by Bill James
I am not suggesting that Scott Peterson is innocent. It is my view, however, that if he is guilty, the actual evidence against him is astonishingly thin. No one saw him commit the murder. No one saw him transport the body. No one heard him make any threats against his wife. No blood was found in his house or in his car that would suggest a murder scene. No one knows where the murder was committed. No one knows what the murder weapon might have been. He had no marks or bruises on him that would be consistent with a struggle. There are no fingerprints or gunshot residue, no bloody footprint or speck of blood on his shoes—nothing. He had not purchased a million-dollar life insurance policy on her, or met with a potential assassin in a bar.
That’s not that easy to do, you know, to commit a murder without any real evidence, other than some coincidences and the fact that he was a first-class heel who fouled up the role of a grieving husband. Not saying he is innocent; it just bothers me a little.
Although there have been hundreds of movies inspired by real-life crimes, The Fugitive may be the only episodic television show in the same genre. If there are others, it was certainly the best. There was a 2000 re-make of the series—which was also quite a good show although it did not succeed—and there was a 1993 Hollywood hit starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, which I think is an extremely good movie. The general theme of an innocent man on the run has also been adapted into countless other TV shows following The Fugitive’s lead, such as The A-Team.
XVIII
Lowell Lee Andrews was an honor student at the University of Kansas. He weighed 300 pounds, had a pasty complexion and wore thick, unfashionable eyeglasses.
On November 28, 1958, Andrews was home from school for the Thanksgiving holiday. Home was Wolcott, Kansas, a town about the size of your living room. After supper he finished reading The Brothers Karamazov. After that he murdered his family—mother, father, sister. He shot them all with a rifle, firing some extra bullets into them from a revolver.
He ransacked the house, faking a robbery; the guy who invented that one must be collecting some massive royalties. Then he drove back to Lawrence, where the university is, a 40-mile drive on icy roads. There he talked to his landlady, picked up a typewriter, went to a movie, chatted to the ushers a minute so that they would remember he was there, and headed back to Wolcott.
No one had discovered the murders, so he called police, reporting a break-in. When the police came Andrews was sitting on the front porch, petting the family dog. The police asked what had happened. He gestured for them to go inside.
Under the M’Naghten Rule a man was innocent by reason of insanity only if he was unable to understand the nature of his actions. Doctors at the Menninger Foundation, anxious to challenge this rule, found an ideal test case in Andrews. Because Andrews had taken pains to establish an alibi, he was unquestionably sane under the M’Naghten Rule. On the other hand, the kid was obviously nuts. He was so dissociated from the events, so un-attached to the world around him, that he was obviously schizophrenic.
So the doctors argued.
They lost.
Lowell Andrews was executed on November 30, 1962.
In June and July, 1959, Floyd Wells and Richard Hickock were cellmates in the Kansas State prison. Ten years earlier Wells had worked for Herb Clutter, a well-to-do farmer in the western part of the state. Wells and Hickock got to talking, as captive men will, and Wells told about the Clutter farm. Hickock was enthralled. Was Clutter rich, he wanted to know? Yes, he was rich. Did he have a safe on the property? Did he keep money there?
Hickock wanted to know everything about the Clutters. He got Wells to draw a map of how you got to the place, and a diagram of the house and where the safe was. He talked often, from then on, about robbing the Clutters. He said that he would leave no witnesses.
November 14, 1959, was a Saturday night with a full moon. A little after midnight, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith pulled into the driveway of the Clutter residence. They parked in the shadow of a tree, some distance from the house. The front door was unlocked. In theory, they might have found the safe and left the house unseen. There was no safe, however, and in truth it was more about murder than it was about money. Hickock and Smith were there to prove themselves to one another, to show each other that it wasn’t all just talk. They woke up Herb Clutter, demanding that he show them the safe. The rest of the family stirred. The murderers escaped with $40.
Truman Capote was casting about for something to write about, and a news item about the inexplicable slaughter of a peaceful family on a quiet farm seized his imagination. He packed lightly, took along his friend Harper Lee, and headed for Kansas.
