Hickock and Smith’s murder confessions

Hickock and Smith’s murder confessions are a sequence of conflicting statements rather than one settled account: Dick first accused Perry Smith of killing all four members of the Clutter family, while Smith later said he had shot them himself. The confessions helped investigators reconstruct the crime, but their changing claims also exposed the partners’ antagonism and left the question of motive open.

Background and Initial Accusations

The account began before the crime, in Lansing, where Dick discussed plans for a future robbery with Floyd Wells, a former farm worker for Herbert William Clutter. After Wells told Dick that Herbert was wealthy, Dick repeatedly asked about the family, the ages of the children, the layout of the house, and whether it contained a safe. Wells later recalled that Dick described a plan to rob the property and kill anyone who might identify the intruders. Wells took the talk as prison boasting, not a real plan. After learning of the murders, however, he recognized details that matched Dick’s earlier description and eventually gave authorities information connecting Dick and Perry to the case.

When investigators detained Dick, their evidence included a photograph matching footprints found near Herbert’s body and boots they said had made those prints. Dick then blamed Perry for all four killings. The accusation came during questioning by investigators Harold Nye and Roy Church, after they confronted Dick with the footprint evidence. It offered a clear division of responsibility, but remained Dick’s version: the public report of his confession noted that investigators had not disclosed who actually shot the family.

The uncertainty had been visible from the investigation’s early stages. At a press conference, Alvin Adams Dewey distinguished known facts from theories: four people had been killed, the exact order of their deaths was unknown, and investigators had not established which family member was the primary target. Dewey was still weighing different reconstructions, including whether one or two killers had acted. Dick’s accusation did not, by itself, resolve those questions; it instead became one account against which later statements and evidence would be measured.

Smith’s Recollection of the Plan

In his later account, Perry Smith traced his involvement to a letter from Dick received while he was in Buhl, Idaho, in September or October. Dick described a supposedly easy, lucrative score and urged Perry to return to Kansas as a partner, without initially explaining what the target was. Perry said he had an unrelated personal reason for going back. Dick met him at the bus station in Kansas City; after Dick’s parents made clear that they did not want a former prison associate in their home, the two went to a hotel in Olathe. There Dick outlined a robbery at the Clutter farm, relying on information that Floyd Wells had supplied about Herbert William Clutter’s wealth, household, and home.

Perry recalled that Dick had a diagram of the house and expected to find a wall safe containing substantial cash. He also said Dick anticipated at least four people in the house, perhaps six, and wanted them prepared for as many as twelve if guests were present. The possibility of so many people made Perry uneasy. He said he hoped they could avoid violence by wearing masks, and that he wanted the money so they could go to Mexico; Dick resisted the mask plan, citing the risk that his bad eye would identify him. Their preparations reflected that disagreement: in Emporia they bought rubber gloves and cord, and in Great Bend they bought tape, while Dick had already brought a knife, shotgun, and ammunition from home. Perry also described trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade Dick to obtain black stockings as disguises.

Near midnight, after reaching Holcomb, they turned onto the private road leading to the farm. A light appeared in a nearby house that Dick identified as the hired man’s, and Perry judged it much closer to the Clutter home than Dick’s diagram had suggested. When the light appeared again, Perry said he wanted to abandon the plan and leave. Dick stopped the car and challenged his resolve; after each man took a drink, Perry agreed to continue. In Smith’s version, the decision to turn back toward the farm followed an attempt to withdraw, making the approach itself the point at which his stated reluctance gave way to participation.

Smith’s Account and the Revision of Responsibility

In custody, Perry Smith began his account by asking to reconstruct events carefully rather than rush through them. He described the plan’s final approach as a moment of hesitation: a light in the hired man’s nearby house, appearing again after the pair had paused, convinced him that the circumstances differed from what Dick had represented. Smith said he wanted to leave, but Dick challenged him, and after they each drank they returned to the farm. The detail complicates the earlier image of a smoothly executed plan: in Smith’s telling, he recognized the danger and briefly tried to withdraw, yet ultimately chose to proceed.

