with Perry. He hasn’t got a single friend on the premises. I mean, just who the
hell does he think he is? Sneering at everybody. Calling people perverts and degenerates. Going
on about what low I.Q.’s they have. It’s too bad we can’t all be such sensitive souls like little Perry.
Saints. Boy, but I know some hard rocks who’d gladly go to The Corner if they could get him
alone in the shower room for just one hot minute. The way he high-hats York and Latham! Ronnie
says he sure wishes he knew where he could lay hold of a bullwhip. Says he’d like to squeeze
Perry a little. I don’t blame him. After all, we’re all in the same fix, and they’re pretty good boys.»
Hickock chuckled ruefully, shrugged, and said, «You know what I mean. Good — considering.
Ronnie York’s mother has been here to visit him several times. One day, out in the waiting room,
she met my mother, and now they’ve come to be each other’s number-one buddy. Mrs. York
wants my mother to come visit her home in Florida, maybe even live there. Jesus, I wish she
would. Then she wouldn’t have to go through this ordeal. Once a month riding the bus here to see
me. Smiling, trying to find something to say, make me feel good. The poor lady. I don’t know how
she stands it. I wonder she isn’t crazy.»
Hickock’s uneven eyes turned toward a window in the visiting room; his face, puffy, pallid as a funeral lily, gleamed in the weak winter sunshine filtering through the bar-shrouded glass.
«The poor lady. She wrote the warden, and asked him if she could speak to Perry the next time
she came here. She wanted to hear from Perry himself how he killed those people, how I never
fired shot one. All I can hope is that some day we’ll get a new trial, and Perry will testify and tell
the truth. Only I doubt it. He’s plain determined that if he goes I go. Back to back. It’s not right.
Many a man has killed and never seen the inside of a death cell. And I never killed anybody. If
you’ve got fifty thousand dollars to spend, you could bump off half of Kansas City and just laugh
ha ha.» A sudden grin obliterated his woeful indignation. «Uh-oh. There I go again. Old cry baby.
You’d think I’d learn. But honest to God, I’ve done my damnedest to get along with Perry. Only
he’s so critical. Two-faced. So jealous of every little thing. Every letter I get, every visit. Nobody
ever comes to see him except you,» he said, nodding at the journalist, who was as equally well
acquainted with Smith as he was with Hickock. «Or his lawyer. Remember when he was in the
hospital? With that phony starvation routine? And his dad sent the postcard? Well, the warden
wrote Perry’s dad and said he was welcome to come here any time. But he never has showed up.
I don’t know. Sometimes you got to feel sorry for Perry. He must be one of the most alone people
there ever was. But. Aw, the hell with him. It’s mostly every bit his own fault.»
Hickock slipped another cigarette away from a package of Pall Malls, wrinkled his nose, and said,
«I’ve tried to quit smoking. Then I figure what difference does it make under the circumstances.
With a little luck, maybe I’ll get cancer and beat the state at its own game. For a while there I was
smoking cigars. Andy’s. The morning after they hanged him, I woke up and called to him, ‘Andy?’

the way I usually did. Then I remembered he was on his way to Missouri. With the aunt and
uncle. I looked out in the corridor. His cell had been cleaned out, and all his junk was piled there.
The mattress off his bunk, his slippers, and the scrapbook with all the food pictures — he called it
his icebox. And this box of ‘Macbeth’ cigars. I told the guard Andy wanted me to have them, left
them to me in his will. Actually, I never smoked them all. Maybe it was the idea of Andy, but
somehow they gave me indigestion.
«Well, what’s there to say about capital punishment? I’m not against it. Revenge is all it is, but
what’s wrong with revenge? It’s very important. If I was kin to the Clutters, or any of the parties
York and Latham dispensed with, I couldn’t rest in peace till the ones responsible had taken that
ride on the Big Swing. These people that write letters to the newspapers. There were two in a
Topeka paper the other day — one from a minister. Saying, in effect, what is all this legal farce,
why haven’t those sonsabitches Smith and Hickock got it in the neck, how come those murdering
sonsabitches are still eating up the taxpayers’ money? Well, I can see their side. They’re mad
’cause they’re not getting what they want — revenge. And they’re not going to get it if I can help it. I
believe in hanging. Just so long as I’m not the one being hanged.»
But then he was.
