Where In the World is Jerry Gillies? -an epilogue
JERRY GILLIES, a stand out performer in CanadaPLUS events from Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre to standup comic at the last Canadian Thanksgiving Dinner in October 2015, is close to finishing his last journey.
The last days of his life were as tragic as some major earlier events before he came to Panama.
In early December last year he had taken a 14 hour return bus trip to Costa Rica, as his tourist visa was close to expiring. Not the best medicine for an elderly man receiving treatment for severe circulation problems.
Jerry, an American citizen, died alone in his apartment in Panama,on December 12 and CanadaPLUS was alerted by friends of his in Vermont, who had been helping promote his last writing venture, a digitalized update of an earlier bestselling book, Money Love.
By then, his body was in the city morgue, and attempts to get information, and access to his belongings, like cell phone, laptop and passport failed, when the landlady, who already had a “for rent sign” up banged the phone down.
With no identity documents and only an email letter from Vermont to go on, access to his body was near impossible to obtain, leading to multiple visits to the morgue and the US Embassy before he was finally identified, and released last week.
The remains have been cremated, and the ashes will remain in Panama until a US friend, who paid for the cremation returns to Panama. Jerry a secular Jew would have appreciated the irony of his ashes resting in a Catholic Church where a brief service will be held.
A Murder Mystery star performer, he was cloaked in his own mystery background until the end when, after much research some of the hints he had dropped in converations were illuminated on his blog which we publish as his epilogue
Under the heading Where in the World is Jerry Gillies? he wrote in 2009:
The answer is, South of San Francisco, in a county where he knows not a single soul, because he is forced to live there for at least a year as a condition of his parole from Folsom State Prison this past August. And hardly any of the two million readers of my book, Moneylove, have a clue of where I’ve been for the past twelve years, let alone why.
In 1996, I was arrested for trying to hijack a motorhome and sentenced to 12 years in prison. How the hell did this happen?
Well, it started with a network marketing company that sold some excellent nutritional products. More on that later.
I had originally been sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for an investment scheme involving underwriting bonds in Europe. It had paid off successfully for eight years, when something went wrong–I still don’t know what, but the bottom line was all the money was supposed to come back through one of the most respected banks in England, Barings, which had one of the biggest bank busts in history in 1995. I then went a little crazy as the date approached for me to report to federal prison. I decided I needed to avoid prisonby stealing a motorhome and becoming a fugitive, since I had almost no money, having lost it all in the overseas investment. I didn’t know why I did something so out of character, a fact testified to by several character witnesses, including old friends Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, co-creators of the Chicken Soup For The Soul books. But as soon as I got locked up, my mind seemed to clear, and I started writing, something I hadn’t done for several years prior to 1996 My cellmate, Keith, who was a meth addict, told me some of his symptoms, and they seemed to fit what I had gone through. I then, began to suspect one of that network marketing company’s products designed for energy and weight loss…and it really worked. But it contained high grade Ephedra, one of the main building blocks for methamphetamine. I had taken it three times a day for five years. So I could no longer be self-righteous about never having done drugs or alcohol, or even tobacco or coffee. A very humbling experience to realize how stupid I had been and how unaware of what was going on in my own mind and body.
But I used my time in prison productively, writing a full-length mystery novel, which is now going out to publishers, and planning a self-help book based on the tools I used to overcome the dehumanizing, debilitating prison experience. I was broke and in prison, but I had two stories published in Chicken Soup For The Prisoner’s Soul, which I helped Jack Canfield plan and title. I also had two stories in the follow-up book, Serving Time, Serving Others, and wrote cartoon gags, including many for Bunny Hoest and John Reiner in Parade magazine, top cartoonists Roy Delgado, Ed Blais, and Bob Vojtko, who sold cartoons based on my gags to national magazines. Not much money in gag writing, just 25% of whatever the cartoonist gets, which is meager pickings at best. They paid for canteen items at the prison store each month, like my daily Coca Cola, ramen noodles, tuna, mayonnaise, potato chips, and so on.
So I lived in relative abundance for an inmate.
I also got one of the most prestigious jobs in any prison as a member of the Folsom Blind Project, which translates texts into Braille, records books on tape, and prepares closed captioning for educational videos.
My radio training prepared me well for recording books on tape. And, from my point of view, one of the best things about the job was that it wasn’t working to support the corrupt prison system, but rather for junior colleges and various charitable organizations, There were many areas of deprivation in prison, especially at Folsom, where I spent most of my incarceration. No citrus fruit, sugar, tomatos, onions, cable TV, napkins, (toilet paper, single ply, was used for everything, including blowing your nose and wiping your face at meals and it was in short supply, often being sold on the thriving black market).
But two of the things I missed most were dried fruit and dark chocolate.
Raisins, dried apricots and figs, and dark chocolate of any kind were not available for over ten years of my life. And these were the first things I wanted when I got out, not filet mignon and lobster, though those were further down on my list.
Jerry was born in Philadelphia, attended The American Foundation of Dramatic Arts. Went into radio, ending up at NBC in New York City. Wrote books and ran workshops in the U.S., Canada, The Bahamas, England, Brussels, and South Africa.
