April 14, 1965

April 14, 1965 is the date on which Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith were executed at the Kansas State Penitentiary, after their appeals failed and the governor declined to intervene. The day turned a repeatedly postponed sentence into a final outcome, while the account of the execution sets the state’s public claim to punishment beside the private responses of the condemned men and the investigator who watched them die.

The Date Set by the Courts

In March 1965, after Smith and Hickock had spent almost two thousand days in Death Row cells, the Kansas Supreme Court ordered that they be executed between midnight and 2:00 a.m. on Wednesday, April 14. The narrow time window made the date more than a distant legal deadline: it fixed the point at which years of litigation and confinement would end.

The order followed three appeals to the United States Supreme Court, each unsuccessful. Their lawyers, Joseph P. Jenkins and Robert Bingham, had argued that counsel was appointed only after the defendants confessed and waived preliminary hearings, that their trial representation was inadequate, that evidence had been taken from the Hickock home without a search warrant, and that publicity warranted a change of venue. Their filings had previously postponed three execution dates: October 25, 1962, August 8, 1963, and February 18, 1965. By April, those legal efforts had not secured a full hearing or changed the sentence.

A clemency appeal to Kansas Governor William Avery was the final attempt to avert execution. Avery refused to intervene, saying he believed that decision served the best interests of the people of Kansas. The combination of judicial rejection and executive refusal left April 14 as the date on which the sentence would be carried out.

The Execution in the Early Hours

Hickock died first, at 12:41 a.m.; Smith followed at 1:19 a.m. Both times fell within the court-ordered interval. The book later places the event in the ordinary morning routine of Alvin Dewey: breakfasting at a Topeka hotel, he read the front page of the Kansas City Star and learned that the men had died. The delayed newspaper account converts a night witnessed by a small group into a public record of the case’s ending.

Dewey had been among roughly twenty witnesses at the ceremony. He had never attended an execution before. The setting was a warehouse at the state prison, and the account emphasizes its bleak, makeshift character rather than the dignity Dewey had expected. The gallows and the two nooses gave the proceeding its formal shape, while the presence of witnesses made the sentence an act observed as well as administered.

Smith’s Last Words and Dewey’s Response

When Smith was brought into the warehouse, he recognized Dewey, an adversary from the investigation, and greeted him with a grin and wink. Asked whether he wished to say anything, Smith spoke against capital punishment on both moral and legal grounds, acknowledged that he might have had something to contribute, and apologized for what he had done. The account presents no extended defense or attempt to overturn the facts; his brief statement holds together opposition to the punishment and responsibility for the crime.

Smith’s hands were stained with ink and paint. During his final three years on Death Row, he had painted self-portraits and pictures of children, often using photographs supplied by inmates. That detail gives the date a quieter counterpoint to the official sentence: the condemned man’s final years had included work made from images of lives and families beyond his cell, even as the date of his death approached.

Dewey shut his eyes before the execution was completed. He believed capital punishment deterred violent crime and thought the penalty had been earned in this case, yet Smith prompted a response different from his feelings about Hickock. Dewey remembered Smith as a wounded, exiled figure whom he could not simply regard as a criminal abstraction. April 14 therefore closes the case without resolving the tension between punishment and pity that the account attaches to Smith.

The Date as an Ending

The execution ended the sequence of appeals and postponements, but the narration gives the date more than a procedural function. It sets the state’s timetable—the midnight-to-two window, the court order, the refused clemency appeal—against the particular actions and reactions surrounding the event: Dewey reading the news, Smith recognizing him, and Smith making a final statement. The outcome is unambiguous, while the moral response remains divided. April 14, 1965 is both the legal terminus of the case and the point at which its final account leaves the reader with punishment carried out, an apology offered, and Dewey’s uneasy sympathy still intact.