one high official
calls «a little peek at Death Row.» Those who accept are assigned a guard who, as he leads the
tourist along the iron walkway fronting the death cells, is likely to identify the condemned with
what he must consider comic formality. «And this,» he said to a visitor in 1960, «this is Mr. Perry
Edward Smith. Now next door, that’s Mr. Smith’s buddy, Mr. Richard Eugene Hickock. And over
here we have Mr. Earl Wilson. And after Mr. Wilson — meet Mr. Bobby Joe Spencer. And as for
this last gentleman, I’m sure you recognize the famous Mr. Lowell Lee Andrews.»
Earl Wilson, a husky, hymn-singing Negro, had been sentenced to die for the kidnapping, rape,
and torture of a young white woman; the victim, though she survived, was left severely disabled.
Bobby Joe Spencer, white, an effeminate youth, had confessed to murdering an elderly Kansas
City woman, the owner of a rooming house where he lived. Prior to leaving office in January,
1961,Governor Docking, who had been defeated for re-election (in large measure because of his
attitude toward capital punishment), commuted the sentences of both these men to life
imprisonment, which generally meant that they could apply for parole in seven years. However,
Bobby Joe Spencer soon killed again: stabbed with a shiv another young convict, his rival for the affections of an older inmate (as one prison officer said, «Just two punks fighting over a jocker»).
This deed earned Spencer a second life sentence. But the public was not much aware of either
Wilson or Spencer; compared to Smith and Hickock, or the fifth man on the Row, Lowell Lee
Andrews, the press had rather slighted them.
Two years earlier Lowell Lee Andrews, an enormous, weak-eyed boy of eighteen who wore hornrimmed glasses and weighed almost three hundred pounds, had been a sophomore at the
University of Kansas, an honor student majoring in biology. Though he was a solitary creature,
withdrawn and seldom communicative, his acquaintances, both at the university and in his home
town of Wolcott, Kansas, regarded him as exceptionally gentle and «sweet-natured» (later one
Kansas paper printed an article about him entitled: «The Nicest Boy in Wolcott»). But inside the
quiet young scholar there existed a second, unsuspected personality, one with stunted emotions
and a distorted mind through which cold thoughts flowed in cruel directions. His family — his
parents and a slightly older sister, Jennie Marie — would have been astounded had they known
the daydreams Lowell Lee dreamed throughout the summer and autumn of 1958; the brilliant
son, the adored brother, was planning to poison them all.
The elder Andrews was a prosperous farmer; he had not much money in the bank, but he owned
land valued at approximately two hundred thousand dollars. A desire to inherit this estate was
ostensibly the motivation behind Lowell Lee’s plot to destroy his family. For the secret Lowell Lee,
the one concealed inside the shy church going biology student, fancied himself an ice-hearted
master criminal: he wanted to wear gangsterish silk shirts and drive scarlet sports cars; he
wanted to be recognized as no mere bespectacled, bookish, overweight, virginal schoolboy; and
while he did not dislike any member of his family, at least not consciously, murdering them
seemed the swiftest, most sensible way of implementing the fantasies that possessed him.
Arsenic was the weapon he decided upon; after poisoning the victims, he meant to tuck them in
their beds and burn down the house, in the hope that investigators would believe the deaths
accidental. However, one detail perturbed him: suppose autopsies revealed the presence of
arsenic? And suppose the purchase of the poison could be traced to him? Toward the end of
summer he evolved another plan. He spent three months polishing it. Finally, there came a nearzero November night when he was ready to act.
It was Thanksgiving week, and Lowell Lee was home for the holidays, as was Jennie Marie, an
intelligent but rather plain girl who attended a college in Oklahoma. On the evening of November
28, somewhere around seven, Jennie Marie was sitting with her parents in the parlor watching
television; Lowell Lee was locked in his bedroom reading the last chapter of The Brothers
Karamazov. That task completed, he shaved, changed into his best suit, and proceeded to load
both a semi-automatic .22-caliber rifle and a Ruger .22-caliber revolver. He fitted the revolver into
a hip holster, shouldered the rifle, and ambled down a hall to the parlor, which was dark except
for the flickering television screen. He switched on a light, aimed the rifle, pulled the trigger, and
hit his sister between the eyes, killing her instantly. He shot his mother three times, and his father
twice. The mother, eyes gaping, arms outstretched, staggered toward him; she tried to speak, her
mouth opened, closed, but Lowell Lee said: «Shut up.» To be certain she obeyed him, he shot her
three times more. Mr. Andrews, however, was still alive; sobbing, whimpering, he thrashed along
the floor toward the kitchen, but at the kitchen’s threshold the son unholstered his revolver and
discharged every chamber, then re-loaded the weapon and emptied it again; altogether, his father
absorbed seventeen bullets.
