Speaker 1: M M A Wall Street line, shackle change, Oh doesome
girdy it's calling my name. There is no mercy and
it's been a tentery juice as the huge stream game Rango.
The three.
Speaker 2: Come here, be by me to die.
Speaker 1: Inside these walls, inside the wild.
Speaker 2: Hadn't went no girls. I Hey everyone, and welcome back
to Bloody Angola, a podcast one hundred and forty two
years in the making, the complete story of America's bloodiest prison.
I'm Jim Chapman, and today I am bringing you another
suggested story from a listener, and this is the story
of Louisiana State Benitentiary Death Row inmate Owen Perry, who
in nineteen eighty five was convicted of the murder of
five members of his own family. So let's get into it,
and I'm gonna start by giving you a little history
on Michael Perry. He was born on December third of
nineteen fifty four in Lake Arthur, Louisiana. Which Lake Arthur, y'all,
is located in West Louisiana, and it's part of what's
known as Jefferson Davis Parish. And it's not a very
large town. Even today, there are only about three thousand
people that reside there, and most of the people that
live there or around that area they work in the
oil fields, and this is primarily due to the proximity
to the Texas Line, it's only about thirty five miles
or so away, and also the proximity to the Gulf
of America not too much further away than that. So
not much is known about Michael Perry's very young childhood,
except that he was troubled mentally, so much so that
at the age of sixteen, his parents drove him to Galveston,
Texas for a mental evaluation. Now, despite what appeared to
be some glaring mental issues, Michael did graduate high school,
and during this time in his life, he was already
kind of known as a little bit off, if you will,
by those who knew him or went to school with him.
Perry would often talk to himself. He was just considered
very strange. However, he was not without talent and actually
known as a pretty talented musician. He even played in
a band called The Great Pretenders. Now, around this time,
his brother suddenly dies in a work related accident, and,
like any family that has to deal with or come
to terms with the loss of a brother, a sister,
a son, a mother, a father. It devastates the family,
and Perry's younger sister, she really takes it hard. She
eventually gets committed to a mental institution and she is
diagnosed with schizophrenia. And Michael also has his difficulty coping.
He would tell neighbors that his dead brother was on
vacation in England. He just could not accept the fact
that his brother was actually dead. And I'll deviate for
a second from the story to tell you now, with schizophrenia,
a lot of times doctors will say that it's a
significant event in a life that will really trigger it,
especially in young people. So it's not surprising that his sister,
after she was committed, was diagnosed with schizophrenia. It's also
believed that that runs in families if you have a
family history of that. They see a lot of cases
where someone's diagnosed in their grandfather or grandmother. You know,
close relatives also either have been diagnosed or they've had
events where people would assume that was likely the reason.
So back to it, it was not long before his
parents took none of this and these strange behaviors, and
just after his graduation from high school, they have him
committed to the Central State Mental Hospital in Pineville, Louisiana. Now,
at this point, Michael Perry is eighteen years old. He's
there for a while, and then at some point he
actually escapes the mental hospital. He somehow manages to make
his way back to Lake Author, Louisiana and his parents home. Now,
when he shows back up at the home, I just
can't tell you why his parents did not call the
police and basically say, hey, our son escape from a
mental hospital and we need you to come in and
take him back to the mental hospital. No one really
knows why it appears, but the fact is that they didn't.
They didn't call the police, they didn't do anything. So
a few years pass in these mental issues with Perry persist.
He can't hold a job, he gets very reclusive, kind
of hangs in his room all the time, and he's
really losing touch with reality by this point. And by
the age of twenty four, he becomes absolutely obsessed with
a film star who had just started in a hit
movie which would become one of the biggest hits of
all time. In the name of that movie was Grease,
and the film star was a relative newcomer and her
name was Olivia Newton John, which in his mental state,
that ain't good. He continues to slip deeper into this
schizophrenic state. Eight He wasn't diagnosed with it, but it
was obvious that he was showing signs of it. He
starts writing letters to Olivia Newton John, and he becomes
convinced that she is sending him telepathic messages. He's so
convinced of this, in fact, that he cuts down all
of the trees in his parents' front yard because he
believed the trees were causing interference with Olivia communicating with
him by using telepathy, and so essentially he was basically
hearing voices her voice talking to him, and he was
convinced it was her and he was actually talking back
to her, which this is a telltale sign of schizophrenia.
