Perry Smith and Richard Hickock’s criminal partnership

Perry Smith and Richard Hickock’s criminal partnership joined a shared appetite for a major score to sharply unequal roles in planning, violence, and the stories they told afterward. Dick brought Perry into a robbery plan based on information from Floyd Wells; Perry went along hoping to obtain money and escape to Mexico, while hoping the crime could be carried out without violence. After the murders, Perry’s admission that he had killed the victims coexisted with an effort to spare Dick the stigma of having killed members of the family. In prison, their partnership persisted as enforced proximity, but little trust or intimacy remained.

Origins and the proposed score

Before the crime, Dick had been Perry’s cellmate at the Kansas State Penitentiary. Floyd Wells, who had worked for Mr. Clutter, recalled that Dick talked about Perry as a former cellmate and as someone he could rely on for a large score. Wells said the two had previously discussed possible ventures, although Wells had never met Perry. The partnership therefore preceded their reunion: Dick’s confidence in Perry was grounded in their earlier association and in his expectation that Perry would join him when a promising opportunity arose.

Wells described how Dick’s questions about his former employer became increasingly specific. After Wells mentioned his work on a large western Kansas wheat operation, Dick asked whether Mr. Clutter was wealthy, how many people lived at the house, the children’s ages, the route to the property, and whether there was a safe. Wells said he recalled a cabinet or safe behind the desk in Mr. Clutter’s office and confirmed its existence when Dick asked. Dick then described a plan to rob the house and kill anyone who could identify the intruders. Wells took the talk for prison bragging and did not believe Dick would carry it out. His recollection nevertheless identifies the information that connected Dick’s ambition to Perry’s eventual participation.

Planning and unequal expectations

In Perry’s later account to Alvin Dewey, the invitation came by letter while Perry was in Buhl, Idaho. Dick described a sure-fire opportunity and urged him to return to Kansas, without initially explaining the details. Perry said he had an unrelated personal reason to go back, but Dick met him at the bus station and took him to his parents’ farm. After Perry felt unwelcome there, they went to a hotel in Olathe, where Dick explained the plan.

Perry said Dick described the Clutter home’s layout, including its doors, halls, bedrooms, and an office containing a wall safe that supposedly held large sums of cash. Dick expected at least four people in the house, perhaps six, and wanted to be prepared for as many as twelve. Perry acknowledged that the prospect of so many people troubled him, but said he trusted Dick’s practical manner and wanted the money. He hoped they could avoid violence by wearing masks. His account makes the difference between their expectations plain: Dick presented the robbery as a straightforward score and prepared to kill witnesses, while Perry described himself as hoping that disguise might make killing unnecessary.

Their preparations turned that disagreement into action. Perry said they left Olathe after lunch and drove to Emporia, where they bought rubber gloves and cord. Dick had brought the knife, shotgun, and ammunition from home. Perry wanted to buy black stockings to cover their faces; Dick objected that his bad eye could still identify him. Perry tried to persuade him to stop at a Catholic hospital to ask for stockings, but Dick only pretended to make the request. They later bought tape in Great Bend, ate a large dinner, and continued toward Garden City. Perry’s recollection presents planning not as a single agreement but as a series of practical choices and arguments in which Dick’s resolve repeatedly prevailed.

Responsibility, testimony, and competing accounts

The partnership’s division of responsibility became a central issue after their arrest. At trial, neither man testified, so the question of which defendant had actually killed the family was not resolved through their own courtroom testimony. Dewey later reported that Perry had wanted to change his statement to say that he had killed Mrs. Clutter and Nancy, rather than Dick. Perry explained that Dick did not want his mother to believe he had killed members of the family and that the Hickocks were good people. Mrs. Hickock wept when she heard this account, which made the attempted act of protection visible to the courtroom even as it intensified the uncertainty surrounding the men’s respective actions.

Perry later gave Donald Cullivan a fuller account of the division he claimed between them. He said he had killed the victims, while Dick helped by holding the flashlight and picking up shells; Perry also maintained that the plan had been Dick’s. His statements complicate any simple picture of a leader and a subordinate. Dick initiated the scheme and supplied the information and weapons, but Perry claimed the decisive violence as his own. His wish to accept responsibility for the killings, at least in part, was tied to his concern for Dick’s mother, not to a claim that Dick had played no part in the crime.

Confinement and the partnership’s end

In prison, the two men’s cells adjoined, allowing them to speak even though they could not see one another. Their earlier association had deteriorated into mutual toleration, not open hostility, and Perry often avoided conversation because he disliked guards or other prisoners overhearing his private affairs. Perry’s resentment toward Lowell Lee Andrews, whose education and corrections of Perry’s grammar humiliated him, was one reason for his withdrawal; Dick was thus a nearby companion, but not a confidant to whom Perry readily spoke.

Dick later complained that Perry was jealous of the letters and visits Dick received and described him as critical and two-faced. He also said that he had tried to get along with Perry and expressed pity for how alone Perry seemed, while blaming Perry for much of that isolation. Dick wanted a new trial and hoped Perry would testify that Dick had not fired a shot. That hope remained unfulfilled: Perry did not testify at trial, and Dick doubted he would ever tell the story in the way Dick wanted. The partnership that had once depended on Dick’s assurance that Perry would join a promising scheme had become a bitter dependence on what Perry might say.

After appeals failed, Dick and Perry were executed in the early hours of April 14, 1965, at the state prison. Dick died first, at 12:41 a.m.; Perry died at 1:19 a.m. Their deaths ended the partnership in its most literal sense, but did not settle the moral and factual asymmetry that had shadowed it: Dick’s planning and participation were clear in the accounts, while the men’s conflicting claims about who killed the victims remained part of the story of their alliance.