The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “Monday 11 January. Have a lawyer. Mr. Fleming. Old man with red tie.” Having been informed by the defendants that they were without funds to hire legal counsel, the court, in the person of District Judge Roland H. Tate, appointed as their representatives two local lawyers, Arthur Fleming and Harrison Smith. Fleming, who was seventy-one, was a former mayor of Garden City, a short man who habitually enlivened an unsensational appearance with rather conspicuous neck-wear. He resisted the assignment. “I do not desire to serve,” he told the judge. “But if the court sees fit to appoint me, then, of course, I have no choice.” Hickock’s attorney, Harrison Smith, was forty-five, six feet tall, a golfer, and an Elk of exalted degree. He accepted the task with resigned grace: “Someone has to do it. And I’ll do my best. Though I doubt that’ll make me too popular around here.”

  “Friday 15 January. Mrs. Meier playing radio in her kitchen and I heard man say the County Attorney will seek Death Penalty. ‘The rich never hang. Only the poor and friendless.’ ” In making his announcement, the County Attorney, Duane West, an ambitious, portly man of twenty-eight who looks forty, told newsmen that day, “If the case goes before a jury, I will request the jury, upon finding them guilty, to sentence them to the death penalty. If the defendants waive right to jury trial and enter a plea of guilty before the judge, I will request the judge to set the death penalty. This was a matter I knew I would be called upon to decide, and my decision has not been arrived at lightly. I feel that, due to the violence of the crime and the apparent utter lack of mercy shown the victims, the only way the public can be absolutely protected is to have the death penalty set against these defendants. This is especially true since in Kansas there is no such thing as life imprisonment without possibility of parole. Persons sentenced to life imprisonment actually serve, on the average, less than fifteen years.”

  “Wednesday 20 January. Asked to take lie-detector in regards to this Walker deal.” A case like the Clutter case—a crime of such magnitude—arouses the interest of law-enforcement men everywhere, and particularly those investigators burdened with similar but unsolved crimes, for it is always possible that the solution to one mystery will solve another. Among the many officers alert to events in Garden City was the sheriff of Sarasota County, which includes Osprey, Florida, a fishing settlement not far from Tampa, and the scene, slightly more than a month after the Clutter tragedy, of a quadruple slaying on an isolated cattle-raising ranch. Again the victims were four members of a family—a young couple, Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Walker, and their two children, a boy and a girl, all of whom had been shot in the head with a rifle. Parallels aside, there was another circumstance that made Smith and Hickock first-class suspects: on the nineteenth of December, the date of the Walker murders, the Clutter murderers had spent the night in a Tallahassee hotel. Not unnaturally, Osprey’s sheriff, who had no other leads whatever, was anxious to have the two men questioned and a polygraph examination administered. Dick consented to take the test, and so did Perry, who told Kansas authorities he had seen reports of the slaying in a Miami newspaper: “I remarked at the time, I said to Dick, I’ll bet whoever did this must be somebody that read about what happened out here in Kansas. A nut.” The results of the test—to the dismay of Alvin Dewey, who does not believe in extraordinary coincidences—were decisively negative. The murderer of the Walker family remains unknown.

  “Sunday 31 January. Dick’s dad here to visit Dick. Said hello when I saw him go past [the cell door] but he kept going. Could be he never heard me. Understand from Mrs. M [Meier] that Mrs. H [Hickock] didn’t come because she felt too bad to. Snowing like a bitch. Dreamed last night I was up in Alaska with Dad—woke up in a puddle of cold urine!!!” Mr. Hickock spent three hours with his son. Afterward, he walked through the snow to the Garden City depot, a work-worn old man, stooped and thinned down by cancer, which would kill him a few months later. At the station, while he was waiting for a homeward-bound train, he spoke to a reporter: “I seen Dick, uh-huh. We had a long talk. And I can guarantee you it’s not like people say. Or what’s put in the papers. Those boys didn’t go to that house planning to do violence. My boy didn’t. He may have some bad sides, but he’s nowhere near bad as that. Smitty’s the one. Dick told me he didn’t even know it when Smitty attacked the man [Mr. Clutter]—cut his throat. Dick wasn’t even in the same room. He only run in when he heard them struggling. Dick was carrying his shotgun, and how he described it was ‘Smitty took my shotgun and just blew that man’s head off.’ And he says, ‘Dad, I ought to have grabbed back the gun and shot Smitty dead. Killed him ’fore he killed the rest of that family. If I’d done it, I’d be better off than I am now.’ I guess he would, too. How it is, the way folks feel, he don’t stand no chance. They’ll hang them both. And having your boy hang, knowing he will—nothing worse can happen to a man.”