The book project was, in a gruesome way, blessed. It seemed odd to other writers that Capote, a foppish eastern author with standing in the literary community, would be attracted to this earthen event, and because it seemed odd, they wrote about it. Capote promoted his “non-fiction novel” brilliantly, and so the book, In Cold Blood, was enormously famous two years before it was published, and became a monster best seller when it finally appeared.
The book is outstanding. The story that Capote had stumbled onto was genuinely interesting—a real-life mystery involving subtle and complex personalities, yielding to another kind of story, about the trial and incarceration, and building to a definitive resolution.
I am a Kansan, born and bred, and known to be hyper-sensitive about the way Kansas is portrayed by alien journalists. Capote, however, came out here and lived with the story until he understood. He wrote about the area without condescension or caricature. His reports on the last days of the Clutter household are so detailed and so natural that the reader almost lapses into the assumption that he was there, taking notes.
The killers had driven out from eastern Kansas. In a sense, eastern Kansas is closer to Philadelphia than it is to Dodge City. Capote grasped this at once, and made it central to his story—the invasion and destruction of an honest, almost noble clan of westerners, by creatures of a different world. In later life Capote became a cartoon character, a lisping, mincing, preening old queer, posing for every camera, but no hint of that can be seen here. Capote’s writing is rich without being contrived, graceful without being delicate.
The book became the basis of a pretty decent movie, In Cold Blood, and of course years later there were twin movies made about the writing of the book. The first movie catapulted Robert Blake to minor stardom as Perry Smith. To get back to the story … Hickock had talked about the perfect crime, about leaving no witnesses. Floyd Wells received the news of the Clutter killings as a sledgehammer to the gut, and knew immediately what had happened. He contacted prison authorities, and the search for Hickock and Smith was soon underway. They were arrested in Las Vegas two months later, and were executed on April 14, 1965.
In Cold Blood was required reading at Shawnee Mission North High School in Mission, Kansas, in the early 1970s. One day a young man was so affected by doing his homework that he dropped the book to the floor, and staggered out of the classroom in a daze. He had figured out, from reading the book, something that his family had never told him. His father was Richard Hickock. He was a baby at the time of the crime. His mother had long since re-married, and he had been adopted many years earlier. But he knew his grandmother, and he pieced the facts together after he saw her name in the book.
Back to Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Wherever, whom we last visited with in the 1930s (page 183). On December 16, 1942, Stroud’s possessions were seized without warning. It had been learned by authorities that Stroud was using his unusual privileges to smuggle uncensored letters out of the prison, and to conceal contraband within his cell. He was placed in handcuffs, and his cells were cleaned. He was being transferred to Alcatraz.
Although known to the world as the Birdman of Alcatraz, Robert Stroud was never allowed to keep birds, or anything else of consequence, while he was in Alcatraz. Through the first ten years of his stay there, he slipped gradually toward obscurity. On the night of April 27–28,
1946, Stroud began yelling about stomach pains. Two visits from a medical technician failed to quiet him down, and Stroud’s complaints eventually triggered a full-scale riot in D Block, the isolation wing of Alcatraz, where Stroud was held with a select group of the most dangerous criminals in America. Although no one was hurt in that incident, enormous damage was done to the prison by fire, water, and broken ceramic plumbing.
Four days later, on May second, three prisoners from D Block broke into the gun gallery, containing keys to most of the prison, as well as a few guns and some ammunition. This set off another wild 24-hour skirmish, in which hundreds of rounds of heavy ammunition (including many grenades) were fired into D Block in the effort to bring the rebellious inmates to heel. Three convicts and two guards were killed in the escape attempt. Two other convicts were later executed for murdering one of the guards.
Alcatraz officials regarded Stroud as an agitator, and held him largely responsible for both events, the riot of April 27 and the escape attempt of May 2. Authorities moved Stroud to a ward in the prison hospital, where it was possible to hold him in an even more restrictive confinement, and redoubled their efforts to keep him in prison for the rest of his life.
