In Colder Blood

by JT Hunter

  “I think it was Hickock losing control, wanting to rape Christine, that could have triggered the events that day,” McGath explained.

  At 4:28, approximately twenty minutes after Christine’s arrival, Cliff and the children pulled up in the Jeep and parked in the back of the house, oblivious to what awaited them inside.

  *****

  Hickock’s attempt at an alibi did nothing to diminish McGath’s belief in her theory of his involvement in the Walker murders. Hickock told KBI investigators that he and Smith had stayed in Miami Beach at the Somerset Hotel from December 21 through December 26, and that when they finally left Miami they drove straight through the state without stopping anywhere overnight. However, his story was subsequently shown to be untrue. For one thing, hotel records unequivocally established that the two men checked into the Somerset Hotel on December 18. If Hickock misled investigators about the date they checked in, it stood to reason that he also lied about when they left, and no one at the Somerset Hotel recalled seeing Hickock or Smith after the morning of December 19.

  In addition, the two men were seen in Sarasota later that day, and they were spotted by several witnesses near Osprey, Florida, the following day, on December 20. A few days later, on the evening of December 22 or 23, they returned to the Tip Top Café on Highway 27 east of Tallahassee. They told the owner, the same witness to whom they had sold a television set on December 17 on their way south, that they were “flat broke” because the job they had lined up in Tampa “had not turned out.” Additionally, on December 24, when according to Hickock they were still in Miami Beach, the two fugitives sold two dolls wrapped in Christmas paper to Reverend John Gibson in Delhi, Louisiana, for gas money. (Witnesses in Florida testified that Christine Walker had gone Christmas shopping shortly before her murder, and baby dolls would have been a likely choice for gifts for her daughter Debbie.) Six days later, just before the New Year, Hickcock and Smith were in Nevada. Thanks to a tip from an informant who knew about their plan to rob the Clutter family, they were arrested in Las Vegas for the Clutter murders, an offense they had committed only six weeks earlier, a crime that shared remarkable similarities with the Walker family murders.

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  In her final investigative report submitted on May 4, 2015, McGath compiled an extensive list of similarities between the unsolved Walker family murder and the Clutter killings that were known to have been committed by Hickock and Smith:

  (a) Both families were murdered on a Saturday night in their own homes.

  (b) Both crimes were quadruple murders of a father, mother, son, and daughter.

  (c) The Clutter family members were murdered in order of father, son, daughter, and mother, while the Walker family members were killed in order of father, son, then most likely daughter and mother.

  (d) No witnesses were left alive at either crime scene.

  (e) Both crimes occurred in an isolated, rural setting on a farm or ranch.

  (f) All of the family members were shot in the head in both cases.

  (g) All male members of both families were shot in the face.

  (h) All female members of both families were shot in the back, side, or top of their heads.

  (i) There was evidence that the adult women were raped at both scenes. Blood Type A semen was found on the clothing of the adult women in both cases: on the “rear” of Bonnie Clutter’s nightgown, and on the “rear” of Christine Walker’s underwear.

  (j) There were hair and head tissue fragments on the walls of the houses from murdered females in both cases, and Hickock told Smith prior to the Clutter murder that “I want to see hair on those walls.”

  (k) Boot prints were found at both crime scenes, with Smith leaving a “cat’s paw design” boot print in the Clutter basement and a similar “cat’s paw design” print being found in the Walker living room.

  (l) Boot prints were found near a window in the Walker home and Smith admitted that he looked out of a window in the Clutter home during the crime to see if anyone was coming.

  (m) The boot prints in both the Clutter and Walker cases made stronger impressions on the right side of the boot than the left, and Perry Smith was known to walk with an unusual gait due to leg injuries he sustained from a motorcycle accident.

  (n) Petty cash and miscellaneous low-value items, such as binoculars (Clutter home) and a carving set (Walker home), were taken from both homes.

  (o) Jewelry was not taken at either crime scene.

  (p) The lights were turned off in both homes.