  Perry Smith’s only living relatives were his father and a sister, and neither of them wrote to him or came to see him. The father, Tex John Smith, was presumed to be prospecting for gold somewhere in Alaska—though investigators, despite great efforts, had been unable to locate him. The sister, on the other hand, had told investigators that she was afraid of her brother, and requested that they please not let him know her address. (When Perry was informed of this, he smiled slightly and said, “I wish she’d been in that house that night. What a sweet scene!”) Except for the squirrel, and except for the Meiers and an occasional consultation with his lawyer, Mr. Fleming, he was very much alone. He missed Dick. “Many thoughts of Dick,” he wrote in his makeshift diary one day. Since their arrest, they had not been allowed to communicate, and, freedom apart, that was what he most desired—to talk to Dick, be with him again. Dick was not the “hard rock” that Perry had once thought him—“pragmatic,” “virile,” “a real brass boy.” He had proved to be “pretty weak and shallow,” “a coward.” Still, of everyone in all the world, this, for the moment, was the person to whom he was closest, for at least they were of the same species, brothers in the breed of Cain, and, separated from Dick, Perry felt “all by myself. Like somebody covered with sores. Somebody only a big nut would have anything to do with.”

  But then, one morning in mid-February, Perry received a letter. It was postmarked Reading, Massachusetts, and it went, “Dear Perry, I was sorry to hear about the trouble you are in and I decided to write and let you know that I remember you and would like to help you in any way that I can. In case you don’t remember my name, Don Cullivan, I’ve enclosed a picture taken at about the time we met. When I first read about you in the news recently I was startled and then I began to think back to those days when I knew you. While we were never close personal friends I can remember you a lot more clearly than most fellows I met in the Army. It must have been about the fall of 1951 when you were assigned to the 761st Engineer Light Equipment Company at Fort Lewis, Washington. You were short (I’m not much taller), solidly built, dark with a heavy shock of black hair and a grin on your face almost all the time. Since you had lived in Alaska quite a few of the fellows used to call you ‘Eskimo.’ One of my first recollections of you was at a Company inspection in which all footlockers were open for inspection. As I recall it all the footlockers were in order, even yours, except that the inside cover of your footlocker was plastered with pictures of pin-up girls. The rest of us were sure you were in for trouble. But the inspecting officer took it in stride and when it was all over and he let it pass I think we felt you were a nervy guy. I remember that you were a fairly good pool player and I can picture you quite clearly in the Company day room at the pool table. You were one of the best truck drivers in the outfit. Remember the Army field problems we went out on? On one trip that took place in the winter I remember that we each were assigned to a truck for the duration of the problem. In our outfit, Army trucks had no heaters and it used to get pretty cold in those cabs. I remember you cutting a hole in the floor-boards of your truck in order to let the heat from the engine come into the cab. The reason I remember this so well is the
impression it made on me because ‘mutilation’ of Army property was a crime for which you could get severely punished. Of course I was pretty green in the Army and probably afraid to stretch the rules even a little bit, but I can remember you grinning about it (and keeping warm) while I worried about it (and froze). I recall that you bought a motorcycle, and vaguely remember you had some trouble with it—chased by the police?—crackup? Whatever it was, it was the first time I realized the wild streak in you. Some of my recollections may be wrong; this was over eight years ago and I only knew you for a period of about eight months. From what I remember, though, I got along with you very well and rather liked you. You always seemed cheerful and cocky, you were good at your Army work and I can’t remember that you did much griping. Of course you were apparently quite wild but I never knew too much about that. But now you are in real trouble. I try to imagine what you are like now. What you think about. When first I read about you I was stunned. I really was. But then I put the paper down and turned to something else. But the thought of you returned. I wasn’t satisfied just to forget. I am, or try to be, fairly religious [Catholic]. I wasn’t always. I used to just drift along with little thought about the only important thing there is. I never considered death or the possibility of a life hereafter. I was too much alive: car, college, dating etc. But my kid brother died of leukemia when he was just 17 years old. He knew he was dying and afterward I used to wonder what he thought about. And now I think of you, and wonder what you think about. I didn’t know what to say to my brother in the last weeks before he died. But I know what I’d say now. And this is why I am writing you: because God made you as well as me and He loves you just as He loves me, and for the little we know of God’s will what has happened to you could have happened to me. Your friend, Don Cullivan.”

