Dick Hickock's relationship with his father, Walter Hickock

Dick Hickock’s relationship with his father, Walter Hickock, is presented through Dick’s account of a steady but watchful family bond, followed by a final, painful act of paternal defense. Dick remembered a childhood marked by financial strain and a strict father, yet insisted they had got along without serious quarrels. After Dick’s release from prison, Walter’s close supervision became part of the circumstances surrounding Dick’s false explanation for an overnight absence. In jail, Walter accepted and repeated Dick’s version of the Clutter killings, defending his son while believing that both defendants would be executed.

Childhood and Family Life

Dick recalled that Walter had fallen ill when Dick was nine or ten, with an illness Dick called rabbit fever. It lasted for many months, and the family depended on assistance from their church and the charity of neighbors to get by. Dick described this as an exceptional period of hardship rather than a childhood of unrelieved deprivation: the family had little money, he said, but generally had clean clothes and enough to eat. His recollection places the family’s precariousness alongside a sense that they had remained intact and cared for.

In Dick’s description, Walter was strict and expected him to do chores. But Dick did not portray that strictness as the source of a lasting rupture. He said there had been no serious arguments between them and that he could not remember his parents quarreling with each other. He spoke warmly of both parents, describing his mother as wonderful and his father as a good man who had done the best he could for his son. The account is Dick’s own retrospective characterization, not an independent portrait of Walter; its importance lies partly in the contrast between Dick’s later conduct and the family stability he claimed to remember.

Supervision After Prison

Walter’s concern took a more immediate form after Dick left the Kansas State Penitentiary. Dick had been convicted of house burglary and sentenced to five years; after his release, he obtained work in Olathe and, by his account, stayed home at night. But Walter watched him closely because he feared his son would break parole. That supervision shaped the excuse Dick and Perry Smith used when Dick was away overnight: they invented a story involving Dick’s sister to reassure Walter. Perry later admitted to investigators that the account was fabricated to pacify Mr. Hickock, and that it had served as an explanation for Dick’s absence and drinking.

This episode complicates Dick’s description of an affectionate family bond. His father’s vigilance suggests that trust was limited by Dick’s criminal record and the conditions of his release, even though the evidence does not show Walter openly rejecting or abandoning him. Dick could describe his father as a good man and still conceal his movements from him. The false story used the family connection as cover: the invented reference to a sister was meant to satisfy the very parent whose watchfulness made concealment necessary. The evidence establishes the deception and its purpose, but does not show how Walter reacted when the truth became known.

The Jail Visit and Walter’s Defense

After Dick’s arrest, Walter visited him in jail and spent three hours with his son. The visit occurred during a winter snowfall. Walter then walked to the Garden City depot, where he spoke with a reporter. His own health was failing: he was described as stooped and worn down by cancer, which would kill him a few months later. The encounter thus brings together a father’s final opportunity to hear his son and his public effort to protect him from the judgment forming around the case.

Walter told the reporter that the men had not gone to the Clutter home intending violence and insisted that Dick was not as bad as newspaper accounts suggested. He attributed the decisive violence to Perry Smith, saying that Dick had told him he was elsewhere when Perry attacked Herbert Clutter and entered only after hearing a struggle. Walter also relayed Dick’s claim that Perry had taken Dick’s shotgun and killed Herbert with it. These statements are evidence of what Walter believed and of the account Dick gave his father; they do not independently establish the sequence of events. Walter’s defense was therefore both intimate and limited: he trusted his son’s explanation, but the reader sees it as a father’s report of Dick’s version, not as a neutral finding.

Love, Blame, and the Expected End

Walter’s defense did not mean that he believed Dick innocent of every responsibility. He repeated Dick’s assertion that he should have stopped Perry, and said Dick believed he would have been better off had he intervened and killed Perry before the rest of the family could be killed. In Walter’s telling, Dick’s regret was framed as a missed chance to prevent further deaths. The account also served to distinguish Dick from the person Walter believed had initiated the violence, even while acknowledging that Dick was implicated in the events and faced the same sentence.

Walter expected neither his own defense nor Dick’s distinctions to alter the outcome. He told the reporter that people had already made up their minds and that both men would be hanged. He described the prospect of his son’s execution, with its certainty as he understood it, as the worst thing that could happen to a father. His visit and statement close the relationship’s documented arc: the father who once enforced chores and watched his son’s parole now stood publicly beside him, repeating his account while anticipating his death. The evidence gives no later reconciliation, further visit, or response from Dick to Walter’s defense. What remains is the stark contrast between the ordinary family bond Dick remembered and the final, irrevocable consequences of his return to crime.