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In Cold Blood
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 hearings in this county every year for the purpose of committing people to the institution. We never call anybody in from Larned or psychiatric institutions of any kind. Our own local physicians attend to the matter. It’s no great job to find whether a man is insane or an idiot or an imbecile … It is entirely unnecessary, a waste of time to send the defendants to Larned.”

In rebuttal, Counsel Smith suggested that the present situation was “far graver than a simple sanity hearing in probate court. Two lives are at stake. Whatever their crime, these men are entitled to examination by persons of training and experience. Psychiatry,” he added, pleading with the judge quite directly, “has matured rapidly in the past twenty years. The Federal courts are beginning to keep in tune with this science as related to people charged with criminal offenses. It just seems to me we have a golden opportunity to face up to the new concepts in this field.”

It was an opportunity the judge preferred to reject, for as a fellow jurist once remarked, “Tate is what you might call a law-book lawyer, he never experiments, he goes strictly by the text”; but the same critic also said of him, “If I were innocent, he’s the first man I’d want on the bench; if I was guilty, the last.” Judge Tate did not entirely deny the motion; rather, he did exactly all the law demanded by appointing a commission of three Garden City doctors and directing them to pronounce a verdict upon the mental capacities of the prisoners. (In due course the medical trio met the accused and, after an hour or so of conversational prying, announced that neither man suffered from any mental disorder. When told of their diagnosis, Perry Smith said, “How would they know? They just wanted to be entertained. Hear all the morbid details from the killer’s own terrible lips.

Oh, their eyes were shining.” Hickock’s attorney was also angry; once more he traveled to Lamed State Hospital, where he appealed for the unpaid services of a psychiatrist willing to go to Garden City and interview the defendants. The one man who volunteered, Dr. W. Mitchell Jones, was exceptionally competent; not yet thirty, a sophisticated specialist in criminal psychology and the criminally insane who had worked and studied in Europe and the United States, he agreed to examine Smith and Hickock, and, should his findings warrant it, testify in their behalf.)

On the morning of March 14 counsels for the defense again stood before Judge Tate, there on this occasion to plead for a postponement of the trial, which was then eight days distant. Two reasons were given, the first was that a “most material witness,” Hickock’s father, was at present too ill to testify. The second was a subtler matter. During the past week a boldly lettered notice had begun to appear in the town’s shop windows, and in banks, restaurants, and at the railroad station; and it read: H. W. CLUTTER ESTATE AUCTION SALE 21 MARCH 1960 AT THE CLUTTER HOMESTEAD. “Now,” said Harrison Smith, addressing the bench, “I realize it is almost impossible to prove prejudice. But this sale, an auction of the victim’s estate, occurs one week from today – in other words, the very day before the trial begins. Whether that’s prejudicial to the defendants I’m not able to state. But these signs, coupled with newspaper advertisements, and advertisements on the radio, will be a constant reminder to every citizen in the community, among whom one hundred and fifty have been called as prospective jurors.” Judge Tate was not impressed. He denied the motion without comment.

Earlier in the year Mr. Clutter’s Japanese neighbor, Hideo Ashida, had auctioned his farming equipment and moved to Nebraska. The Ashida sale, which was considered a success, attracted not quite a hundred customers. Slightly more than five thousand people attended the Clutter auction. Holcomb’s citizenry expected an unusual turnout – the Ladies’ Circle of the Holcomb Community Church had converted one of the Clutter barns into a cafeteria stocked with two hundred homemade pies, two hundred and fifty pounds of hamburger meat, and sixty pounds of sliced ham – but no one was prepared

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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