my soul by telling the officers what I’d told him, and would
I?» Receiving an affirmative nod, the prisoner’s spiritual adviser stepped into an adjacent room,
which was crowded with expectant policemen, and elatedly issued an invitation: «Come on in. The
boy’s ready to make a statement.»
The Andrews case became the basis for a legal and medical crusade. Prior to the trial, at which
Andrews pleaded innocent by reason of insanity, the psychiatric staff of the Menninger Clinic
conducted an exhaustive examination of the accused; this produced a diagnosis of
«schizophrenia, simple type.» By «simple,» the diagnosticians meant that Andrews suffered no
delusions, no false perceptions, no hallucinations, but the primary illness of separation of thinking
from feeling. He understood the nature of his acts, and that they were prohibited, and that he was
subject to punishment. «But,» to quote Dr. Joseph Satten, one of the examiners, «Lowell Lee
Andrews felt no emotions whatsoever. He considered himself the only important, only significant
person in the world. And in his own seclusive world it seemed to him just as right to kill his mother
as to kill an animal or a fly.»
In the opinion of Dr. Satten and his colleagues, Andrews’ crime amounted to such an undebatable example of diminished responsibility that the case offered an ideal chance to challenge
the M’Naghten Rule in Kansas courts. The M’Naghten Rule, as has been previously stated,
recognizes no form of insanity provided the defendant has the capacity to discriminate between right and wrong — legally, not morally. Much to the distress of psychiatrists and liberal jurists, the
Rule prevails in the courts of the British Commonwealth and, in the United States, in the courts of
all but half a dozen or so of the states and the District of Columbia, which abide by the more
lenient, though to some minds impractical, Durham Rule, which is simply that an accused is not
criminally responsible if his unlawful act is the product of mental disease or mental defect.
In short, what Andrews’ defenders, a team composed of Menninger Clinic psychiatrists and two
first-class attorneys, hoped to achieve was a victory of legal-landmark stature. The great essential
was to persuade the court to substitute the Durham Rule for the M’Naghten Rule. If that
happened, then Andrews, because of the abundant evidence concerning his schizophrenic
condition, would certainly be sentenced not to the gallows, or even to prison, but to confinement
in the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
However, the defense reckoned without the defendant’s religious counselor, the tireless
Reverend Mr. Dameron, who appeared at the trial as the chief witness for the prosecution, and
who, in the overwrought, rococo style of a tent-show revivalist, told the court he had often warned
his former Sunday School pupil of God’s impending wrath: «I says, there isn’t anything in this
world that is worth more than your soul, and you have acknowledged to me a number of times in
our conversations that your faith is weak, that you have no faith in God. You know that all sin is
against God and God is your final judge, and you have got to answer to Him. That is what I said
to make him feel the terribleness of the thing he’d done, and that he had to answer to the
Almighty for this crime.»
Apparently the Reverend Dameron was determined young Andrews should answer not only to
the Almighty, but also to more temporal powers, for it was his testimony, added to the defendant’s
confession, that settled matters. The presiding judge upheld the M’Naghten Rule, and the jury
gave the state the death penalty it demanded.
Friday, May 13, the first date set for the execution of Smith and Hickock, passed harmlessly, the
Kansas Supreme Court having granted them a stay pending the outcome of appeals for a new
trial filed by their lawyers. At that time the Andrews verdict was under review by the same court.
Perry’s cell adjoined Dick’s; though invisible to each other, they could easily converse, yet Perry
seldom spoke to Dick, and it wasn’t because of any declared animosity between them (after the
exchange of a few tepid reproaches, their relationship had turned into one of mutual toleration:
the acceptance of uncongenial but helpless Siamese twins); it was because Perry, cautious as
always, secretive, suspicious, disliked having the guards and other inmates overhear his «private
business» — especially Andrews, or Andy, as he was called on the Row. Andrews’ educated
accent and the formal quality of his college-trained intelligence were anathema to Perry, who
though he had not gone beyond third grade, imagined himself more learned than most of his
acquaintances, and enjoyed correcting them, especially their grammar and pronunciation. But
here suddenly was someone — «just a kid!» — constantly correcting him. Was it any wonder he
never opened his mouth? Better to keep your mouth shut than to risk one of the college kid’s
snotty lines, like: «Don’t say disinterested. When what you mean is un-interested.» Andrews
meant well, he was without malice, but Perry could have boiled him in oil — yet he never admitted
it, never let anyone there guess why, after one of these humiliating incidents, he sat and sulked
and ignored the meals that were delivered to him three times a day. At the beginning of June he
stopped eating altogether — he told Dick, «You can wait around for the rope. But not me» — and
from that moment he refused to touch food or water, or say one word to anybody.
