by JT Hunter
IN COLDER BLOOD
The Walker Family Murder
by
JT HUNTER
IN COLDER BLOOD
The Walker Family Murder
by
JT HUNTER
Copyright and Published by
RJ Parker Publishing, Inc.
ISBN-13: 978-1987902143
ISBN-10: 1987902149
http://RJParkerPublishing.com/
Published in the United States of America
Copyrights
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written authorization from the author and RJ Parker Publishing, Inc. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by fines and federal imprisonment.
While the Publisher is responsible for the sales, marketing and distribution of a book, it is the author's obligation to ensure the accuracy of facts.
Table of Contents
Copyrights 3
Preface 5
Chapter 1: Their Last Day of Errands 6
Chapter 2: The Approaching Storm 13
Chapter 3: A Shocking Discovery 17
Chapter 4: Bodies and Blood 22
Chapter 5: Too Many Suspects 35
Photos 48
Chapter 6: New Blood, Renewed Direction 64
Chapter 7: A New Theory Emerges 79
Chapter 8: The Circumstances of Evidence 88
Chapter 9: Awaiting Closure 99
Epilogue 102
About the Author 105
Optioned May 2018 by a Major Production Company to be made into a Motion Picture 108
RJ Parker Publishing, Inc. 113
References 114
Preface
In 1965, Truman Capote published In Cold Blood, a self-styled true account of the November 15, 1959, quadruple murder of a family of four in Holcomb, Kansas. The two men who committed the crime, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, had recently been released from prison.
In addition to murdering Herb Clutter, Bonnie Clutter, and their teenaged son and daughter, Hickock and Smith were seasoned con artists and cunning liars. They denied killing another family of four near Sarasota, Florida, approximately a month after the Clutter murders, despite many remarkable similarities between the two crimes.
While In Cold Blood provides a fascinating character portrait of Hickock and Smith, Capote’s narrative focuses on their involvement in the Clutter family murders.
There is more to their story.
Chapter 1: Their Last Day of Errands
Christine Walker glanced excitedly in the bathroom mirror as she hurried to get ready. Her husband, Cliff, had just surprised her with the news that it was time to trade in their 1952 Plymouth for a newer model, one with more room for their growing family. Thrilled by the prospect of getting a new car, Christine quickly changed into a red-and- white floral dress that complimented her “well-built” body and curvy, Marilyn Monroe-like figure. After a couple of quick touch-ups to her curly, light brown hair, she slipped on a pair of high-heeled shoes and started rounding up their two children. Cliff, a rugged 25-year-old ranch hand, standing about 5’10” and weighing a lean 140 pounds, was already on his way out the door. He was dressed in his typical cowboy attire of Levi’s jeans, a denim jacket, brown cowboy boots, and a white cowboy hat.
It was Saturday, December 19, 1959, and with Christmas right around the corner, the Walker family planned a busy day of errands, one that would be highlighted by car shopping in Sarasota. Christine let three-year-old Jimmy wear his cowboy hat so he could look like his father, and she dressed Debbie, just a month shy of her second birthday, in a blue plaid dress. Christine looked forward to showing off Debbie’s newly curled hair, which had been styled at a beauty parlor the day before.
With her friendly smile and outgoing personality, 24-year-old Christine liked meeting new people and going places, even for such seemingly mundane matters as running errands. Aside from the inherent excitement of looking for a new car, she always enjoyed visiting the city, seeing some friends, and simply getting out of the house for a while. There was only so much that could entertain her in their small, sleepy town of Osprey, located in a rural area of Sarasota County in southwestern Florida.
In contrast to Christine, Cliff was more of an introvert, a quiet cowboy-type who had a few close friends, but mainly kept to himself and focused on his family. Well-liked by those who knew him, Cliff would “go out of his way not to offend anyone,” and a family member described him as “one of the most wonderful guys you ever met.” Although not much of a drinker, Cliff did have one guilty pleasure: a deep-seated affinity for cigarettes. Indeed, his long-time smoking habit had such a hold on him that he would not hesitate making a special trip in the middle of the night to buy a pack of Kools, his cigarette of choice.
