was only temporary. Just before he died, in 1897, like Perry he tried to stab himself in the eye. Was he genuinely deranged by fear or trying to feign insanity to save his life? In the end he faced the hangman calmly, but, like Edward Clifford, he took a long time to die: after the 'drop' he lived, hands clenching and unclenching, for fourteen minutes. Years later it was revealed that this was a signal to an opponent of capital punishment who wanted proof of the cruelty of hanging.

  Perry, meanwhile, gradually regained some psychological balance. Dramatic as his breakdown had been, like the first episode that had taken him to Matteawan, it subsided. He would always be volatile, prone to violent mood swings and paranoia, but he remained intelligent, rational and capable. Little is known about his daily life in Matteawan but there are clear signs that he was not a broken man. He had occasional visits from Amelia Haswell, and he showed his determination once again, this time by overcoming the handicaps of blindness and imprisonment to write. He had always enjoyed writing when he was allowed pencil and paper. Now he had to rely on someone else to do the writing but when he was able to find a transcriber, he had an outlet that would become essential to his survival.

  In October 1897, about two years after his return to Matteawan, a local newspaper published one of Perry's poems, noting that the one-time robber was
'considerable of a poet'. There is no surviving copy of the entire poem but a fragment remains on a torn newspaper. It told a conventional tale of a naughty boy's progress into a life of crime and ended with a defiant assertion that:

  I don't intend to serve this out

  Or even let despair,

  Deprive me of my liberty

  Or give me one grey hair.

  The conclusion was intriguing. Surely as a blind man, certified once more as insane, he was not planning another escape? He was obviously not suicidal. So how was he planning to avoid serving out his sentence?

  The plan soon became clear. Perry, the celebrity outlaw, hoped to use the press to engage public sympathy for an appeal to be released as a blind man who could do no harm. The poem was sent to the paper by one of Perry's supporters, probably Amelia Haswell, who also relayed his renewed allegations of abuses in the asylum. It was a sensible enough idea, but by now the press and public were more interested in Perry the character than Perry the protestor or Perry the poet. Since his return to the asylum he no longer made the front pages. Instead he was now a curiosity, almost a grotesque, to be paraded on the pages of the illustrated supplements published with weekend editions.

  The New York Tribune's interpretation or Ferry s 'Blinding Machine'.

  The most extraordinary feature was in the New York Tribune in 1899. In it Perry described his blinding. Contrary to the official report, Perry claimed that he had devised an intricate blinding ma­chine: T thought it out very carefully. I was very ingenious, even as a child.' He described constructing a blinding machine with wood, nails, cord and a candle, all smuggled into his cell or made " from gifts, including a small dumb bell, meant for exercising, sent by friends. He had, he claimed, put sharpened nails through a piece of herring box, at exactly the right distance to pierce his eyes, and used the dumbbell to weight the board. Then he rigged up a pulley system above his bed that used a burning candle to release the weighted board so that it would drop into his eyes. Then, he said, he took some opium that he had obtained from a friend, lit the candle and waited for the machine to do its work.

  Perry claimed that the Auburn officials had suppressed the story of his machine in order to avoid publicity. The apparatus, which he described in extraordinary detail, sounds impossible to construct in a prison, even for a man of Perry's evident ingenuity, but it is possible that he had managed to conceal the equipment he described in his cell, given the vagaries of prison security at the time. Even so, he was almost certainly embellishing the truth, hoping to turn the traumatic event that had labelled him a madman into a story of skill and daring, to recall, if not rival, those of his robberies. The compulsion to display his intelligence and skill that accompanied his masochistic recklessness was evidently as strong as ever. In the past it had charmed and impressed, now it merely seemed to prove his lunacy. The paper that printed his story even concluded that Perry's 'bump of self-esteem is, so to say, affected with elephantiasis, so that he loves notoriety with a consuming passion. And he has sought it in spectacular ways that would have fed the soul of Tom Sawyer.' Once Perry had been able to use the press even as it used him. The relationship was no longer mutually beneficial.

  If Perry had not been judged an insane fantasist, his arguments easily dismissed as deranged, his criticisms of the institutions in which he was held might have found a more receptive audience. As the century drew to a close, an increasing number of people felt that the American dream was being turned to nightmare by unregulated business, political indifference and corruption, and a lack of welfare for the poor. New York's prisons came under mounting pressure from reformers, as the sheer number of convicts made primitive conditions intolerable. To some the prisons were a moral affront, to others examples of old-fashioned inefficiency in a system that gave powerful posts to friends and political allies rather than the able or experienced. Liberals and pragmatists alike pressed for curbs to the power of wardens and superintendents who ran them like private kingdoms. Over the coming decades there would be bitter battles over the correctional system, but in 1900 drastic measures were needed to avoid the immediate threat of violent insurrection.