  The name meant nothing, but Perry at once recognized the face in the photograph—a young soldier with crew-cut hair and round, very earnest eyes. He read the letter many times; though he found the religious passages unpersuasive (“I’ve tried to believe, but I don’t, I can’t, and there’s no use pretending”), he was thrilled by it. Here was someone offering help, a sane and respectable man who had once known and liked him, a man who signed himself “friend.”

  Gratefully, in great haste, he started a reply: “Dear Don, Hell yes I remember Don Cullivan….”

  · · ·

  Dick Hickock’s cell had no window—he faced a wide corridor and the façades of other cells—but he was not isolated. There were people to talk to—a plentiful turnover of drunkards, forgers, wife beaters, and Mexican vagrants—and Dick, with his light-hearted “con-man” patter, his sex anecdotes and gamy jokes, was popular with the inmates. (There was one, though, who had no use for him whatever—an old man who yelled at him, “Killer! Killer!,” and who once drenched him with a bucketful of dirty scrub water.) Outwardly, Hickock seemed to one and all an exceptionally untroubled young man. When he was not talking or sleeping, he lay on his cot smoking or chewing gum and reading sports magazines or paperback thrillers. Often, he simply lay there whistling old favorites (“You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” “Shuffle Off to Buffalo”) and staring at an unshaded light bulb that burned day and night in the ceiling of the cell. He hated the light bulb’s monotonous surveillance; it disturbed his sleep and, more explicitly, endangered the success of a private project—escape. For the prisoner was not as unconcerned as he appeared to be, or as resigned; he intended taking every step possible to avoid “a ride on the Big Swing.” Convinced that such a ceremony would be the outcome of any trial—certainly any trial held in the State of Kansas—he had decided to “bust jail, grab a car, and raise dust.” But first he must have a weapon, and, over a period of weeks, he had been making one: a shiv, an instrument very like an icepick—something that would fit with lethal niceness between the shoulder blades of Under-sheriff Meier. The components of the weapon—a piece of wood and a piece of hard wire—were originally part of a toilet brush he had appropriated, dismantled, and hidden under his mattress. Late at night, when the only noises were snores and coughs and the lugubrious whistle-wailings of Santa Fe trains rumbling through the darkened town, he honed the wire against the concrete floor of the cell. And while he worked he schemed.

  Once, the winter after he finished high school, he had hitchhiked across Kansas and Colorado. “This was when I was looking for a job,” he recalled one day. “Well, I was riding in a truck, and the driver, me and him got into a little argument, no reason exactly, but he beat up on me. Shoved me out. Just left me there. High the hell up in the Rockies. It was sleeting, like, and I walked miles, my nose bleeding like fifteen pigs. Then I come to a bunch of cabins on a wooded slope. Summer cabins, all locked up and empty that time of year. And I broke into one of them. There was firewood and canned goods, even some whiskey. I laid up there over a week, and it was one of the best times I ever knew. Despite the fact my nose hurt so and my eyes were green and yellow. But when the snow stopped, the sun came out. You never saw such skies. Like Mexico. If Mexico was in a cold climate. I hunted through the other cabins and found some smoked hams and a radio and a rifle. It was great. Out all day with a gun. With the sun in my face. Boy, I felt good. I felt like Tarzan. And every night I ate beans and fried ham and rolled up in a blanket by the fire and fell asleep listening to music on the radio. Nobody came near the place. I bet I could’ve stayed till spring.” That, provided the escape succeeded, was the course he had determined upon: to head for the Colorado mountains, and find there a cabin where he could hide until spring—alone, of course. (Perry’s future did not concern him.) The prospect of so idyllic an interim added to the inspired stealth with which he whetted his wire, filed it to a limber stiletto fineness.