In 1955 Thomas Gaddis published a book about Stroud, Birdman of Alcatraz. Gaddis had never actually met Stroud, until years later, was denied access to his prison records, and was prohibited from corresponding directly with him. He picked up the book project from another writer, who bailed out after realizing that Stroud was perhaps not someone who should be celebrated in print. Gaddis was given access to hundreds of letters written by Stroud to his family over the years, got involved with the birding community, and listened to the gossip about him in a community of people who had never met him, either.
Gaddis imagined Stroud to be a kindly, good-natured old man, sort of a country bird doctor, paying a heavy price for his youthful indiscretions. This is the Robert Stroud that he created in his book, and this is the Robert Stroud that Burt Lancaster won an Oscar nomination for portraying in the 1962 film Birdman of Alcatraz.
Unfortunately it bears not the slightest resemblance to the actual Robert Stroud, who was a vicious sociopath. Stroud, among his other charming qualities, liked to write violent pornography in which he fantasized about abducting, raping and murdering small children. Alvin (Creepy) Karpis, a famous criminal from the 1930s who was confined with Stroud at Alcatraz, wrote in his account of life on Alcatraz that Stroud talked constantly about raping and killing children, and insisted that he wasn’t bluffing; if he had gotten a chance, he would have done it. This led to a Kafkaesque scene at a parole hearing for Stroud in 1962. Outside the building protestors marched, holding placards demanding the release of the kindly bird doctor portrayed by Burt Lancaster in the movie, while inside the hearing parole officials dealt with a distinctly disturbed old man who mumbled about getting out of prison soon because he had a long list of people he wanted to kill and not much time left to kill them.
There was a much more accurate book about Stroud written forty years later by Jolene Babyak, Bird Man: The Many Faces of Robert Stroud (Ariel Vamp Press, Berkeley, California, 1994). Her research is extremely good. Her writing is uneven. About Stroud’s prison friendship with Morton Sobell (involved in the Rosenberg conspiracy), Babyak writes (p. 234) that “Sobell, an engineer with two master’s degrees, was almost as equally famous as Stroud.”
Babyak quotes frequently from Stroud’s writing, including liberal quotes from unpublished manuscripts. This is disconcerting, as Stroud’s writing is trim and graceful, while Babyak’s is harsh and blocky. Stroud was a remarkable man—brilliant, resourceful, determined and courageous. If you want to read a compelling story that uses his name a lot, read Gaddis’. If you want to know what the man was really like, read Babyak’s.
About 10 o’clock on the evening of March 9, 1963, a Saturday night, officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger stopped two men in a car. They were patrolling Hollywood, and they stopped the two men because they looked like hoodlums, using a missing rear license light as a specific, legal excuse to make the stop.
One of the hoodlums, Gregory Powell, pulled a gun on Campbell, took Campbell’s weapon, and forced Hettinger to surrender his. They drove them to a county road in the San Joaquin Valley, between two onion fields, where Powell murdered Officer Campbell. Hettinger broke and ran. His glasses fell off. He ran blindly through the onion fields, pursued by the two armed men who had just murdered his partner.
Powell was arrested leaving the area in a stolen car. His partner, Jimmy Smith, was apprehended in Bakersfield the next day. They confessed to the crime, were convicted, and were sentenced to die in the California gas chamber.
Hettinger, however, had escaped into a personal hell. Police Inspector John Powers, described as the General Patton of the Los Angeles Police Department, drafted an order known as the Hettinger Memorandum, which second-guessed Hettinger’s decision to surrender his weapon, and ordered all members of the force never, ever, to do anything like that again. Hettinger, who felt tremendous guilt over the death of his partner, was pushed further into depression and despair. He began to steal things, shoplifting, and was forced to leave the police force.
Meanwhile, the prosecution of Powell and Smith got caught in the backwash of the Supreme Court decisions that rocked the criminal justice system in the mid-sixties. On the day that Ian Campbell was buried, police in Phoenix, Arizona, arrested Ernesto Miranda, a young man whose name would enter the language. Between June 22, 1964, and June 13, 1966, the Supreme Court issued three decisions about the rights of prisoners—the Escobedo, Dorado and Miranda decisions.
