I've had problems with Crypt::SSLeay in the past, so I followed zentara's advice and googled. Most of the hits were about the current user's locale. Evidently, primarily on older, pre-5.8.8 perls, having your locale set to UTF-8 can cause broken Makefiles which give you the error that you're getting. Here's one of the responses that I got:

NOTE: if you get an error like this (the Makefile line number may vary
+):
Makefile:91: *** missing separator
then set the environment variable LC_ALL to "C" and retry
from scratch (re-run perl "Makefile.PL").
-(And consider upgrading your Perl.)
+(And consider upgrading your Perl to, say, at least Perl 5.8.8.)
(You got this message because you seem to have
an UTF-8 locale active in your shell environment, this used
- to cause broken Makefiles to be created from Makefile.PLs.)
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The problem that I have with that is that my locale is UTF-8 and Crypt::SSLeay installed with no problems:-).

You could set LC_ALL to C, at least for the duration of the install, but I'm willing to bet that you need to install openssl-devel or libssl-devel.