paint this picture
can’t be one hundred percent bad. All the same it’s hard to know what to do. Capital punishment
is no answer: it doesn’t give the sinner time enough to come to God. Sometimes I despair.» A
jovial fellow with gold-filled teeth and a silvery widow’s peak, he jovially repeated, «Sometimes I
despair. Sometimes I think old Doc Savage had the right idea.» The Doc Savage to whom he
referred was a fictional hero popular among adolescent readers of pulp magazines a generation
ago. «If you boys remember, Doc Savage was a kind of superman. He’d made himself proficient
in every field — medicine, science, philosophy, art. There wasn’t much old Doc didn’t know or
couldn’t do. One of his projects was, he decided to rid the world of criminals. First he bought a big
island out in the ocean. Then he and his assistants — he had an army of trained assistants kidnapped all the world’s criminals and brought them to the island. And Doc Savage operated on
their brains. He removed the part that holds wicked thoughts. And when they recovered they were
all decent citizens. They couldn’t commit crimes because that part of their brain was out. Now it
strikes me that surgery of this nature might really be the answer to — «
A bell, the signal that the jury was returning, interrupted him. The jury’s deliberations had lasted forty minutes. Many spectators, anticipating a swift decision,
had never left their seats. Judge Tate, however, had to be fetched from his farm, where he had
gone to feed his horses. A hurriedly donned black robe billowed about him when at last he
arrived, but it was with impressive sedateness and dignity that he asked, «Gentlemen of the jury,
have you reached your verdicts?» Their foreman replied: «We have, Your Honor.» The court bailiff
carried the sealed verdicts to the bench.
Train whistles, the fanfare of an approaching Santa Fe express, penetrated the courtroom. Tale’s
bass voice interlaced with the locomotive’s cries as he read: » ‘Count One. We the jury find the
defendant, Richard Eugene Hickock, guilty of murder in the first degree, and the punishment is
death.’ » Then, as though interested in their reaction, he looked down upon the prisoners, who
stood before him handcuffed to guards; they stared back impassively until he resumed and read
the seven counts that followed: three more convictions for Hickock, and four for Smith.
» — and the punishment is death»; each time he came to the sentence, Tate enunciated it with a
dark-toned hollowness that seemed to echo the train’s mournful, now fading call. Then he
dismissed the jury («You have performed a courageous service»),and the condemned men were
led away. At the door, Smith said to Hickock, «No chicken-hearted jurors, they!» They both
laughed loudly, and a cameraman photographed them. The picture appeared in a Kansas paper
above a caption entitled: «The Last Laugh?»
A week later Mrs. Meier was sitting in her parlor talking to a friend. «Yes, it’s turned quiet around
here,» she said. «I guess we ought to be grateful things have settled down. But I still feel bad
about it. I never had much truck with Dick, but Perry and I got to know each other real well. That
afternoon, after he heard the verdict and they brought him back up here — I shut myself in the
kitchen to keep from having to see him. I sat by the kitchen window and watched the crowd
leaving the courthouse. Mr. Cullivan — he looked up and saw me and waved. The Hickocks. All
going away. Just this morning I had a lovely letter from Mrs. Hickock; she visited with me several
times while the trial was going on, and I wished I could have helped her, only what can you say to
someone in a situation like that? But after everybody had gone, and I’d started to wash some
dishes — I heard him crying. I turned on the radio. Not to hear him. But I could. Crying like a child.
He’d never broke down before, shown any sign of it. Well, I went to him. The door of his cell. He
reached out his hand. He wanted me to hold his hand, and I did, I held his hand, and all he said
was, ‘I’m embraced by shame.’ I wanted to send for Father Goubeaux — I said first thing tomorrow
I’d make him Spanish rice — but he just held my hand tighter.
«And that night, of all nights, we had to leave him alone. Wendle and I almost never go out, but
we had a long-standing engagement, and Wendle didn’t think we ought to break it. But I’ll always
be sorry we left him alone. Next day I did fix the rice. He wouldn’t touch it. Or hardly speak to me.
He hated the whole world. But the morning the men came to take him to the penitentiary, he
thanked me and gave me a picture of himself. A little Kodak made when he was sixteen years
old. He said it was how he wanted me to remember him, like the boy in the picture.
