Wanted Man

by Tamsin Spargo

  Oliver Perry died at 6.32 a.m. on 5 September 1930, just days before his sixty-fifth birthday. He had served thirty-eight years of his sentence and had spent nearly forty-five years in institutions, fighting for his freedom. The cause given on his death certificate was 'Strangulated Left Inguinal Hernia', while contributory causes were listed as an operation, conducted in the hospital three days earlier, a chronic heart infection and chronic mental condition.

  The operation may have been to correct a hernia, or to remedy a different problem, such as appendicitis, inadvertently causing a hernia by cutting through the abdominal wall. No record survives and no autopsy was conducted. But in either case, weakened by decades of abuse and struggle, his body had, it seems, quite literally snapped. It is a poignant coincidence that Perry almost certainly died from the same injury that he had suffered after his dramatic chase through the snow.

  The death certificate suggests almost nothing about his life. It states that his birthplace, original occupation and marital status were unknown. One statement stands out, the only suggestion that he belonged, or wanted to belong, to anyone at all: his father's name, 'Oliver H. Perry'.

  Perry's death was barely noticed. One newspaper reported the passing of 'Charles Curtiss Perry', while another simply commented, 'No relatives have been located. So, Perry, inoffensive youth who turned out to be one of the most desperate bandits of his time, lies in a felon's grave.' In the press which had used him, and which he had used in return, Oliver Perry was a forgotten man: an outlaw in an age of gangsters. Nobody thought to dramatize his story as they would those of the outlaws he was judged to have 'outdone': in the cinemas, the new tales of the Old West had no place for a New Yorker, no matter how daring his crimes. But Oliver Perry had, and has, an afterlife.

  In the hospital itself, he left such an impression that attendants who first worked there years after his death swore they had known 'Old Blind-Eye Perry'. In the stories of his daring crimes that sent Depression-era treasure-seekers out to dig for gold in the hills, in the careful narratives by railroad aficionados, in cartoons and in bedtime stories, traces of Perry survived.

  Fittingly, his name has also been written into the landscape of the Mohawk valley near the site of his first robbery. Although the hunt for his treasure has ended, boys and girls in Utica still know of a special place to go, to be alone, to hide, to get away. It is one of those exciting but scary places that become the landmarks of remembered childhood. 'Perry's Cave', where he hid after the robbery, is now the only physical memorial to a man who was once one of America's most notorious, most wanted men: Oliver Curtis Perry.

  I PUT OFF visiting the Dannemora graveyard for a long time. While I was looking for Oliver Perry, I didn't want to see his grave. Eventually, feeling that I had to, I wrote to the prison authorities and asked if I might visit it and take a photograph. After some negotiation they agreed, but warned me that it would not be easy to find. There are no names on the gravestones of men who died in the Dannemora State Hospital, only numbers, those allotted when they entered the institution. I reminded myself that it was probably a matter of confidentiality, or economy, rather than indifference. But there was something terrible about the fact that these men, cut off for so long from family and society, should, in the end, still have only institutional identities.

  The graveyard for Clinton prison is by the main road, easily accessible to visitors. The final resting place of the prisoners judged insane is, as they were, hidden from public view. Their bodies could be claimed for private burial, but those whose families could not, or would not, come for them were interred in a remote part of the grounds. It occurred to me as I drove with a prison official from the hospital buildings, past the prison farm to the edge of the forest that sweeps up the mountainside, that I was one of very few people who had visited the graves of these unwanted men. I thought of Perry asking to be buried 'alongside dear Blanchy', and of the respectable monument, standing tall in the Syracuse cemetery, that now holds all the family but one.

  We passed a small area designated as the Jewish burial ground, then continued on foot across rougher terrain. My guide was friendly and apologetic. They had been trying, he explained, to restore the prison graveyards and had made good progress with the main cemetery. But this one, in a fitting parallel to the history of New York's prison reform, was the last to be renovated. We walked to a sloping field of scrubby grass, where the roots of fir trees tangled across stones the size of house bricks. This was the graveyard. Some of the grass had recently been cut, possibly for my visit, and I could just about discern that the stones were in rows, but only a dozen or so were visible, standing a few inches clear of the earth. These were the graves of the unclaimed men. I had spent years searching for Perry and now I was looking again. I rubbed the earth from half-submerged stones and peered to decipher numbers eroded by decades of rain and ice. But there was no sign of 216.

  On the slope above the stones, under tree roots that have gradually snaked downwards, and soil carried by spring mudslides as the snows of winter melt, lie more graves. There men buried by the guards have been buried again, and the stones, the markers of their prison identities, covered over. As I wiped the earth from my hands and walked among the tangled roots, I suddenly found myself smiling. For a man who had fought the system so ferociously that he sacrificed his own body and mind to have been found, finally, in an allocated plot, identified for ever by his prison number, would have seemed like defeat. Instead his body has been covered by the wildness of nature as it reclaims the land from the state. Perry has escaped one last time.

