Hickock’s hunting shotgun

Hickock’s hunting shotgun is central to the material evidence connecting Dick and Perry Smith to the Clutter murders. Dick brought it from home, it was used during the killings, and it was returned to his family’s house before investigators recovered it there. Tests later established that the buried shells had been discharged by the shotgun. Its route—from a familiar household setting to the crime scene and back—gave the investigation a concrete link between the perpetrators’ accounts and physical evidence.

Background and Preparation

In Perry Smith’s account of the journey toward Holcomb, Dick had brought the shotgun, ammunition, and a knife from home before the pair set out. They later bought rubber gloves and cord in Emporia, and adhesive tape in Great Bend. The distinction matters: the shotgun was not acquired along the way. It was part of the equipment Dick already had with him, while some of the other materials used in the crime were purchased during the drive.

At a press conference before the investigation had settled on a reconstruction, Alvin Adams Dewey explained that the known facts did not establish whether one person or two had committed the murders. Privately, he was considering both possibilities. His single-killer concept imagined an intruder who knew the Clutter home and the family’s routines; the account also made the household dog’s fear of guns part of the conjecture. These were investigative hypotheses, not established facts about the shotgun’s use. The uncertainty highlights the difference between an early reconstruction and the later combination of confessions and physical evidence.

Use During the Murders

Smith’s later account placed the shotgun at the center of the killings. In recounting the moment at which he said he had taken the gun and fired, he described Dick holding a flashlight. The account then proceeded through the deaths of the other family members, with Dick searching for the discharged shells. The narration therefore connects the weapon not only to the shootings but also to the effort to collect evidence from the scene.

The object’s role is further complicated by the shifting accounts of who fired. Smith initially gave investigators an account that assigned some of the killings to Dick. Later, when refusing to sign a typed statement, he wanted to correct two details: he sought to acknowledge that he, rather than Dick, had shot the entire family. He explained that his earlier version had been intended to punish Dick for what he described as cowardice, and said that he now wished to spare Dick’s mother the belief that her son had pulled the trigger. Dewey did not accept the proposed revision into the statement, and the account preserves uncertainty about Smith’s explanation even as it records his attempt to change it. The shotgun is thus associated with both the physical sequence of the crime and the dispute over responsibility that followed.

Return and Recovery

After the murders, Smith said, the pair drove away and buried the empty shells, along with leftover cord and tape, in the countryside. He also said Dick kept the shotgun and took it home. That detail made the weapon’s return to the family house part of the evidentiary trail rather than an incidental end to its journey.

Investigators sent to Dick’s home found the shotgun propped against a kitchen wall. Dick’s father rejected the implication that it was the murder weapon, insisting that it had not been out of the house since the first week of November. The claim directly conflicted with the account that Dick had taken it on the trip. The investigators also found the knife in a fishing-tackle box. The ordinary placement of the shotgun at home could not settle that contradiction; the case depended on testing and corroboration beyond its location.

The buried shells and other materials were recovered with help from Virgil Pietz, a county-highway employee. Using Smith’s account to identify the area, Pietz worked with a road grader and removed the earth gradually until the articles were found. Tests established that the shells had been discharged by Dick’s shotgun, while the recovered cord and tape matched materials used to bind and silence the victims. The shotgun’s connection to the murders therefore rested on more than a confession or a family member’s denial: the recovered shells supplied an independent physical link between the weapon and the scene.

Evidentiary and Narrative Significance

The shotgun helps show how the investigation moved from uncertainty toward a case supported by converging evidence. The suspects’ accounts changed; Smith’s proposed correction remained contested; and Dick’s father disputed that the gun had left home. Against those competing statements, investigators had the shotgun itself and shells recovered from the location Smith identified, with testing linking the two. The evidence did not make every question about the men’s individual actions disappear, but it established a material connection that their conflicting accounts could not erase.

In the narrative, the weapon is first part of the preparation for a robbery the pair expected to carry out, then an instrument of the killings, and finally an exhibit whose evidentiary meaning emerges through recovery and testing. Its presence against a kitchen wall contrasts with its documented role in the crime. That contrast gives the object particular weight: it connects the domestic space from which Dick took it, the violent events in the Clutter home, and the painstaking search that helped investigators close the chain of evidence.