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CHAPTER FOURTEEN ▪
EXTREME HAZARDS
“In ourselves our safety must be
sought.
By our own right hand it must be wrought.”
—William Wordsworth
All of us will encounter people in our lives who alarm us or might pose some hazard, but as you’ve seen, a prominent public figure can have literally hundreds of people seeking unwanted encounters. I am not talking about fans; I am talking about people who feel they are under orders from God to harm a famous person, or who believe they are destined to marry a particular star, or who believe some media figure is being held hostage, and on and on. These cases have lessons any of us can benefit from. I want to present one which will demonstrate that even the most extreme safety hazards are manageable.
This book has explored obsessions, death threats, stalking, mental illness, child abuse, multiple shootings, and children who kill their parents. Amazingly, there is one case that brings all these elements together, a virtual hall of fame of American violence.
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At about four P.M.on July 20th, 1983, I was at a hotel in Los Angeles to meet with a client who was finishing a public appearance event. As I crossed the lobby, I was waved over by one of several people assigned to my client from my company’s Protective Security Division (PSD). He told me about an important radio call from our office that he suggested I take in one of our cars. As always, I found the cars lined up, drivers at the ready, fully prepared for an “unscheduled departure,” our euphemism for an emergency.
The report I received was an alarming one; it would clear my schedule for that day and for the thirty days that followed: “Police in Jennings County, Louisiana, have discovered the bodies of five people brutally murdered. The lead suspect is Michael Perry.”
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It was not the first time I’d heard that name. Michael Perry was among thousands of mentally ill pursuers my office had under assessment, but one of the very few we placed in the highest hazard category. The radio call was personal to me because the public figure Perry was obsessed with was not only a long time client, she was also a dear friend.
The client Perry was obsessed with is an internationally known recording artist and film actress. She already had a team of PSD agents who’d been assigned to her home for about a year. The precaution of full-time bodyguards had been undertaken in part because we predicted that Perry might show up and in part because of another murderous stalker (Ralph Nau). The radio crackled with bulletins between my office and the security personnel at my client’s house in Malibu. Someone from our Threat Assessment and Management division (TAM) was already speaking with local police, and a meeting was scheduled for me at the FBI field office.
Alarming reports are not uncommon for major media figures, but usually the more you learn about a situation the less serious it turns out to be. The exact opposite happened in the Michael Perry case. While one person from TAM reviewed our files on Perry, another gathered information from police in Jennings County, Louisiana.
To insulate clients from the routine management of safety issues, I maintain a policy of not telling them about particular cases unless there is something they must personally do. The Perry matter had reached that point and here is what I intended to tell my client: Perry had been obsessed with her for about two years. He was an accomplished survivalist who had been to Los Angeles several times in pursuit of her. Perry’s parents were among the homicide victims, and a high-powered rifle and at least two handguns were missing from their home. Perry had had more than enough time to reach Los Angeles. He had recently told a psychiatrist that my client was “evil and should be killed.”
Before making that call, however, I was informed of one more detail that changed everything. Based on what I learned about a few words Perry had written on a sheet of paper found at the murder scene, I did something I’d never done before and haven’t done since, even though clients have faced very serious hazards. I called my client and asked her to pack for a few days because I’d be there within a half hour to pick her up and take her to a hotel. Given what I now knew, I didn’t feel we could adequately protect her at her home, even with a team of bodyguards.
By the time I got to my client’s neighborhood, the street had been closed by police, and a sheriff’s helicopter was buzzing loudly overhead. Within minutes, I was answering my client’s anxious questions as we drove away from her home followed closely by a PSD backup car. We’d be met at the hotel by two more PSD people. We would enter through a loading dock and be taken upstairs via a service elevator. A room near my client’s suite was being modified to serve as a security command center.
Two people from my office had already left Los Angeles bound for Louisiana. By the time they got to the murder scene the next morning, the bodies had been removed, but photos revealed a gruesome aspect of the homicides: Perry had shot out his parents’ eyes with a shotgun. He also killed an infant nephew in the same house, and then broke into another house and killed two more people.
In the living room, we saw that he’d fired several shotgun blasts into a wall heater. The damaged heater was a mystery we’d solve the next day, along with why he had shot out the eyes of his victims, but at that point, we were looking past these details in search of a single sheet of paper.