  Matteawan may have had medical aspirations, but it was no exception and by 1900 was a cause for real concern. Designed to hold 550 patients, it now housed 719. Henry Allison officially reported that conditions were dangerous: about 200 patients slept in corridors, and as there was inadequate housing for keepers, many were obliged to lodge outside, leading to security problems. Rumours of the state's solution, moving men to a new asylum within the grounds of Clinton prison in the village of Dannemora in the far north-east, just fifteen miles south of the Canadian border, made matters worse. Inmates dreaded being sent into what sounded like total isolation and panic ensued. In October a crowd of patients attacked their keepers in a mass escape attempt; although order was eventually restored, seven men got away. The following month, the first group of patients was transferred to the new asylum. This was designed to hold men who, like Perry, had been certified and, some might argue, driven insane while serving sentences; Matteawan would now only hold women and men judged insane at their trial. Sheer numbers meant that the transfer would be done in groups over the next year.

  Perry, meanwhile, was continuing, with the assistance of friends, to seek public support for a pardon from the Governor. In 1901 a selection of his poetry was published in the New York Journal, William Randolph Hearst's rival to Pulitzer's World, the paper that had previously got the best Perry stories.

  One poem, called 'Sweetheart', was addressed to an anonymous 'friend', a young woman whose identity is still unknown. The 'sweetheart' was possibly one of Perry's younger Christian supporters, possibly a friend of Amelia Haswell's, but she may have been an invention. Perry was still adept, even in an asylum, at tapping into the concerns of his audience. This poem neatly recalled the lost comforts of romance and home that Perry had once hinted at as the catalyst for his crimes:

  I often feign to be with thee,

  And to talk with thee and chat,

  But letters are no use to me,

  I am sightless - you know that,

  Yet the light I cannot moan,

  Nor your pretty eyes to meet,

  But break the bar and let me home,

  To your heart so pure and sweet.

  The second poem was dedicated to his father:

  0 father, list ye to my prayer,

  That tho' I oft did blunder

  1 hope once more to be with thee,

  Ne'er again to break asunder.

  While the sentiments, like those in the first poem, may have been designed to appeal to tender-hearted readers, there is a directness about the verse, despite its conventional language, that suggests it was heartfelt. Perry had angrily refuted rumours that his father had been terrified that his son would hunt him down when he escaped from Matteawan and clearly still yearned for his support.

  The other poems were more explicitly concerned with his desire to be pardoned. One was addressed to the Governor, Republican Benjamin Odell, the other, the best of his poems, to an even higher power, calling on the 'Great Light divine' to:

  Flash down into this earthly hell

  Where lying brutes their libels tell

  And then, O, Christ, if it be right,

  Show me a friend of holy might

  Present some one from the outside world

  Who shall not cry, 'Demented, absurd'.

  But demented and absurd was precisely what most people believed Oliver Perry to be, whatever his true condition. His campaign to be pardoned gained little momentum and a publicized fight with a fellow inmate damaged his cause. Its timing could not have been worse. Reformers had long argued that because when judged insane a convict could be held well beyond the end of his original sentence, even for life, he had little incentive to good behaviour. Finally, in 1901, a bill was passed to grant insane convicts the possibility of commutation of sentences. Perry's poems might have elicited public sympathy, but any
official record of misconduct, even provoked, could ruin his chance of proving his sanity and winning his freedom.

  The following spring he tried to make his case in person, when Governor Odell visited the asylum. Dr Allison met the Governor and his party, which included members of his family as well as state officials, at the ferry and escorted them on a tour of the institution. Just before his visit Odell had issued pardons for two Matteawan inmates, raising the hopes of many patients. The visitors asked to see the most notorious inmates, including Perry. Asked to present themselves for 'inspection', the patients seized their chance. First Quimbo Appo, a well-known old Chinese man, sent to Matteawan after a series of grisly murders, asked for a pardon so that he might return to China. When Odell refused, Appo reportedly became threatening and was dragged away. Perry tried a more diplomatic approach, shaking the Governor's hand and presenting a petition, signed by many of his supporters, for his release. Odell listened politely but, according to a report, 'left him with little hope'. The Governor finally fled when a Polish woman tried to show him the marks of the hypodermic needle on her arm that she claimed had driven her mad. Appo died in the institution, but some of the other hopeful patients did leave Matteawan before too long. On Wednesday, 5 June 1902, thirty-five men, including Perry, now thirty-seven years old, set out on the long railroad journey not to freedom, but to Danne­mora.

  CAPTER 17

  Mountain Bughouse 216

  THE RAILROAD journey upstate from Beacon to Platts-burgh, the nearest stop to the village of Dannemora, is truly spectacular. First the train runs alongside the wide