Murder Without Motive: The Edmund Perry Story (1992 TV Movie) User Reviews

Wasted Potential

[jnmil3 · 8/10 · 6 July 2021]

It's been so long, 36 years, since the death of Edmund Perry and reading of Robert Sam Anson's work Best of Intentions. Didn't even know about this film until I looked up one of the actors, on whom I had a wicked crush during this timeline, actor Joseph Cali of Saturday Night Fever.

The film was also of interest as one of my college classmates attended Exeter with the late Mr. Perry, characterizing him as someone whom, no matter what white students did or didn't do, it was related to their feelings about black peoples.

Eat separately from him? You didn't like black people. Eat with him? You just felt sorry for him as a black student.

I never met the young man to say anything one way or the other, but the immense academic & financial potential he had that he squandered for God only knows what reason continues to make this story haunting. Murder Without Motive destroys the myth that racism isn't to be found in the northeast.

The assumptions made at Exeter *spoilers* like that black students might need extra help & that Eddie could buy drugs if given the money are pretty accurate for attitudes in this part of the U S. A good cast of actors & performances were featured.

Sadly, Curtis McClarin, who portrayed Eddie, also passed at an early age from a brain aneurysm. A convincing performance by Cuba Gooding as a neighborhood friend was also featured.

Some liberties were taken. Spoiler For example, if researching the actual Edmund Perry, he actually enjoyed and benefited from his overseas studies and had a warm relationship with his host family in Spain.

Other than the above, and Mr. Cali's part being rather small, it was a film worth watching and one I would recommend if interested in the sad ending of Edmund Perry or works by any of the actors.

You have to think of Exeter as a bridge you have to cross not a cross you have to bear

[sol-kay · 23 July 2011]

(Some Spoilers) On the evening of June 12, 1985 17 year old Edmund Perry and his brother Jonah, Curtis McClarin & Guy Killum, were out playing night basketball when all of a sudden their lives were turned upside down. In Emdund's case it in fact ended! It was then that Edmund ended up with three bullets in his gut when he and Jonah pounced upon undercover NYPD officer Lee Van Hotton, Angelo Tiffe, for reasons known only to themselves which, in the two having no previous criminal records, practically excluded the two trying to rob or mug him.

The film then goes back some four years when Edmund was 13 and living in the Harlem ghetto and the obstacles that he had to overcome for him to get out of it. It was Edmund's scholastic record that had his teacher Mr. Tolliver, Georg Standord Brown, have him be put in a special class for gifted students that Edmund excelled in. In no time at all Edmund or Eddie was accepted in the prestigious New Hampshire Exeter Academy with him being one of the few blacks to be accepted there.

You would think that things were to really improve for Eddie but as we soon saw they didn't. Eddie feeling very uncomputable surrounded by rich white students had trouble adjusting to the schools lifestyle. Even though he did good in his classes he was a total failure in his social life in Exeter always having a chip on his shoulder in not just being black but being from Harlem. Eddie did in fact make some friends at the exclusive and almost lily white prep school in Sean Putnam, Chris Daniel Barnes, and pretty Allison Connors, Carla Gugino, but his inferiority complex of being black in a white world or school didn't help Eddie in evolving any real friendship with them. In fact if was Allison who tried to open Eddie up by going out of her way to be friendly with him but the fact that her parents, if she even told them, would have disowned her if they found out about her friendship with Eddie had his paranoia as being black intensify to the point that he walked out on Allison without as much as saying goodbye to her. It was at graduation day at Exeter Academy that both Allison and Sean patched up their past differences with Eddie with him slated to go, on a full scholarship, to Sanford University in the fall and also getting a summer job on Wall Street. Within two weeks all that together with Eddie Perry was dead on arrival at a local Harlem hospital emergency ward!

What in fact drove Eddie Perry, who had the world at his feet, to do such a stupid thing that lead to his untimely death? As we later find out Eddie fit the description of that famous saying in "That you can take the man out of the ghetto but not the ghetto out of the man". At Exeter Eddie was at times a bit violent when provoked, mostly with words not actions, about his blackness by being quick with his fists but tried, with some success, to keep his hurt feelings under raps. It was when Eddie was back on his home turf in Harlem New York that the feelings that he suppressed so successfully at Exeter came out in the open. Officer Van Hotton, as the evidence showed, in no way incited Eddie as well as Jason, who in fact was later found innocent, to attack him to the point that he ended up hospitalized with a brain concussion! It in fact was what Eddie thought, in him and Jason planning to mug him, what Van Hotton thought not did to him that set the young man off! And with that Eddie Perry not only had himself killed but also all the hopes and dreams that he his family and friends had for him as well.

No motive?

[NavyOrion · 14 January 2014]

You want a motive? The jury had no trouble finding one: Edmund Perry and his brother Jonah had attempted to mug a policeman, who reacted, quite reasonably, by shooting him. It was simply their bad luck that their intended victim turned out to be an armed plain-clothes policeman rather than what they assumed was just another unarmed white guy.

Nor was this just the "official story," as implied in early accounts by the New York Post and Village Voice, both of which played up the fact that Perry had just graduated from a prestigious prep school, and suggested that latent racism on the part of the detective was the actual cause of the tragedy.

Jonah himself confessed to two neighbors that they had been trying to rob someone when Edmund was shot. In fact, 23 witnesses all confirmed the officer's version of the events. He was cleared of the shooting, and the media quickly dropped the subject.

Not so, apparently, the racial grievance industry, for whom propaganda like this execrable film is a major product. Never mind the facts; just make sure the minority is shown as the victim.

Edmund Perry had already been accepted to attend Stanford on a full scholarship. It is unfortunate the consequences of choices HE made prevented what might have been a successful and fulfilling life. But sometimes, justice really IS blind.