It's actually known as auditory hallucination. He would also exhibit
other signs. For example, his mother and Olivia had the
same color eyes, and due to this, he go in
and out of this state of mind where he would
actually think his mother was Olivia Newton John. Then suddenly
he would kind of snap out of this state of
mind and he would realize his mother was not Olivia
Newton John, that it was his mother, and he would
actually get pissed, extremely pissed, and he would get violent
and he would physically beat up his own mother. This
happened several times. Now it would come out later that
Michael had harbored an enormous amount of resentment for the
fact that his parents had had him committed when he
was eighteen years old to that mental institution, and that
would play an important role in my opinion of how
this case turned out. So I'll get to that later on.
But as I said, he started beating his mother during
these episodes. So his parents were like, screw that, and
they told him he could not come in the house
anymore without permission. And they had a large property where
a bunch of family lived, including Michael's cousins, were on
this property. Of course, his parents' home was on this property,
and also on this property was a vacant trailer. So
rather than just throw Michael to the wolves, his parents
were nice enough to allow him to live in this
trailer on their property. And Michael progresses even deeper into
his schizophrenia. He starts exhibiting symptoms of the paranoia aspect
of it One example of this is Michael is convinced
that he is being monitored by his family, so he
would mail himself empty packages and he would pack them
in a way that he could tell if they had
and opened or tampered with. And he would do this
y'all over and over again. He then started thinking that
Olivia Newton John is intentionally changing the color of her
eyes as a method to keep him from communicating with
her telepathically. I know it sounds crazy, but we're not
dealing with what I would consider a sane human being here.
He starts seeing rotting corpses coming through his floorboards, and
he becomes convinced that Olivia Newton John is responsible for this.
And it's around this time that he leaves Louisiana and
he travels all the way to Malibu, California. He camps
out in the woods near her home for several days,
and he tries to gain access to her home several times. Now,
Levia Newton John, as you can imagine, she lived in
a gated community and she had security at the front
and back gates, and he would actually walk up to
this major megastar. At this point in time, this is
like four years after Greece had come out, so she's
at the top of her stardom. He would go to
the front gates and try to get in to see
Olivia Newton John, and of course the security is like,
you know, go kick rocks. You're not getting in here.
We're not gonna let you in here, and he would leave.
He tried this multiple times, but in this dude's fragile
state of mind, he took this shit hard. To him.
This is like Olivia Newton John is rejecting him, basically,
like they were boyfriend and girlfriend and they broke up,
and he just gets filled with this massive amount of rage.
He is so pissed off. It is like the straw
that broke the cammel's back mentally for him. He goes
back to Lake Arthur, Louisiana. He breaks into his cousin's home.
Two of his cousins lived there, both males, adult males.
He finds one cousin in one room sleeping, shoots him
with a pistol right in the eye, killing him. Instantly
goes into another bedroom where the other cousin is sleeping
and shoots him in the head, killing him. He then
walks over to his parents' house, which he knew they
were on vacation, and their home was right across the
yard basically from where his cousins lived. He knew they
were on vacation, but he also knew they were scheduled
to return home that morning. When he shot and killed
his cousin, it was very early in the morning. So
he goes over there, He makes himself something to eat.
