Who is Jerry?

Full name: Jerry Warren

• Jerry killed his mother and father at age 16, and then burnt the house down.
• The vacant block where Jerry finds the last pretty, is the Warren block, his old home. 
• Locals fear the vacant block but do not know that Jerry owns it.

Popular lore: The popular lore suggests that the Warren boy was abused by his father and his mother would watch. One night the boy stabbed his father to death, and then he slit his mother’s throat. To try and hide what he had done he set the house on fire burning everyone inside. To this day the Warren boy remains locked away in an asylum somewhere.

True story: Alfred Warren, Jerry’s father would beat him every night. It is true that Wilfred Warren, Jerry’s mother, did watch Alfred beat Jerry to within an inch of his life, but only after he had brutally beaten Wilfred. Dragging herself up to rest against a blood soaked kitchenette, she would watch in horror as her husband viciously beat her child. On that fateful night, Wilfred had received a particularly savage beating and was unable to make her usual attempts to pull her husband off of her boy. As the blood from a gash to her head streamed down her face into her eyes joining with her tears, Wilfred endured another night, the last night, of watching that man  torture her beautiful son.

Jerry’s thrashing was severe. Bloodied and bruised he had rolled up into a little ball while his father kicked and punched him, taunting him with every breath he took from him. Jerry could see his mother watching, but unable to move and knew that this had to stop. Enduring what seemed like hours, Jerry remembered the pocket knife in his pocket that his father smilingly gave to him only three hours earlier. Alfred continued to kick Jerry's badly beaten body, while occasionally staggering over to give Wilfred another punch to the face and belly.

Her sight shrouded in blood, with a continual stream dripping from the ends of her short blonde hair into her squinting eyes, Wilfred's mind began to focus again. Clarity had begun to return and a little feeling in her legs. She too had decided that that night would be the last time that man ever touched her, or her boy. Alfred Warren turned to her, as he always did, while beating his son, and he once again looked to Wilfred's beaten and bloody body leant up against the cupboards, and began his nightly spiel.

Uncaring of where his blows landed, he began to scream in a contorted voice full of rage, while still laying into Jerry, ‘Stop judging me with those eyes of yours… you’re always judging me with those big green eyes, what’ll the boy grow into when you’re judging him with those eyes all the time,’ he would say, as the sickening sound of another blow connected with Jerry’s head, ‘Always judging,’ he continued, ‘I’m gonna take those eyes right out of your head one day, just you wait and see if I don’t… always judging… always accusing… always watching… with those green eyes…’

Mother Warren beat Alfred on a daily basis, she was a chronic alcoholic too. It has also been suggested old Mother Warren knocked off her husband, Frank Warren, Alfred’s father, just prior to giving birth to Alfred. The story has never been substantiated but widely believed as truth.

I mean who dies from home-made Mushroom soup?

An intended victim if you ask me!

Alfred Warren only ever gave Jerry one gift. That pocket knife for his 16^th birthday, that day, the day the Warren family died.

Jerry felt around in his jeans pocket between blows until he found the knife. As Alfred came in for another blow, Jerry pulled it from his pocket and raised the open knife, connecting with his fathers fist, embedding itself deep between his white and bloodied knuckles. Taken aback from what had just happened, Alfred stepped closer to where is wife was sitting, his eyes wide with disbelief, then fury. Jerry fought through the pains of that night’s particularly bad beating, and reached above him, grabbing the rim of the kitchen sink to pull himself upright.

Keeping the knife directed at his father, he began his slow, short walk to where Alfred still stood trying to wrap his hand in a tea towel he'd grabbed from the table. The same tea towel used to pull Jerry's roast Lamb, birthday dinner from the wood stove earlier that night. As Jerry neared his father he saw that his birthday cake had yet to be sliced up, and in that moment years of rage grew within him, at the thought of another dinner ruined by this alcoholic bastard standing in front of him crying about the wound to his hand.

