Alvin Dewey and Herbert Clutter's friendship

Alvin Dewey and Herbert William Clutter’s friendship gives Dewey’s investigation a personal stake: he does not consider the Clutter family merely as victims in a solved case, but remains haunted by what his friend and the family endured. The friendship makes the confessions an answer to how the crime happened, not an answer to the suffering it caused.

Friendship and the Clutter Family

As Dewey reconstructs the night of the killings, he imagines Herbert William Clutter among his frightened family. He believes his friend would have fought to the death to defend Bonnie Clutter and their children. That conviction makes the family’s helplessness especially painful: Dewey sees Herbert’s restraint not as cowardice, but as the response of a gentle man who had no reason to anticipate the danger.

What the Confessions Could Not Explain

Dewey had wanted to learn exactly what happened in the house. By the time he hears the accounts, he has been told the story twice. The versions are substantially alike, though Dick attributes all four deaths to Perry Smith, while Perry says Dick killed the two women. The conflicting claims leave an important detail unsettled, but the accounts otherwise answer many of Dewey’s questions about how and why the crime occurred.

For Dewey, however, those answers do not make the deaths meaningful or comprehensible. He regards the crime as nearly accidental and impersonal, yet cannot set aside the prolonged terror and suffering of the victims. His friendship with Herbert gives that suffering an intimate human presence: it is not an abstraction that can be resolved by identifying the killers or assembling their explanations.

Sympathy Without Forgiveness

After hearing Perry’s account, Dewey can look at him without anger and feel some sympathy for the lonely, painful course of Perry’s life. That response does not extend to forgiveness or mercy. Dewey hopes that Perry and his partner will be hanged, even as he recognizes Perry’s misery. The friendship therefore frames a difficult distinction in Dewey’s response: compassion for the person responsible does not displace his memory of what Herbert and the rest of the family suffered.