Pam Perillo greets me at the door of her trailer, the yaps of a chihuahua named Peewee nearly drowning out our niceties. Perillo had just been looking for something to put on TV to soothe her animals—the territorial dog, two cats named Karla Faye and Tucker, plus a kitten she just rescued—while she leaves for a few hours. I’m driving her from her home in Prairie View, a nearly 9,000-person town at the far edge of the Houston metro, into the city for an event where she’s speaking.
Perillo, 69, is tiny in height and build, with massive blue-green eyes and numerous facial piercings. Tattoos peek out from the sleeves of her pink business-casual blouse. In the car, she brainstorms what to say; she’s been allotted 10 minutes to talk about herself. “I don’t really know what to talk about,” she says on the August morning as we start our drive. “I think 10 minutes is a long time.”
It’s arguably not long enough for her to scratch the surface of her story. And nowhere near as long as the 40 years she spent in prison, half of that on women’s death row. “I guess I could just say I’m a death row survivor,” she muses.
