their trial. Though convicted of a single slaying, the pair had claimed seven victims in the course of a cross-country murder spree.
Ronnie York, blond and blue-eyed, had been born and raised in Florida, where his father was a well-known, well-paid deep-sea diver. The Yorks had a pleasantly comfortable home life, and Ronnie, overloved and overpraised by his parents and a worshipful younger sister, was the adored center of it. Latham’s back-ground was at the opposite extreme, being every bit as bleak as Perry Smith’s. Born in Texas, he was the youngest child of fertile, moneyless, embattled parents who, when finally they separated, left their progeny to fend for themselves, to scatter hither and thither, loose and unwanted as bundles of Panhandle tumbleweed. At seventeen, in need of a refuge, Latham enlisted in the Army; two years later, found guilty of an AWOL offense, he was imprisoned in the stockade at Fort Hood, Texas. It was there that he met Ronnie York, who was also under sentence for having gone AWOL. Though they were very unlike—even physically, York being tall and phlegmatic, whereas the Texan was a short young man with foxy brown eyes animating a compact, cute little face—they found they shared at least one firm opinion: the world was hateful, and everybody in it would be better off dead. “It’s a rotten world,” Latham said. “There’s no answer to it but meanness. That’s all anybody understands—meanness. Burn down the man’s barn— he’ll understand that. Poison his dog. Kill him.” Ronnie said Latham was “one hundred percent correct,” adding, “Anyway, anybody you kill, you’re doing them a favor.”
The first person they chose to so favor were two Georgia women, respectable housewives who had the misfortune to encounter York and Latham not long after the murderous pair escaped from the Fort Hood stockade, stole a pickup truck, and drove to Jacksonville, Florida, York’s home town. The scene of the encounter was an Esso station on the dark outskirts of Jacksonville; the date was the night of May 29, 1961. Originally, the absconding soldiers had traveled to the Florida city with the intention of visiting York’s family; once there, however, York decided it might be unwise to contact his parents; his father sometimes had quite a temper. He and Latham talked it over, and New Orleans was their new destination when they stopped at the Esso station to buy gas. Along side them another car was imbibing fuel; it contained the two matronly victims-to-be, who, after a day of shopping and pleasure in Jacksonville, were returning to their homes in a small town near the Florida-Georgia border. Alas, they had lost their way. York, from whom they asked directions, was most obliging: “You just follow us. We’ll put you on the right road.” But the road to which he led them was very wrong indeed: a narrow side-turning that petered off into swamp.
The ladies followed along faithfully until the lead halted, and they saw, in the shine of their headlights, the helpful young men approaching them on foot, and saw, but too late, that each was armed with a black bullwhip. The whips were the property of the stolen truck’s rightful custodian, a cattleman; it had been Latham’s notion to use them as garrotes—which, after robbing the women, is what they did. In New Orleans the boys bought a pistol and carved two notches in the handle.
During the next ten days notches were added in Tullahoma, Tennessee, where they acquired a snappy red Dodge convertible by shooting the owner, a traveling salesman; and in an Illinois suburb of St. Louis, where two more men were slain. The Kansas victim, who followed the preceding five, was a grandfather; his name was Otto Ziegler, he was sixty-two, a robust, friendly fellow, the sort not likely to pass distressed motorists without offering assistance. While spinning along a Kansas highway one fine June morning, Mr. Ziegler spied a red convertible parked by the roadside, its hood up, and a couple of nice-looking youngsters fiddling with the motor. How was the good-hearted Mr. Ziegler to know that nothing ailed the machine—that this was a ruse devised to rob and kill would-be Samaritans? His last words were, “Anything I can do?” York, at a distance of twenty feet, sent a bullet crashing through the old man’s skull, then turned to Latham and said, “Pretty good shootin’, huh?”
Their final victim was the most pathetic. It was a girl, only eighteen; she was employed as a maid in a Colorado motel where the rampaging pair spent a night, during which she let them make love to her. Then they told her they were on their way to California, and invited her to come along. “Come on,” Latham urged her, “maybe we’ll all end up movie stars.” The girl and her hastily packed cardboard suitcase ended up as blood-soaked wreckage at the bottom of a ravine near Craig, Colorado; but not many hours after she had been shot and thrown there, her assassins were in fact performing before motion-picture cameras.