He turns up the music very loud, and you can
only assume that's to drown out what I'm about to
tell you about. But he just chills out on the couch,
waiting for his parents and his young nephew to get
back from this vacation. Jim, did you see what happened
in Texas today? Wait before you tell me that, let
me tell you what happened in New York. It cannot
be as crazy as the case I told you about
yesterday in Louisiana. You know what, we should do a
podcast about it, and with that we did. Crime War
Weekly covers the crime news headlines that have dominated the week.
We cover trending crimes from all over the country, and
even sprinkle in a few globally. Crime War Weekly is
available now wherever you listen to your podcasts simply by
searching Crime War Weekly or clicking the link in the
description of this podcast. The parents and his two year
old nephew get home. His dad opens the front door,
and as soon as he opens it, Michael shoots him
with his dad's shotgun. Now at this point, he's twenty
eight years old. He shoots his father, then shoots his mother,
who was coming in the door behind his father. Then
he shoots his two year old nephew. Now, because both
of his parents were still alive after that first shotgun blast,
he shoots them both a second time, killing them. He
then was unsure if his two year old nephew was dead,
so he shoots his two year old nephew a second
time to make sure. Michael then drags his mother. There's
dead body inside the house. She had fell halfway inside
the door and halfway outside of the door of the home.
He drags her completely inside and closes the front door.
And that also will play a part in my opinion
of this that I'm going to give you at the
end of this story. So at this point, he reaches
in his father's wallet, and his dad had like three
thousand dollars cash in his wallet. Look, he's coming back
from vacation. I doubt the guy walked around with three
thousand dollars cash every day, but he's coming back from vacation,
and that's probably the residual of what he had. This
is in the early eighties. Banks warn't as prevalent as
they are now atm machines. I don't even think ATMs
existed back then. So when you went on vacation, you
brought a bankroll with you, and his father had a
bank roll on him, so he steals that money. And
his mom had a like a small portable safe that
he it was called a strong box. He took that
as well. He was going to break in that. If
there was any jewelry or anything, of course, he's going
to steal that, try to point it or whatever. And
he flees the scene in his dad's car. So police
they get called to the scene, and it's not clear
who called them or how they heard about this, but
at some point the next morning they get called to
the scene and as you can imagine, it's horrific. Some
officers were interviewed at that time, and that's exactly the
adjective they used to describe it. Just horrific. You've got
a two year old who is just blown away, the
mother and the father both shot in just execution fashion.
It's just an ugly scene. And as I mentioned, this
is a small town, and everyone knew Michael. They also
knew he had been in and out of mental institutions
for years. So the fact that he's not on the
scene and nobody knew where he was, it did not
take you know, a rocket scientist or an extremely astute
detective to know he probably did this, and he was
the number one suspect. Police wanted to talk to this guy.
In the meantime. The first thing they did was they
searched his trailer. Now remember his entire family lived on
this property, and it was in his trailer they discovered
a blank check. And on the back of that blank
check they find what police referred to as a kill list. Now,
this list included the names of all five of the
relatives he had just killed, as well as several celebrities.
In the word sky was written next to the name
of each person he had killed, which I can only
ascertain was meant as a reference to them being dead.
It's almost like in his crazy mind, he's thinking I
need to keep track of who I've already killed. It's
almost like crossing someone off of a list, except for
he used the term sky, which I guess means they
went up in the sky. It was another word for killed,
and also strangely written above the list where the words
quote the Ten Commandments. The biggest issue for police at
this point was they had no idea where Michael Perry
may be. And what they did not know at the
time that they discovered these bodies of these five family
members is Michael Perry had already made his way all
the way to Washington, d C. They would learn later
he had planned to kill Supreme Court Justice and the
first female justice on the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor.
Now later, Perry would say he targeted a because quote,
no woman should ever be above a man. So while
in BC, he would check into a hotel, he would
go to the store and he would buy nine televisions.
And y'all, this is the early eighties. This isn't televisions
like they have now. These things a lot of people
referred to him as bubble back TVs. They were very heavy.