Near where the bodies were found was a small pad printed up as a promotion for a local dry-cleaner. On the top page was a collection of names, some crossed out then re-written, some intersected by lines that connected them to other names, some circled, some underlined, some in a column, others separated into groups of three or four. The names and lines were Perry’s efforts to narrow down to ten the number of people he intended to kill. Some were in Louisiana, one in Texas, one in Washington, D.C., and one in Malibu (the one that concerned me most). Little could any of these people have known that they were part of a bizarre contest between the enemies of Michael Perry. Little could they have known that in a small, dingy house in Louisiana, a man sitting with the bodies of three relatives he’d just shot was calmly and studiously weighing whether they would live or die.
Perry wrote the word sky near the names of those he’d killed already, and he crossed out some others that didn’t make his top ten. When he was done, my client’s name remained. Now I had to find Michael Perry.
His list not only brought us to the humid bayou, but started my excavation of Perry’s history. In the weeks that followed, I would come to know his family and the people of Jennings County very well, come to know his schizophrenic sister, the doctors he’d told about his plan to kill people in “groups of ten,” the coroner who would later Fed Ex us plaster casts of Perry’s shoeprints from the murder scene, the neighbor boy who told us how Perry had decapitated his dog, the librarian who had lent Perry the books on survivalism that made him so hard to catch. I would soon know Michael Perry better than anyone else had ever wanted to know him.
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While people from my office began their second day in Louisiana, others quickly hustled my client from the hotel to a safe-house we rented out of state. Others pursued leads in California, Nevada, Texas, Washington, D.C, New York, and even Africa. In Louisiana, Jennings County’s small sheriff’s department placed all three of its investigators on the Michael Perry case; my office added another fourteen people to the search.
Grace and Chester Perry had long ago predicted that their son would someday kill them. Whenever he was in town, his mother locked herself in the house, and he was rarely allowed in unless his father was home. They kept family guns hidden, paid Perry money to leave whenever he visited, and slept easier when he was off on one of his trips to California (looking for my client). It is unclear exactly when he got angry enough to orphan himself, but it may have been at seven years old, when, according to him, his mother pushed him against the wall heater in their home. Certainly the disfiguring and (to him) shameful burns on his legs daily reminded him of that incident. The shotgun blasts at the heater was a too-little, too-late revenge that had waited more than twenty years.
As Michael Perry grew up, stories about him were always making the rounds, and neighbors had given up trying to figure out why he did the bizarre things he did. For example, he liked to be called by the nickname Crab, but then hired a lawyer to legally change his name to Eye. Everybody thought it was just another of his senseless ideas, but it did make sense. Michael Perry hadn’t been the only six-year-old whose father came home from work and questioned him about his various transgressions of the day, such as riding his bike in the street. He was, however, probably the only one whose father knew the details of each and every misdeed. Perry’s father had been so uncannily accurate because a neighbor we interviewed had agreed to watch the boy from her porch and then report his activities to Chester. His father told Michael: “When I go to work, I leave my eyes at home.” Perry spent twenty-eight years trying to hide from the scrutiny of those eyes; he even tried to symbolically become an Eye. Then on July 19th, 1983, he closed his father’s eyes forever.
The Perry house was built on foot-high stilts, and a child might predictably fear what was under there, as many fear what is beneath the bed. But unlike those of most children, Perry’s fears were not soothed, and they grew into an elaborate delusion that dead bodies were rising from a chamber beneath the floor.
With so much to occupy his pathology right at home, why did Perry’s mind wander to a famous woman who lived 1,500 miles away? Why did he believe he would find his peace by killing her? I would know soon enough.
There was another prominent woman on his list: Sandra Day O’Connor, who’d just been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Why did she get Perry’s attention? “Because no woman should be above a man,” he later explained.
He was used to powerful women; he’d been raised, as nearly all children are, by the most powerful woman in the world: his mother. Her power was misused, he felt, and his anger over it consumed him. Though the burns from the heater were long healed, Perry still wrapped his legs in Ace bandages and never bared them in public. After returning from one of his stalking trips to Malibu, he beat his mother so badly that he was arrested and committed to a mental hospital. He quickly escaped and went right back to her house. Sheriff’s deputies found him there, but his mother refused to let them take Perry back into custody. They persisted, but she resisted and she prevailed. The next time deputies came to her home, the strong and domineering woman would be dead.