«The bad part was saying goodbye. When you knew where he was going, and what would
happen to him. That squirrel of his, he sure misses Perry. Keeps coming to the cell looking for
him. I’ve tried to feed him, but he won’t have anything to do with me. It was just Perry he liked.»
Prisons are important to the economy of Leavenworth County, Kansas. The two state
penitentiaries, one for each sex, are situated there; so is Leavenworth, the largest Federal prison,
and, at Fort Leavenworth, the country’s principal military prison, the grim United States Army and
Air Force Disciplinary Barracks. If all the inmates in these institutions were let free, they could
populate a small city.
The oldest of the prisons is the Kansas State Penitentiary for Men, a turreted black-and-white
palace that visually distinguishes an otherwise ordinary rural town, Lansing. Built during the Civil
War, it received its first resident in 1864. Nowadays the convict population averages around two
thousand; the present warden, Sherman H. Grouse, keeps a chart which lists the daily total
according to race (for example, White 1405, Colored 360, Mexicans 12, Indians 6). Whatever his
race, each convict is a citizen of a stony village that exists within the prison’s steep, machine-gunguarded walls — twelve gray acres of cement streets and cellblocks and workshops.
In a south section of the prison compound there stands a curious little building: a dark two-storied building shaped like a coffin. This establishment, officially called the Segregation and Isolation
Building, constitutes a prison inside a prison. Among the inmates, the lower floor is known as The
Hole — the place to which difficult prisoners, the «hard rock» troublemakers, are now and then
banished. The upper story is reached by climbing a circular iron staircase; at the top is Death
Row.
The first time the Clutter murderers ascended the staircase was late one rainy April afternoon.
Having arrived at Lansing after an eight-hour, four-hundred-mile car ride from Garden City, the
newcomers had been stripped, showered, given close haircuts, and supplied with coarse denim
uniforms and soft slippers (in most American prisons such slippers are a condemned man’s
customary footwear); then armed escorts marched them through a wet twilight to the coffinshaped edifice, hustled them up the spiral stairs and into two of the twelve side-by-side cells that
comprise Lansing’s Death Row.
The cells are identical. They measure seven by ten feet, and are unfurnished except for a cot, a
toilet, a basin, and an overhead light bulb that is never extinguished night or day. The cell
windows are very narrow, and not only barred but covered with a wire mesh black as a widow’s
veil; thus the faces of those sentenced to hang can be but hazily discerned by passers-by. The
doomed themselves can see out well enough; what they see is an empty dirt lot that serves in
summer as a baseball diamond, beyond the lot a piece of prison wall, and above that, a piece of
sky.
The wall is made of rough stone; pigeons nest inside its crevices. A rusty iron door, set into the
part of the wall visible to the Row’s occupants, rouses the pigeons whenever it is opened, puts
them in a flap, for the hinges creak so, scream. The door leads into a cavernous storage room,
where on even the warmest day the air is moist and chilly. A number of things are kept there:
stockpiles of metal used by the convicts to manufacture automobile license plates, lumber, old
machinery, baseball paraphernalia — and also an unpainted wooden gallows that smells faintly of
pine. For this is the state’s execution chamber; when a man is brought here to be hanged, the
prisoners say he has «gone to The Corner,» or, alternatively, «paid a visit to the warehouse.»
In accordance with the sentence of the court, Smith and Hickock were scheduled to visit the
warehouse six weeks hence: at one minute after midnight on Friday, May 13,1960.
Kansas abolished capital punishment in 1907; in 1935, due to a sudden prevalence in the
Midwest of rampaging professional criminals (Alvin «Old Creepy» Karpis, Charles «Pretty Boy»
Floyd, Clyde Barrow and his homicidal sweetheart, Bonnie Parker), the state legislators voted to
restore it. However, it was not until 1944 that an executioner had
a chance to employ his craft; over the next ten years he was given nine additional opportunities.
But for six years, or since 1954, there had been no pay checks for a hangman in Kansas (except
at the Army and Air Force Disciplinary Barracks, which also has a gallows). The late George
Docking, Governor of Kansas from1957 through 1060, was responsible for this hiatus, for he was
unreservedly opposed to the death penalty («I just don’t like killing people»).
Now, at that time — April, 1960 — there were in United States prisons one hundred and ninety
persons awaiting civil execution; five, the Clutter killers included, were among the lodgers at
Lansing. Occasionally, important visitors to the prison are