The fast lasted five days before the warden took it seriously. On the sixth day he ordered Smith
transferred to the prison hospital, but the move did not lessen Perry’s resolve; when attempts
were made to force-feed him he fought back, tossed his head and clenched his jaws until they
were rigid as horseshoes. Eventually, he had to be pinioned and fed intravenously or through a
tube inserted in a nostril. Even so, over the next nine weeks his weight fell from 168 to 115
pounds, and the warden was warned that forced-feeding alone could not keep the patient alive
indefinitely.
Dick, though impressed by Perry’s will power, would not concede that his purpose was suicide;
even when Perry was reported to be in a coma, he told Andrews, with whom he had become
friendly, that his former confederate was faking. «He just wants them to think he’s crazy.»
Andrews, a compulsive eater (he had filled a scrapbook with illustrated edibles, everything from strawberry shortcake to roasted pig), said, «Maybe he is crazy. Starving himself like that.»
«He just wants to get out of here. Play-acting. So they’ll say he’s crazy and put him in the crazy
house.»
Dick afterward grew fond of quoting Andrews’ reply, for it seemed to him a fine specimen of the
boy’s «funny thinking,» his «off on a cloud» complacency. «Well,» Andrews allegedly said, «it sure
strikes me a hard way to do it. Starving yourself. Because sooner or later we’ll all get out of here.
Either walk out — or be carried out in a coffin. Myself, I don’t care whether I walk or get carried. It’s
all the same in the end.»
Dick said, «The trouble with you, Andy, you’ve got no respect for human life. Including your own.»
Andrews agreed. «And,» he said, «I’ll tell you something else. If ever I do get out of here alive, I
mean over the walls and clear out — well, maybe nobody will know where Andy went, but they’ll
sure hell know where Andy’s been.»
All summer Perry undulated between half-awake stupors and sickly, sweat-drenched sleep.
Voices roared through his head; one voice persistently asked him, «Where is Jesus? Where?»
And once he woke up shouting, «The bird is Jesus! The bird is Jesus!» His favorite old theatrical
fantasy, the one in which he thought of himself as «Perry O’Parsons, The One-Man
Symphony,»-returned in the guise of a recurrent dream. The dream’s geographical center was a
Las Vegas night club where, wearing a white top hat and a white tuxedo, he strutted about a
spotlighted stage playing in turn a harmonica, a guitar, a banjo, drums, sang «You Are My
Sunshine,» and tap-danced up a short flight of gold-painted prop steps; at the top, standing on a
platform, he took a bow. There was no applause, none, and yet thousands of patrons packed the
vast and gaudy room — a strange audience, mostly men and mostly Negroes. Staring at them, the
perspiring entertainer at last understood their silence, for suddenly he knew that these were
phantoms, the ghosts of the legally annihilated, the hanged, the gassed, the electrocuted — and in
the same instant he realized that he was there to join them, that the gold-painted steps had led to
a scaffold, that the platform on which he stood was opening beneath him. His top hat tumbled;
urinating, defecating, Perry O’Parsons entered eternity.
One afternoon he escaped from a dream and wakened to find the warden standing beside his
bed. The warden said, «Sounds like you were having a little nightmare?» But Perry wouldn’t
answer him, and the warden, who on several occasions had visited the hospital and tried to
persuade the prisoner to cease his fast, said, «I have something here. From your father. I thought
you might want to see it.» Perry, his eyes glitteringly immense in a face now almost
phosphorescently pale, studied the ceiling; and presently, after placing a picture postcard on the
patient’s bedside table, the rebuffed visitor departed.
That night Perry looked at the card. It was addressed to the warden, and postmarked Blue Lake,
California; the message, written in a familiar stubby script, said: «Dear Sir, I understand you have
my boy Perry back in custody. Write me please what did he do wrong and if I come there could I
see him. Alls well with me and trust the same with you. Tex J. Smith.» Perry destroyed the card,
but his mind preserved it, for the few crude words had resurrected him emotionally, revived love
and hate, and reminded him that he was still what he had tried not to be — alive. «And I just
decided,» he later informed