Within a day of the murders, sociologist Walt Risler, a pioneering thinker in the field of predicting violence and a full-time consultant to our office for more than a decade, was on his way to Louisiana. There he interviewed family members, reviewed Perry’s writings, and studied other evidence. Risler found the murder scene to be fertile ground for just the kind of madness deciphering he was so expert at. In a crib in the living room, Perry had piled an assortment of items: a crucifix, a pillow, three family photos face down, a wall plaque of the Virgin Mary, and a ceramic crab. This was a shrine of meaning to only Michael Perry until Risler began putting the pieces together.
It was fair to assume that Perry was in one of three places or somewhere between them: still in Louisiana in pursuit of local victims on his list; in Washington, D.C. stalking Sandra Day O’Connor; or in Malibu, likely in the thousands of acres of wilderness behind my client’s home. Predicting that he might act out violently was simple; we’d done that even before the murders. The difficult questions to answer were how he would go about encountering his victims and how patient he would be.
One late night, sitting in my office reviewing case material for the hundredth time, I noted a report indicating that a book written by expert tracker Tom Brown was missing from the Jennings County Library. We knew that Perry had once checked out another book by Brown called The Search. Did Perry use the information in these books to escape detection while he lived secretly in the hills behind my client’s home? Could he be just a few feet off a path as we walked obliviously by him? I knew whom to ask.
Tom Brown had authored more than a dozen books on tracking and on nature, and he had been called in to search for dangerous men before. He was not anxious to do it again, but in an hour-long phone call, I convinced the wary and reluctant tracker to fly to Los Angeles and help us find Michael Perry. I picked him up at the airport, a wiry man with the quiet seriousness of Clint Eastwood. As I drove him to a waiting helicopter, he asked me questions about Perry: What kind of food does he like? Does he eat meat? Does he smoke? Tell me about his shoes. What kind of clothes does he wear? Tell me what his hair is like.
Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, Brown was high above the Malibu hills surrounding my client’s home, looking for any sign of Perry. Some firemen who had been shown a picture of Perry told us about a makeshift camp where they’d seen him some months before, and Tom over-flew the area, pointing out spots that PSD agents then checked out on foot or horseback. When he searched on the ground, he was accompanied by armed PSD agents, and during the few days they spent together, he taught them some of what he knew about tracking. Brown was an absolute marvel. He could tell you where a person had walked, slept, even paused. His intuition was informed by a subtle and sometimes odd series of signals: bent weeds, unsettled pebbles, shadows in the dust, and other details most people would look right past.
Brown explained to me that “When somebody moves something in your house, you notice it. When somebody moves something in the woods, I notice it.”
In a backpack, one of the PSD agents carried a plaster cast of a shoe-print taken from the dirt outside the murder scene. Occasionally Brown would ask to have it brought out and he’d compare it to some small ridge or depression in the dust.
One afternoon after I dropped Brown back at his hotel for a brief rest, I was told by radio that a Malibu resident a mile or so from my client’s home had reported that a strange man had knocked on the door and asked questions about “the magic movie star.” He had headed up the hill on foot. I sped back to my client’s house, knowing I’d get there before someone who was walking. When I arrived, several sheriff’s deputies had joined two PSD people. We waited for about thirty minutes, and then the dogs began barking and running up the side of a hill.
Everyone followed the dogs, and soon we could clearly see a man crawling through the brush. Some sheriff’s deputies ran around behind him, and a police helicopter descended on him from above. In a flash of everyone’s adrenaline, the intruder was on the ground, handcuffed and scuffling. I rushed up the hill to identify him for the deputies, hoping the search for Michael Perry had just ended. He was lifted up and seated on the dirt looking right at me, and I recognized him immediately—but he wasn’t Michael Perry. He was Warren P., another mentally ill pursuer, whom we had interviewed years before, and heard from occasionally. He was a lovesick man who hoped to marry my client.
Though worthy of assessment, Warren was without sinister intent; he was more of a tragic figure than a dangerous one. His bad luck had carried him through years of effort and across thousands of miles, finally getting him to my client’s home, the mecca of his romantic delusions, but on the worst possible afternoon for a visit. As he was walked to one of the sheriff’s cars, he just kept repeating, “I had no idea the security would be this tight.”