Still believing he had control over Jerry and his wife, Alfred began taunting them once more, as he took a step towards Jerry, but Jerry lunged at him with the knife, just barely scraping against the plaid of his shirt. Alfred took another step back, a step too far it would seem. Wilfred saw that Jerry was finally standing up to the man who had hurt him so much and with her last ounce of energy, she threw herself forward, wrapping her bloody body around Alfred's feet. Holding tight with a strength she thought had failed her, Wilfred caused him to topple over. As Alfred began to fall, he smashed his head on the Kitchenette cutting a slice of his scalp away.

Taking the gift he so eagerly accepted from his father only hours earlier, the one and only thing he had ever given him, Jerry began a ferocious attack. Alfred, dazed and confused from his fall, found that he couldn't move, that there was a weight on his legs holding him down. As the first strike of many, plunged into Alfred's chest, Jerry's rage had taken over completely, as was evident from the forty seven stab wounds to his chest. Sitting astride his father’s corpse, his blood spattered all over his face, hands, clothes and the walls, Jerry looked to his mother, semi conscious and still holding tight to Alfred's feet.

Jerry desperately wanted her blessing for what he had done, but as he looked to her all he could see were her piercing green eyes, and his father’s voice began to flow through his head once more… always in his head…

Staring into his mothers green eyes, he understood that to be truly free from this hell, he needed his father’s wife to no longer judge him with those eyes of hers.

Even though his rage had abated, Jerry did cut his mother's throat, but Jerry loved his mother and because of that, the slice across her throat was not very deep. The beating she had taken from her husband is what really killed her. After Jerry cut his father’s wife's throat, he finally saw his mother and not those eyes. He sat on the floor next to her dying body laying lax across the feet of his dead father, the warmth of her blood began to soak deep into his clothes.

Sudden fear and sadness filled his heart as he realised what he had done to his mother. He pulled Wilfred's limp body up over his legs, and cradled her in his arms, crying as she lay dying wrapped in Jerry's love for her.

‘Jerry,’ she whispered coughing up a light spattering of blood, ‘You’re a good boy Jerry, mummy loves her good boy. I’m so sorry, forgive me, I forgive you Jerry, Mummy forgives her little boy,’ the kind and caring Wilfred said in her dying whispers. Holding her head tight into his chest, jerry released a little to see his mothers face one last time. As he looked down at her, her eyes were closed and her tears were running down across her face into the dried streaks of blood from her earlier beating. He leant down and kissed her forehead and sobbed, ‘I’m sorry mummy, I’m so sorry. I just wanted him to stop mummy.’

As Jerry wept over his mothers face, Wilfred took her last breath. As she died her eyes fell open, and the last thing she saw was her little boy. As her head fell back in Jerry's arms, her piercing green eyes looked directly into his own. Jerry knew what he had to do, just one more thing and it would all stop. He had to cut those green eyes out of her head, those judging eyes that made his father beat him so. Using his father’s gift one last time, Jerry cut each eye from their sockets.

No-one ever came to the house because no-one wanted to know what was happening. After the deed was done, Jerry sat cradling his mother for a long time, not wanting to let her go.

In the early hours of the morning, Jerry finally got up off the kitchen floor. He showered and changed his clothes, throwing his bloodied clothing on top of his father’s body. They had been living in an old wooden railway cottage for the past year, because Alfred worked on the railway lines. Jerry threw more wood on the kitchen wood fired stove, then moved his mother’s body away from Alfred's. He didn't want his father to touch his mother ever again.

They lay in a large shared pool of their own blood as Jerry left the house through the back door to grab the old jerry can from the wood shed. As he reached the fly-wire door, one of his mother’s eyes lay on the floor, and that green eye was looking straight at him through the wire.

Jerry entered the house tipping petrol on that eye first, and then poured it all over his parent’s bodies. As he walked into the living room to get to the front door, Jerry threw a match into the kitchen and the fuel ignited with a ‘whoosh.’ The bare floors were so old that the entire railway cottage was up in flames by the time he reached the post box.