Andrews, according to statements credited to him, «didn’t feel anything about it. The time came,
and I was doing what I had to do. That’s all there was to it.» After the shootings he raised a
window in his bedroom and removed the screen, then roamed the house rifling dresser drawers
and scattering the contents: it was his intention to blame the crime on thieves. Later, driving his
father’s car, he traveled forty miles over snow-slippery roads to Lawrence, the town where the
University of Kansas is located; en route, he parked on a bridge, dismantled his lethal artillery,
and disposed of it by dropping the parts into the Kansas River. But of course the journey’s true
purpose was to arrange an alibi. First he stopped at the campus house where he roomed; he
talked with the landlady, told her that he had come to pick up his typewriter, and that because of
the bad weather the trip from Wolcott to Lawrence had taken two hours. Departing, he visited a
movie theater, where, uncharacteristically, he chatted with an usher and a candy vendor. At
eleven, when the movie let out, he returned to Wolcott. The family’s mongrel dog was waiting on the front porch; it was whining with hunger, so Lowell Lee, entering the house and stepping
across his father’s corpse, prepared a bowl of warm milk and mush; then, while the dog was
lapping it up, he telephoned the sheriff’s office and said, «My name is Lowell Lee Andrews. I live
at 6040 Wolcott Drive, and I want to report a robbery — «
Four officers of the Wyandotte County Sheriff’s Patrol responded. One of the group, Patrolman
Meyers, described the scene as follows: «Well, it was one in the morning when we got there. All
the lights in the house was on. And this big dark-haired boy, Lowell Lee, he was sitting on the
porch petting his dog. Patting it on the head. Lieutenant At eleven, they asked the boy what
happened, and he pointed to the door, real casual, and said, ‘Look in there.'» Having looked, the
astonished officers summoned the county coroner, a gentleman who was also impressed by
young Andrews’ callous nonchalance, for when the coroner asked him what funeral arrangements
he wished to have made, Andrews replied with a shrug, «I don’t care what you do with them.»
Shortly, two senior detectives appeared and began to question the family’s lone survivor. Though
convinced he was lying, the detectives listened respectfully to the tale of how he had driven to
Lawrence to fetch a typewriter, gone to a movie, and arrived home after midnight to find the
bedrooms ransacked and his family slain. He stayed with the story, and might never have altered
it if, subsequent to his arrest and removal to the county jail, the authorities had not obtained the
aid of the Reverend Mr. Virto C. Dameron.
The Reverend Dameron, a Dickensian personage, an unctuous and jolly brimstone-anddamnation orator, was minister of the Grandview Baptist Church in Kansas City, Kansas, the
church the Andrews family attended regularly. Awakened by an urgent call from the county
coroner, Dameron presented himself at the jail around 3:00 a.m., whereupon detectives, who had
been strenuously but abortively interrogating the suspect, withdrew to another room, leaving the
minister to consult privately with his parishioner. It proved a fatal interview for the latter, who
many months afterward gave this account of it to a friend: «Mr. Dameron said, ‘Now, Lee, I’ve
known you all your life. Since you were just a little tadpole. And I knew your daddy all his life, we
grew up together, we were childhood friends. And that’s why I’m here — not just because I’m your
minister, but because I feel like you’re a member of my own family. And because you need a
friend that you can talk to and trust. And I feel terrible about this terrible event, and I’m every bit
as anxious as you are to see the guilty party caught and punished.’
«He wanted to know was I thirsty, and I was, so he got me a Coke, and after that he’s going on
about the Thanksgiving vacation and how do I like school, when all of a sudden he says, ‘Now,
Lee, there seems to be some doubt among the people here regarding your innocence. I’m sure
you’d be willing to take a lie detector and convince these men of your innocence so they can get
busy and catch the guilty party.’ Then he said, ‘Lee, you didn’t do this terrible thing, did you? If
you did, now is the time to purge your soul.’ The next thing was, I thought what difference does it
make, and I told him the truth, most everything about it. He kept wagging his head and rolling his
eyes and rubbing his hands together, and he said it was a terrible thing, and I would have to
answer to the Almighty, have to purge my soul by telling