  · · ·

  “Thursday 10 March. Sheriff had a shake-out. Searched through all the cells and found a shiv tucked under D’s mattress. Wonder what he had in mind (smile).” Not that Perry really considered it a smiling matter, for Dick, flourishing a dangerous weapon, could have played a decisive role in plans he himself was forming.

  As the weeks went by, Perry had become familiar with life on Courthouse Square—its habitués and their habits. The cats, for example, the two thin gray toms who appeared with every twilight and prowled the square, stopping to examine the cars parked around its periphery: behavior puzzling to him until Mrs. Meier explained that the cats were hunting food—dead birds caught in the vehicles’ engine grilles—and thereafter it pained him to watch their maneuvers, “because most of my life I’ve done what they’re doing, the equivalent.” And there was one man of whom he had grown especially aware: a robust, upright gentleman with hair like a gray-and-silver skullcap; his face, filled out, firm-jawed, was somewhat cantankerous in repose, the mouth down-curved, the eyes downcast as though in mirthless reverie—a picture of unsparing sternness. And yet this was at least a partly inaccurate impression, for now and again the prisoner glimpsed him as he paused to talk to other men, joke with them, and laugh, and then he seemed carefree, jovial, generous, “the kind of person who might see the human side”—an important attribute, for the man was Roland H. Tate, Judge of the Thirty-second Judicial District, the jurist who would preside at the trial of the State of Kansas vs. Hickock and Smith. The name Tate, as Perry soon learned, was an old and awesome one in western Kansas. The judge was rich, he raised horses, he owned much land, and his wife was said to be very beautiful. He was the father of two sons, but the younger had died—a tragedy that had greatly affected the parents and had led them to adopt a small boy who appeared one day in court as an abandoned, homeless child. “He sounds softhearted to me,” Perry once said to Mrs. Meier. “Maybe he’ll give us a break.” But that was not what Perry really believed. He believed what he’d written to Don Cullivan, with whom he now corresponded regularly: his crime was “unforgivable,” and he fully expected to “climb those thirteen steps.” However, he was not altogether without hope, for he, too, had plotted an escape. It depended upon a pair of young men whom he had
often observed observing him. One was red-haired, the other dark. Sometimes, standing in the square under the tree that touched the cell window, they smiled and signalled to him—or so he imagined. Nothing was ever said, and always, after perhaps a minute, they drifted away. But the prisoner had convinced himself that the young men, possibly motivated by a desire for adventure, meant to help him escape. Accordingly, he drew a map of the square, indicating the points at which a “getaway car” could most advantageously be stationed. Beneath the map he wrote, “I need a Hacksaw Blade 5.” Nothing else. But do you realize the consequences if you get caught (nod your head if you do)? It could mean a long stretch in prison. Or you might get killed. All for someone you don’t know. YOU BETTER THINK IT OVER!! Seriously! Besides, how do I know I can trust you? How do I know it isn’t a trick to get me out there and gun me down? What about Hickock? All preparations must include him.” He kept this document on his desk, wadded and ready to drop out the window the next time the young men appeared. But they never did; he never saw them again. Eventually, he wondered if perhaps he had invented them. (He once mentioned a notion that he “might not be normal, maybe insane.” This had troubled him “even when I was little,” he said, recalling, “My sisters laughed because I liked moonlight. To hide in the shadows and watch the moon.”)