The “natural killer” idea

The natural-killer idea is Dick’s theory that Perry Smith combined sanity with an absence of conscience and an exceptional capacity for lethal violence. It gives Dick a reason to cultivate Perry as a partner, but the narrative tests the theory against Perry’s suspicions, the evidence of the crimes, and the competing labels applied to men in prison and court.

Origin of the Theory

Dick’s estimation of Perry changed after Perry described a previous killing in Las Vegas. Before hearing that story, Dick had regarded him as likable but self-involved and dreamy, not especially worth pursuing as a companion. The account of a murder committed without an apparent reason made Dick reconsider: among the men at Lansing who had killed or claimed they could kill, he came to regard Perry as unusually capable.

Dick’s formulation was not simply that Perry was violent. He believed Perry to be sane, yet without conscience, and able to deliver a killing blow whether or not he had a motive. In Dick’s mind, this supposed combination made Perry a rare asset. The idea thus began as Dick’s interpretation of Perry, not as a neutral or independently established diagnosis.

Recruitment and Doubt

Dick imagined that Perry’s capacity could be turned to practical advantage under his direction. To draw him in, Dick flattered him and pretended to share his interest in buried treasure, beaches, and seaports. Those yearnings did not appeal to Dick, whose own ambitions were conventional: a business, a home, a horse, a new car, and women. He concealed that mismatch because he wanted Perry’s help before Perry understood the extent of Dick’s plans.

At a stop on the journey, Perry remained behind a bolted men’s-room door while Dick waited outside. Dick wondered whether he had mistaken Perry’s character and whether Perry was proving to be merely an ordinary criminal rather than the exceptional figure Dick had imagined. If so, Dick thought, their plan was finished and the months of preparation wasted. His unease reveals the practical weakness beneath the grand theory: Dick’s confidence in Perry depended on a prediction about what Perry would do next.

Perry’s Premonitions and Suspicion

Perry, meanwhile, interpreted events through his own belief in foreknowledge. After reading a newspaper account emphasizing how little investigators knew about the killings, he challenged its suggestion that the perpetrators had left few clues. He also corrected the article’s grammar, a small, precise intervention amid his larger distrust of its conclusions. Dick was impatient with Perry’s repeated questioning and treated the report as no cause for alarm.

Perry told Dick that Willie-Jay had described him as a medium with extrasensory perception. To support his belief, Perry recalled that in 1949, while in Alaska with his father, he had announced that his brother Jimmy was dead; news of Jimmy’s death arrived about a week later. He also recounted an incident in Japan when an inner warning made him jump just before heavy cargo fell where he had been sitting. Perry further said that before his motorcycle accident he had pictured the rain, the skid tracks, and his own injuries. These recollections led him to suspect that the newspaper report concealed a trap. Dick dismissed the suspicion and attributed Perry’s unusual leaps of thought to his sparse diet; their opposing readings of the same danger sharpen the contrast between Dick’s confidence and Perry’s foreboding.

Labels, Evidence, and Denial

The idea of a natural killer is set against the ways other people name and classify suspected killers. During testimony, defense attorney Harrison Smith adopted a sneering manner and pressed Floyd Wells about whether people now called him a snitch. Wells replied that Dick had been implicated because the crime was carried out as he had said it would be. The exchange makes naming part of the struggle over credibility: the witness’s alleged betrayal is put on display, while the connection between Dick’s earlier words and the crime is asserted in court.

Later, when George Ronald York and James Douglas Latham joined the condemned men’s row, Dick objected to being counted among the killers. He corrected Lowell Lee Andrews’s arithmetic, insisting that there were four killers and one man wrongly convicted, and maintained that he had never harmed anyone. His denial stands in stark contrast to the role Dick had assigned Perry and to the evidence that had made Perry’s supposed capacity useful to him. The book leaves the natural-killer idea less as a settled category than as a revealing contradiction: Dick uses it to recruit and manage Perry, Perry uses premonition to question the plan, and Dick ultimately rejects the very identity that the crimes and his own earlier calculations place upon him.