The relationship between Dick Hickock and Floyd Wells

Dick and Floyd Wells’s relationship began in prison as a friendship and became a direct link between Dick and River Valley Farm. Wells’s account of their conversations exposed Dick’s interest in the farm and the prospect of a robbery without witnesses; his later testimony helped connect that plan to the killings. For Dick, the former companion was both a source of incriminating knowledge and a betrayer he had once considered silencing.

From River Valley Farm to Prison

Wells had worked for approximately a year as a hired hand at River Valley Farm. About ten years later, after Wells was convicted of burglary and imprisoned, he became friendly with Dick, another burglar. Wells described the farm and the Clutter family to him, bringing knowledge of the household into the prison conversations that would acquire a far more dangerous meaning afterward.

The relationship was close enough for Dick to discuss his anticipated parole and possible plans in the West. He told Wells he might look for work and stop to see Herbert William Clutter about a job. Wells, for his part, described Herbert as wealthy. The talk moved from a possible visit and employment to the question of whether the house had a safe: Dick asked about one, while Wells recalled that he believed there was a safe but knew there was a cabinet of some kind. The uncertainty mattered less than the fact that Dick was testing what might be available there.

The Plan Wells Recalled

Wells testified that the next thing he knew, Dick was talking about robbing Herbert. In Wells’s account, Dick said he would leave no witnesses; he described tying the people up, robbing them, and then killing them. The testimony thus presented the relationship not as an accidental exchange of farm gossip but as the setting in which a specific robbery plan was voiced. Wells’s earlier employment at the farm supplied the information; Dick’s questions and statements supplied the incriminating intent.

At the same time, the two men occupied sharply different positions in the story that followed. Wells was the former farmhand who had described the property and family; Dick was the man who turned that knowledge toward a contemplated robbery. Dick later insisted to himself that a convict’s report was not proof, distinguishing Wells’s account from physical evidence, eyewitnesses, or a confession. Yet Wells was precisely the person who could connect Dick to the Clutter name and farm before the case produced its other evidence.

Betrayal Recognized

During questioning after the arrests, Dick and Perry were held apart, with Dick in a cell on a floor below Perry. In his recollection of that period, Dick understood at once who the authorities meant when they invoked a witness: Wells, his former cellmate. He believed Perry might mistake the reference for an eyewitness, but Dick knew that Wells was the one person, apart from Perry, who could link him to the Clutters.

Dick also remembered that, while serving the final weeks of his sentence, he had planned to stab Wells through the heart with a handmade shiv. He regretted not having carried out that plan. But he considered Perry more dangerous than Wells: Wells might be a source of incriminating information, while Perry could disclose what had happened and implicate them both. In Dick’s retrospective reasoning, the danger he had failed to prevent had shifted—from a former companion he had once thought he could intimidate to the partner he feared might lose his nerve. The thought that he should have silenced Perry on a road in Mexico or while crossing the Mojave came too late to change anything.

Testimony and Its Aftermath

Because Wells was still serving a sentence at Kansas State Penitentiary and could face retaliation from other inmates, the authorities kept his identity as the informer from public view before trial. To make his testimony safer, they moved him from the prison and lodged him in a small jail in an adjacent county. When he crossed the courtroom toward the stand, his passage appeared stealthy; as he walked past Dick, Dick whispered an obscenity. Wells acted as if he had not noticed, but shied away from Dick’s vicinity.

Wells’s appearance and testimony were prepared for the courtroom. The State of Kansas had bought him a dark-blue suit so its principal witness would look respectable and trustworthy, and his account had been rehearsed before trial. Under questioning, he described his year at River Valley Farm, his prison friendship with Dick, Dick’s questions about a safe, and the discussion of a robbery with no witnesses. The exchange made their former intimacy legible as evidence: the details had come from conversations between cellmates, but now they were spoken before the court as testimony against one of them.

Dick’s public response kept the personal hostility visible. When questioning turned to whether Wells had seen information in a newspaper before going to the authorities, the defense asked what immunity the county attorney had offered him. The objection was sustained because immunity had not been established in testimony. As Wells left the stand, Dick accused him aloud of deserving to hang and predicted that he would receive money and go free. The prediction proved correct: Wells collected both a reward and parole. His good fortune did not last. After further trouble over the years, he was serving a thirty-year sentence for armed robbery at Mississippi State Prison in Parchman, Mississippi. The relationship that had begun in prison friendship ended, in court, as an exchange of accusation, fear, and testimony, with Wells’s disclosure fixed as a consequential link in the case against Dick.