Richard Eugene Hickock

Richard Eugene Hickock, usually called Dick, is one of the architects of the plan to rob Herbert William Clutter’s household and the more polished of the two men who carried it out. In his dealings with others, he could turn confidence into a tool: he persuaded merchants to accept forged checks, recruited Perry Smith into a plan built on information from a former Clutter employee, and initially blamed Perry for all four killings. His concern for his parents and his composed final conduct complicate, but do not undo, the record of his calculated choices.

Identity and Background

At the time investigators sought him, Hickock was twenty-eight. A police dossier described him as a car painter, blond and blue-eyed, stout, and previously associated with cheating, defrauding, and bad checks. He had worked as a car mechanic and, according to Floyd Wells, once drove a hospital ambulance. Wells first encountered him at the Kansas State Penitentiary, where the two shared a cell for about a month in June and July 1959. Hickock was finishing a three-to-five-year sentence and expected parole in August.

In prison, Hickock talked about what he would do after release. One idea was to go to Nevada, buy a uniform, impersonate an Air Force officer, and circulate fraudulent checks. Wells regarded this as one of the plans prisoners often boasted about. Hickock also spoke of Perry Smith, a former cellmate he had not yet met again, and of the large score they might make together. He presented Perry as someone he could count on when an opportunity arose.

The eventual scheme emerged from a conversation about work. Wells told Hickock that he had spent a year working for Herbert William Clutter on a substantial wheat farm in western Kansas. He described Clutter as wealthy and recalled that running the operation could cost ten thousand dollars in a week. Hickock pressed him for details about the family, the children’s ages, the route to the house, its layout, and whether Clutter kept a safe. Wells remembered a cabinet or safe behind a desk in Clutter’s office and told Hickock so. Wells later said that Hickock repeatedly described robbing the house and killing anyone who might witness the robbery. At the time, Wells assumed the talk was prison bravado; he did not believe Hickock would carry it out.

The Plan and the Partnership

Hickock’s account of the opportunity reached Perry by letter while Perry was in Buhl, Idaho, in September or October. Hickock urged him to return to Kansas and join a supposedly sure-fire score, without initially explaining what it involved. Perry later said he had another private reason for wanting to go to Kansas, but that Hickock met him at the bus station and took him to his parents’ farm. Walter Hickock and Eunice Hickock did not want Perry staying in their home. Hickock took him instead to a hotel in Olathe, Kansas, where he laid out the plan.

Hickock had a diagram of the Clutter house and described the office safe as containing at least ten thousand dollars in cash. The two men expected to encounter at least four people, perhaps six, and discussed the possibility of as many as twelve. Perry said he hoped they could avoid violence by wearing masks. Hickock objected that he could still be recognized because of his bad eye. Perry proposed buying black stockings, but Hickock resisted the idea; their disagreement continued on the drive toward the farm. In Perry’s later account, Hickock had brought the knife, shotgun, and ammunition from home. They acquired rubber gloves and cord in Emporia and tape in Great Bend before continuing toward Garden City.

The partnership also depended on Hickock’s ability to perform a convincing role. In a Kansas clothing store, he introduced Perry as a friend preparing to marry and presented himself as the best man helping with wedding clothes. He invented a wealthy bride, a Florida honeymoon, and ample time before the supposed wedding. When the bill was ready, Hickock pretended to have forgotten his wallet. The clerk supplied a blank check; Hickock wrote it for eighty dollars more than the bill, and the clerk handed over the difference in cash. Perry, who had not previously passed a check, was nervous, but Hickock coached him to remain quiet and follow the situation.

The shopping spree extended beyond that store. The men pawned rings for $150, obtained a man’s gold wristwatch from another jewelry store, and acquired a motion-picture camera and television sets, along with clothing and smaller goods from several shops. Hickock told Perry that cameras and television sets were easy to sell or pawn. By sundown, they had cash and a car loaded with saleable merchandise. Investigators later established that on November 20 Hickock had passed at least seven forged checks. Witnesses identified him as the person who presented them and Perry as his silent companion.

Money, Parents, and Mexico

The proceeds appeared to offer the pair a way to leave the country. Perry felt newly hopeful about reaching Mexico and beginning a different life, and praised Hickock’s skill at persuading the merchants. Hickock did not share his elation. After three drinks, he worried aloud that his parents would be left in Kansas when the checks began to bounce. He expected Walter Hickock to try to make them good, despite being old, ill, and without the means to cover them. Perry answered that they could repay the money once they had started earning in Mexico. Hickock’s anxiety shows that his attachment to his parents remained present even as he made choices that exposed them to the consequences of his fraud.

The two crossed the border at Laredo, Texas, on November 23. They spent their first night in San Luis Potosí and were later picnicking at a promontory, about two hundred miles north of Mexico City. Hickock looked through binoculars kept in a leather case initialed H.W.C., an object taken from the Clutter household. The outward signs of escape—travel, food, and a destination—coexisted with Perry’s growing return to the subject of what they had done.

