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Friends United Meeting |
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July 1998
Road to Life
By Perry Bernard Warthan
"Road to Life" has a double meaning. This road that led to a life sentence has also led to Eternal Life.
I was born January 20, 1941, the day Franklin D. Roosevelt started his third term as President. My mother was sixteen years old, and my father was in prison for armed robbery. He was released when I was three years old. Since my mom had divorced him, he soon married another woman-a Mexican girl that he had gotten pregnant at the age of sixteen, just like he had my mom. I was raised by my mom, who worked as a waitress, and her mother, but dad's influence on me was great. He always packed a .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol in his car. He would later do two more prison terms, graduating from armed robbery to business fraud.
When I was about four years old, I was introduced to a leather walking harness with a leash. These were the style about 1945 but it left deep scars on me. I remember the feeling of seeing other children secured on walks with their parent by a warm loving hand while dogs were harnessed and leashed as I was. Mom and Grandma Small also took a leather belt or willow switch to my body (not always the rump) for anything I did out of line, including poor school grades.
At age eleven I started setting fires, first vacant grass lots, then school lockers, trash cans, our family garage and finally a vacant house. Perhaps this was rebellion against things like my dad dropping hot matches down the inside of my shirt or my grandmother locking me in closets. I don't know.
At fourteen, I was arrested for lighting two small fires, and committed to Napa State Hospital for 90 days' observation. After only eighteen days there, two other boys my age and I strangled a male patient, age thirteen. We did this out of boredom. I was transferred to Atascadero State Hospital, California's maximum security place for the criminally insane.
After almost two years, I conned my way into getting ground privileges and walked off. I was picked up the next morning. Two years later, in 1960, I was part of a mass escape in which we took over four wards, liberating eleven patients, including five from the hole. Everyone was picked up again. For my part in the escape, I was transferred to a regular state prison.
In 1963 I was returned to court in Napa, California, to stand trial for my part in the 1955 homicide. I was charged with first degree murder and stood trial as an adult. I was found not guilty by reason of insanity and returned to Atascadero for another two years.
I was then transferred to a minimum security state hospital at Stockton, my home town. There, in 1965, at age twenty-four, I had sex with my first woman. I then had every woman I could get. Plenty were willing, including Liz who was in for attempted suicide.
I was discharged in December 1966. After quitting or losing several jobs, I decided to take the monthly S.S.I. government checks given to most former mental patients. I was already back into petty crime. I married Liz and got trained as a barber. Marijuana, and Liz's lust for material things, soon caused our divorce. She remarried. When that marriage failed, she killed herself. She was twenty-seven.
I joined an outlaw bike club called the Diablos. Diablos means "devils" in Spanish, and I did worship the devil during this time, even joining Antone La Vey's Church of Satan. Between 1966 and 1982, I was involved in burglary, shoplifting, kidnapping, drug dealing, pimping, sabotage, street fighting, and a host of other things.
In 1970, on my twenty-ninth birthday, the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms raided my apartment and confiscated a 7.62 mm Russian rifle. They were operating under a new gun law passed after Sirhan Sirhan had killed Senator Robert Kennedy. I had fought for a year, after my 1966 discharge, to obtain a rare certificate of competency to own a gun. Now I felt all governments violated someone's rights, and I became an anarchist. I would remain an anarchist activist for seven years. In addition, I supported every anti-authority or rebellious cause from "Gay Lib" to Communist fronts like the Black Panther Party.
I married again in 1970. The local newspaper described the wedding as a "Satanic civil ceremony." Beth shared my love of drugs. She had just turned eighteen and I was almost thirty. Partying and a free-sex lifestyle took its toll on us. We had a boy in 1972. At age four, Eric was run over and suffered a broken leg, because Beth wasn't watching him. I feel this added to her drinking and doping to dull the guilt she felt.
In 1977, I became disenchanted with the revolutionary left, which I then abandoned to become a Neo-Nazi. The reason for this change was, in part, an act of black racism. I was attacked by a mob of drunk black kids who had left their party in search of a white man to kill. I was lucky that a police car happened by when it did.
After I was arrested for possession of pot for sale, I worked with a carnival so I could travel and find a new place to organize a Nazi group. At the end of summer, I rented a place in Oroville (population 10,000), the county seat of Butte County. I hooked up a "Dial-A-Nazi" telephone message, leafleted, wrote newspapers, and in a year or so had a small group going. An Ohio-based Nazi-Manson cultist asked me to visit Charles Manson at Vacaville, where he was in prison. I visited him four times in 1982, which led to some popularity for me among local rebellious youth and I formed a local Nazi youth group. We leafleted two local high schools in September. This drew lots of media attention. A $1,000 reward was offered for proof of who had done the midnight school locker stuffings. One of our youth group turned informer and was found two weeks later on a swamp road with eight shots in his head. He was six days short of eighteen. I was arrested and convicted.
My old Nazi unit leader helped me get my ten-year-old boy out of town; he was an "Identity Christian." Aryan Nations was the major church arm of this cult. The Michigan Klan leader, another friend, was a member of a different white racist Christian cult. His brand of Christianity seemed more like white witchcraft to me so I looked into it. I decided to try a hex on my two crime partners who had turned state's witnesses against me. The next thing I knew I was sick with some sort of type "x" flu. This taught me that there's no "good" witchcraft, there's just witchcraft. So I involved myself in Identity, which built a racist dogma around a twisted version of British-Israelism.
Child Protective Services made a motion to the court to ban me from writing my son or having any contact with him until he was eighteen. The judge was the same as in my murder trial and the outcome looked hopeless, but the night before the hearing, I surrendered my son to the care of Jesus Christ. I was still a Jew-hating Nazi and had nothing coming from God-but He honored that faith and the next day, the judge ruled on my behalf! This was the first of several miracles where I trusted in the name of Jesus Christ.
It was this type of thing that kept me looking to Jesus Christ, and my nose in the Bible. I continued to study God's Word over the next five and a half years. My mind was open to God's Holy Spirit, and I discovered the Identity cult's views were not God's truth of racial equality. In December, 1988, I fully accepted the truth, pulled the Nazi stuff off my cell wall, and became born again.
Since then, my life has changed 180 degrees. I took a prison job as a barber and stopped lying around the cell all day. This returned my blood pressure to normal. I haven't smoked since 1988. I was transferred to general population. My son started visiting me. My mom, dad, and sister also visited me. I have Christian pen pals from the Philippines to Romania for fellowship. God's blessings have been countless for one still in prison, though I truly feel freer inside here than I ever did out. But the greatest of these blessings is my salvation from that Lake of Fire. I'm now promised eternity with Christ through grace.
After searching, since my rebirth, for a Christian denomination that I felt at home with, I "officially" declared to my Christian peers and others that I am a Friend (a.k.a. Quaker) as of June 11, 1997, (my son's 25th birthday) because I truly feel the beliefs of the Evangelical end of the Friends spectrum are my own. While I can't claim a certain meeting or church due to my current imprisonment, I do feel part of Friends as a whole and have enjoyed the support of several good "Ffriends" (both friends and Friends alike) while serving my life sentence. If I'm to die in prison of old age (I'm now 57), I pray God will give me the grace to win souls here.
Perry Bernard Warthan #C-68662
P.O. Box 8101
San Luis Obispo CA 93409
Copyright (c) 1998 Friends United Meeting
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