Late the next night, three PSD agents searching the area around my client’s property using some of Tom Brown’s techniques found a suspicious-looking trail. They took me there, and shone their flashlights parallel to the ground, showing me the patters in the dust. I confess I didn’t see what they saw, but we all followed along, through a gully and into the dark brush. We were silent, hoping to find Perry and on some level hoping not to. Ahead of us we saw what even I could tell was a shelter built of gathered wood and twigs. We moved toward it, and as we got closer we could see that nobody was there.
Inside we found evidence that it was indeed the home of someone pursuing my client: Amid the filthy clothes we found the sleeve of one of her record albums. There was also a fork, some matches, and a crude weapon called a bola, made from two rocks tied to the end of a length of rope. As we crawled out of the hut, we could see through a clearing directly to where my client drove by each day on her way to and from home. If Michael Perry lived here, he likely surveilled her from this spot.
It did not take long before we heard the sounds of someone moving toward us through the brush. In the moonlight, we held our breath and watched a man approach. He had a mess of dark hair, more than I thought Perry could have grown in the time he’d been at large. The man was wearing a crown on his head made of twigs and leaves. Pounced on from all sides, he yelled out, “I’m the king, I’m the King!” as he was handcuffed. It wasn’t Perry, but still another mentally ill pursuer. This one was here to watch over my client, his “queen.”
(Those two obsessed men living in my client’s orbit during the Perry case make clear just how menacing public life can be. The next time you see one of those frequent tabloid reports about some star’s being stalked by a “crazed fan,” you’ll know how silly the hype is—you could choose almost any star almost any day and that story would be true. All that makes it “news” is that a tabloid needed a headline.)
Just as we might come upon Michael Perry in Malibu at any moment, Walt Risler and our investigator might find him in the reeds along the marshy waterways around Jennings County. Some lucky (or, if not careful, unlucky) State trooper might find him speeding in Chester Perry’s Oldsmobile down the highway, or the U.S. Supreme Court police might find him wandering the halls of the historic building in search of Sandra Day O’Connor.
Walt Risler, swimming deepest in the waters of Perry’s delusions, concluded that Washington, D.C. and Malibu were a Perry-esque Sodom and Gomorrah. Weighing everything he’d learned about the case, Risler predicted that Perry was on his way to the nation’s capitol to kill Justice O’Connor. Based on this, I made contact with a seasoned Washington, D.C. homicide investigator named Tom Kilcullen and filled him in on the case and Risler’s opinion. Kilcullen was a creative thinker who followed up on several leads in the Washington area.
Our efforts in Malibu continued with daily interviews of people who might have seen Perry. We asked local shopkeepers to keep us informed of anyone inquiring about my client, and we urged special attentiveness at the Malibu library. That’s because a search of Grace and Chester Perry’s phone records had revealed that their son had called them collect from there a few times during one of his visits to California. Another call on those records was more chilling. Six months earlier, there’d been a small newspaper report about my client’s frequenting a particular Beverly Hills shop. The phone records revealed that Perry had called his parents from the phone booth right outside that shop. We were dealing with a capable stalker.
To learn what Perry might know about his own manhunt, I reviewed newspaper stories about the case. Scanning USA TODAY during those weeks was interesting because I would come to a headline like “Suspect in Five Murders…,” and it wouldn’t be Perry; “Mass Killer Still at Large…,” and it wouldn’t be Perry; “Man Wanted for Family Slayings…,” and it wouldn’t be Perry. Only in America.
For eleven days, teams in different parts of the country looked for a man who hated to be looked at, until July 31, when Risler’s prediction proved correct. Police in Washington, D.C., received a call from a sleazy hotel: A guest had reportedly stolen a radio from another guest. An officer was dispatched to question the two derelict oddballs who’d been annoying each other, and he concluded that nothing illegal had happened. The minor dispute call would be over once the officer completed the routine step of checking each man for any arrest warrants. He asked them to wait a moment while the results of the computer search came over his radio. The unimportant matter became the most important of that officer’s career because standing patiently in front of him was mass-murderer, Michael Perry.
Within an hour, Detective Kilcullen called me and offered to let me talk to Perry, who was now in his custody. Just that quickly, the murderous stalker who had dominated my thoughts every moment for almost two weeks was on the other end of the phone, ready to chat.