When Perry said that something must be wrong with them for committing the crime, Hickock was irritated. He considered himself normal and regarded Perry as the one with something wrong. Recalling their time together in prison, he described Perry as childish at times, given to crying in his sleep and spending hours with treasure guides, yet also capable of sudden fury that was difficult to read from his calm exterior. Hickock said he had once believed he could manage Perry’s temper, but had become uncertain of him. This judgment was Hickock’s own, not a neutral diagnosis; it also sits uneasily beside the fact that he had recruited Perry for a plan he knew could involve multiple deaths.

Investigation and Conflicting Accounts

Floyd Wells’s information led investigators to Hickock and Perry. When Alvin Adams Dewey opened the manila envelope containing their photographs and dossiers, his wife recognized the significance in his elated expression. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation then checked Wells’s account against the evidence. Harold Nye interviewed people targeted in the forged-check spree, and witnesses identified Hickock as the talkative check passer and Perry as his quiet accomplice. Hickock’s last employer said he had left the body shop without notice around November 19 or 20. The employer had recently met Perry, who played guitar and sang at a gathering Hickock attended.

On the second day of 1960, four Kansas investigators confronted the men at the Las Vegas City Jail. The investigators had recovered boots whose soles matched photographs of prints from the Clutter house. When Nye asked whether Hickock had heard of the case, Hickock visibly reacted and insisted that he was not a killer. Later, as the investigators described the charges, Hickock said Perry had killed the Clutters and that he had been unable to stop him. After giving this account, Hickock fainted in the hallway. The version reported publicly was that the pair had expected a safe with at least ten thousand dollars, found none, and bound and shot the family; investigators cautioned that this was Hickock’s account and did not establish who had fired the shots.

Perry’s later account contradicted Hickock’s accusation. He said Hickock had devised the plan, supplied the supposed safe information, and helped prepare for the robbery. Perry also said he had wanted the money and had been carried along by his faith in Hickock’s practicality, while hoping to avoid violence. He initially blamed Hickock for some of the killings. Later, Perry acknowledged that he himself had shot the family, explaining that he had lied partly to punish Hickock for seeming cowardly and partly out of consideration for Hickock’s mother. He maintained that Hickock had helped during the crime, including holding a flashlight and picking up shells, and that the plan was Hickock’s. The changing accounts leave responsibility for the planning and participation clearer than the division of actions at the scene: Hickock’s initial accusation did not settle the question of who fired, and Perry’s later admission supplied a different account.

Trial, Appeals, and Execution

When the defense case resumed on a Monday morning, it lasted about ninety minutes. Hickock and Perry declined to testify, so the trial did not resolve through their own testimony the question of which man had been the executioner. Walter Hickock was among the defense witnesses. He described his son as a happy-go-lucky boy before a 1950 car accident and offered that history in support of a temporary-insanity claim. The jury found Hickock guilty on all four murder counts and imposed the death penalty. As the verdict was read, Hickock and Perry stood handcuffed to guards. They laughed together afterward, and a newspaper captioned a photograph of them with the question of whether it was their last laugh.

Two Kansas City lawyers, Joseph P. Jenkins and Robert Bingham, later pursued federal appeals without compensation. They argued that counsel had not been appointed until after the men confessed and waived preliminary hearings, that their trial representation had been inadequate, that evidence taken from Hickock’s home had been seized without a warrant, and that the court had wrongly denied a change of venue despite prejudicial publicity. The appeals avoided execution dates in October 1962, August 1963, and February 1965, but the United States Supreme Court declined to grant a full hearing on each occasion. In March 1965, the Kansas Supreme Court set an execution window for April 14. A clemency appeal to Governor William Avery failed.

On the night of the execution, rain struck the warehouse roof as Hickock arrived under guard. Before the warden read the execution order, he asked whether anyone from the Clutter family was present; when told no, he appeared disappointed. He then said he held no hard feelings and shook hands with the four investigators who had requested permission to attend: Roy Church, Clarence Duntz, Harold Nye, and Alvin Adams Dewey. Hickock was executed by hanging. Church, who had thought of him as a coward, said afterward that he had not expected Hickock to face the end with such composure.

Character and Narrative Significance

Hickock is defined by a practiced division between the story he tells about himself and the effects of his conduct. He is inventive and socially agile in the forged-check operation, yet the concern he expresses in a bar for Walter and Eunice Hickock is not simply another sales pitch: Perry says their affection for his parents touched him. At the same time, Hickock’s distress focuses on the financial damage the checks will cause his family, while his plan had already treated the Clutter household as a robbery target whose witnesses might be killed. The contrast makes filial feeling a genuine part of his characterization without making it an excuse.

The shifting accounts of the killings sharpen that contradiction. Hickock first denies being a killer, then places the deaths entirely on Perry. Perry’s later statement accepts that he fired the shots but assigns Hickock the initiative and assistance. Hickock’s account is therefore both a self-defense and an attempt to cast Perry as dangerous; Perry’s account, in turn, distinguishes who planned the crime from who killed the family. The book presents these claims through testimony, interrogation, and retrospective conversation rather than resolving every uncertainty through a single voice. Hickock’s final gestures—asking for the Clutter family and greeting the investigators who helped convict him—bring the public ritual of punishment back into contact with the people and relationships his choices had placed at its center.