  (q) Hickock was a chain smoker, and a cellophane wrapper for cigarettes that did not match the Kool brand which Cliff Walker smoked exclusively was found near Christine’s body. A cigarette butt was also found at the Clutter crime scene.

  (q) Hickock and Smith buried evidence in a field after the Clutter murders, and bloody clothing was found in a nearby field after the Walker murders.

  (r) Smith followed the news on the radio and in newspapers about both the Clutter and Walker murders.

  (s) “Undoing” acts by the killer at the Walker crime scene – pulling the quilt over the bloody pillow on Jimmy’s bed, and covering Debbie’s head with her brother’s cowboy hat before shooting her – were similar to actions taken by Perry Smith during the Clutter killings, such as tucking Nancy Clutter in her bed and placing a pillow under Kenyon Clutter’s head before killing them.

  McGath also noted that Cliff and Jimmy Walker were both shot directly in the eyes, while Herb and Kenyon Clutter were shot in the face. She thought this might be another connection since Dick Hickock had been temporarily blinded after his automobile accident in 1950, and he donated his eyes for transplant after his death.

  Additionally, McGath recalled that Perry Smith claimed that while he was housed in a children’s shelter operated by the Salvation Army, one of the shelter’s nurses forced him into a tub of ice-cold water and held him underwater until he turned blue, nearly drowning him. McGath believed that Debbie Walker’s drowning by being held face down in the bathtub might have been a case of the psychological condition of Identification with the Aggressor, whereby Perry Smith identified with the power figure of the nurse who held him under ice-cold bath water when he was a child. Indeed, during Smith’s trial for the Clutter killings, a widely respected psychiatrist concluded that he suffered from schizophrenic episodes in which he was prone to commit violent acts while in a “trancelike state.” The psychiatrist specifically compared Smith to a similarly disturbed individual who had drowned a young girl by holding her head under water.

  Combined with Hickock and Smith being spotted near the Osprey area, both a few days before the December 19 murder of the Walker family as well as the day after the crime, it all added up, at the least, to an extraordinary and startling coincidence.

  Chapter 8: The Circumstances of Evidence

  Despite all of the unusual similarities and incriminating coincidences between the Clutter and Walker family murders, nothing in the Walker case file gave an indication that anyone from the Sarasota Sheriff’s Office had ever interviewed Hickock or Smith about the Walker killings. McGath could not help but lament this missed opportunity. She knew from experience that the first interview with a suspect constitutes a crucial time period for obtaining candor since it is when they are most vulnerable, before the passage of time allows them to distance themselves from their crimes and create false alibis. After their arrest, the initial interview of Hickock and Smith had been conducted by members of the Las Vegas Police Department, who had no inkling that the two men might be connected to a quadruple murder on the other side of the country in Florida. Even subsequent interviews of Hickock and Smith conducted by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation had focused on the Clutter case, with no mention of the Walker murders until much later in the process.

  McGath also knew that her task had been made more difficult due to other mistakes committed by investigators early in the case. Indeed, since Sheriff Boyer did not have a crime scene team in 1959, he allowed liberal ac
cess to the Walker home after the bodies were discovered, actively enlisting press photographers to take pictures inside the house and permitting reporters to wander through the site. It was also likely that one of the first deputies to respond to the site had inadvertently destroyed tire tracks left behind by the killers.

  *****

  Convinced that Hickock and Smith committed the Walker murders, but lacking direct evidence that could conclusively tie them to the crime, McGath turned to the ever-evolving field of forensic DNA analysis. During early 2012, McGath made a series of unsuccessful attempts to locate a relative of Dick Hickock who would be willing to provide DNA samples that would allow comparison testing with the evidence recovered at the scene of the Walker murders. She was also frustrated by the inability to obtain palm prints of Hickock or Smith to compare against the partial palm print recovered from the bathtub faucet handle in the Walker home.

