Execution of Hickock and Smith

The execution of Dick and Perry Smith on April 14, 1965, ended the long legal struggle over the Clutter murders and fulfilled the death sentences imposed after their trial. The event is presented not simply as the enforcement of a verdict, but as a public ritual whose meanings remain divided: punishment, revenge, legal finality, and the troubling persistence of human sympathy all meet in the prison warehouse. For Alvin Dewey, who had investigated the crime and attended the executions, the deaths did not bring the clean sense of closure he had expected.

Appeals and the Final Order

The executions followed years of challenges to the convictions. After Russell Shultz resigned from the case, Joseph P. Jenkins and Robert Bingham, two Kansas City attorneys appointed by a federal judge, represented the defendants without compensation. They believed the trial had been profoundly unfair and pursued numerous appeals in the federal courts. Their efforts postponed three scheduled execution dates: October 25, 1962; August 8, 1963; and February 18, 1965.

The lawyers argued that counsel had not been appointed until after Dick and Perry had confessed and waived preliminary hearings. They also challenged the quality of the trial representation, the admission of evidence taken from the Hickock home without a search warrant, and the refusal to move the trial despite extensive publicity in the surrounding area. The disputed items included a shotgun and a knife. These claims placed procedural questions alongside the gravity of the crimes: the appeals did not deny the stakes of the case, but challenged whether the state had secured the convictions through fair legal means.

The case reached the Supreme Court of the United States three times. Each time, the Court declined to grant certiorari, leaving the convictions in place without a full hearing there. In March 1965, after Dick and Perry had spent almost two thousand days in their Death Row cells, the Kansas Supreme Court ordered that they be executed between midnight and 2:00 a.m. on April 14. A clemency request went to newly elected governor William Avery, who refused to intervene, saying the decision served the best interests of the people of Kansas. With that refusal, the remaining appeal for mercy ended as well.

The Prison and the Ceremony

The setting gives the executions a larger institutional frame. Leavenworth County, Kansas, contained several major prisons, including the Kansas State Penitentiary for Men in Lansing, Kansas. The penitentiary’s guarded compound was a self-contained community of cell blocks, workshops, and cement streets. Within it, a separate building held both the isolation cells and Death Row. The description of this landscape makes clear that the executions were the culmination of a long confinement, not an isolated act detached from the routines and architecture of imprisonment.

Dewey attended as one of roughly twenty witnesses. He had never seen an execution before and had imagined a setting with more dignity than the warehouse he entered: a plainly lit space used for the ceremony, with lumber and other materials nearby. The execution apparatus, by contrast, commanded attention. The contrast between official solemnity and the makeshift surroundings unsettled him. So did the witnesses’ deliberately casual conversation as they waited, which made the occasion seem to some like an event to be watched rather than a state taking of life.

Rain began against the warehouse roof before Dick was brought in, accompanied by guards and a chaplain. The warden read the formal order. Dick looked over the small audience and asked whether anyone from the Clutter family was present. When told that no one was, he appeared disappointed, as if their absence had left something important out of the proceedings. The moment connected the legal ceremony to the people whose deaths had made it necessary, even though no member of the family was there to witness it.

Dick and Perry at the Scaffold

Asked whether he wished to make a final statement, Dick said he held no hard feelings toward those carrying out the sentence and described the next world as better than this one. He then shook hands with the four investigators who had requested permission to attend: Roy Church, Clarence Duntz, Harold Nye, and Dewey. His courteous manner, including a charming smile, made the encounter seem almost like a social leave-taking. Church later admitted that Dick’s composure had surprised him; another detective answered that the manner of facing death did not alter his judgment of Dick’s character or guilt.

Perry’s arrival produced a different exchange with Dewey. He recognized the detective, whom he had long regarded as an adversary, stopped chewing his gum, and grinned and winked. When asked to speak, however, he became sober. He objected to capital punishment on moral and legal grounds, suggested that he might have had something to contribute, and said that an apology could not undo what he had done, though he offered one. His words did not cancel responsibility for the murders. They placed remorse beside the acknowledgment that remorse could not restore the victims or repair the damage.

The details of Perry’s last years in prison sharpen that contrast. During his final three years on Death Row, he painted self-portraits and pictures of children, often working from photographs supplied by inmates who rarely saw their own children. At the ceremony, his fingers were stained with ink and paint. Before the proceedings continued, he handed his gum to the chaplain. The small, ordinary gesture sat beside the finality of the sentence, while his paintings recalled a capacity for work and attention that could not be reconciled easily with the violence of his crime.

Dewey’s Response and the Case’s Ending

Dewey believed capital punishment deterred violent crime and thought the penalty had been earned in this case. He had not been deeply troubled by Dick’s execution. Perry, whom Dewey considered the actual killer, affected him differently: the detective remembered him as a wounded, displaced figure, without that response amounting to forgiveness. As Perry faced the sentence, Dewey shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he recalled their first meeting in the Las Vegas interrogation room, where Perry’s small, booted feet had not quite reached the floor. The memory made the condemned man before him overlap with the vulnerable-looking figure of their earlier encounter.

The next morning, Dewey read a newspaper account of the executions in a Topeka hotel coffee shop. Dick had died first, at 12:41 a.m.; Perry followed at 1:19. The report supplied public confirmation of what Dewey had witnessed, turning the private experience of the witnesses into a headline about a notorious Kansas crime. Yet the news did not give Dewey the climax or release he had anticipated. Instead, he found himself remembering an encounter from almost a year earlier at Valley View Cemetery, a place that, in retrospect, had seemed to him to mark the case’s end.

That movement from the execution warehouse to the cemetery resists a simple ending. The state had carried out the sentences, the courts had refused further review, and both men were dead. But Dewey’s memory shifted away from the machinery of punishment toward an earlier, quieter meeting among the graves. The executions therefore close the legal sequence while leaving emotional resolution incomplete. Their final significance lies in that tension: the law could pronounce the case finished, but the people who had pursued it continued to carry different and unresolved meanings of justice, guilt, and loss.