Wells’ testimony, perfected by pre-trial rehearsal, was as tidy as his appearance. Encouraged by the sympathetic promptings of Logan Green, the witness acknowledged that he had once, for approximately a year, worked as a hired hand at River Valley Farm; he went on to say that some ten years later, following his conviction on a burglary charge, he had become friendly with another imprisoned burglar, Richard Hickock, and had described to him the Clutter farm and family. “Now,” Green asked, “during your conversations with Mr. Hickock what was said about Mr. Clutter by either of you?”
“Well, we talked quite a bit about Mr. Clutter. Hickock said he was about to be paroled, and he was going to go West looking for a job; he might stop to see Mr. Clutter to get a job. I was telling him how wealthy Mr. Clutter was.”
“Did that seem to interest Mr. Hickock?”
“Well, he wanted to know if Mr. Clutter had a safe around there.”
“Mr. Wells, did you think at the time there was a safe in the Clutter house?”
“Well, it has been so long since I worked out there. I thought there was a safe. I knew there was a cabinet of some kind. . . .The next thing I knew he [Hickock] was talking about robbing Mr. Clutter.”
“Did he tell you anything about how he was going to commit the robbery?” “He told me if he done anything like that he wouldn’t leave no witnesses.” “Did he actually say what he was going to do with the witnesses?”
“Yes. He told me he would probably tie them up and then rob them and then kill them.”
Having established premeditation of great degree, Green left the witness to the ministrations of the defense. Old Mr. Fleming. a classic country lawyer more happily at home with land deeds than ill deeds, opened the cross-examination. The intent of his queries as he soon established, was to introduce a subject the prosecution had emphatically avoided: the question of Wells’ own role in the murder plot, and his own moral liability.
“You didn’t,” Fleming said, hastening to the heart of the matter, “say anything at all to Mr. Hickock to discourage him from coming out here to rob and kill the Clutter family?”
“No. Anybody tells you anything about that up there [ Kansas State Penitentiary], you don’t pay any attention to it because you think they are just talking anyway.”
“You mean you talked that way and didn’t mean anything? Didn’t you mean to convey to him [Hickock] the idea that Mr. Clutter had a safe? You wanted Mr. Hickock to believe that, did you not?’
In his quiet way, Fleming was giving the witness a rough time Wells plucked at his tie, as though the knot was suddenly too tight.
“And you meant for Mr. Hickock to believe that Mr. Clutter had a lot of money, didn’t you?” “I told him Mr. Clutter had a lot of money, yes.”
Fleming once more elicited an account of how Hickock had fully informed Wells of his violent plans for the Clutter family. Then, as though veiled in a private grief, the lawyer wistfully said, “And even after all of that you did nothing to discourage him?”
“I didn’t believe he’d do it.”
“You didn’t believe him. Then why, when you heard about the thing that happened out here, why did you think he was the one that was guilty?”
Wells cockily replied, “Because it was done just like he said he was going to do!”
Harrison Smith, the younger half of the defense team, took charge. Assuming an aggressive, sneering manner that seemed forced, for really he is a mild and lenient man, Smith asked the witness if he had a nickname.
“No. I just go by ‘Floyd.'”
The lawyer snorted. “Don’t they call you ‘Squealer’ now? Or do they call you ‘Snitch’?” “I just go by ‘Floyd,’ ” Wells repeated, rather hangdog.
“How many times have you been in jail?” “About three times.”
“Some of those times for lying, were they?”
Denying it, the witness said that once he’d gone to jail for driving without an operator’s license, that burglary was the reason for his second incarceration, and the third, a ninety-day hitch in an Army stockade, had been the outcome of something that happened while he was a soldier: “We was on a train trip guard. We got a little intoxicated on the train, done a little extra shooting at some windows and lights.”
Everyone laughed; everyone except the defendants (Hickock spat on the floor) and Harrison Smith, who now asked Wells why, after learning of the Holcomb tragedy, he had tarried several weeks before telling the authorities what he knew. “Weren’t you,” he said, “waiting for something to come out? Maybe like a reward?”
