Barbara Johnson

Barbara Johnson, called Bobo as a child, is Perry Smith’s sister and one of the few surviving members of his immediate family. Her role in the narrative is defined by a difficult combination: she remembers loving the boy Perry once was, but as an adult she rejects his attempts to blame others for his choices and fears the violence into which he has grown. Through her letter from prison and her later account to investigators, she becomes both a witness to the Smith family’s past and a forceful challenger to Perry’s self-explanations.

Family Identity and Childhood

Barbara Johnson grew up with Perry, their brother Jimmy Smith, and their sister Fern Smith, the children of Florence Buckskin and Tex John Smith. Their parents had once performed on the rodeo circuit, but the family’s later life was marked by constant movement and severe material hardship. In 1933, the family traveled in an old truck while looking for work; a photograph from that period shows the four children barefoot and tired. Barbara remembered stretches when their food consisted of berries or stale bread softened with condensed milk, and a period when the family ate rotten bananas. Perry became ill after eating them, and the young Barbara, frightened for him, cried through the night.

Her childhood attachment to Perry was unusually close. Three years older than him, she treated her little brother as a cherished companion, tending to him as if he were a doll. Photographs preserve them together as small children, including one taken beside a Colorado creek and another showing them close together on a pony. These images belong to a period before affection gave way to distance: Barbara later said that her love for Perry weakened after the children and their mother moved to San Francisco, as she came to see him as a wild and dishonest boy rather than the child she had cared for.

The family’s instability also shaped Barbara’s later understanding of Perry’s grievances. He was arrested for the first time on his eighth birthday and, after further placements in institutions and detention centers, was returned to Tex John Smith’s custody. Barbara did not see him for many years, apart from photographs their father sent. Those pictures tracked a life increasingly distant from hers: Perry with their father and a husky dog, prospecting for gold, and hunting in Alaska. They also made visible the loneliness and fatigue she associated with him, without resolving the conflict over who was responsible for his adult choices.

Estrangement and the Dispute over Responsibility

Barbara’s last face-to-face meeting with Perry took place in the spring of 1955, when he visited her in Denver. During a discussion of his childhood and their father, he became angry and physically confronted her. He accused their father of denying him an education and complained that Barbara, Jimmy, and Fern had received schooling while he had not. He described himself as talented but deprived of a chance to develop that talent, and directed his anger toward their father and the siblings. Barbara’s account presents the scene as a rupture that joined Perry’s resentment to her fear of him.

Her response was not to deny the family’s hardships, but to resist Perry’s version of what they meant. Jimmy had completed school through his own determination; all three siblings had finished high school, while Perry had not. Barbara nevertheless recalled that their lives had not been easy: there was insufficient food and clothing, and their mother’s drinking created burdens for the children. The contrast did not persuade her that Perry’s suffering excused what he did. Rather, she saw the family’s history as shared hardship, not proof that one person could assign responsibility for his own actions to everyone around him.

When Perry was imprisoned in Lansing, Barbara wrote to him. Her letter of April 28, 1958, was shaped by an ordinary household routine: she was caring for three young children, supervising their play, and trying to write between their needs. She also described her limited typing skills and praised Perry for having learned to type well. In the same letter, she recognized artistic ability in the family, including in their parents, but insisted that ability did not erase personal responsibility. She argued that people understood right and wrong early in life and that environment mattered without determining every choice.

Barbara’s central objection was that Perry’s letters seemed to place the blame for his difficulties on other people rather than show sincere regret or respect for the law. She told him that his father was not responsible for Perry’s wrongdoings or good deeds, and challenged him to decide what he wanted to do and make an honest effort to achieve it. Her criticism was also personal: Perry’s confinement embarrassed her and their father, she said, not simply because of the crime but because she saw no evidence that he accepted responsibility. She feared that his intelligence and ability would come to nothing if he remained unwilling to work or reconsider his conduct.

