Invisible Killer

by Diana Montane

  James and Roberta Spitzer had lived in Big Pine Key for three years and described a moderately heavyset man they had seen walking to and from the swimming hole, acting suspicious enough to stick in their memory. On the night of the murder, James claimed that he was driving over the bridge at 8:00 p.m. and briefly looked over, seeing Sherry Perisho’s boat sunk with her umbrella submerged at the dinghy’s side.

  Billy Joe Shepherd was short, with graying hair, numerous tattoos, and a ninth-grade education. He had turned his vehicle, a light-blue 1968 Chevy pickup truck, into a makeshift home, and had turned a boat ramp at the west end of West Summerland Key into his property. The police were told to be on the lookout for the vehicle, based upon a witness mentioning it being in the background of a photo of Sherry Perisho in her dinghy taken just hours before her demise. When they came across it parked where its owner slept, the police noticed very suspicious items inside the vehicle. There were four knives, and on the dashboard of the trunk were two folding knives and one additional knife in a case. On the floor, peering out from underneath the passenger’s side, was another knife. Also on the passenger’s side, sticking out of a brown paper bag like some sort of perverse ornament, was a giant rubber dildo, coupled with a pornographic book in plain view. When Shepherd approached the vehicle, the police asked him to come to the substation, where they read him his rights, then performed a search on the vehicle to test for blood or any other evidence. While under interrogation, Shepherd said that Ed Banner, owner of the local B&B Auto Salvage Garage, had found a knife and given it to his son. When questioned about this, Banner explained he had found a knife and gave it to his son, but that was months before the murder. When police asked Banner what he knew about Shepherd, he offered a very interesting piece of information. Shepherd had told Banner that he was involved in cult activity and that people up in Ohio were trying to get him to do sinful things while simultaneously sending their people to follow him wherever he went. The last thing he had said to Banner was, “I wrestled with the Devil, and the Devil won.”

  Obviously there was no lack of leads in the murder of Sherry Perisho, but the case was growing cold. As investigators and other police officials know, crimes are not solved over a one-hour television slot, or even in a three-hour movie. And there was no shortage of Keys residents who knew, or were at least acquainted with, Sherry—but none who witnessed her murder.

  The fever finally did subside, and the case was relegated to the coldcase files. Fifteen years would pass until the vision of the man hanging from his neck from the rafters in the garage of a young woman’s house would heat it up again like a furnace.

  What no one knew at the time of her murder was the real Sherry Perisho.

  Sherry Perisho was supposedly a homeless transient who was a fixture in the area of Big Pine Key, which she had made her home when she first visited from New York, where she had previously moved from Illinois. She was nothing of the sort. To the locals, she was just Sherry. She was pleasant, and well-liked.

  To understand some of this, it’s important to understand the culture of the Florida Keys.

  The motto of the Florida Keys is, “We seceded where others failed.” The reason for the so-called secession, according to “conchs,” or denizens of the Keys, was a decision by the U.S. Border Patrol to cut off the Keys from the mainland in the early 1980s, and to stop every car leaving the Keys, looking for illegal immigrants.

  This, of course, caused not only an insurmountable traffic jam, but paralyzed tourism, the main income of the islands. So in 1982, the mayor of Key West, Dennis Wardlow, along with a handful of powerful community leaders, decided to secede. They raised their own flag, along with the U.S. flag, and even issued a secession proclamation.

  The locals felt justified in keeping to their freewheeling yet low-key and non-judgmental lifestyle, and everyone was welcome to paradise—except for when Satan paid a visit.

  It is a beautiful, breezy, calm, friendly, “lazy-days” place. It is a place where people from all walks of life are accepted, and sometimes embraced.

  Oftentimes one cannot tell the difference between a CEO or a street person by just looking at them. According, there is no or little judgment of people regarding their “status in life,” or past. It is a small community where everyone knows one another, even though there are a large number of transients.

  Sherry Perisho was known to many people in the Big Pine area. She was seen frequently at the local convenience store on Big Pine Key. Although she opted to live in her dinghy—despite the invitations of some friends to come and stay at their homes—she was a familiar presence to those who lived and worked in the area. She was known to engage in prostitution, but she was not judged or scorned. After all, she did this only when she needed money for food. Also, she had a circle of friends and boyfriends from time to time. She lived in her dinghy at the east end (or north end for non-Keys folk) of the Big Pine Channel Bridge. She would sit on top of or in her little boat on the shore, visible to all. She heard communicating with the planet Saturn and singing out loud. She was a beautiful woman, and the image fit—a strange mermaid floating on the waves, singing the song of the sirens.

  This area was also known as the “swimming hole,” where many locals would go to party and swim. It was not a secluded area; it could be seen from the main roadway. In fact, there was a picture of Charlie at a party at the swimming hole, which would not have been uncommon since he lived in the area. There are other photos of Charlie and Teri picnicking here. Coincidentally, or on purpose, Charlie has his back to the camera in those photos.