Cliff and Christine were both from Arcadia, another small, rural town about 45 miles to the east of Osprey. They had met when Christine was still a teenager attending Arcadia High School. The former Christine Myers had caught Cliff’s eye when she was head drum majorette, leading the high school marching band at football games and proudly parading down Main Street, twirling her baton high into the air, using a technique she had perfected through hours of practice with a broomstick at home. Christine and Cliff shared a love of rodeos where she often twirled rope and he tested his skills in calf-roping competitions. Their romance had quickly blossomed, culminating in their marriage in 1954 when Christine was only 19.
Although they married young and they had their share of marriage spats, Cliff and Christine maintained a strong relationship and never wavered in their devotion to each other and their children. Indeed, Christine once remarked to her mother that although her sister lived a more comfortable lifestyle and owned a lot more clothes, “she still hasn’t got what I’ve got. I’ve got a husband and a happy home.”
The Walkers lived in a small, white, wood-frame house in an isolated area at the edge of the Palmer Ranch, situated among a varying assortment of pine trees, oaks, and palmettos, about two miles northeast of town. Commonly referred to as a “line shack,” the simple, sparsely furnished “cottage” was similar to other living quarters used by ranch hands in scattered locations around the sprawling 14,000- acre ranch that bounded much of southern Sarasota County. Located off a mixed shell and dirt road that led to Highway 41 at Osprey, the house sat about 100 feet from the Seaboard Line railroad tracks. Although Cliff only earned about $220 a month, the family lived in the house rent-free. It was one of the perks of his job at Palmer Ranch, where he had served as a ranch hand for the past three years, proving to be a dependable, hard-working employee.
Aside from the house’s modest furnishings, a few pictures adorned the walls or otherwise decorated the interior of the home. One picture frame held a photo of Cliff on horseback, dressed in a white cowboy hat, a dark-colored, long-sleeved Western shirt, Levi's jeans, and a thick leather belt with a large buckle. Two prize ribbons jutted prominently from his hands.
*****
The Walkers began their Saturday errands in the late morning, leaving their undecorated Christmas tree outside on the front porch. Their first stop was the local IGA store to do some grocery shopping. Always eager to catch up on the latest town gossip, Christine chatted with Thelma Tillis, the store’s owner, and mentioned that she was mad at Cliff for getting into a fight with someone the day before. Half an hour later, groceries in hand, the Walkers were on their way to Sarasota to look at cars.
Shortly before noon, the family began
browsing at several used car lots as they considered potential trade-ins. At one of the lots, a 1956 Chevy caught their eye, a two-tone model painted green with a white top. They test drove a car at another dealer, Altman Chevrolet, then stopped by Johnny’s Hardware and bought hot dogs, sodas, and hot drinks, as well as penny candy and cookies for the kids. Cliff also picked up a little something for himself: a new carton of Kool cigarettes. Cliff’s mood, temporarily brightened by his purchase, morphed to one of annoyance when he learned that one of the kids had dropped the keys to the Plymouth out of the window during the test drive at Altman Chevrolet. However, deep down Cliff enjoyed his kids’ antics, and by the time they back-tracked to the car dealership to recover the missing keys, his irritation had mostly faded away. The family dropped by Corbett’s Garage on Swift Road in Sarasota for a short time period afterward as one of their last errands of the day.
Around 2:00 in the afternoon, the Walkers arrived at Don McLeod’s house on Clark Road located at the opposite end of the Palmer Ranch in Sarasota. After some polite conversation, Don and Cliff left to go hunting nearby, leaving Christine and the children in the house to visit with Don’s wife, Lucy. At one point, Christine used the McLeods’ telephone to call her uncle, Carl Myers. During the conversation, Lucy overheard Christine mention that she would be “trading” her car.
