Garden City, Kansas – March 1960
Two men, one farmhouse, and the invention of American dread
Even now, the Clutter house sits in the mind like a stage set: the wheat-town quiet, the long flat road, the lamps burning in rooms where nothing stirred. On a Sunday morning in November 1959, the bodies were found — Herbert and Bonnie Clutter, and their teenage children, Nancy and Kenyon — the neat order of a prosperous farm ripped open with a shotgun blast and a knife. By spring, two ex-con drifters — Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith — had been hauled back from a greyhound trail of bad checks and cheap motel rooms to face a jury in Finney County. The case would become the spine for a new kind of true crime, but first it was simply a trial: twelve Kansans, two defendants, one courtroom.
The men at the table
Hickock arrived in a crisp suit and the posture of a man who believed in his own charm. He could be funny, even ingratiating, and he liked to meet a gaze and hold it until the other person blinked. Beside him sat Smith, compact and wary, a fighter’s neck above a starched collar, his face switching between stillness and sudden warmth. They had met in prison. They had listened to another inmate spin a tale about a safe on the Clutter place. They had left prison convinced that money lived behind a basement wall in Holcomb and that witnesses, if there were any, would not be left to talk.
The state’s blunt case
The prosecution’s narrative was simple, almost brutally so: two men drove into the prairie night, bound and gagged a family, ransacked a house that did not have a safe after all, and — for less than fifty dollars cash and a transistor radio — killed four people. The prosecution did not need imagination; it had confessions. Questioned separately in Las Vegas after being picked up on the bad-check spree that followed the murders, Smith confessed first and then Hickock, each allocating the worst of it to the other but agreeing on the enormous fact that the Clutters were dead and that they were responsible for making them so.
Inside the Garden City courthouse
The courtroom was all blond wood and long afternoons. Women in hats. Men in shirtsleeves. A press row that grew as the week went on. County Attorney Logan Green and Assistant County Attorney Duane West worked in a rhythm — West laying down a foundation, Green driving the nail. When the state played its strongest card, the room felt smaller: details from the statements, the cold logistics of tape and cord and steel, the inventory of a house unmade. It was not, for once, a case of circumstantial wisps. It was a case in which the defendants themselves supplied the bones.
The narrow window of the law
The defense tried to bend the light away from murder and toward mind. The M’Naghten rule — the old English test that asked whether a defendant knew right from wrong at the time of the act — hung over the proceedings like antique furniture: too heavy, too formal, not shaped for modern rooms. Defense lawyers sought a fuller psychiatric work-up for Smith and Hickock; instead, three local doctors conducted brief interviews and reported the men sane. A state hospital psychiatrist who saw signs of mental illness in Smith and possible brain injury effects in Hickock never reached the ears of the jurors. The law’s question remained narrow: did they know killing was wrong when they did it? If yes, the rest — impulse, compulsion, whatever storm was blowing inside — was weather, not climate.
The verdict
When it came time for closing arguments, Logan Green spoke in the hot, flat cadence of a man who understood the uses of plain speech in a farm county. The murders, he told the jurors, were not the by-product of panic or accident; they were the plan. “Some of our most enormous crimes only happen because once upon a time a pack of chicken-hearted jurors refused to do their duty,” he warned. The defense rose to make a different kind of plea: that sanity is not a light switch, that human wreckage can be measured in ways a 19th-century standard cannot grasp.
The jury filed out. Time, which had felt viscous all week, thinned to minutes — forty of them, by some accounts. In the corridor, a quiet grew around the family members and friends and strangers who had come to hear what the law would say for the dead. When the panel returned, everyone stood. The clerk read. “Guilty.” Hickock looked toward West with something like a grin that never finished forming. Smith dipped his head and then lifted it quickly, as if the weight had surprised him but not bent him.
The long shadow of Holcomb
What followed is part of American legal weather: motions and denials, arguments over venue and psychiatric testimony, federal counsel and the repeated knock on the door of a Supreme Court that never opened. Appeals pressed against the verdict but did not move it. In April 1965, five years after the trial, the two men walked together once more — this time down a final corridor in the Kansas State Penitentiary.
It was in those same courtrooms and prison interviews that Truman Capote, then already a celebrated novelist, sat with his notebooks. He and his research partner, Harper Lee, had come to Kansas intending to write about the shock of murder in a small town; instead, they created In Cold Blood (1966), the work that would define the nonfiction novel. Capote’s cool, exact prose blurred the lines between journalism and literature, shaping a genre that treated trials and killings with the pacing of a novel and the moral weight of history. Without the Clutter murders — and without the Hickock-Smith trial — there would be no In Cold Blood, no decades of writers following its blueprint, and no template for the courtroom drama as literature.
Endings, and mistaken identities
Richard Hickock and Perry Smith were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. (Not to be confused with “Wild Bill” Hickok — one “c” — the 1870s gunslinger who was shot dead in Deadwood; his killer, Jack McCall, was convicted on retrial in 1877 and hanged.)
Explore the Trials of the Century audiobooks
More on the Clutter family murders (Kansas Historical Society)