From our part of Vermont comes some ghastly news. In a paranoid fit, James Perry Jr. shot and killed Karina, his 38-year-old daughter.
According to the Vermont Digger, our internet newspaper, Perry had been holing up in his home, convinced that "bad guys with guns" were after him. Here's part of the newspaper account: "Perry said he shot his daughter... as she stood on a landing outside his residence. He told police he was concerned that unknown people were playing 'gun games' with him and he asked his daughter not to come to his residence.... He was concerned Karina was being used as a “ploy” by unknown individuals.... For the past couple weeks he has been unable to sleep.... He was sitting on his couch when he saw his daughter at the door. He picked up his 12-gauge shotgun, and could see Karina holding cookies, waving, and trying to open the locked door. ‘I’m just so nervous… and I didn’t want her to come in, and I didn’t want the cookies. I ordered her to stop, and I just, I guess I, pulled the trigger. And then I pulled it more, and then I cut her neck.'" Perry said he believed he used a pocket knife to stab her.
Could there be a more horrific tragedy? A man goes crazy and kills his own daughter.
But yet there's worse -- in the details that don't appear in the newspaper. Karina, Jim's older daughter by his second wife, Phyllis, is divorced and is the mother of four children, who are now left motherless. And Phyllis, Karina's mother, is ill with a very bad cancer -- so she had to learn, in this last phase of her life, that her ex-husband shot and killed one of their children.
Here's a picture of James Perry Jr. as it appeared in the Digger. He looks like a guy who's just been cast as a maniac in a chainsaw massacre movie.
He certainly does not look at all like the Jimmy Perry whom I've known for 45 years. Except for the bright blue eyes, he's unrecognizable.
I remember Jim when he was in his twenties -- a normal guy. Actually he was quite handsome, strong, energetic, well-liked, already skilled with wood and bricks and stones. He built the chimney in our new house and he was a more-than-competent carpenter.
How could the Jimmy Perry that I knew and admired in the 1970s turn into a man who shoots and kills his own daughter?
Even back then, he drank too much. And used too much marijuana. Sometime in the 1980s, he worked in Wyoming as a roustabout on oil rigs. One day he fell into a vat of what he called "mud" but was a container for the strong chemicals used in the oil drilling process. He was burned neck to ankle and spent close to a year, if I remember correctly, in a hospital -- in severe pain for much of the time. I don't think he ever fully recovered. His body was a mass of scars. I'm sure that the beer and the drugs and the pain, and possibly the isolation caused by the pandemic, contributed to his derangement. But nothing explains what is fundamentally inexplicable.
I didn't see much of Jim in the last few years. I'd run into him in Hannaford's occasionally. He appeared to be many years older than his true age. He was emaciated, sickly-looking. Clearly someone who'd had a hard life. He told me that he didn't know how long he could continue "crawling on roofs." The last time I caught sight of him, I confess, I avoided him. I could see even from a distance that he was "off" and I didn't want to engage with him.
I don't mean to excuse Jim. What he did was the worst. I wish that he hadn't had a shotgun in the house. If he had to be armed, I would have preferred that he shot himself. That would have been bad enough. I hope that he doesn't regain his sanity, because if he does so, he'll have to reckon with what he's done. The guilt will kill him twenty times over.
Jim was an ordinary man, not an evil one. The picture above doesn't tell the whole story. He was unlucky, and crazed, and something went horribly wrong in his brain. Those of us who are lucky and sane should thank our good fortune, because all of us are vulnerable.
Jim did a lot of work for me in 1978. In the summer of 1979, he came to visit and said that he had gone over his books and discovered that I had overpaid him for about a week of work. News to me -- I had no idea. He said that he couldn't reimburse the money he owed me, but he would take a few days and build me a nice stone wall -- even then, he was famous for his classy stonework. So together and with the help of my kids we poached a dozen truckloads of stone from some of our many crumbling walls. We picked out a site and he built us about fifty feet of handsome drystone. It's still there, an ornament to the property. The maker of that wall is the Jimmy Perry, an honest craftsman and a reliable friend, that I prefer to remember, even while I mourn the death of his daughter and regret the abysmal woe that he caused his family.
What a terribly sad story. Thank you for telling us about Jimmy's honesty and good workmanship.
Posted by: Sarah Finch | May 25, 2021 at 03:00 AM