Tallahassee is the Florida city where Dick and Perry Smith spent the night of December 19, 1959, while traveling south. Their presence there became significant after investigators connected that date to the nearby murder of the Walker family, making the city a point of inquiry in both the Florida case and the investigation into the Clutter murders.

The Journey and Overnight Stop

After driving through Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, Dick and Perry continued through Alabama toward Florida. A failed generator had delayed them in Louisiana, where they bought a replacement in Shreveport. Their next day included stops at an alligator farm and a rattlesnake ranch, a glass-bottomed boat ride, and a long meal at a roadside seafood restaurant. Exhausted by the time they reached Tallahassee, they decided to stay overnight; later, investigators established that they had been at a Tallahassee hotel on the night the Walker family was killed.

The Walker Murders and the Investigation

While in Florida, Perry read a Miami newspaper account of the unsolved killing of four members of the Walker family at their cattle ranch near Osprey. The report described a young couple and their two children, all shot with a .22 weapon. The apparently motiveless crime had occurred on December 19, the same night Dick and Perry were in Tallahassee. That coincidence brought the case to the attention of the Sarasota County sheriff, whose jurisdiction included Osprey.

Questioning and Aftermath

With no other leads, the Osprey sheriff wanted Dick and Perry questioned and asked them to take polygraph examinations. Both consented. Perry had suspected that the Walker killer might have read about the murders in Kansas, but the test results for both men were decisively negative, to the disappointment of the Florida sheriff and Alvin Adams Dewey. The investigation did not identify the Walker family’s murderer; Tallahassee remained important to the account as the place where the suspects’ travel intersected with an unrelated, still-unsolved crime.