Even a nineteen inch TV at that time weighed a
thousand pounds. It seemed like he bought nine of these
some bitches and brought them back to his hotel room,
and he would tune them all to static because he
would say later, static is the only thing that made
sense to him. So Michael Perry is on the lamb,
if you will, for about two weeks in Washington, d C.
Before he makes a mistake that would get him caught. Now,
at the time of his capture, police in Louisiana they
thought Perry was somewhere in Beverly Hills, California, because they
had discovered this obsession with Olivia Newton John. So it
was somewhat of a surprise to them when DC police
contacted them and they said, hey, Michael Owen Perry, and
when we were doing a search on his name, and y'all,
this is in the infancy of computers, so it took
him a while. But when they searched his name, they
figured out he was wanted in Louisiana for those five murders. Now,
the way he got caught is he was attempting to
shoplift a radio in the nation's capital. And that in
and of itself is wild because he had eleven hundred
dollars in his pocket at the time of the arrest,
but he tries to shoplift a radio, so police search
his room after his arrest, they find these nine TVs,
all tuned to static, and they also discovered that he
had written on the screens of these TVs the names
of all five murder victims his family, and on the
sides of those TVs, another hit list was found with
Sandra Day O'Connor and Olivia Newton John written on that list.
This was on August first of nineteen eighty three. So
Perry gets extradited back to Louisiana and during his interrogation
with investigators, he confirms that he killed his parents due
to being mad at them for having him committed and
when they asked why he killed his two year old nephew,
he stated that his nephew was evil and a demon
and that's why he killed him two year old. So
during his trial he would do some strange things as well.
He would craft headbands out of napkins and he would
wear those headbands to court. He would also show up
to court wearing no shoes or socks, and he would
have very dirty clothing on and when he did wear shoes.
Of course, they would admonish him for this and say
you have to wear shoes. He would often remove his
shoes during court inside of the courtroom. In the media,
they would ask him about this and he would say,
it's the lifestyle of the mafia. Very strange. It also
came out in the trial that Olivia Newton John was
so frightened by Michael Parris. She was very aware of
this stalker before he was caught, well before he was caught.
As I told you, he was writing her letters and
his letters were even very crazy. But it came out
she was so frightened prior to his capture that she
moved from Beverly Hills back to her home country of Australia.
She was quoted as saying in a magazine that primarily
that was due to a photo that he sent the
film star of herself, but her eyes were scratched out
in the photo. There were something with Michael Owen Perry
and eyes that bothered him. So evidence is presented and
eventually Perry is found guilty of the murder of his
five relatives in nineteen eighty five, and the question now
with regard to his sentencing was do you sentence him
to the death penalty? Specifically, the question was is Michael
Owen Perry sane enough to be sentenced to death? And
the judge had to consider this, and he was in
a pickle, and I got to be honest with you
on this one. This is the first case that personally
that I've come across that I have covered where this
duve may have kind of a legitimate gripe as far
as an insanity defense. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve
everything he gets, but by the letter of the law,
in my mind, if anyone qualifies, it would be this guy.
But I could definitely give you some arguments as well
that would speak to his sanity during the murders in
my opinion. For example, in the case of his mother,
he shoots her, kills her, and her body was basically
halfway in and halfway out of that front door, so
he pulls her body completely into the house and shuts
the door. Now, in my mind, there's an argument that
can be made there that this was an attempt to
hide the crime. He also told police he killed his
parents because he was mad at them because they had
him committed to a mental hospital, and that he waited
for them to come home from vacation to do it.
