KANSAS: The Killers

Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas. The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung.

—Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel!

The state penitentiary at Lansing, Kans. and the farmhouse of Herbert Clutter at Holcomb, Kans., 400 miles apart, belonged to separate worlds, and the Clutter family could not have imagined that a hidden thread connected the two. Wheat-grower Herbert Clutter, 48, his wife Bonnie and their teen-age children Kenyon and Nancy might have thought themselves the happiest and most secure family in Kansas. They were prosperous; they lived in a peaceful, law-abiding community; they were liked and admired. But one day a year or so ago, a prisoner in the penitentiary, a sometime farm hand who had once worked on the Clutter farm, told two fellow convicts, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, about a safe full of money that Herbert Clutter kept in the house. The safe, like the local legend of Herbert Clutter’s great wealth, was a product of imagination, but that trivial fable was the beginning of a twisted thread that for the Clutters ended in terror and death (TIME, Nov. 30).

Hickock and Smith, veteran lawbreakers sent to Lansing on larceny and burglary raps, were paroled in mid-1959. Fortnight ago, ending a man hunt set off by a tip from the imprisoned farm hand, police in Las Vegas, Nev. arrested Hickock and Smith at the request of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. Weak-faced Richard Hickock, 28, and runty (5 ft. 4 in.) Perry Smith, 31, broke down under questioning, were arraigned last week on charges of murder. In November, they confessed, they drove to the Clutter farm in the middle of the night, entered the house through an unlocked door, herded the Clutters into a bathroom at shotgun point. Hickock stood guard over them while Smith futilely searched for the imaginary safe.

After giving up hope of a big haul, the thugs bound and gagged the Clutters, then cold-bloodedly slaughtered them one by one, shooting each in the head with a shotgun held a few inches away. Then, after carefully collecting the fired shells, the killers hurried away with their skimpy loot: a portable radio, a pair of field glasses, about $40 in cash. Why did they murder the Clutters? Explained Hickock: “We didn’t want any witnesses.”