ice pick—something that would fit with lethal niceness between the shoulder-blades of Undersheriff Meier. The weapon’s components, a piece of wood and a length of hard wire, were originally part of a toilet brush he’d confiscated, dismantled and hidden under his mattress. Late at night, when the only noises were snores and coughs and the mournful whistle-wailings of Santa Fe trains rumbling through the darkened town, he honed the wire against the cell’s concrete floor. And while he worked he schemed.
Once, the first winter after he had finished high school, Hickock had hitchhiked across Kansas and Colorado: “This was when I was looking for a job. 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. And 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.” If the escape succeeded, that was the course Dick 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 Umber 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 he had become familiar with life on Courthouse Square, its habitues 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 for dead birds caught in the vehicles’ engine grilles. 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 Perry 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 partially 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 32nd Judicial District, the jurist who would preside at the trial of the State of Kansas versus Smith and Hickock. Tate, as Perry soon learned, was an old and awesome name 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 greatly affected the parents and led them to adopt a small boy who had appeared in court as an abandoned, homeless child. “He sounds soft-hearted 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 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 that 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 signaled 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. 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.
Perry 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 (a notion that he “might not be normal, maybe insane” had troubled him “ even when I was little, and my sisters laughed because I liked moonlight. To hide in the shadows and watch the moon”). Phantoms or not, he ceased to think of the young men. Another method of escape, suicide, replaced them in his musings; and despite the jailer’s precautions (no mirror, no belt or tie or shoelaces), he had devised a way to do it. For he also was furnished with a ceiling bulb that burned eternally, but, unlike Hickock, he had in his cell a broom, and by pressing the broom-brush against the bulb he could unscrew it. One night he dreamed that he’d unscrewed the bulb, broken it, and with the broken glass cut his wrists and ankles. “I felt ill breath and light leaving me,” he said, in a subsequent description of his sensations. “The walls of the cell fell away, the sky came down, I saw the big yellow bird.”
Throughout his life—as a child, poor and meanly treated, as a foot-loose youth, as an imprisoned man—the yellow bird, huge and parrot-faced, had soared across Perry’s dreams, an avenging angel who savaged his enemies or, as now, rescued him in moments of mortal danger: “She lifted me, I could have been light as a mouse, we went up, up, I could see the Square below, men running, yelling, the sheriff shooting at us, everybody sore as hell because I was free, I was flying, I was better than any of them”
The trial was scheduled to start on March 22, 1960. In the weeks preceding that date the defense attorneys frequently consulted the defendants. The advisability of requesting a change of venue was discussed, but as the elderly Mr. Fleming warned his client, “It wouldn’t matter where in Kansas the trial was held. Sentiment’s the same all over the state. We’re probably better off in Garden City. This is a religious community. Eleven thousand population and twenty-two churches. And most of the ministers are opposed to capital punishment, say it’s immoral, unchristian; even the Reverend Cowan, the Clutters’ own minister and a close friend of the family, he’s been preaching against the death penalty in this very case. Re-member, all we can hope is to save your lives. I think we stand as good a chance here as anywhere.”
Soon after the original arraignment of Smith and Hickock, their advocates appeared before Judge Tate to argue a motion urging comprehensive psychiatric examinations for the accused. Specifically, the court was asked to permit the state hospital in Larned, Kansas, a mental institution with maximum-security facilities, to take custody of the prisoners for the purpose of ascertaining whether either or both were “insane, imbeciles or idiots, unable to comprehend their position and aid in their defense.”
Larned is a hundred miles east of Garden City; Hickock’s attorney, Harrison Smith, informed the court that he had driven there the previous day and conferred with several of the hospital’s staff; “We have no qualified psychiatrists in our own community. In fact, Larned is the only place within a radius of two hundred and twenty-five miles where you’ll find such men—doctors trained to make serious psychiatric evaluations. That takes time. Four to eight weeks. But the personnel with whom I discussed the matter said they were willing to start work at once; and, of course, being a state institution it won’t cost the county a nickel.”
This plan was opposed by the special assistant prosecuting attorney, Logan Green, who, certain that “temporary insanity” was the defense his antagonists would attempt to sustain in the forth-coming trial, feared that the ultimate outcome of the proposal would be, as he predicted in private conversation, the appearance on the witness stand of a “pack of head-healers” sympathetic to the defendants (“Those fellows, they’re always crying over the killers. Never a thought for the victims”). Short, pugnacious, a Kentuckian by birth, Green began by pointing out to the court that Kansas’ law, in regard to sanity, adheres to the M’Naghten Rule, the ancient British importation which contends that if the accused knew the nature of his act, and knew it was wrong, then he is mentally competent and responsible for his actions. Furthermore, said, Green, there was nothing in the Kansas statutes indicating that the physicians chosen to determine a defendant’s mental condition must be of any particular qualification: “Just plain doctors. Medical doctors in general practice. That’s all the law requires. We have sanity