Loyalty to Their Father and the Meaning of Freedom

Barbara’s letter defended Tex John Smith while acknowledging that he had sometimes been wrong. She described an aging, unwell father whose heart was broken by Perry’s situation and who had shared his life and belongings with Perry in ways he did not with other people. She did not claim that Perry owed him his life or unlimited gratitude; she asked for respect and ordinary decency. Barbara was proud of her father, and her husband respected him as well. She worried that the father’s choice to live independently had left him alone in a small trailer, longing for his son.

That defense of their father stood against Perry’s enduring anger. In 1959, Barbara told investigators that their father had visited her after Perry came out of prison and had written that he intended to take Perry north with him. A later letter from her father reported that he and Perry had quarreled and separated before reaching the border: Perry turned back, and their father continued to Alaska alone. Barbara had not heard from Perry since his release and said she had not seen him in four years. Her information thus tied the old family dispute to a fresh separation, rather than presenting the estrangement as a single argument in the past.

For Barbara, freedom did not mean exemption from obligations to other people. In her letter, she argued that individual liberty had limits when a person’s actions injured others, and that Perry alone had to overcome his own failures. This belief gave her criticism a moral structure: she could recognize the pressures of family life and human weakness while still holding each person answerable for what he chose to do. The distinction was especially pointed because Perry’s complaint about confinement and his resentment toward their father had not, in her view, become genuine remorse.

The Interview and the Return of Fear

On December 18, 1959, Harold Nye and another San Francisco investigator came to Barbara’s new home while she was expecting neighborhood guests. She had been preparing a conventional suburban house for the visit, with her three children playing in the fenced back garden. The detectives instead asked about Perry, who had failed to report to his parole officer. Barbara remained composed and answered their questions, but the inquiry made plain that she did not know where her brother was and had not heard from him since his release.

She acknowledged that she had written frequently while Perry was imprisoned, hoping to help him and change some of his ideas. She no longer believed that effort had succeeded. When the investigators asked whether she feared him, she could not say whether she thought he would physically harm her; she was certain, however, that she was afraid. She remembered Perry as capable of warmth, sympathy, and tears, including as a boy moved by a sunset or the moon. That tenderness did not reassure her. It made his capacity to elicit sympathy part of the danger, because it could obscure what she believed about his disregard for other people.

Barbara asked the investigators not to give Perry her new address. He believed she was still living in Denver, and she wanted that information withheld. After the detectives left, the effort to remain composed lasted through the visit with her guests, the children’s meal and bath, and their bedtime prayers. Only afterward did her familiar despair take hold. Her fear extended beyond Perry alone to the family’s accumulated losses: Jimmy had died by suicide, Fern had fallen or jumped from a window, and Perry had become a violent criminal. Barbara wondered whether she, too, might eventually be overwhelmed by the pattern of suffering she saw in the family.

The Letter as a Measure of Their Divide

Perry kept Barbara’s letter among the papers he did not want to leave behind in a Mexico City hotel room, but the narrative makes clear that preservation did not signify affection. He hated her and had told Dick that he wished she had been in the house during the Clutter murders; Dick expressed a similarly murderous fantasy about his own former family. The letter mattered to Perry because Willie-Jay had written a two-page analysis of it, not because Barbara’s appeal had reconciled them.

Willie-Jay read the letter as beginning in an effort to express Christian compassion and turning, as Barbara’s frustration grew, into a more emotionally charged rebuke. He thought that this movement weakened its power to persuade Perry and risked provoking another angry exchange. His analysis also identified the gap between Barbara’s conventional family life and Perry’s rejection of conventional obligations. The letter therefore survives in the narrative in two competing readings: Barbara’s direct appeal for accountability, and Willie-Jay’s interpretation of the rhetorical choices that might make Perry resist it.

Perry’s later account to Don Cullivan sharpens the conflict without settling its cause. Perry admitted killing the Clutters and invoked Willie-Jay’s idea that murder was a form of theft because it took a life, yet said he did not feel remorse and could not explain why he had done it. His account included anger, old injuries, and the claim that the victims had not personally harmed him. Barbara’s letter had anticipated the crucial disagreement: for her, an explanation of hardship could not transfer responsibility elsewhere. Her presence is consequently less a resolution of Perry’s family history than a sustained countervoice to his grievance, insisting that love, deprivation, intelligence, and freedom do not cancel accountability.