ought to stay that way. Anybody wanted my life wasn’t
going to get any more help from me. They’d have to fight for it.»
The next morning he asked for a glass of milk, the first sustenance he had volunteered to accept
in fourteen weeks. Gradually, on a diet of eggnogs and orange juice, he regained weight; by
October the prison physician, Dr. Robert Moore, considered him strong enough to be returned to
the Row. When he arrived there, Dick laughed and said, «Welcome home, honey.»
Two years passed.
The departures of Wilson and Spencer left Smith and Hickock and Andrews alone with the Row’s
burning lights and veiled windows. The privileges granted ordinary prisoners were denied them;
no radios or card games, not even an exercise period — indeed, they were never allowed out of
their cells, except each Saturday when they were taken to a shower room, then given a once
weekly change of clothing; the only other occasions for momentary release were the far between
visits of lawyers or relatives. Mrs. Hickock came once a month; her husband had died, she had
lost the farm, and, as she told Dick, lived now with one relative, now another.
It seemed to Perry as though he existed «deep underwater» — perhaps because the Row usually was as gray and quiet as ocean depths, soundless except for snores, coughs, the whisper of
slippered feet, the feathery racket of the pigeons nesting in the prison walls. But not always.
«Sometimes,» Dick wrote in a letter to his mother, «you can’t hear yourself think. They throw men
in the cells downstairs, what they call the hole, and plenty of them are fighting mad and crazy to
boot. Curse and scream the whole time. It’s intolerable, so everybody starts yelling shut up. I wish
you’d send me earplugs. Only they wouldn’t allow me to have them. No rest for the wicked, I
guess.»
The little building had been standing for more than a century, and seasonal changes provoked
different symptoms of its antiquity: winter cold saturated the stone-and-iron fixtures, and in
summer, when temperatures often hurtled over the hundred mark, the old cells were malodorous
cauldrons. «So hot my skin stings,» Dick wrote in a letter dated July 5, 1961. «I try not to move
much. I just sit on the floor. My bed’s too sweaty to lie down, and the smell makes me sick
because of only the one bath a week and always wearing the same clothes. No ventilation
whatever and the light bulbs make everything hotter. Bugs keep bumping on the walls.»
Unlike conventional prisoners, the condemned are not subjected to a work routine; they can do
with their time what they like — sleep all day, as Perry frequently did («I pretend I’m a tiny little baby
that can’t keep its eyes open»); or, as was Andrews’ habit, read all night. Andrews averaged
fifteen to twenty books a week; his taste encompassed both trash and belle-lettres, and he liked
poetry, Robert Frost’s particularly, but he also admired Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and the comic
poems of Ogden Nash. Though the quenchless quality of his literary thirst had soon depleted the
shelves of the prison library, the prison chaplain and others sympathetic to Andrews kept him
supplied with parcels from the Kansas City public library.
Dick was rather a bookworm, too; but his interest was restricted to two themes — sex, as
represented in the novels of Harold Robbins and Irving Wallace (Perry, after being lent one of
these by Dick, returned it with an indignant note: «Degenerate filth for filthy degenerate minds!»),
and law literature.
He consumed hours each day leafing through law books, compiling research that he hoped would
help reverse his conviction. Also, in pursuit of the same cause he fired off a cannonade of letters
to such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Kansas State Bar Association

letters attacking his trial as a «travesty of due process,» and urging the recipients to aid him in
his quest for a new trial. Perry was persuaded to draft similar pleas, but when Dick suggested that
Andy follow their example by writing protests in his own behalf, Andrews replied, «I’ll worry about
my neck and you worry about yours.» (Actually, Dick’s neck was not the part of his anatomy that
most immediately troubled him. «My hair is coming out by the handfuls,» he confided in yet
another letter to his mother. «I’m frantic. Nobody in our family was bald headed as I can recall,
and it makes me frantic the idea of being an ugly old baldhead.»)
The Row’s two night guards, arriving at work on an autumn evening in 1961, had a piece of news.
«Well,» one of them announced, «seems like you boys can expect company.» The import of the
remark was clear to his audience: it meant that two young soldiers, who had been standing trial
for the murder of a Kansas railroad worker, had received the ultimate sentence. «Yessir,» the
guard said, confirming this, «they got the death penalty.» Dick said, «Sure. It’s very popular in
Kansas. Juries hand it out like they were giving candy to kids.»
