Hickock and Smith's pretrial imprisonment

Dick and Perry Smith’s pretrial imprisonment placed them under the same jail’s authority but kept them physically apart, exposing two very different ways of enduring confinement. In January 1960, they were held in the Finney County Courthouse and Jail, where the jail’s institutional routine met the unexpected intimacy of a family apartment. Perry occupied the women’s cell beside the undersheriff’s kitchen; Dick faced a corridor and other cells. Their separation, their contact with the Meiers, and the contrasting habits they developed made the jail a place of waiting, observation, and attempted escape.

Setting and Separation

The jail occupied the fourth floor of the courthouse, alongside the so-called Sheriff’s Residence: a pleasant five-room apartment set apart from the jail proper by steel doors and a short corridor. In January 1960, Sheriff Earl Robinson did not live there. The occupants were undersheriff Wendle Meier and his wife, Josephine Meier, whose daily domestic life included cooking, sewing, laundry, and other work for prisoners. The ordinary warmth of their home existed immediately beside the cells, without erasing the fact that it was part of a jail.

The jail had six cells. Its sixth, intended for female prisoners, was an isolated unit inside the residence and adjoining the kitchen. Josephine Meier was accustomed to the company of women held there, but Perry became the first man she knew to be placed in that cell. The sheriff’s purpose was to keep Perry and Dick separated until their trial. Thus Perry’s unusual placement was not simply a feature of the building: it made the domestic space of the Meiers’ home part of his confinement, while preventing the two prisoners from being together.

Their arrival brought the jail into public view. Several hundred people had gathered on the Square to see the men accused of killing the Clutter family. By the time the cars arrived, after six o’clock on a bitterly cold evening, more than half the crowd had gone home. Those who remained watched without calling out. Dick came upstairs first, in light summer trousers and an old cloth shirt; Josephine thought he looked sick and very pale. Perry followed, and the two were taken to separate cells.

Josephine Meier’s Care and Perry’s First Night

Josephine made an exception to the jail’s usual meal schedule, preparing hot soup, coffee, sandwiches, and pie so the prisoners would not go to bed hungry. Dick’s response to this offer is not described in the account, but Perry refused the tray she brought him. He stood at the women’s-cell window, looking toward the trees, the Square, and the rooftops—the same view available from her kitchen. When she returned roughly an hour later, the food remained untouched and Perry was still at the window.

The first snow of the year had begun. As Josephine spoke about the weather and offered to make a dish he liked, Perry eventually turned and described a film scene in which a man was thrown into a crowd. Seeing the gathering on the Square had brought that image to mind, and he feared the people might harm him; he said his fear had left his stomach hurting. Josephine reassured him that no one would attack him. After some conversation, he named Spanish rice as a favorite, and she promised to make it. He smiled. Her small act of hospitality offered a brief counterpoint to the public’s silent scrutiny and to the fear Perry associated with it.

Josephine’s sympathy did not settle the moral question raised by the crime. Later, she told her husband that Perry had not seemed like the worst young man she had encountered. Wendle, who had been among the first at the Clutter property after the bodies were discovered, challenged that impression. His response brought the distance between a quiet encounter in a cell and the deaths that had led to it into the Meiers’ own home. Josephine lay awake wondering whether either prisoner was troubled by the four graves. The scene records her kindness without making it a verdict on Perry’s guilt or character.

Perry’s Confinement and Daily Habits

Snow fell through much of the following month, covering the countryside and town. A snow-laden elm brushed the window of Perry’s cell, and a squirrel living in the tree gradually became his companion. After tempting it with leftover breakfast scraps for weeks, Perry persuaded it to come through the bars onto the sill. He named the male squirrel Red and taught it to play with a paper ball, beg, and perch on his shoulder. Caring for and training Red helped occupy the long hours, but could not end Perry’s isolation.

Perry was not allowed newspapers and found the old issues of Good Housekeeping and McCall’s that Josephine lent him boring. He filled time instead with detailed personal routines: filing and buffing his nails, combing his hair, brushing his teeth repeatedly, and shaving and showering often. He kept the cell orderly, and took pride in Josephine’s praise of how neatly he had made his bunk. The room contained a toilet, shower stall, cot, chair, and table. The table served as his practical and creative center: he ate there, sketched Red, drew flowers and faces, and wrote diary-like notes about daily events.

One note records that on Thursday, January 7, Alvin Dewey visited, brought cigarettes, and gave Perry typed copies of a statement to sign. Perry declined. The brief entry shows the investigation and the possibility of a signed statement entering his daily routine, while recording his refusal without explaining it. In this restricted life, even a visitor, a carton of cigarettes, or a document could mark the day.

Dick’s Cell and Escape Scheme

Dick’s cell had no window. From his cot he faced a broad corridor and the fronts of other cells, but he had company among a changing population of prisoners. His joking patter, sexual anecdotes, and coarse humor made him popular with many inmates. One older prisoner was openly hostile and had once drenched him with dirty scrub water. Dick’s sociability therefore distinguished his experience from Perry’s more solitary routine, even as both remained confined and unable to communicate with one another.

To other people, Dick appeared unusually untroubled. He socialized, slept, read sports magazines and paperback thrillers, chewed gum, smoked, and sometimes whistled old songs while lying on his cot. Yet the unshaded light bulb burning around the clock bothered him: it disrupted his sleep and made the cell feel continuously watched. Beneath his easy manner, Dick was planning an escape because he believed trial would lead to his execution. He intended to get out, take a car, and flee.

Over a period of weeks, he assembled a homemade weapon from wood and hard wire taken from a toilet brush, hiding its parts beneath his mattress and working the wire against the concrete floor at night. He also imagined where he would go if he escaped. Recalling a winter when he had found shelter in empty cabins in the mountains, he planned to hide in a Colorado cabin until spring. The remembered experience gave his scheme a destination as well as a motive; in his plan, the refuge was for him alone, and Perry’s future did not figure in it. The two prisoners had been separated by the sheriff’s order, but Dick’s private plan revealed a further divide: confinement intensified Perry’s loneliness, while Dick imagined freedom as an escape from both jail and his partner.