  It seemed a fitting, and open, conclusion to my search. Just as his boyhood home had disappeared, enveloped in the broadleaf woodland of the Mohawk valley, so his grave had been subsumed within the darker forest of the Adirondacks. The traces of his life that I had found in the years of looking had brought me closer to him than I had ever expected, but he was still out of reach. The daring robber I had set out to find turned out to be America's broken dream boy, an unwanted child determined to make his mark in a society whose passions and problems he epitomized. His daring crimes that had first caught my eye had made him an instant celebrity, but it was his long struggle to survive, to preserve his identity in a system designed to reduce him to a number that had commanded my respect. I had found the courage, strength and spirit that I had looked for in an outlaw lover, riding free across the Western landscape of my fantasy, in a man who was confined in institutions almost all his life. And looking for the man of my dreams had changed me.

  Instead of restoring my imagined scene of childhood innocence, or transporting me into a romantic fantasy, my search had taken me into a darker, harsher world. But there I encountered someone with more determination to savour even life's bitter pleasures than I could have imagined. In the years after I first saw his picture, Oliver Perry had charmed, shocked, infuriated and moved me, as he had the men and women he encountered in his lifetime. In my research I had tried my best, as they had, to pin him down. At times I came quite close to knowing something of what, and who, he was. I saw him at his best and at his worst. But he always escaped. I could never make him mine. And, in the end, I was glad that I could not.

  In my strange relationship with Oliver Perry I learned that no matter how much we yearn to belong, to possess and be possessed by anyone, parent, forbidden sweetheart or wanted man, in the end we are alone. When we are children and when we are grown, our desires must always leave us wanting.

  Acknowledgements

  I COULD FILL another book with the names of all the people who have helped in my search for Oliver Perry and in my efforts to tell his story. These acknowledgements are only a suggestion of my gratitude to them all. While it feels like a minor betrayal of Perry's memory, I must first thank the Department of Correctional Services of the State of New York, especially Superintendents William Mazzuca, Daniel Senkowski and Hans Walker, Deputy Superintendents Paul Annatts and Jimmie Harris, Plant Superintendent Dale Gordon, Lt G. Wilkers
on, Faculty Historian Michael Pettigrass, Correction Officer Michael O'Sul-livan and Dr Leonard I. Morgenbesser. Whatever happened in the past, the current representatives of New York's Correctional Services could not have been more courteous or helpful. I would also like to thank the staff of the New York State Archives, especially Dr William Evans and Dr James Folts, who helped me locate Perry's records and writings. Dr John R. Sellers and Mrs Nan Ernst, of the Library of Congress, kindly allowed me to work with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency archive before cataloguing.

  The following individuals, in New York and further afield, all gave me invaluable help and encouragement: Rebekah Ambrose, Peter Bedrossian, Joe Bendle, Ruby Biswas, Michael V. Carlisle, Doreen Chaky, Beverly Choltco-Devlin, Dorothea Cooper, Phil Cubbin, Barbara Dix, Thomas G. Eldred, Andi Evangelist, Deborah J. Ferrell, Carlton Gilroy, Malcolm Goodelle, Hope V. Hatch, Edward Knoblauch, Virginia LaGoy, Michael Martin, Nancy Martin, Eileen McHugh, Rick Miller and the National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History, Sharon O'Brien, Roy O'Dell, Jeanette Shiel, Tom McCarthy of the New York Correctional History Society, Wayne Miller of the Feinberg Library, Joan Van Voorhis, Paul Paciello, Richard Palmer, Emma Parry, Joe Price, Mat Rapacz, Ruth Rosenberg-Naparsteck, Wendy Scalfaro, Joe Sim, Daniel Smith, Debra Staley, Gina Stankivitz, and Kelly Yacobucci-Farquahar. I would also like to thank colleagues and students, too many to list, at Liverpool John Moores University for their support and suggestions.

  I have very special memories of my research in upstate New York because of the good company, hospitality and kindness of Mark de Lawyer, Dawn Capece, Marta Zimmerman, Larry-Ann Evans, Robert Weiss and Ann Rowland and David. Without the enthusiasm and encouragement of James Friel and Peter Wheeler, the passionate advocacy of Jane Turnbull, and the skill and sensitivity of Alexandra Pringle, Chiki Sarkar and their colleagues at Bloomsbury, my obsession with Oliver Perry would have remained a private matter.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Tamsin Spargo was born and raised in Cornwall. She worked as a reporter, then as an actor, before embarking on her current career as a cultural historian. She is Reader in Cultural History and Director of the School of Media, Critical and Creative Arts at Liverpool John Moores University. Her academic works include The Writing of John Bunyan, Foucault and Queer Theory and Reading the Past: Literature and History.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  The text of this book is set in Linotype Sabon, named after the type founder, Jacques Sabon. It was designed by Jan Tschichold and jointly developed by Linotype, Monotype and Stempel, in response to a need for a typeface to be available in identical form for mechanical hot metal composition and hand composition using foundry type.

  Tschichold based his design for Sabon roman on a font engraved by Garamond, and Sabon italic on a font by Granjon. It was first used in 1966 and has proved an enduring modern classic.