The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence (42 page)

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.

▪ ▪ ▪

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.

▪ ▪ ▪

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.

“Fears are educated into us, and can,
if we wish, be educated out.”
—
Karl A. Menninger

We all know there are plenty of reasons to fear people from time to time. The question is, what are those times? Far too many people are walking around in a constant state of vigilance, their intuition misinformed about what really poses danger. It needn’t be so. When you honor accurate intuitive signals and evaluate them without denial (believing that either the favorable or the unfavorable outcome is possible), you need not be wary, for you will come to trust that you’ll be notified if there is something worthy of your attention. Fear will gain credibility because it won’t be applied wastefully. When you accept the survival signal as a welcome message and quickly evaluate the environment or situation, fear stops in an instant. Thus, trusting intuition is the exact opposite of living in fear. In fact, the role of fear in your life lessens as your mind and body come to know that you will listen to the quiet wind-chime, and have no need for Klaxons.

Real fear is a signal intended to be very brief, a mere servant of intuition. But though few would argue that extended, unanswered fear is destructive, millions choose to stay there. They may have forgotten or never learned that fear is not an emotion like sadness or happiness, either of which might last a long while. It is not a state, like anxiety. True fear is a survival signal that sounds only in the presence of danger, yet unwarranted fear has assumed a power over us that it holds over no other creature on earth. In
Denial of Death
, Ernest Becker explains that “animals, in order to survive have had to be protected by fear responses.” Some Darwinians believe that the early humans who were most afraid were most likely to survive. The result, says Becker, “is the emergence of man as we know him: a hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even when there are none.” It need not be this way.

I learned this again on a recent visit to Fiji, where there is less fear in the entire republic than there is at some intersections in Los Angeles. One morning, on a peaceful, hospitable island called Vanua Levu, I took a few-mile walk down the main road. It was lined on both sides with low ferns. Occasionally, over the sound of the quiet ocean to my left, I’d hear an approaching car or truck. Heading back toward the plantation where I was staying, I closed my eyes for a moment as I walked. Without thinking at first, I just kept them closed because I had an intuitive assurance that walking down the middle of this road with my eyes closed was a safe thing to do. When I analyzed this odd feeling, I found it to be accurate: The island has no dangerous animals and no assaultive crime; I would feel the ferns touch my legs if I angled to either side of the road, and I’d hear an approaching vehicle in plenty of time to simply open my eyes. To my surprise, before the next car came along, I had walked more than a mile with my eyes closed, trusting that my senses and intuition were quietly vigilant.

When it comes to survival signals, our minds have already done their best work by the time we try to figure things out. In effect, we’ve reached the finish line and handily won the race before even hearing the starting pistol—if we just listen without debate.

Admittedly, that blind walk was in Fiji, but what about in a big American city? Not long ago, I was in an elevator with an elderly woman who was heading down to an underground parking garage after business hours. Her keys were protruding through her fingers to form a weapon (which also displayed her fear). She was afraid of me when I got into the elevator as she is likely afraid of all men she encounters when she is in that vulnerable situation.

I understand her fear and it saddens me that millions of people feel it so often. The problem, however, is that if one feels fear of all people all the time, there is no signal reserved for the times when it’s really needed. A man who gets into the elevator on another floor (and hence wasn’t following her), a man who gives her no undue attention, who presses a button for a floor other than the one she has selected, who is dressed appropriately, who is calm, who stands a suitable distance from her, is not likely to hurt her without giving some signal. Fear of him is a waste, so don’t create it.

I strongly recommend caution and precaution, but many people believe—and we are even taught—that we must be extra alert to be safe. In fact, this usually decreases the likelihood of perceiving hazard and thus reduces safety. Alertly looking around while thinking, “Someone could jump out from behind
that
hedge; maybe there’s someone hiding in
that
car” replaces perception of what actually is happening with imaginings of what could happen. We are far more open to every signal when we don’t focus on the expectation of specific signals.

You might think a small animal that runs across a field in a darting crisscross fashion is fearful even though there isn’t any danger. In fact, scurrying is a strategy, a precaution, not a reaction to a fear signal. Precautions are constructive, whereas remaining in a state of fear is destructive. It can also lead to panic, and panic itself is usually more dangerous than the outcome we dread. Rock climbers and long-distance ocean swimmers will tell you it isn’t the mountain or the water that kills—it is panic.

Meg is a woman who works with violently inclined mental patients every day. She rarely feels fear at her job, but away from work, she tells me, she feels panic every night as she walks from her car to her apartment. When I offer the unusual suggestion that she’d actually be safer if she relaxed during that walk, she says, “That’s ridiculous. If I relaxed, I’d probably get killed.” She argues that she must be acutely alert to every possible risk. Possibilities, I explain, are in the mind, while safety is enhanced by perception of what is outside the mind, perception of what
is
happening, not what might happen.