Chris Parry, a 39-year-old man, was sentenced to death by hanging this morning. The man violently killed his wife and walled her body up in the basement wall. The murderer would have got away with the crime unless his cat had drawn the police’s attention to the hidden body.
On May 21, Mr. Parry and his wife, Olivia Parry, were doing household chores when suddenly Mr. Parry stumbled over his cat. The man became outraged and tried to hit the cat with a hatchet, but his wife interfered and rescued the animal. Then, Mr. Parry stroke his wife with the hatchet directly “in her brain,” as he said in his deathbed confession (Poe 11). This caused her to die on the spot, and Mr. Parry buried her body in a damp basement wall.
Three days later, the police came to the Parrys’ house for a search. Mr. Parry accompanied them along the way and even showed them the basement without revealing his guilt. The police would have left empty-handed if it were not for a mere accident. When police officers were about to leave, Mr. Parry knocked on the wall with his cane, and the police heard “a cry … quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream” (Poe 14). The police broke down the wall and saw a female corpse starting to decay, with a black cat sitting on her head. Mr. Parry was arrested and put on trial, where he confessed to his crime and was sentenced to death by hanging.
The man seemed to feel no remorse for his felony. In his confession that he wrote while in jail, he blamed the cat for his crime: “[Its] craft had seduced me into murder, and [its] informing voice had consigned me to the hangman” (Poe 14). Mr. Parry was mentally unstable, presumably because of alcoholism. His neighbors report that they often saw the man drunk. Mr. Parry admitted to consuming alcohol, as well as using “intemperate language” and “personal violence” toward his wife (Poe 4). Naturally, alcohol abuse does not alleviate his guiltiness for the crime.
Mr. Parry’s criminal path started long before his murder of Mrs. Parry. The cat that helped the police discover the body was the second cat that the Parry family had ever had. Their first cat was named Pluto, and it was the favorite pet of the family. When Mr. Parry started drinking, he also began mistreating his domestic animals. Although Pluto at first remained untouched, he eventually suffered the most damage. First, Mr. Parry cut one of the cat’s eyes with his penknife. Later, the man tied a rope around the animal’s neck and hung it on the tree. The night after the killing of the cat, Mr. Parry’s house burnt down, which he considered revenge.
Notably, Mr. Parry had not been such a cruel man earlier in his life. Heavy drinking drastically changed his personality. In his confession, he shared that he was “noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition” and was “especially fond of animals” (Poe 3). His wife shared his positive traits and love for animals, so their household was full of pets, including birds, a dog, goldfish, a small monkey, rabbits, and a cat. Intemperance ruined the idyll of their life, causing “a rapid alteration for the worse” (Poe 4). In the end, two living beings – a cat and a woman – fell victim to the mind clouded by alcohol.
Work Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Black Cat. Elegant Ebooks, 1843. Elegant Ebooks. Web.