Another three years passed, and during those years two exceptionally skillful Kansas City
lawyers, Joseph P. Jenkins and Robert Bingham, replaced Shultz, the latter having resigned from
the case. Appointed by a Federal judge, and working without compensation (but motivated by a
hard-held opinion that the defendants had been the victims of a «nightmarishly unfair trial»),
Jenkins and Bingham filed numerous appeals within the framework of the Federal court system,
thereby avoiding three execution dates: October 25, 1962, August 8, 1963, and February 18,

1. The attorneys contended that their clients had been unjustly convicted because legal
   counsel had not been appointed them until after they had confessed and had waived preliminary
   hearings; and because they were not competently represented at their trial, were convicted with
   the help of evidence seized without a search warrant (the shotgun and knife taken from the
   Hickock home), were not granted a change of venue even though the environs of the trial had
   been «saturated» with publicity prejudicial to the accused.
   With these arguments, Jenkins and Bingham succeeded in carrying the case three times to the
   United States Supreme Court — the Big Boy, as many litigating prisoners refer to it — but on each
   occasion the Court, which never comments on its decisions in such instances, denied the appeals
   by refusing to grant the writs of certiorari that would have entitled the appellants to a full hearing
   before the Court. In March, 1965, after Smith and Hickock had been confined in their Death Row
   cells almost two thousand days, the Kansas Supreme Court decreed that their lives must end
   between midnight and 2:00 a.m., Wednesday, April 14, 1965. Subsequently, a clemency appeal was presented to the newly elected Governor of Kansas, William Avery; but Avery, a rich farmer
   sensitive to public opinion, refused to intervene — a decision he felt to be in the «best interest of
   the people of Kansas.» (Two months later, Avery also denied the clemency appeals of York and
   Latham, who were hanged on June 22, 1965.)
   And so it happened that in the daylight hours of that Wednesday morning, Alvin Dewey,
   breakfasting in the coffee shop of a Topeka hotel, read, on the first page of the Kansas City Star,
   a headline he had long awaited: die on rope for bloody crime. The story, written by an Associated
   Press reporter, began: «Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, partners in crime, died
   on the gallows at the state prison early today for one of the bloodiest murders in Kansas criminal
   annals. Hickock, 33years old, died first, at 12:41 a.m.; Smith, 36, died at 1:19 .. .»
   Dewey had watched them die, for he had been among the twenty-odd witnesses invited to the
   ceremony. He had never attended an execution, and when on the midnight past he entered the
   cold warehouse, the scenery had surprised him: he had anticipated a setting of suitable dignity,
   not this bleakly lighted cavern cluttered with lumber and other debris. But the gallows itself, with
   its two pale nooses attached to a crossbeam, was imposing enough; and so, in an unexpected
   style, was the hangman, who cast a long shadow from his perch on the platform at the top of the
   wooden instrument’s thirteen steps. The hangman, an anonymous, leathery gentleman who had
   been imported from Missouri for the event, for which he was paid six hundred dollars, was attired
   in an aged double-breasted pinstriped suit overly commodious for the narrow figure inside it — the
   coat came nearly to his knees; and on his head he wore a cowboy hat which, when first bought,
   had perhaps been bright green, but was now a weathered, sweat-stained oddity.
   Also, Dewey found the self-consciously casual conversation of his fellow witnesses, as they stood
   awaiting the start of what one witness termed «the festivities,» disconcerting.
   «What I heard was, they was gonna let them draw straws to see who dropped first. Or flip a coin.
   But Smith says why not do it alphabetically. Guess ’cause S comes after H. Ha!»
   «Read in the paper, afternoon paper, what they ordered for their last meal? Ordered the same
   menu. Shrimp. French fries. Garlic bread. Ice cream and strawberries and whipped cream.
   Understand Smith didn’t touch his much.»
   «That Hickock’s got a sense of humor. They was telling me how, about an hour ago, one of the
   guards says to him, ‘This must be the longest night of your life.’ And Hickock, he laughs and says,
   ‘No. The shortest.'»
   «Did you hear about Hickock’s eyes? He left them to an eye doctor. Soon as they cut him down,
   this doctor’s gonna yank out his eyes and stick them in somebody else’s head. Can’t say I’d want
   to be that somebody. I’d feel peculiar with them eyes in my head.»
   «Christ! Is that rain? All the windows down! My new Chevy. Christ!»
   The sudden rain rapped the high warehouse roof. The sound, not unlike the