Dick Hickock's parent-child relationship with his mother

Dick Hickock’s relationship with his mother, Mrs. Hickock, is revealed through memory, loyalty, and the moral strain of the Clutter case. She remembers him as a sweet, good-natured child, yet does not deny his responsibility as an adult. At the trial, her efforts to remain loyal to him meet the painful possibility that she may have failed him as a parent; meanwhile, Dick reportedly revises his account of the killings partly to spare her that pain.

A mother’s welcome, and its limit

When Perry Smith returned to Kansas to join Dick in a proposed robbery, Dick brought him to his parents’ home. Mrs. Hickock did not want Perry staying there: she recognized him as a friend Dick had made in prison and was uncomfortable having him in the house. Smith recalled that he understood her reluctance and described her as a sweet person, distinguishing her personal kindness from her refusal to accept him as a guest. The distinction matters to the relationship: the family home was a place where Dick belonged, but his criminal association with Smith could not simply be brought inside without consequence.

Dick then took Smith to a hotel in Olathe, where he outlined the plan to rob the Clutter home. In Smith’s recollection, the hotel became the setting in which the scheme was made explicit after the visit to Dick’s parents. Mrs. Hickock had not endorsed the plan, and the account gives no indication that she knew of it. Her importance to what followed lies elsewhere: Smith later described Dick’s concern for her as a reason to alter the story of who had killed the family.

The child she remembered

At the trial, Mrs. Hickock recalled a side of Dick that she felt was absent from the prosecution’s public account. She had taught him to dance the foxtrot. Although he did not readily take to dancing, she remembered him as sweet and as the best-natured little boy. The memory is specific and domestic, a measure of their earlier closeness rather than an argument that could erase what he had done.

Her own memories of dancing also shaped the way she spoke about him. Dancing had been central to her life as a young woman, and she remembered a childhood dream of going on stage. After she married Walter Hickock, she said, no one danced with her again until she taught Dick. This recollection places their shared dancing within her personal history: the son she taught became, in a limited but meaningful way, the person with whom that part of her life resumed. The scene supports her affection for him without establishing that their bond was uncomplicated or that she understood his later choices.

Confession and filial concern

Before Smith revised his account, he had blamed Dick for shooting Nancy Clutter and her mother. According to Alvin Dewey’s account of Smith’s explanation, Smith later wanted to correct the record and say that he himself had killed all four members of the Clutter family. Dewey connected this change to Smith’s stated concern that Dick’s mother should not believe her son had killed anyone in the family. Smith also said the Hickocks were good people and that Dick’s role in setting the crime in motion remained substantial, even if Dick had not fired the shots.

The attribution requires care: the reader receives the motive through Smith’s account as relayed by Dewey, not through an independent statement from Dick. Smith had earlier admitted lying about who killed Nancy and her mother, and Dewey was not certain enough of Smith’s later version to let him amend his formal statement. The reported revision therefore shows both a claimed act of consideration toward Mrs. Hickock and the difficulty of treating the men’s changing confessions as settled truth. It does not absolve Dick of responsibility for the robbery plan or his part in the crime.

The trial and a mother’s grief

Dewey publicly recounted Smith’s proposed correction while testifying. Mrs. Hickock had sat quietly beside her son, holding a rumpled handkerchief and trying to catch his eye with a reassuring smile. When she heard that Smith had claimed responsibility for the killings in order to spare Dick and his mother, she began to cry. A reporter led her from the courtroom to a private room, where she spoke about the loneliness of having few people with whom she could discuss what had happened.

She described neighbors and strangers as kind, noting that no one had openly blamed her or Walter. Yet their kindness did not settle her private question: she feared that people might think she was somehow responsible because of how she had raised Dick. She searched her memory for what she might have done wrong, without finding an answer. Her distress thus extended beyond fear for her son; it included the burden of interpreting his crime as a possible judgment on her motherhood.

Love without exoneration

Mrs. Hickock did not make affection a defense. She said she could not excuse Dick’s part in the murders and continued to pray for the Clutter family as well as for her son. She also said that she had come to pity Smith, whom she had previously hated, and believed that the murdered Mrs. Clutter might have felt pity for him too. Her sympathy did not collapse the difference between victims and perpetrators; it placed grief and compassion alongside a clear recognition that a family had been killed.

The relationship is therefore marked by a painful separation between the boy Mrs. Hickock remembered and the man judged in court. Her childhood recollections preserve tenderness, while her statements about responsibility refuse to turn tenderness into denial. Smith’s reported revision gives that bond a final, uncertain expression: whether or not his explanation is accepted as the full truth, he presented Mrs. Hickock’s feelings as a reason to protect her from believing Dick had personally taken the family’s lives. At the same time, her own response remained grounded in mourning for the victims and in the unresolved question of how a beloved child became a man implicated in their deaths.