I was in the hospital several days with extensive head injuries. While I was in the condition I was in I couldn’t find another job, so I was unemployed most of the winter. Meantime, I had met a girl and fallen in love. Her dad was a Baptist preacher and resented me going with her. In July we were married. All hell broke loose from her dad until he learned she was pregnant. But still he never wished me good luck and that has always gone against the grain.
After we were married, I worked at a service-station near Kansas City. I worked from 8 at night till 8 in the morning. Sometimes my wife stayed with me all night – she was afraid I couldn’t keep awake, so she came to help me. Then I got an offer to work at Perry Pontiac, which I gladly accepted. It was very satisfactory, though I didn’t make a lot of money – $75 a week. I got along good with the other men, and was well liked by my boss. I worked there five years. . . . During my employment there was the beginning of some of the lowest things I have ever done.
Here Hickock revealed his pedophiliac tendencies, and after describing several sample experiences, wrote:
I know it is wrong. But at the time I never give any thought to whether it is right or wrong. The same with stealing. It seems to be an impulse. One thing I never told you about the Clutter deal is this. Before I ever went to their house I knew there would be a girl there. I think the main reason I went there was not to rob them but to rape the girl. Because I thought a lot about it. That is one reason why I never wanted to turn back when we started to. Even when I saw there was no safe. I did make some advances toward the Clutter girl when I was there. But Perry never gave me a chance. I hope no one finds this out but you, as I haven’t even told my lawyer.
There were other things I should have told you, but I’m afraid of my people finding them out. Because I am more ashamed of them (these things I did) than hanging…. I have had sickness. I think caused from the car wreck I had. Spells of passing out, and sometimes I would hemorrhage at the nose and left ear. I had one at some people’s house by the name of Crist – they live south of my parents. Not long ago I had a piece of glass work out of my head. It came out the corner of my eye. My dad helped me to get it out. … I figure I should tell you the things that led to my divorce, and things that caused me to go to prison. It started the early part of 1957.
My wife and I were living in an apartment in Kansas City. I had quit my job at the auto-mobile company, and went into the garage business for myself. I was renting the garage from a woman who had a daughter-in-law named Margaret. I met this girl one day while I was at work, and we went to have a cup of coffee. Her husband was away in the Marine Corps. To make a long story short, I started going out with her. My wife sued for divorce.
I began thinking I never really loved my wife. Because if I had, I wouldn’t have done all the things I’d done. So I never fought the divorce. I started drinking, and was drunk for almost a month. I neglected my business, spent more money than I earned, wrote bad checks, and in the end became a thief. For this last I was sent to the penitentiary. . . . My lawyer said I should be truthful with you as you can help me. And I need help, as you know.
The next day, Wednesday, was the proper start of the trial; it was also the first time ordinary spectators were admitted into the courtroom, an area too small to accommodate more than a modest percentage of those who applied at the door. The best seats had been reserved for twenty members of the press, and for such special personages as Hickock’s parents and Donald Cullivan (who, at the request of Perry Smith’s lawyer, had traveled from Massachusetts to appear as a character witness in behalf of his former Army friend).
It had been rumored that the two surviving Clutter daughters would be present; they were not, nor did they attend any subsequent session. The family was represented by Mr. Clutter’s younger brother, Arthur, who had driven a hundred miles to be there. He told newsmen: “I just want to get a good look at them [Smith and Hickock]. I just want to see what kind of animals they are. The way I feel, I could tear them apart.” He took a seat directly behind the defendants, and fixed them with a gaze of unique persistence, as though he planned to paint their portraits from memory.
Presently, and it was as if Arthur Clutter had willed him to do it, Perry Smith turned and looked at him – and recognized a face very like the face of the man he had killed: the same mild eyes, narrow lips, firm chin. Perry, who was chewing gum, stopped chewing; he lowered his eyes, a minute elapsed, then slowly his jaws began to move again. Except for this moment, Smith, and Hickock too, affected a courtroom attitude that was simultaneously uninterested and disinterested; they chewed gum and tapped their feet with languid impatience as the state summoned its first witness.
Nancy Ewalt. And after Nancy, Susan Kidwell. The young girls described what they saw upon entering the Clutter house on Sunday, November 15: the quiet rooms, an empty purse on a kitchen floor, sunshine in a bedroom, and their schoolmate, Nancy Clutter, surrounded by her own blood. The defense waived cross-examination, a policy they pursued with the next three witnesses (Nancy Ewalt’s father, Clarence, and Sheriff Earl Robinson, and the county coroner, Dr. Robert Fenton), each of whom added to the narrative of events that sunny November morning: the discovery, finally, of all four victims, and accounts of how they looked, and, from Dr. Fenton, a clinical diagnosis of why – “Severe traumas to brain and vital cranial structures inflicted by a shotgun.”
Then Richard G. Rohleder took the stand.
Rohleder is Chief Investigator of the Garden City Police Department. His hobby is photography, and he is good at it. It was Rohleder who took the pictures that, when developed, revealed Hickock’s dusty footprints in the Clutter cellar, prints the camera could discern, though not the human eye. And it was he who had photographed the corpses, those death-scene images Alvin Dewey had continuously pondered while the murders were still unsolved. The point of Rohleder’s testimony was to establish the fact of his having made these pictures, which the prosecution proposed to put into evidence. But Hickock’s attorney objected: “The sole reason the pictures are being introduced is to prejudice and inflame the minds of the jurors.” Judge Tate overruled the objection and allowed the photographs into evidence, which meant they must be shown to the jury.
While this was being done, Hickock’s father, addressing a journalist seated near him, said, “The judge up there! I never seen a man so prejudiced. Just no sense having a trial. Not with him in charge. Why, that man was a pallbearer at the funeral!” (Actually, Tate was but slightly acquainted with the victims, and was not present at their funeral in any capacity.) But Mr. Hickock’s was the only voice raised in an exceedingly silent courtroom.
Altogether, there were seventeen prints, and as they were passed from hand to hand, the jurors’ expressions reflected the impact the pictures made: one man’s cheeks reddened, as if he had been slapped, and a few, after the first distressing glance, obviously had no heart for the task; it was as though the photographs had pried open their mind’s eye, and forced them to at last really see the true and pitiful thing that had happened to a neighbor and his wife and children. It amazed them, it made them angry, and several of them – the pharmacist, the manager of the bowling alley – stared at the defendants with total contempt.
The elder Mr. Hickock, wearily wagging his head, again and again murmured, “No sense. Just no sense having a trial.”
As the day’s final witness, the prosecution had promised to pro-duce a “mystery man.” It was the man who had supplied the information that led to the arrest of the accused: Floyd Wells, Hickock’s former cellmate. Because he was still serving a sentence at Kansas State Penitentiary, and therefore was in danger of retaliation from other inmates, Wells had never been publicly identified as the informer. Now, in order that he might safely testify at the trial, he had been removed from the prison and lodged in a small jail in an adjacent county. Nevertheless, Wells’ passage across the courtroom toward the witness stand was oddly stealthy – as though he expected to encounter an assassin along the way – and, as he walked past Hickock, Hickock’s lips writhed as he whispered a few atrocious words. Wells pretended not to notice; but like a horse that has heard the hum of a rattlesnake, he shied away from the betrayed man’s venomous vicinity. Taking the stand, he stared
