read about in a Miami newspaper on Christmas Day. The victims were again 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. Since the Clutter murderers had spent the night of December 19, the date of the murders, in a Tallahassee hotel, Osprey’s sheriff, who had no other leads whatever, was understandably anxious to have the two men questioned and a polygraph examination administered. Hickock consented to take the test and so did Smith, who told Kansas authorities, “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 Osprey’s sheriff as well as Alvin Dewey, who does not believe in exceptional 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. At [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 the cancer that would kill him a few months hence. At the station, while waiting for a homeward-bound train, he spoke to a reporter: “I seen Dirk 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 had 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 how 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,” he added, fatigue and defeat glazing his eyes, “having your boy hang, knowing he will, nothing worse can happen to a man.”
Neither Perry Smith’s father nor sister wrote him or came to see him. Tex John Smith was presumed to be prospecting for somewhere in Alaska—though lawmen, despite great effort, been unable to locate him. The sister had told investigators she was afraid of her brother, and requested that they please not let him know her present address. (When informed of this, Smith smiled slightly and said, “I wish she’d been in that house that night. What a sweet scene!”)
Except for the squirrel, except for the Meiers and an occasional consultation with his lawyer, Mr. Fleming, Perry was very much alone. He missed Dick. Many thoughts of Dick, he wrote one day in his make shift diary. Since their arrest they had not been allowed to communicate, and that, freedom aside, was what he most desired—to talk to Dick, be with him again. Dick was not the “hard rock” he’d once thought him: “pragmatic,” “virile,” “a real brass boy”; he’d proven himself to be “pretty weak and shallow,” “a coward.” Still, of everyone in all the world, this was the person to whom he was closest at that moment, for they at least were of the same species, brothers in the breed of Cain; separated from him, Perry felt “all by myself. Like somebody covered with sores. Somebody only a big nut would have anything to do with. “But then one mid-February morning Perry received a letter. It was postmarked Reading, Mass., and it read:
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 the 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 all 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 afterwards 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.
The name meant nothing, but Perry at once recognized the face in the photograph of a young soldier with crew-cut hair and round, very earnest eyes. He read the letter many times; though he found the religious allusions 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…”
Hickock’s cell had no window; he faced a wide corridor and the faces 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 (though there was one who had no use for him whatever—an old man who hissed at him: “Killer! Killer!” and who once drenched him with a bucketful of dirty scrub water).
Outwardly, Hickock seemed to one and all an unusually untroubled young man. When he was not socializing 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 un-shaded 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’d been making one: a “shiv,” an instrument very like an