Without preparation, I stumbled into an
interview with the nation’s most wanted killer. We knew he’d been
to my client’s home, so I first asked him about that. He lied
without hesitation, sounding like a fast-talking, street-wise con
man.
Perry: I don’t think I’ve ever been to her house, sir. I don’t think so. I really don’t.
GdeB: Really?
Perry: Right. I really don’t.
GdeB: Have you ever been to California at all?
Perry: Well, I just went swimming at the
beach, you know, and did some camping; that’s all.
Then, without my even asking, he told me how
my client fit in to his reasons for killing.
Perry: When she was in that movie, and
whenever she turned around, she had quite a different face, you
know. She looked like my mother back in 1961, you know, the face
that my mother had. It was 1961, my mother walked into the room,
and I was up way before anyone else. And my mother walked in and
she had this ugly-looking face, and I looked at this, and she
turned her head and rubbed her shoulder. And that face in that
movie reminded me of 1961. It ruined the whole thing, you
know.
Perhaps he was recalling the day of the heater
incident, burned into his memory as it was burned into his skin. He
then quickly changed the subject and again denied ever having been
to my client’s home. It’s common for criminals to avoid giving
information someone wants, often precisely because it’s wanted, but
then he just gave up the lie and described the entrance to my
client’s home exactly.
Perry: You know they had like a little
drive-in theater deal [the gate intercom], you know, you push the
button. And a red light [part of the security program]. And I had
the impression that the house might have had an underground
shelter, and it’s a big place. And I rang the bell, and there was a
camera out in front and everything. I didn’t get that girl’s
attention, and she didn’t get mine, either. I just said, ‘This
can’t be the place,’ you know, due to respect that this was such an
ancient place. That’s a strong, strong feeling.
Perry became quiet. When he next spoke, it was
about the nature of obsession itself. In his unsophisticated way,
he described the inside of his experience as accurately as any
psychiatrist could hope to.
Perry: I really don’t want to bring it up. It
passed my mind. She kind of creeped up, and nothing, nothing had ever stuck to my mind like
that. And even, you know, even today, even today, even
today…
He drifted off into silence, and I waited
quietly for him to speak again.
Perry: On her special, on HBO, I saw her eyes change color. Her eyes change color a lot.
GdeB: What was that like?
Perry: I didn’t like it at all. That girl might be a witch, you know. She may do some damage to me if she hears me saying this. I’m saying what I saw. It did look like my mother. I don’t want to mess with it because I know it was a relief whenever I forgot about it. I weighed the fact that she was a movie star, and realistically speaking, her address being in a magazine is not right. So I’m kind of scared of this girl if I met her. Of course, I don’t know what it would be like. I know it’s a touchy situation with this girl. I’ve stayed up many nights thinking about it.
GdeB: What if you had seen her at the house?
Perry: I never did, and anyway, she has a
boyfriend. But you know, she asked of me and so I did, so that’s
about it, but I don’t want to get too personal. I’m under arrest
right now, I just want you to know that. They called the folks back
home, and there’s been some sort of big accident, some theft or
something like that, which I didn’t do.
Perry got quiet again. It was clear that the
man who’d tried to exorcise one of his demons by shooting his
mother in the face still wasn’t free of it.
GdeB: You don’t like this whole subject, do you?
Perry: No, I don’t. The bad thing about it was
that she turned around and had that ugly face. The face was
completely different from the one she had had. I mean, it was a
disaster that she looked like her. It was terrible, you know, and I
turned off the TV and I left. I don’t want to talk too much about
it because man, it took a lot of my time after I saw that. I said,
‘This is too much.’ It took a lot of my time, and I didn’t want it
anymore.
His voice drifted off and then he hung up. I sat at my desk in disbelief. The emergency that had consumed nearly every hour of every person in my company had just ended, not with a stakeout or a gunfight or a SWAT team, but with a phone call. The man I had tried to know and understand through every means I could find had just told me outright why he had stalked my client and why he wanted to kill her. I walked into the TAM office, which was bustling with activity regarding the case, and said, “I just got off the phone with Michael Perry.” That didn’t make sense to anybody, but it wasn’t funny enough to be a joke.
I flew to D.C. the next morning to learn anything of relevance to the case and to gain information that would help with the prosecution. Since our next job would be to help ensure that Perry was convicted, I’d been in regular touch with the Jennings County prosecutor, who was meeting me in D.C..