Cliff and Don McLeod returned to the house about ninety minutes later. Shortly after getting back, they took Cliff’s Jeep to the adjacent barn to load some sacks of feed for his bulls. At 3:45 p.m., Christine stopped by the barn in the family’s Plymouth.
“The kids want to ride with you in the jeep,” she told Cliff, pulling up next to him.
Christine helped Jimmy and Debbie out of the car, and as she prepared to leave, Cliff assured his wife that he would be home soon.
“I’ll be right on,” he told her.
At 3:50 p.m., Cliff went inside the McLeod home to use their phone, but no one answered the call. Don and Lucy tried to convince him to stay for a while, but after looking at the clock, Cliff commented that he had better get going because it was “almost 4:00.”
As Cliff started the Jeep’s engine and pulled away, Jimmy waved goodbye to Don McLeod.
“See you later, Uncle Donald!” he yelled with a little boy’s infectious smile.
At 3:55, Christine stopped at the Phillips 66 gas station near the intersection of U.S. 41 and Bay Street in Osprey. She stayed for only a few minutes, just long enough to put air in her tires, and then continued on her way home.
About fifteen or twenty minutes later, Howell Crawford waved to Cliff and the kids as they pulled into the same Phillips 66 gas station that Christine had stopped at a little earlier. The sun was beginning to set, giving way to a cloudy, chilly night as an oncoming cold front moved in from the north, its gloomy grey-black clouds growing ominously darker as they approached.
Chapter 2: The Approaching Storm
A few days before the Walker family's busy Saturday of shopping, two men with errands of their own drove south down Highway 27. Recently released from prison, their past crimes had consisted primarily of burglaries and thefts, but lately they had escalated the level of their offenses. The two men had been on the run since committing their most egregious crime, a quadruple murder in cold blood, a month ago and over a thousand miles away. During the early morning hours of November 15, 1959, 28-year-old Richard Eugene Hickock and 31-year-old Perry Edward Smith had broken into a remote farmhouse in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, and murdered rancher Herb Clutter, his wife Bonnie, and their two teenaged children, Nancy and Kenyon.
Despite the magnitude of their crime, the 5’10”, 175-pound Hickock and 5’4”, 155-pound Smith were singularly calm as they drove, confident no one would catch them, convinced Kansas authorities would never be able to link them to the killings. After all, they had no prior connection to the Clutters, and they had been careful not to leave any witnesses behind. Hickock had insisted on that part of the crime, reminding Smith on several occasions that he wanted to see “hair on the walls” of the Clutter house. True to the plan, after surprising the Clutter family members in the dead of night, Hickock and Smith tied them up in four different parts of their house, then shot each of them in the head at close range, one by one, with a shotgun.
*****
Born in Kansas City, Kansas, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Hickock had once been a promising student, but when his family could not afford to send him to college, he gave up on his grades, replacing his books with mechanic’s tools instead. Born in Huntington, Nevada, Smith was in many ways Hickock’s opposite, brown-haired, brown-eyed, and with a much darker complexion. While neither man had enjoyed anything close to a perfect childhood, Smith had the harsher upbringing of the two due to an abusive father and an alcoholic mother who committed suicide when he was only thirteen. Unlike Hickock, Smith had never married.
In their more recent pasts, both men had suffered serious accidents that left lasting physical and psychological scars. Hickock had a severe car accident in 1950 that left his face slightly disfigured and caused him to occasionally black out. Smith had a damaging motorcycle accident in 1952 that nearly killed him, permanently disfiguring his legs, causing him chronic pain for the rest of his life.
The two men had met while serving prison sentences in the Kansas State Penitentiary: Smith was released on parole in early July, while Hickock had been released on August 13. They reunited in Kansas City, Missouri, three days before driving to Holcomb, Kansas, and killing the Clutters.