  One promising lead that developed on the DNA front soon turned into another dead end. A KBI agent had managed to obtain a DNA profile for one of Hickock’s purported children, a son named D.R. Although D.R. had declined to voluntarily provide a DNA sample, the KBI agent he met with to discuss the matter was able to procure his profile from a Styrofoam cup that D.R. had used during their meeting. Unfortunately, subsequent analysis showed that the DNA profile taken from the cup was not consistent with the suspect profile obtained from Christine Walker’s underwear. Disappointing as this news was, it did not weaken McGath’s resolve to exhaust all available avenues to prove her theory. As explained by the KBI, there were many possibilities for the negative results, including that D.R. was not really the biological child of Hickock, or that the Styrofoam cup had been contaminated either in storage or during the testing process. Another possibility was that the suspect sample from Christine Walker’s underwear was itself contaminated.

  In light of the uncertainty surrounding D.R.’s DNA profile, McGath decided that she needed to go straight to the sources: she would try to get DNA directly from the remains of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. In early November, using a court order template provided by the KBI, she started writing the probable cause narrative to be filed in support of a proposed order from a Kansas court that would allow her to exhume Hickock's and Smith’s bodies from their Kansas graves.

  McGath knew there was no guarantee that usable DNA could be extracted from the two men’s long-buried bodies. After all, they had been decomposing in their graves for nearly half a century. Nonetheless, she believed that any chance of success warranted trying to bring closure to Cliff and Christine’s surviving family members.

  “It’s absolutely possible” to obtain usable DNA, McGath explained. “It depends on all kinds of circumstances. The soil conditions, the weather, what type of casket it is in. We will have no idea until we get out there.”

  The fact that Hickock and Smith were buried in Kansas offered McGath greater hope of success because it considerably increased the odds of being able to extract usable DNA. She knew that the DNA deterioration process is slowed in bodies buried in higher elevations and away from excessive heat and moisture.

  *****

  On November 14, 2012, in the midst of McGath’s efforts to obtain DNA profiles for Hickock and Smith, Cliff Walker’s niece contacted her with information about Cliff and Christine’s marriage certificate. The marriage certificate was a key item that had been missing from the Walkers' personal possessions for more than fifty years. Though long believed to have been stolen from the house by the Walkers’ killer, Cliff’s niece gave McGath the surprising news that the marriage certificate had turned up among items recently given to her by another family member. The fact that the marriage certificate had not been taken by the Walkers’ killer cast some doubt on the long-held theory that the killer was someone who personally knew Cliff and Christine and resented their being together. It weakened an interpretation of the evidence suggesting that the crime had been committed by a jilted lover or jealous former boyfriend.

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  On December 10, McGath completed a proposed court order to exhume the bodies of Hickock and Smith, and six days later she caught a Delta Airlines flight to Kansas City, Missouri, accompanied by Sarasota Sheriff’s Office videographer Jeffrey Blossom. After arriving in Kansas City, they rented a car and drove to Leavenworth County, Kansas, the location of the cemetery in which Hickock and Smith had been buried after their execution. On December 17, McGath and Blossom met Kansas Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Micky Rantz at the Leavenworth County Courthouse. The trio then presented the proposed exhumation order to district court Judge Gunnar Sundby. Judge Sundby reviewed the order and signed it, granting permission to exhume Hickock's and Smith’s bodies for purposes of obtaining hair, molar, and femur samples. Since a Kansas warrant authorized the exhumation, any samples obtained would be sent to a Kansas laboratory, the KBI laboratory in Great Bend, for examination and DNA testing.

  Shortly after sunrise on December 18, under mild, clear skies, McGath, Blossom, Rantz, KBI Assistant Director Kyle Smith, Special Agent in Charge Bill Delaney, and other KBI personnel assembled at Mount Muncie Cemetery in Lansing, Kansas, more than 1,300 miles away from the site of the Walker murders. It was exactly 53 years to the day that Hickock and Smith had checked into the Somerset Hotel in Miami Beach, and nearly 53 years to the day that Cliff, Christine, Jimmy, and Debbie Walker were murdered.

