The killers started their getaway by driving 2,1000 miles to Acapulco.
In Cold Blood: Manhunt
Chief Mitch Geisler of the Garden City Police Department – that’s GCPD – was one of the first officers to arrive at the murder scene at the Clutter’s farmhouse. Ritch Rohleder, his assistant, arrived with the chief. Rohleder, an expert photographer, photographed the crime scene.
One of the killers left a bloody footprint on the basement floor close to the body of Herb Clutter.
The footprint, however, was invisible to the naked eye. But it was revealed in Rohleder’s photographs after the film was developed.
In most murder investigations, the first potential suspects are the person, or persons, last seen with the victims while they were still alive.
The investigators quickly learned that Bobby Rupp, 16, spent the night preceding the murders with the Clutter family. He was a high school basketball star, and he was dating Nancy Clutter, also 16. Rupp called Nancy earlier in the day to ask her out on a Saturday night date.
Nancy asked her father for permission. But Rupp was Catholic, the Clutters were Methodists, and Herb Clutter wanted his daughter to start dating boys from their own religion. So instead of going out on a date, Herb suggested inviting Rupp over to the house to watch TV with the family.
Which he did.
But when Rupp arrived, he noticed that Nancy wasn’t wearing the ring he’d given her. She was angry because he’d been caught drinking beer at a party. Which led to some discord between them.
The investigators brought Rupp in for questioning and he openly disclosed that information, which painted him as a possible jilted lover seeking revenge. So the investigators considered him a suspect.
They asked him to take a polygraph and he agreed. He passed the test and eliminated himself as a suspect.
Almost instantly, the four murders were making headlines all over the country.
But the Garden City police, after running into one dead end after another, turned the case over to the Kansas Bureau of Investigations (KBI).
The KBI assigned Special Agent Alvin Dewey to lead the investigation and gave him three topnotch investigators to assist him.
Meanwhile, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith were 400 miles to the east, back in Dick’s hometown of Olathe, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City.
While Dick was eating supper at his parents’ house, Perry was sleeping in a hotel room soaking his bloody boots in the bathtub.
Without coming away with the $10,000 from the Clutters’ farmhouse, Hickock and Smith were broke. So Hickock started writing a series of bad checks to finance their getaway, signing his real name to the bogus checks.
Two days after Dick Hickock and Perry Smith murdered the Clutter family, they crossed the Kansas border and entered Oklahoma with all of Perry Smith’s belongings in the car. They drove nearly 1,700 miles due south to Mexico City.
After spending a couple days in Mexico City, they drove another 400 miles due south to Acapulco on the Pacific Ocean.
There, they met a rich man from Germany who was on vacation. He befriended them. He took them fishing and Perry hooked a ten-foot sailfish.
But once the fishing excursions ended, Dick and Perry came face to face with the harsh reality that they were once again broke. So they planned to drive back to Mexico City and sell the car to raise some money. Then Dick would get a mechanic’s job in a garage to help them stay afloat until Perry found work.
They sold the car for $200, but Dick quickly found out that being a mechanic in Mexico City paid next to nothing. They went through the $200 in no time. When the rent was due on their hotel room, they changed the plan. They pawned Herb Clutter’s binoculars to raise enough money to eat, then starting hitchhiking.
Their trek took them north across the border back into the U.S., then further north into California, and then east to Omaha, Nebraska.
In Omaha, they stole a car and returned to Olathe, where Dick Hickock again floated more bad checks, again signing his own name. From Olathe, they drove to Miami, Florida, stayed for a while, and then drove west to Las Vegas, Nevada.
While Dick Hickock and Perry Smith were crisscrossing the country, the KBI investigation was going nowhere. But then came the missing link.
Floyd Wells. Remember him?
Floyd Wells was Dick Hickock’s cellmate at Leavenworth Prison. He was the man who planted the fantasy about the $10,000 in Herb Clutter’s safe into Dick Hickock’s head.
Still incarcerated at Leavenworth, Floyd Wells learned that the Hutchinson News was offering a $1,000 reward for news leading to the capture and conviction of the Clutter killers.
Floyd Wells contacted the KBI and ratted out Dick Hickock.
He mentioned telling Hickock that Herb Clutter kept $10,000 in cash in his farmhouse. He said the notion of stealing the $10,000 dollars fascinated Hickock. He said Hickock told him he planned to rob the farmhouse and not leave any witnesses. He said Hickock mentioned getting another former Leavenworth inmate – Perry Smith – to be his accomplice.
Finally, the KBI had legitimate suspects to pursue.
By then nearly six weeks had passed since the murders of the Clutter family.
On the night of December 30, 1959, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith were cruising along the Las Vegas strip in the stolen car when a Las Vegas PD policewoman recognized their license number as belonging to a stolen car. She stopped the vehicle, then ran a background check on Hickock’s and Smith’s names.
The check came back quickly. They were both wanted for parole violations in Kansas, and Hickock was also wanted for passing several bad checks.
The policewoman arrested them on the spot.
As soon as Alvin Dewey got wind of the arrests, he and his three KBI associates flew to Las Vegas to try to solicit a confession from the two men.
They interviewed the suspects separately. Dick Hickock adamantly denied having anything to do with the murders. But Perry Smith confessed to shooting all four members of the Clutter family.
The case looked to be solved when the KBI agents found a pair of boots amongst Perry Smith’s belongings.
Forensic tests would eventually match the heel of one of the boots to crime scene photos of the bloody footprint taken by GCPD assistant chief Ritch Rohleder.
The next day, Dick Hickock confessed.
Both men were extradited to Kansas and incarcerated at Leavenworth Prison once again.
Less than three months later, on March 22, 1960, their trial began. The trial lasted for eight days.
On March 29th, the jury deliberated for just 40 minutes before convicting both defendants on all four counts of murder. The judge sentenced them to death by hanging and sent them to Death Row at Leavenworth.
The appeals process lasted for five years before coming to a perfect conclusion.
During the first hour of April 14, 1965, executioners led Dick Hickock and Perry Smith to the gallows to be hanged by the neck until death.
Dick Hickock went first. He shook the hands of each KBI agent, then said just one word – “Goodbye.” He was then hanged and pronounced dead at 12:41 a.m.
Perry Smith went second. But unlike Hickock’s quick goodbye, Smith decided to use the gallows as a soapbox.
“Maybe I had something to contribute,” Smith began. “It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize. I think it’s a hell of a thing that a life has to be taken in this manner. I think capital punishment is legally and morally wrong.”
He was then hanged by the neck and pronounced dead at 1:19 a.m.
So that’s it for the manhunt. That only leaves Truman Capote and the book. But I’d be remiss to not offer my two cents about Perry Smith’s last words.
You – you – you convicted murderer of four innocent individuals – you – you think that capital punishment is morally wrong. But you near-sighted motherfucker, you didn’t think it was morally wrong to murder four innocent victims you’d never seen before.
Sir – and I use that word contemptuously – sir, I hope your soul is burning in the hottest of hell’s fires.
I’m America’s Best Crime Writer
and I approve of this message.
Comments
Comments Off on In Cold Blood: Manhunt