*****
A few days after the Clutter murders, Hickock and Smith had fled to Mexico, moving from place to place in that country until they returned to the United States on December 11. After taking a bus to San Diego, the two made their way to Las Vegas, and then hitchhiked to Nebraska and Iowa. It was in Iowa that they acquired the 1956 two-door Chevrolet Bel Air that they now drove. Two-tone in color, Hickock had stolen the car after finding it parked in a barn, and they had been using it ever since. Next, they drove to Kansas City, where they stole a Kansas license plate, tag identification number JO-16212, to replace the existing tag on the stolen Chevy. While in Kansas, they also purchased an Olympic television set by writing a bad check as payment, Hickock’s particular criminal specialty.
After travelling through Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana, they crossed the Florida state line and spent the night of December 16 at a Salvation Army shelter in the Florida Panhandle city of Pensacola. By late morning the next day, Hickock and Smith had made their way to Tallahassee. They pulled in to the Tip Top Café on U.S. 27 just east of town, and after showing a bill of sale for the bad check purchase, they sold the Olympic television set to the café’s owner for $50.00, assuring the buyer that they had some promising job prospects around Tampa and would return in a week or so to buy it back.
After lunch, they turned back onto Highway 27 and stopped at Frosty Mack’s Tire Shop, where they exchanged the new tires on their car for $20 cash and a set of used tires. Then they continued on U.S. 27, taking it south toward Miami.
Chapter 3: A Shocking Discovery
Early on the morning of December 20, twenty-nine-year-old Don McLeod roused himself from sleep and quietly dressed in the semi-darkness. Careful not to wake his wife and children, he crept out of the house and stepped outside into the cold, predawn air. Wearing thick clothes, a jacket, and an aviator-style hat with ear flaps, he coaxed a horse into the trailer attached to his GMC pick-up truck, started the engine, and drove west on Clark Road. At U.S. 41, he turned and headed toward Cliff Walker’s house. He and Cliff had plans to hunt wild hogs that had recently been spotted on the Palmer Ranch, and the two men had agreed to get an early start.
It was about 5:30 a.m. when McLeod arrived at the Walkers’ home. He found the metal cattle gate that served as the main entryway to the property fastened, but not locked. He pulled the gate open and drove through, parking near the silent, unlit house. Christine’s car was parked by the interior gate, a patchwork woo
den door constructed of wood planks that were nailed together and secured to woven wire fencing mounted on old wooden fence posts. He noticed that Cliff’s Jeep was parked between the house and barn near the back gate.
After walking to the back door of the house, McLeod knocked and waited. There was no response. Not a sound issued from the still-dark house. Not a noise penetrated the eerily quiet yard except the faint exhalations of his own chilled breath. A look of bewilderment slowly spread across his face as he realized that Cliff had failed to answer. The two men had been friends for over three years, and on the many prior occasions that they had gone hunting together, Cliff had always been dressed and ready to go when McLeod arrived, waiting to share a pot of hot coffee with him. Amused by the thought that he might have finally caught Cliff asleep, he walked to the bedroom window and tapped on it, gently at first, but then gradually louder and with more urgency. Still no one answered.
Growing concerned that something might not be right, he hurried to the front of the house and found the screen door to the porch unlocked. An undecorated Christmas tree stood sentinel on the porch. Wrapped Christmas presents were arranged neatly below it. McLeod moved forward onto the porch and tried to open the French doors that allowed access to the living room, but they were securely locked. Despite several attempts, he could not get the doors to budge.
Peering through a window to one of the bedrooms, McLeod noticed a faint light flickering inside. The unnerving thought crept into his mind that the Walkers’ gas heater might have malfunctioned during the night and asphyxiated the helpless family while they slept.
Moving more urgently, he hastened back to the rear door. Fearing that every second could be the difference between life and death, he cut the mesh screen door with his pocket knife, then unhooked the door latch, opened the back door, and stepped into the house. He turned on the kitchen light and froze in place. Through the kitchen doorway, he could see Christine Walker’s bare feet and legs lying motionless on the cold, hardwood floor.