Descriptions of the red car’s occupants, provided by witnesses who had noticed them loitering in the area where Otto Ziegler’s body was discovered, had been circulated through the Midwest and Western states. Roadblocks were erected, and helicopters patrolled the highways; it was a roadblock in Utah that caught York and Latham. Later, at Police Headquarters in Salt Lake City, a local television company was allowed to film an interview with them. The result, if viewed without sound, would seem to concern two cheerful, milk fed athletes discussing hockey or baseball—anything but murder and the roles, boastfully confessed, they had played in the deaths of seven people. “Why,” the interviewer asks, “why did you do it?” And York, with a self-congratulatory grin, answers, “We hate the world.”
All five of the states that vied for the right to prosecute York and Latham endorse judicial homicide: Florida (electrocution),Tennessee (electrocution), Illinois (electrocution), Kansas (hanging), and Colorado (lethal gas). But because it had the firmest evidence, Kansas was victorious.
The men on the Row first met their new companions November 2, 1961. A guard, escorting the arrivals to their cells, introduced them: “Mr. York, Mr. Latham, I’d like you to know Mr. Smith here. And Mr. Hickock. And Mr. Lowell Lee Andrews—‘the nicest boy in Wolcott!’”
When the parade had passed, Hickock heard Andrews chuckling, and said, “What’s so funny about that sonofabitch?”
“Nothing,” Andrews said. “But I was thinking: when you count my three and your four and their seven, that makes fourteen of them and five of us. Now five into fourteen averages out—“
“
Hickock continued writing letters protesting his conviction, and one of these at last bore fruit. The recipient, Everett Steerman, Chairman of the Legal Aid Committee of the Kansas State Bar Association, was disturbed by the allegations of the sender, who insisted that he and his co-defendant had not had a fair trial. According to Hickock, the “hostile atmosphere” in Garden City had made it impossible to empanel an unbiased jury, and therefore a change of venue should have been granted. As for the jurors that were chosen, at least two had clearly indicated a presumption of guilt during the voir dire examination (“When asked to state his opinion of capital punishment, one man said that ordinarily he was against it, but in this case no”); unfortunately, the voir dire had not been recorded because Kansas law does not require it unless a specific demand is made. Many of the jurors, moreover, were “well acquainted with the deceased. So was the judge. Judge Tate was an intimate friend of Mr. Clutter.”
But the bulkiest of Hickock’s mud pies was aimed at the two defense attorneys, Arthur Fleming and Harrison Smith, whose “incompetence and inadequacy” were the chief cause of the correspondent’s present predicament, for no real defense had been prepared or offered by them, and this lack of effort, it was implied, had been deliberate—an act of collusion between the defense and the prosecution.
These were grave assertions, reflecting upon the integrity of two respected lawyers and a distinguished district judge, but if even partially true, then the constitutional rights of the defendants had been abused. Prompted by Mr. Steerman, the Bar Association undertook a course of action without precedent in Kansas legal history: it appointed a young Wichita attorney, Russell Shultz, to investigate the charges and, should evidence warrant it, challenge the validity of the conviction by bringing habeas corpus proceedings in the Kansas Supreme Court, which had recently upheld the verdict.
It would appear that Shultz’s investigation was rather one-sided, since it consisted of little more than an interview with Smith and Hickock, from which the lawyer emerged with crusading phrases for the press: “The question is this—do poor, plainly guilty defendants have a right to a complete defense? I do not believe that the State of Kansas would be either greatly or for long harmed by the death of these appellants. But I do not believe it could ever recover from the death of due process.”
Shultz filed his habeas corpus petition, and the Kansas Supreme Court commissioned one of its own retired justices, the Honorable Walter G. Thiele, to conduct a full-scale hearing. And so it came to pass that almost two years after the trial, the whole cast reassembled in the courtroom at Garden City. The only important participants absent were the original defendants; in their stead, as it were, stood Judge Tate, old Mr. Fleming, and Harrison Smith, whose careers were imperiled—not because of the appellant’s allegations per se, but because of the apparent credit the Bar Association bestowed upon them.