  Since Lansing Police had previously barricaded the cemetery’s entrance in preparation for the exhumation, the team of Kansas and Florida investigators stood together as the sole onlookers in the cemetery. McGath and the others watched as a backhoe began digging up the cold ground of a gently sloping hill at Section 34, Row 29, graves 43 and 44, the spots where the two convicted killers had been buried after being hanged in a Lansing prison warehouse on April 14, 1965, almost half a century earlier. When no family members claimed the killers’ bodies, they were placed in plain, cheap coffins and deposited under the dirt in their simple burial plots, all of it paid for with tax dollars from the people of Kansas.

  When the backhoe had excavated enough of the long-undisturbed earth covering Perry Smith’s grave, members of a KBI Crime response team converged on the coffin and chiseled away at the seal securing the cement lid. After breaking through the seal and removing the lid, they took molar and hair samples from Smith’s skull, noting pieces of a black cloth material on his face that appeared to be remnants of the executioner’s hood that he had been wearing when he was hanged. After taking the samples from Smith’s skull, the team collected samples from his femur bones as well. Then they repeated the process with Hickock’s grave.

  After both exhumations were completed, the coffin lids were re-secured and the backhoe re-buried the bodies, confining them once again to the darkness of the grave. By the time the team of investigators left the cemetery around noon, an area of fresh dirt spread neatly over Hickock's and Smith’s graves gave the only indication that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.

  *****

  On February 5, 2013, McGath answered her phone to find Special Agent Rantz on the line. He had good news and bad news, and something in between. The good news was that KBI laboratory personnel had been able to obtain a DNA profile from Perry Smith’s femur bone. The bad news was that the test results revealed that Smith’s profile did not match the suspect profile in the Walker case. The other news Rantz shared was that KBI analysts had not been able to obtain a DNA profile for Dick Hickock, and they were planning on sending Hickock’s femur bone and molars to a private laboratory for analysis to see if a DNA profile could be extracted using the equipment and techniques employed by that facility.

  Kyle Smith, Deputy Director of the KBI, pointed out that the many decades Hickock's and Smith’s bodies had spent buried underground were not helping matters.

  “The challenge in this particular case is the age of the material,” Smith said. “There are some practical difficulties, that’s what we’re running into.”

  Smith mentioned
that Florida law enforcement had been interested in renewing the investigation of Hickock and Smith at various times over the decades, but the existing DNA technology had not made it feasible until now. He also explained the KBI’s reasons for assisting with the Florida case.

  “Our interest is in providing closure to the Walker family,” he remarked, before adding, “Obviously, there’s a lot of historical interest as well.” By “historical interest,” he meant the potential ramifications that DNA testing could have with respect to Truman Capote’s novel about the Clutter family murder.

  “The analysis is not completed,” he stressed. “We are still trying.”

  Smith also emphasized that the DNA analysis would take time and the examination for the Walker case would not take precedence over Kansas crimes that KBI lab personnel were already working on.

  Asked when a final analysis of Hickock's and Smith’s samples might be completed, Smith could only speculate.

  “Ideally, the earliest is in a couple of weeks,” he said.

  Detective McGath was not surprised. She had anticipated a lengthy process, and she was prepared to wait, no matter what the timetable.

  “On cold cases, you have to be very, very patient,” she acknowledged before reiterating her resolve. “My gut tells me that we’re on the right track.”

  *****

  Almost six months later, on August 1, McGath received and eagerly reviewed the final results of the KBI analysis, as well as the DNA results produced by the private laboratory that KBI had enlisted, Paternity Testing Corporation. After sifting through pages of complex data, McGath discerned the ultimate findings: the tests were still inconclusive.

  Although discouraged that a positive DNA match had not been made, McGath took some measure of comfort in the fact that the tests had not exonerated the Clutter killers either. She noted that both sources contained contaminated results, including some of Perry Smith’s profiles that had somehow ended up being classified as “female” and one such profile which was determined to be that of the serologist who had conducted the testing on Smith’s femur bone.