Donald Cullivan

Donald Cullivan enters the account as one of the few people Perry Smith can call a friend while imprisoned. His importance lies less in a fully described life of his own than in the encounters through which he becomes a correspondent, a listener to Perry’s account of the murders, and a character witness at trial. Cullivan’s questions do not produce a conventional confession of remorse or a turn toward faith. Instead, they expose the distance between the language of forgiveness he expects and the friendship Perry says he has actually experienced.

Correspondent and Friend

During Perry’s imprisonment, Cullivan writes to him and signs himself as a friend. Perry later tells him that this simple act has mattered more than anything he associates with God: Cullivan wrote when Perry felt he had no friends. Perry names Joe James as another exception, but distinguishes that distant bond from the immediate fact of Cullivan’s letters and personal regard. Their correspondence gives Perry a listener beyond the prison authorities and the people judging his case.

The relationship is not presented as effortless intimacy. When Perry speaks openly about the murders and his lack of feeling afterward, Cullivan is silent. Perry reads that silence as possible disapproval and pushes back against what he sees as pressure to perform repentance. The exchange shows both the value Perry places on Cullivan’s acceptance and his resistance to reshaping his account to satisfy another person’s moral expectations. When Cullivan answers directly that he likes him, Perry is pleased and flustered. The affirmation matters precisely because Perry has asked for it rather than assumed it.

A Conversation About Responsibility

Cullivan probes whether Perry is sorry and whether he wants God’s mercy and forgiveness. Perry says he does not feel remorse, though he wishes he did. He distinguishes feeling sorry for himself—for being unable to leave prison—from feeling sorrow for the Clutters. He recalls that he and Dick joked and laughed not long after the murders, and says that he barely knew the family. In his account, that limited acquaintance helps explain why he did not experience their deaths as he imagines he might have if he had truly known them. Cullivan cannot readily accept this emotional detachment, but the conversation records Perry’s claim rather than resolving its meaning.

Perry also contests any suggestion that he should quickly adopt a religious explanation. He compares killing in wartime with the violence for which he faces execution, and describes the contrast between the ease of killing and the difficulty of passing a bad check. These comparisons do not absolve him; they show how he argues against a moral distinction that would make his own actions uniquely comprehensible. His admission that the Clutters had never harmed him sits beside his inability to explain why he killed them. Cullivan’s questioning draws out that contradiction without supplying a motive Perry himself cannot identify.

Friendship in the Shadow of Judgment

Perry tells Cullivan that he did kill the Clutters and clarifies Dick’s part: Dick helped with the light and collected the shells, and had proposed the plan, but Perry insists that Dick did not shoot the family. Perry also rejects the idea that he acted because of Dick or because he feared being identified. His account does not settle every question about responsibility, but it marks Cullivan as a person to whom he is willing to speak plainly about both the crime and the limits of his understanding of it.

The conversation also turns from judgment to the possibility of being cared for. Perry asks whether Cullivan likes him; after receiving an affirmative answer, he says he should not have to die among strangers and expresses an urge to end his life before the state can execute him. The sequence connects his despair to isolation without making Cullivan responsible for it: the friend’s answer pleases him, but does not remove the prospect of death. Cullivan’s presence gives Perry a brief, personal counterweight to the court and the condemned-prisoner role, not an escape from either.

Testimony at Trial

Cullivan later appears among the witnesses called by Arthur Fleming for Perry’s defense. He is presented as a character witness, one of several men expected to offer evidence of the defendant’s human qualities. Cullivan describes Perry as likable during the time he knew him in the Army. The prosecution interrupts before he can develop the point, objecting to personal comments as irrelevant. The limited testimony establishes the basis of their acquaintance and shows how little room the trial allows Cullivan to present it.

The defense’s witnesses include Cullivan, Joe James, Reverend James E. Post, and Dr. Jones. Their accounts are not treated as a substitute for the question of what happened in the murders; their purpose is to speak to the character of the accused. Cullivan’s brief statement consequently contrasts with the longer private exchange in which Perry’s detachment, self-pity, uncertainty, and desire for friendship emerge together. In the courtroom he can offer only a small favorable judgment. In their conversations, his willingness to listen gives Perry space to disclose a more complicated and unsettled self.