Let me break this down. For not guilty by reason
of insanity plea, you need several things. First. You have
to prove you were insane at the time that you
committed these crimes and you didn't know what you were
doing was wrong. Well, when you pull a body inside
of a home of someone you just killed and you
shut the door in an attempt to hide the crime,
that proves that you knew it was wrong and you
didn't want to get arrested for it. Otherwise you would
have just left the body where it fell. Second, you
waited for your parents to get home, and you picked
the day in time in which to kill them, right
after they got off vacation, when his dad would have
a ton of money. Right, That proves premeditation. That's also
not something an insane person does. There was no sudden
argument that got out of control when you lost your
shit and you just started killing everyone. You planned it
in advance. So I'm not sure what was running through
the judge's mind. I'm not sure what he considered, but
it would be my guess that he probably considered several
of those things. I just brought up, and he eventually
imposes the death penalty for Michael Owen Perry. Now, I'm
going to reference Ford versus Wainwright, which was a decision
that was used as a precedent in this case, and
the judges in that case ruled that if an inmate
does not understand or is not competent to understand that
they are getting the death penalty and they're going to
be sentenced to death and they're going to die vias,
you know, the state killing them. Essentially, you can't impose
a death penalty on someone that doesn't understand the ramifications
of their crime. However, in this case Michael Perry and
bloody Angola, he was prescribed an anti psychotic drug known
as how Dall, and they had look, they had several doctors,
psychiatric doctors assigned to him, and they stated to the
judge prior to this sentencing that while on this drug
called how Dall hl DOL, his condition was controlled enough
that he fully understood what being sentenced to death actually meant.
So the judge imposed the death penalty. And obviously, this case,
being as sensitive as it was because of all these
extenuating circumstances, it goes through appeal city and it ends
up in the Louisiana Supreme Court, and the question was
can the state force Perry to take hawdall, which is
the drug that deemed him competent for execution. You see,
Perry didn't want to take it. They were forcing him
to take this drug, and that was the question before
the Supreme Court in Louisiana, and they ruled eight to
nothing that he could not be forced to take the drug,
which according to the law, you would think that would
negate the legal authority to execute him, because these doctors
were saying, when he's not on that medication, he has
no grip of reality. But as of today, Michael Owen
Perry does still sit on death row, some thirty years
after his conviction. Now they say that one of the
things he does inside of Bloody Angola is he drops
soap in his toilet bowl every and eventually, I guess
the CEO's there. They asked him why he does this,
and he said it's because his toilet is hungry and
his toilet likes to eat soap. So apparently his toilet
is like a pet. To Michael Owen Perry. He talks
to his toilet. He feeds his toilet. And look, we
all know soap, if you drop it in a toilet,
eventually it dissolves. But in Perry's mind, that's his toilet
eating the soap. I mean, if that ain't some crazy
shit right there, I don't know what it. Hey not
saying I agree, disagree, or whatever with the sentence that
was imposed. I'm just saying, by the letter of the law,
I don't know if there's anyone any crazier than this
story that I just covered right here, I'll say that.
But if it was my family that he killed, you know,
I'd say he gets everything he deserves with the death penalty.
But there you have it. But there you have it,
the full story of Michael Owen Perry. Thank you so
much for listening. Check out the Patreon at patreon dot
com Slash Bloody and Goal of Podcasts for commercial, free
early releases and more. Check out Exposed Scandalous Files of
the Elite. I cover all the wildness that occurs in
the world of the elite members of societies, whether they're sports, figures, entertainers,
you name it. I covered Exposed Scandalous Files of the
Elite and Crime Wire Weekly it is myself and Kelly
Jennings of Unspeakable of true crime podcasts by Kelly Jennings,
and we cover the crime headlines that have trended throughout
the week, and we do it in our own unique fashion.
I promise you you will be entertained. Check us out
Crime Whire Weekly wherever you get your podcast, And until
next time for Bloody Angola, a podcast one hundred and
forty two years in the making, the complete story of Americas,
Bloody is present. I'm Jim Chapman, Peace.
Speaker 1: A Wall Street line, shackle chain, Oh bosome birdie, it's
calling my name. There is no mercy and this been
a tentery juice as the huge stream game Wrangle three.
Speaker 2: I'm here.
Speaker 1: By me to die inside these walls, inside the wild
and when the wals I know it's overbody angle, obody Angle,