“No.”
“You didn’t hear anything about a reward?” The lawyer was referring to the reward of one thousand dollars that had been offered by the Hutchinson News, for information resulting in the arrest and conviction of the Clutter murderers.
“I seen it in the paper.”
“That was before you went to the authorities, wasn’t it?” And when the witness admitted that this was true, Smith triumphantly continued by asking, “What kind of immunity did the county attorney offer you for coming up here today and testifying?”
But Logan Green protested: “We object to the form of the question, Your Honor. There’s been no testimony about immunity to anybody.” The objection was sustained, and the witness dismissed; as he left the stand, Hickock announced to everyone within earshot, “Sonofabitch. Anybody ought to hang, he to hang. Look at him. Gonna walk out of here and get that money and go scot-free.” This prediction proved correct, for not long afterward Wells collected both the reward and a parole. But his good fortune was short-lived. He was soon in trouble again, and, over the years, experienced many vicissitudes. At present he is a resident of Mississippi State Prison in Parchman, Mississippi, where he is serving a thirty-year sentence for armed robbery.
By Friday, when the court recessed for the weekend, the state had completed its case, which included the appearance of four Special Agents of the Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. These men, laboratory technicians skilled in various categories of scientific crime detection, had studied the physical evidence connecting the accused to the murders (blood samples, footprints, cartridge shells, rope and tape), and each of them certified the validity of the exhibits. Finally, the four K.B.I. agents provided accounts of interviews with the prisoners, and of the confessions eventually made by them. In cross-examining the K.B.I. personnel, the defense attorneys, a beleaguered pair, argued that the admissions of guilt had been obtained by improper means – brutal interrogation in sweltering, brightly lighted, closet-like rooms. The allegation, which was untrue, irritated the detectives into expounding very convincing denials. (Later, in reply to a reporter who asked him why he had dogged this artificial scent at such length, Hickock’s lawyer snapped. “What am I supposed to do? Hell, I’m playing without any cards. But I can’t just sit here like a dummy. I’ve got to sound off once in a while”)’
The prosecution’s most damaging witness proved to be Alvin Dewey; his testimony, the first public rendering of the events detailed in Perry Smith’s confession, earned large headlines (UNVEIL MUTE MURDER HORROR – COLD, CHILLING FACTS TOLD), and shocked his listeners – none more so than Richard Hickock, who came to a startled and chagrined attention when, in the course of Dewey’s commentary, the agent said, “There is one incident Smith related to me that I haven’t as yet mentioned. And that was that after the Clutter family was tied up, Hickock said to him how well built he thought Nancy Clutter was, and that he was going to rape her. Smith said he told Hickock there wasn’t going to be anything like that go on. Smith told me he had no respect for anyone who couldn’t control their sexual desires, and that he would have fought Hickock before allowing him to rape the Clutter girl.
“Heretofore, Hickock had not known that his partner had informed police of the proposed assault; nor was he aware that, in a friendlier spirit, Perry had altered his original story to claim that he alone had shot the four victims – a fact revealed by Dewey as he neared the end of his testimony: “Perry Smith told me he wished to change two things in the statement he had given us. He said everything else in that statement was true and correct. Except these two things. And that was that he wanted to say he killed Mrs. Clutter and Nancy Clutter – not Hickock. He told me that Hickock . . . didn’t want to die with his mother thinking he had killed any members of the Clutter family. And he said the Hickocks were good people. So why not have it that way.”
Hearing this, Mrs. Hickock wept. Throughout the trial she had sat quietly beside her husband, her hands worrying a rumpled handkerchief. As often as she could she caught her son’s eye, nodded at him and simulated a smile which, though flimsily constructed, affirmed her loyalty. But clearly the woman’s control was exhausted; she began to cry. A few spectators glanced at her,
and glanced away, embarrassed; the rest seemed oblivious of the raw dirge counter pointing Dewey’s continuing recitation; even her husband, perhaps because he believed it unmanly to take notice, remained