Smith’s account also made the allocation of violence unstable. He described Herbert William Clutter as courteous and said he had not wanted to harm him, but then acknowledged that he had killed him. He initially attributed the deaths of Nancy Clutter and Bonnie Clutter to Dick, portraying Dick as participating in the events while hesitating at decisive moments. Smith further recalled that, after the family had been killed, he considered killing Dick because Dick had insisted that there must be no witnesses. He said he did not act on that thought. The confession thus presented the partnership as both cooperative and hostile: each man had helped bring about the crime, while Smith’s version cast Dick as the instigator and himself as the person who finally carried out the killings.

That account did not remain fixed. On January 7, Smith recorded in his notes that Alvin Adams Dewey had brought typed copies of a statement for him to sign, and that he had declined. The document was seventy-eight pages long and contained admissions he had already given Dewey and Clarence Duntz. Dewey later recalled that Smith offered to sign if two details could be corrected. The requested changes concerned who had killed Nancy and Bonnie: Smith now wanted the record to say that he, not Dick, had shot the whole family. He explained the earlier version as retaliation against Dick, whom he had considered cowardly, and said he wanted to spare Dick’s mother the belief that her son had killed anyone. Although Smith’s stated concern shifted toward the Hickock family, Dewey remained unconvinced enough to refuse to alter the statement; he believed the existing evidence already established the case.

The revision mattered because it changed the apparent division of action without withdrawing Smith’s account of Dick’s responsibility for the plan. In a later conversation with Don Cullivan, Smith again said that he had killed the family, while maintaining that Dick had proposed the robbery, assisted him, held the flashlight, and collected the spent shells. He also said the Clutters had done nothing to him and that he could not explain why they had become the people who paid for the injuries he associated with his life. His admission therefore supplied no settled motive: it combined responsibility for the killings with an inability, or refusal, to identify a single cause.

Investigators had evidence beyond either man’s changing account. Harold Nye traced a radio and binoculars stolen from the Clutter home to a pawnshop in Mexico City. Smith also disclosed where the pair had buried spent shells and leftover cord and tape after leaving the farm, and described burning gloves and a shirt at a roadside rest area. These recoveries and disclosures strengthened the investigation independently of whether Smith signed the statement. The confessions were consequential not because they produced one consistent narrative, but because their discrepancies could be compared with physical evidence and with the earlier information linking Dick to the household.

Public Disclosure and the Limits of the Record

The revised account became consequential in court when Alvin Adams Dewey testified that Perry Smith had asked to change his statement, taking responsibility for shooting Nancy Clutter and Bonnie Clutter rather than attributing their deaths to Dick. Dick had not known that Smith had made this change. As Dewey explained Smith’s stated wish to spare Dick’s mother the belief that her son had killed members of the family, Mrs. Hickock began to weep; a reporter led her from the courtroom. The disclosure therefore altered not only the account of who had fired the shots but also what Dick’s family understood about Smith’s version of their shared crime.

Afterward, Mrs. Hickock described the strain of being judged through her son’s actions, while recalling his childhood and the ordinary family life that preceded the trial. She did not excuse Dick’s part in the murders and said she prayed for the Clutters, but she also prayed for Dick and Perry. Her response gives the shifting confessions a consequence beyond the division of criminal responsibility: Smith’s revision reached the family whose grief he said he meant to spare, while leaving intact the fact that Dick had helped plan and carry out the crime.

The account’s evidentiary character is correspondingly layered. The narrative draws on Smith’s recorded notes, Dewey’s recollections of their conversations, testimony presented in court, investigators’ physical findings, and the earlier information supplied by Floyd Wells. The author states that material not based on personal observation came from official records or interviews with people directly involved, often conducted repeatedly over time. Read together, these sources make the confessions powerful but not self-sufficient: their contradictions require comparison with testimony and physical evidence, and Smith’s changing explanations do not settle why the Clutters were killed.