  On the date of her murder, Sherry Perisho was last seen sitting on her boat on the shore, reading a newspaper. It was around 8:00 or 8:30 p.m. At that time of year it is still somewhat light out and she was visible. Charlie’s house was across the highway, a couple of blocks in. He would have seen her presence in that area regularly. It was highly likely they crossed paths at the local store. He would have known she was there, and it is conceivable that he targeted her in advance because she was visible and available. After all, there she was, every day, in various stages of dress or undress—the watery temptress, Saturn’s Secret.

  In 1989, right after Sherry Perisho was found mutilated, investigators brought in a profiler from the FBI.

  She said the killer was way off the radar and not at all like one of the residents, but also a street person or a transient. She added that he had never maintained a “healthy relationship,” especially with women. The police department focused on bringing in every transient and homeless person in the Florida Keys, much as the Border Patrol had when the Conch Republic seceded.

  At first, when the Sheriff’s Department began their investigation and were canvassing the neighborhood door-to-door and stopping cars, they‘d uncovered a witness, a woman who described a man running across the street. They didn’t put much stock in that witness, even though they took her to Ft. Lauderdale to a sketch artist. But Sherry Perisho’s murder investigation eventually went cold, with nobody to claim her and nobody to miss her except the ocean, who was her only friend. Perhaps if the neighborhood canvass had continued just a couple of houses down, Teri Brandt would have told investigators about the fish-cleaning room.

  FREEDOM’S JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE…

  And so long as you haven’t experienced

  This: to die and so to grow,

  You are only a troubled guest

  Of the dark earth

  — Goethe, “The Holy Longing”

  But somebody cared about Sherry Perisho—somebody missed her terribly, and claimed her by writing letter after letter to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office for anything that might tell her why Sherry had moved to Big Pine Key, and why she had been murdered.

  Her first cousin, Marilyn Angel, was also her best friend, and her surname fits. She wanted to protect Sherry’s reputation, and was incensed when her cousin was called a prostitute. She even wrote a letter to a television station in Miami when they show
ed her cousin’s body, nude, floating in the water. “If you show one, you have to show them all!” she wrote.

  Investigators found stuck inside her dinghy, among the deceased woman’s things, an autobiography Sherry Perisho was writing. It is, of course, incomplete. The last chapter was written in blood by Charlie Brandt.

  What the autobiography—which Sherry was in the process of getting copyrighted—reveals, is an infinitely more complex portrait than that of “the homeless transient” who is mentioned in passing by all the media covering the case. She was more like “The Outsider,” from the book of the same title by Colin Wilson—a landmark investigation into alienation in literature and in life.

  She was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, and she and her mother lived in a series of trailer parks. Then they moved to Illinois, where Sherry started high school. Something she wrote at the time summarizes her restlessness and curiosity about the world: “Spiritually, I didn’t want to be dead at 21 like most country wives.”

  She recounted how her father taught her to swim at the age of three by simply throwing her in the ocean, while “Mother taught me to make paper flowers colored with lipstick to sell in the bars for a dollar. Dad would give me a little sip of beer in a glass and encourage me to pan handle change from the men he worked with.” Sherry Perisho was well prepared, from earliest infancy, for life on the road—or in the ocean, as evidenced by another entry:

  “We visited Cypress Gardens. Sometimes Dad would rent a cabin cruiser and take us deep-sea fishing. The dock was busy and clean. The north had left me sad.”

  According to her autobiography, Sherry felt a “sadness,” or “depression,” or worse yet, “alienation,” whenever she was in colder climates. In other words, apparently, whenever she was not in Florida.

  “I missed the sun and the beach,” she writes. Happily the wandering family settled in the Sunshine State.

  According to the writer, she was, and was reputably acknowledged as being, “psychic.” Whether there is such an explanation for this, and whether it be coincidence, precognition, or just a bad dream, is still an enigma.

  “Although really not a mind reader, I wanted to know about sex and crime. I had scored 85% on tests given by psychics at Duke University and occasionally had uncanny dreams. Later, while studying death and violence, I realized that violent and primitive scenes may have laid the foundation for one of the more shocking and violent of all my occult experiences. At the age of four, I slept in the upstairs…room of a large house in St. Petersburg. We were several miles from the beach with senior citizens. I had begun to withdraw; my hair had turned blonde from sleeping tightly curled on one end of the bed like a rabbit. I’ll describe the nightmare. About dusk or twilight I saw my father seated in a wheelchair in front of a motel near a heavily wooded area. Three men stood behind him. I noticed the middle-man suddenly raise a chainsaw and slice the top of my father’s head off.

  After the nightmare, my father found work in Washington and asked my aunt and uncle to put me on a plane. I remember the trip very distinctly.”

  A dream of decapitation is certainly a coincidence, though some may think that it is not. After Sherry Perisho’s murder, the Medical Examiner found her head almost severed from her body. Her heart was never found.

  When she was a young girl, she also had a Howdy Doody marionette; it took hours to untangle the strings. And the children laughed at “Charlie the Bartender,” whose face would light up and smoke would pour out of his ears whenever he took a drink. That is obviously a coincidence as well, but is, in retrospect, grotesquely poetic, like a Grimm’s fairy tale.