The police officers who questioned Smith and Powell in custody had treated them like gentlemen, eliciting confessions from them by a few hours of friendly questioning. They clearly informed Smith and Powell that anything they said could be used against them in court, and also that they had the right to an attorney. Still, the Supreme Court decisions made it all but inevitable that Smith and Powell would receive new trials. Various courts had required—a year after the fact—not only that these warnings be given, but that specific language be used, and that a paper trail be maintained to ensure that those protections were in place.
Since the confessions of Smith and Powell had been obtained without “qualified” Miranda warnings, the confessions were thrown out, and the police had to start from scratch. Their opponents were two career criminals. By now, those criminals had already spent several months on death row, and were very much aware that they faced the gas chamber if they confessed again.
Powell and Smith came back into court with new lawyers, including the infamous Irving Kanarek, who specialized in making such a circus of a courtroom that it became almost impossible to conduct a trial. (Kanarek later defended Charlie Manson. If Manson’s prosecutors could have executed one or the other, Manson would have gone free and Kanarek would have hanged.) Without confessions, their prosecution rested almost exclusively on the testimony of the surviving officer, Karl Hettinger. Since Hettinger, riddled by guilt, had developed into a kleptomaniac and been dismissed by the force, the defense bore down upon him, forcing him through an interminable series of psychological evaluations and re-evaluations, trials and appeals and penalty hearings which forced him to re-live that pitiless night again, and again, and again. The transcript of the trials (alone) would eventually run more than 45,000 pages, at the time a California record.
Joseph Wambaugh wrote a brilliant book about the case, The Onion Field, and in 1979 the book was made into a movie, starring a young Ted Danson as Ian Campbell, James Woods as Gregory Powell and John Savage as Karl Hettinger. I must have seen that movie a dozen times. If it is on TV, I have to watch it. Gritty and depressing, the movie was not a box office hit. It is probably the best movie ever made about a crime. Made on a low budget, it was the breakthrough movie for two stars, Danson and Woods, but the most memorable performance is by Franklyn Seales, as Jimmy Smith.
All generalization is dangerou
s. The Los Angeles police brought about some of their own headaches with Smith and Powell by trying too hard to send them both to the gas chamber. While Gregory Powell was a despicable punk whose actions surely merited a cyanide capsule or two, Jimmy Smith was a follower. He had never intended to kill Campbell or anyone else; it was his misfortune—and his bad judgment—to be Powell’s partner when Powell chose to murder a cop. As far as the law was concerned they were equally guilty, since they were partners in the commission of a felony that led to a murder. The police were determined that they should both pay the ultimate price for this offense. That isn’t justice. Smith may have fired four shots into Campbell as he died, but the prosecution couldn’t prove it. I believe in protecting police officers, too, but it’s not right to execute a man because his partner does something stupid. The prosecutors complicated the battle for justice by pushing for something more than justice.
Still, for anyone who wants to understand the explosion in crime rates in this country between 1964 and 1976, there can be no better explanation than to read The Onion Field. The Supreme Court decisions of the mid-sixties, though carrying no inevitable harm, established in the minds of lower courts the idea that the primary object of the process was not to deliver justice, but to protect the rights of the accused. The lower courts for ten years thereafter competed to see who could force the police to jump through the most hoops in the process of trying to convict a criminal. The California Supreme Court, the Rose Bird court, ruled that the police had violated the cop killers’ rights by being friendly with them so as to earn their trust so that they would confess. Such “psychological devises,” they ruled, were condemned by the U.S. Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona.
The best book about crime in the late 1950s/early 1960s is certainly In Cold Blood—but the book which can help you to truly understand America’s prevailing attitudes about crime in that era is Birdman of Alcatraz. And the book which can help you to understand the transition that followed, how we got from Burt Lancaster to Charles Manson in just seven years, is The Onion Field.