Alvin Dewey’s conflict with and empathy for Perry Smith

Alvin Dewey’s conflict with and empathy for Perry Smith grows out of the distance between what Dewey must establish as an investigator and what he cannot forget about the man he helped bring to justice. Dewey regards Smith as responsible for the killings and believes the sentence has been earned, yet Smith’s execution brings back an image of him that resists any simple division between criminal and person. Their relationship ends not in reconciliation, but in Dewey’s recognition that legal closure does not extinguish human attachment or memory.

An Investigator and His Suspect

Dewey’s connection to Smith begins within the criminal investigation, where Smith is the person Dewey must understand and hold accountable. The narrative later recalls their first meeting in the Las Vegas police headquarters interrogation room: Smith, a slight, boyish figure, sat in a metal chair with his booted feet not quite reaching the floor. That image becomes a lasting measure of Dewey’s perception of him, distinct from the facts of the case and the demands of the investigation.

The contrast is sharpened by what Smith had represented to Dick. Recalling their time in Lansing, the narrative explains that Dick came to regard Smith as an unusually capable killer after hearing him describe a previous killing. Dick concluded that Smith was sane but without conscience, and set about flattering him and cultivating his supposed interests because he believed Smith’s capacity for violence could advance Dick’s own ambitions. This account does not describe Dewey’s view, but it sets the two men’s perceptions against each other: Dick sees a quality to exploit, while Dewey’s later memory holds on to the small figure behind the criminal identity.

The Case and the Person

Dewey’s response to Smith is not an exoneration. He believes capital punishment deters violent crime and considers Smith’s case one in which the penalty was deserved. His judgment remains clear even as he feels a response to Smith that he did not feel toward Dick, whom he regarded as an empty, small-time offender who had exceeded his depth. Smith was, in Dewey’s understanding, the actual murderer; nevertheless, Dewey could not disregard what the narrative presents as Smith’s wounded, almost exiled quality.

This tension makes Dewey’s attitude more than either condemnation or sympathy. His role requires him to recognize the harm Smith caused and to accept the consequence imposed by law. At the same time, Smith’s past vulnerability remains legible to him. The remembered interrogation-room image does not cancel guilt; it complicates the emotional certainty Dewey expected the case’s conclusion to bring.

The Execution and Its Afterimage

At Smith’s execution, Dewey shuts his eyes and keeps them closed until he hears the sound that signals the hanging is over. When he opens them, the earlier image returns: Smith’s small feet, tilted and dangling from the chair in the Las Vegas interrogation room. The recurrence links the end of Dewey’s investigation to its beginning, making the remembered suspect present at the moment when the law’s judgment is carried out.

Dewey had expected the deaths of Smith and Dick to bring a sense of climax, release, and a justly completed design. Instead, Smith’s death leads him back to a casual encounter at Valley View Cemetery the previous year, which in retrospect had more or less ended the Clutter case for him. The case has its legal conclusion, but Dewey’s emotional response refuses a neat ending: the investigator can believe that justice has been done and still carry the person he once saw in the interrogation room in his mind.