Then he changed. When he had to settle for honorable mention in a couple of speaking contests, he seethed in anger. He abandoned his friends, quit extracurricular activities, neglected his schoolwork. He managed to graduate and enrolled at a junior college—where he lasted for nine days. Aimless, he worked at odd jobs.
A different and sinister personality now resided in the body of William Edward Hickman. Or had that personality been dormant in him for years? The “new” Hickman had no conscience, no empathy, no real concept of shame or remorse. He was a psychopath.
The new Hickman dreamed of going to Hollywood and becoming a movie star. In one of his odd jobs, at a public library in Kansas City, he befriended a similarly restless youth named Welby Hunt, who was three years younger. In November 1926, the pair robbed a candy store, getting away with about $70. They headed to California, where they would live with Hunt’s grandparents. Hickman still hoped to make it in the movies—the longest of long shots, since this was still the era of silent films. Hickman’s speaking skills would be useless.
On Christmas Eve, the pair robbed a drugstore. During the heist, a police officer wandered in. There was a shootout, and the proprietor was fatally wounded. The police officer was wounded in the abdomen.
Hickman and Hunt stayed out of sight for a while, but eventually, they needed money. They got jobs as messengers at a local bank—fatefully, the bank where Perry Parker worked. Then, on May 24, 1927, the body of Hunt’s grandfather was found beneath a bridge in Pasadena. The day before, he had withdrawn a large sum of money from his bank. The money was not found with the body, but five purported suicide notes were.
Under normal circumstances, the murder might have overshadowed all other events. But Charles Lindbergh had landed in Paris just three days earlier, and for a moment in time, his triumph dominated the news.
Los Angeles detectives were instantly suspicious of the “suicide.” In their experience, one note was usually sufficient for someone about to commit suicide. Besides, the five notes found with Hunt’s grandfather appeared to have been written by two different people.
In the autumn of 1927, after losing his bank messenger job and being placed on probation for the check forgeries, Hickman returned to Kansas City and got a job as an usher in a movie theater. But he spent too much time watching the screen and not enough time ushering, so he was fired. Then, he apparently got the urge to travel…and to kill.
He stole a car from a traveling salesman and drove to Chicago. Then he is believed to have moved on to Milwaukee, where on October 11, a young girl was strangled by a man fitting Hickman’s description. On to Michigan and thence to Philadelphia. On October 29, a gas station attendant in Chester, Pennsylvania, was shot to death during a robbery by a man answering Hickman’s description.
Then the intellectual side of Hickman’s personality—or former personality—is believed to have resurfaced. He is believed to have driven to Gettysburg to tour the Civil War battlefield.
After more frenetic travel in the East, he drove to Ohio, robbing three stores in the space of a half hour. After several more robberies, he was back in Kansas City, there to abandon the car he’d stolen from the traveling salesman and ponder what to do next.
On the night of November 7, just as Dr. Herbert Mantz of Kansas City was starting his new gray Chrysler coupe, Hickman emerged from the dark, pointed a pistol at the doctor, and took his car. Eleven days later, having driven back to California, he robbed a drugstore, getting away with $30. Then he settled into the Bellevue Arms Apartments.
On November 23, Hickman drove to San Diego to see the sights. He picked up a young couple who needed a ride to Los Angeles. On the way, it became clear that Hickman and the young man had similar interests: they planned to meet three days hence to do some stickups.
Hickman and his new accomplice robbed a drugstore on November 27 and two more on December 5. The accomplice asked Hickman why he stole sleeping pills and chloroform as well as money. Because I have an idea to make some real money, Hickman explained: kidnapping a child for ransom.
In the days after the murder of Marion Parker, Hickman was so loathed that several men who bore a resemblance to him were set upon and beaten by mobs before they could prove that they were not Hickman.
The real Hickman had driven a stolen car to Seattle, where he bought gasoline. The station attendant thought he recognized him and called police. Quickly, it was determined that the twenty-dollar bill Hickman spent for gas was from the ransom. Acting on a hunch that Hickman might head south again, the police staked out a stretch of highway leading from Washington State into Oregon.
He was spotted three days before Christmas near the little town of Echo in northeastern Oregon. The police found about a thousand dollars of the ransom money, along with a sawed-off shotgun and an automatic pistol, in the car he was driving. Hickman was jailed in nearby Pendleton, Oregon, for the time being.
The article on the arrest of William Edward Hickman was displayed on the front page of the New York Times on Friday, December 23, 1927.
The editors of the Times thought their readers deserved something more cheerful on page 1 for the start of the Christmas weekend. “A flying mother joined her more famous flying son here today,” an article from Mexico City began.31
The article, in the center at the top of the front page, told of Mrs. Evangeline Lindbergh’s flight to Mexico City to meet her son, Charles, who was visiting the capital for a few days, and Ambassador Dwight Morrow, his father-in-law.
In an uncharacteristic display of emotion, Charles went up in his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, to greet