One of the soldiers, George Ronald York, was eighteen; his companion, James Douglas Latham,
was a year older. They were both exceptionally personable, which perhaps explains why hordes
of teen-aged girls had attended their trial. Though convicted of a single slaying, the pair had
claimed seven victims in the course of a cross-country murder spree.
Ronnie York, blond and blue-eyed, had been born and raised in Florida, where his father was a
well-known, well-paid deep-sea diver. The Yorks had a pleasantly comfortable home life, and
Ronnie, overloved and overpraised by his parents and a worshipful younger sister, was the
adored center of it. Latham’s back-ground was at the opposite extreme, being every bit as bleak
as Perry Smith’s. Born in Texas, he was the youngest child of fertile, moneyless, embattled
parents who, when finally they separated, left their progeny to fend for themselves, to scatter
hither and thither, loose and unwanted as bundles of Panhandle tumbleweed. At seventeen, in
need of a refuge, Latham enlisted in the Army; two years later, found guilty of an AWOL offense,
he was imprisoned in the stockade at Fort Hood, Texas. It was there that he met Ronnie York,
who was also under sentence for having gone AWOL. Though they were very unlike — even physically, York being tall and phlegmatic, whereas the Texan was a short young man with foxy
brown eyes animating a compact, cute little face — they found they shared at least one firm
opinion: the world was hateful, and everybody in it would be better off dead. «It’s a rotten world,»
Latham said. «There’s no answer to it but meanness. That’s all anybody understands — meanness.
Burn down the man’s barn — he’ll understand that. Poison his dog. Kill him.» Ronnie said Latham
was «one hundred percent correct,» adding, «Anyway, anybody you kill, you’re doing them a
favor.»
The first person they chose to so favor were two Georgia women, respectable housewives who
had the misfortune to encounter York and Latham not long after the murderous pair escaped from
the Fort Hood stockade, stole a pickup truck, and drove to Jacksonville, Florida, York’s home
town. The scene of the encounter was an Esso station on the dark outskirts of Jacksonville; the
date was the night of May 29, 1961. Originally, the absconding soldiers had traveled to the
Florida city with the intention of visiting York’s family; once there, however, York decided it might
be unwise to contact his parents; his father sometimes had quite a temper. He and Latham talked
it over, and New Orleans was their new destination when they stopped at the Esso station to buy
gas. Along side them another car was imbibing fuel; it contained the two matronly victims-to-be,
who, after a day of shopping and pleasure in Jacksonville, were returning to their homes in a
small town near the Florida-Georgia border. Alas, they had lost their way. York, from whom they
asked directions, was most obliging: «You just follow us. We’ll put you on the right road.» But the
road to which he led them was very wrong indeed: a narrow side-turning that petered off into
swamp.
The ladies followed along faithfully until the lead halted, and they saw, in the shine of their
headlights, the helpful young men approaching them on foot, and saw, but too late, that each was
armed with a black bullwhip. The whips were the property of the stolen truck’s rightful custodian, a
cattleman; it had been Latham’s notion to use them as garrotes — which, after robbing the women,
is what they did. In New Orleans the boys bought a pistol and carved two notches in the handle.
During the next ten days notches were added in Tullahoma, Tennessee, where they acquired a
snappy red Dodge convertible by shooting the owner, a traveling salesman; and in an Illinois
suburb of St. Louis, where two more men were slain. The Kansas victim, who followed the
preceding five, was a grandfather; his name was Otto Ziegler, he was sixty-two, a robust, friendly
fellow, the sort not likely to pass distressed motorists without offering assistance. While spinning
along a Kansas highway one fine June morning, Mr. Ziegler spied a red convertible parked by the
roadside, its hood up, and a couple of nice-looking youngsters fiddling with the motor. How was
the good-hearted Mr. Ziegler to know that nothing ailed the machine — that this was a ruse
devised to rob and kill would-be Samaritans? His last words were, «Anything I can do?» York, at a
distance of twenty feet, sent a bullet crashing through the old man’s skull, then turned to Latham
and said, «Pretty good shootin’, huh?»
Their final victim was the most pathetic. It was a girl, only eighteen; she was employed as a maid
in a Colorado motel where the rampaging pair spent a night, during which she let them make love
to her. Then they told her they were on their way to California, and invited her to come along.
«Come on,» Latham urged her, «maybe we’ll all end up movie