When I arrived, Kilcullen told me Perry’s car had been found and was being held at a nearby tow yard. We drove over together to look at it and see what evidence it held.
Chester Perry’s green Oldsmobile was dusty from its long drive. An officer looked in the window at the front seat and then recoiled a bit. “It’s covered in blood,” he said. Sure enough, there was a dark, pulpy liquid sticking to the fabric upholstery. As we opened the door, I saw watermelon seeds on the floor; it wasn’t blood on the seat, it was watermelon juice. Rather than pause to eat somewhere, Perry had bought a watermelon and eaten it with his right hand as he sped along the highway toward D.C..
Perry had chosen to stay at a cheap little place called the Annex Hotel, which was about a mile and a half from the Supreme Court. When we went there, it became clear what he had spent most of his money on. He had turned Room 136 into something that stunned us all, a bizarre museum of the media age, a work of pop-art that connected violence and madness and television. Into that tiny room, Perry had crammed nine television sets, all plugged in, all tuned to static. On one, he had scrawled the words “My Body” in red marker. Several of the sets had giant eyes drawn on the screens. One had my client’s name written boldly along the side.
The Louisiana detective in charge of the Perry homicides, Irwin Trahan, came to D.C. to transport Perry back home for trial. Often, such prisoners are flown on commercial planes or on “Con Air”—the nick-name for the U.S. Marshals’ jet fleet—but Trahan and his partner had decided to drive Perry back to Louisiana. This unusual trio sped along the same highways Perry had driven to get to D.C.. Checking into motels along the way, the detectives took turns staying awake to watch Perry, who didn’t sleep at all. At the close of their two-day trip, Perry asked them to pass a message to me. It was about my client: “You better keep an eye on her twenty-four hours a day.”
In an irony I wouldn’t recognize for many years, Perry also told the detectives that if his case ever went before the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Sandra Day O’Connor, “I wouldn’t have a chance then, because that’s a woman.” (His case did eventually go before the Supreme Court.)
A while after Perry was back in Louisiana, we arranged for Walt Risler to interview him in jail to follow up on his sinister warnings about my client. An agitated Perry explained to him, “Tell her to stay away from Greece. That’s all I want to say to you now, man. I’m feeling sick, so sick; my head is just filled with vomit.”
To keep the interview from ending, Risler asked about one of Perry’s favorite topics: television. Perry responded: “Man, TV is really fucked up lately. I don’t know what it means. After a while it got so that the only sense I could make of television was by watching channels with nothing on. I could read them and make more sense than what was happening on the programs.”
He then asked his attorney to leave so he could speak with Risler in private. He took Risler’s hands in his and explained that if he didn’t get out of jail, there would be hell to pay. If he was executed, it would trigger the explosion of an atomic missile hidden in the swamps near town. “So you see, getting me out of here is important to everyone. I’m just trying to save lives.”
Perry stood up to end the interview: “Oh, man, my head is filled with vomit. You can just see how fucked up my head is, can’t you, from the things I think?”
Perry was not faking insanity—this was the real thing.
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When I got back to Los Angeles, there was a kind letter from Justice O’Connor thanking me for my help and lamenting the fact that “there are people in this country who are sufficiently unstable to constitute genuine threats to others.”
A few years later, after the Supreme Court adopted the MOSAIC program I designed, I met with Justice O’Connor in her office. Michael Perry, by then convicted of the five murders and sentenced to death, had come back into her life in an interesting way. Prison officials ordered doctors to give Perry medication so that he would be lucid enough to know what was happening on the day he was executed. The doctors refused, reasoning that since the medication was being given just so he could be killed, it was not in their patient’s best interest. The matter went all the way to the Supreme Court, and in one of history’s most impartial decisions, the justices ruled that the murderer who had stalked one of them could not be forced to take medication just to be executed. Michael Perry is alive today because of that ruling.
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The Perry case shows that even the most public of crimes are motivated by the most personal issues. Though the odds are overwhelming that you’ll never appear on the death list of some mass killer, I’ve discussed the case here to add to your understanding of violence, and to reveal the human truth in the sensational stories we see in the news. Reports of such murders on TV, presented in one dimension without perspective and without the kind of detail you’ve just read, usually do little more than add unwarranted fear to people’s lives. And people hardly need more of that.