  And then the “alienation” seeps in, as well as Sherry Perisho’s precociousness and the angst that went with it.

  “I started exhibiting some coldness and alienation. I became instantly aware of time and a silent inner and outer dimension. At seven, I was acutely conscious of the microscopic and atomic worlds.”

  According to her, her I.Q. tested out at 136 in primary school, which indicates a superior intelligence. “As I studied drawing, poetry, and music I was sorely piqued over my lack of imagination and considered it also a handicap.” This “lack of imagination” may have played a part in her choice of action, or inaction, much later on, when she moved to Big Pine Key and opted to live in a dinghy under the bridge.

  What is known, again, from her writings, is that the young woman did despise whatever she considered “bourgeois” or conformist.

  “My aunt and uncle’s home was quite comfortable, furnished in expensive maple and carpeted. They wore expensive clothing and enjoyed television. Although they loved art, they would never give up the comforts of home to run away. Artists and radicals were frightening, although they were of the same fibre as the original prairie settlers.”

  She might not have become “an original prairie settler,” but chose the ocean for other reasons.

  Another entry:

  “Not only was depression a constant presence in my life, it was the keystone to an event that became a turning point in my life.

  “As I stood in the honeysuckle-covered back porch, I was struck by the hideous ugliness of my environment. In five seconds, the sky had darkened and ping-pong-size balls of hail began to rain from the firmament.

  “I connected the terrible weather and depressed state I was casually familiar with American Indian rain dancers and The English version of dowsers and thought if it was possible I would set about to reverse the effect as an alternative heating source for northern climates.”

  Sherry Perisho was often observed gazing at the sky from her dinghy, and trying to communicate with the planets out loud. She loved astronomy from a very early age, she writes.

  “Staying out at night to study the skies, I studied charts of the constellations and the Greek and Roman mythology about them.

  “The mystery of the universe intrigued me. I fought my doubts about the power of the mind. Is it possible to read minds? Is the spoken language simply the pyrotechnics of pre-recorded genetic material?”

  Later, as she matured, Sherry would test some of these theories by pushing her personal boundaries.

  She mentions becoming a contestant in beauty pageants, and winning some of them. She doesn’t seem to attach any importance to this, as if the events don’t carry any sense of reality. Instead, she pens her thoughts about social injustice.

  “News of the American farmer on the media seemed to consist of pictures of deplorable poverty and food stamps. The universe seemed to consist of haves and have-nots, and a have-not generally had ‘have not’ permanently stamped on his forehead. The general working class couldn’t even understand the state or government policy, and had never even read a hardcover book on economics from end to end. Lay-offs meant unbearable cutbacks and violence.”

  As far as a personal romantic life, Sherry Perisho is equally casual and detached.

  She met a young hockey player from Chicago at age thirteen, and although she had no knowledge of sex, he became the first boy to make love to her, and in half a minute.

  And then, in her usual cavalier way, she writes, as if all in one breath and in one sentence.

  “I managed to get elected as Freshman Class President and managed to get engaged before my sixteenth birthday. I was on decorating committees and spent a lot of time at the apple grower’s house. His physique was unimpressive and he suffered from Huntington’s chorea but his hair was blonde, his eyes were green and he was quite intelligent. Sometimes at night, we drove to the orchard and parked by the lake, to make love.

  We talked about everything under the sun. From Mary Baker-Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, to Impressionist art. He made a good lover, strong and enduring. I reached sexual fulfillment and would have remained faithful till the end. We used birth control.”

  As emotionally disconnected as the romance started, it ended, and Sherry is not sorry.

  “I was relieved. I had wanted to marry a more attractive man and gave his diamond back.”

 
At this point, she seemed somewhat disconnected, and too concerned about national and world issues than her to care much about own microcosm.

  “1965 had been the beginning of the bad times both for me and for the nation. The escalation of the Vietnam conflict made it a national issue. The evening news reports were full of bombings and massacres. Anti-war protesters began to flood the capital. Human rights activists like Martin Luther King began to appear making speeches for radical changes in society.”

  She was obviously either influenced by the feminist movement, or might have been a forerunner of it as she writes:

  “As to sleeping with a man without benefit of clergy when younger, I felt if I wasn’t pregnant there were no charges. The person and the time and place weren’t unpleasant. A cosmopolitan person would survive countless extra-marital experiences and multiple marriages. The only bad experiences were due to exploitation and lack of choices.”

  Again, the incipient detachment seeps into her writing.

  She had a “flirtatious affair with an older man.” According to her writings, the man was married and poor. She got pregnant. She arranged for an abortion. The older man introduced her to his best friend.

  This cannot really be interpreted as coldness—given the writer’s intensity and longing for something more—let alone promiscuity. Sherry Perisho was more or less, in her own words, a student of life, with all the disconnect and detachment that entails. At this point, she might have been headed for a nervous breakdown, or a bout of enlightenment.