Found lying on the front verge, bloodied and bruised, first responders believed that Jerry had escaped a murder suicide after the neighbours gave their account of the goings on at the Warren place. Neighbourhood whispers abounded with rumours and speculations about Jerry’s involvement in the death of his parents. Police covered every avenue of the investigation and Jerry was found to be the sole surviving victim of his father’s murderous rage, then suicide after setting the house on fire, the case was closed, and Jerry never spoke about that night. He was too old to be placed in foster care, so childcare workers put Jerry into an institution for 2 years, because his only living relative, his wealthy psychotic grandmother on his father’s side, refused to take him in.

Grandma gave Jerry his father’s old car, that was bequeathed to him in his father’s will, after he came knocking on the door once he was released from state care. Refusing to let him in, she threw the keys out of the door at him with a piece of very old paper threaded through them. On the old paper was a hand written address to a lockup where the car had been stored.

That night still gave Jerry nightmares, but for the most part, he was a happy healthy young man, even with the abuses suffered at the hands of carers at the institution. There was nothing they could do to him, that could even touch on the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father. Jerry missed his mother greatly, but every time he thought about her, all he could see was her green eyes and that would shake him from his thoughts.

He bounced around for a few years before joining the forces. At 26 Jerry took part in an aid operation in Iraq, driving trucks (1990). After a 6 month tour, Jerry was given a medical discharge. He became traumatised by the death and devastation he witnessed. He was driving his truck full of doctors and other aid workers delivering fresh water and medical assistance where they could, along with other aid supplies through an area covered in land mines. They had just left a small community of refugees when they heard a mine go off.

Getting everyone back into the truck, Jerry drove to the site where the dust plume was still settling back on to the ground. When they arrived, Jerry saw a group of screaming, crying, bloody, dead and dying children who had walked straight into a mine field. He pulled the truck over to let the doctors out to assist who they could, but he mainly pulled over because the sight of all those children, covered in blood, victims of something they had no control over was too much for him, and he disappeared into his mind.

Jerry’s trauma was so deep that he retreated into himself. He began to live moment to moment, in those moments that play on a loop. So traumatic are the images playing out in his mind, that he sees them in sleep and in waking. They are relentless.

Jerry was catatonic for over a month and was sent home, where he spent more than a year in and out of hospitals. His Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) continues to this day. Never regular with his med's, Jerry is only ever semi lucid and is occasionally picked up by police when a concerned member of the public calls them for assistance. Jerry is sent to the psychiatric hospital, where they put him on med's for a few days.

After the incident in Iraq and Jerry’s subsequent trauma, he developed schizophrenia. When he stops his medication he is eventually hospitalised, but when he becomes stable, he is released from hospital with enough med's for a week, with directions to see his own doctor for a repeat prescription. Jerry makes all the right assurances to hospital staff that he will see his own doctor, and they know that he will not follow through, but there is nothing they can do about it.

After the first day, the med's begin to wear off and Jerry quickly devolves into his psychosis, with his assurances dissolving into the imagery playing out in his mind.

Jerry’s trauma is life long, he relives the beatings he and his mother endured at the hands of his father, and the night he killed them both. He continues to experience the abuse he endured while caught up in the childcare system, and he eternally witnesses the death and destruction of the little children that hit at the heart of Jerry’s own personal traumas.

Jerry is now 53. He has his father’s beat up old car. His grandmother, certain that he had killed her son, has never shown Jerry any compassion, even before the death of his parents in a tragic house fire. Why would she? She never showed any to Jerry’s father... or his grandfather, so the story goes. She knew what her son did to his son because, ‘That is how boys should be treated.’

Although he travels from vacant block to vacant block, Jerry always returns to his vacant block, his home. He is incapable of escaping his life, all he has endured, everything he has done, and all he has witnessed. He both sees and hears those victims; their voices are incessant within his mind leaving him with no rest.

All utilities at Jerry’s block are taken care of by an executor. Jerry is quite wealthy on his own thanks to his mother. He received quite the inheritance after her death. He knows about it, but he doesn't know about it also. His damaged mind won’t allow him to grasp hold of reality for very long.

When old Gran drops off the perch Jerry’s going to be a very, very wealthy man… unless Tibbles is going to become a very wealthy cat.

I hope this gives you an idea behind the character Jerry, aka The Jazzman