A Sniper in the Tower (27 page)

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Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

Tags: #History, #United States, #General, #State & Local, #Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), #True Crime, #Murder, #test

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27 Unidentified clipping in AHC;
UTmost
, September, 1991.
28 Professor Leonardt Kreisle quoted in
Daily Texan
, 1 August 1986; Connally Report, p. 10; APD Files:
Affidavit
, Lawrence A. Fuess, 7 August 1966; Lawrence A. Fuess.
29 APD Files: Charles Whitman's Notes,
Affidavit
, Robert Don McCrary, 8 August 1966;
UTmost
, September 1991.
30 Time-Life, p. 46.
31 Leonardt Kreisle quoted in
Daily Texan
, 1 August 1986.
 
Page 77
6
After Much Thought
I
During the summer of 1966 mass murder frequented the news. Truman Capote's
In Cold Blood
ushered in a "new journalism," where real events were reported with fictional techniques. Capote engaged in a prolonged investigation to detail the mass murder of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, by two wanderers on 15 November 1959. Although first serialized in
The New Yorker
magazine in 1965,
In Cold Blood
was still the year's most talked about bestseller in 1966.
Mr. Herbert Clutter, an affluent wheat farmer, employed
 
Page 78
several farm hands. Floyd Wells, a former employee, later served time in the Kansas State Penitentiary where he became friends with a fellow prisoner named Richard E. Hickock, who made repeated efforts to learn as much about the Clutter family as possible. Specifically, Hickock was interested in finding out if the Clutters had a safe in their home. Wells either suggested or Hickock conjured up a nonexistent safe located in a wall behind Herb Clutter's office desk. Eventually, Hickock was paroled. Shortly afterwards he and a friend named Perry E. Smith headed for the Clutter home, where they expected to steal at least ten thousand dollars. They did not know that Herbert Clutter had a well-known reputation for not carrying cash; anyone in Holcomb could have told the pitiful fools that Herb Clutter paid for everything by check.
Hickock and Smith sneaked into the home through an unlocked door (most people from Holcomb saw no need to lock doors) and terrorized the family before killing Mr. Clutter, his wife Bonnie, and their two children Kenyon and Nancy. Each of the victims had been tied at the wrists. Mrs. Clutter and her children were murdered by shotgun blasts to the head from short range. Mr. Clutter's body was found in the basement of his home; he had been shot in the head and his throat had been slashed.
1
Still in prison, Floyd Wells notified the warden of Hickock's interest in the murdered family. A manhunt ensued and shortly thereafter Hickock and Smith were arrested in Las Vegas after having traveled much of the United States and Mexico. Both men confessed and revealed that the brutal murder of the family of four netted only fifty dollars. After his arrest, Smith said of Clutter, ''He was a nice gentleman [and] I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat."
2
Hickock and Smith were hanged in April of 1965. Capote released
In Cold Blood
the next year. Hickock, and especially Smith, became infamous characters not only in American criminal history, but in literature as well.
In Cold Blood
, specifically its brilliant descriptions of two mass murderers, made Truman Capote an American icon.
In late July of 1966 America was horrified by a mass murder in Chicago. A lone drifter and abuser of alcohol and drugs named Richard Speck forced his way into a large but crowded apartment that functioned as a student nurses' dorm for the South Chicago
 
Page 79
Community Hospital. Six of the nine young nurses who lived in the house were trapped immediately. He took their money and waited for the other three to return. Speck bound them with bedsheets he had cut into strips. For the next four hours, Speck committed some of the most heartless and brutal murders in American criminal history. He did not seem to tire of killing; he took eight of the nurses, one at a time, and murdered them with his bare hands. Although armed with a knife and a pistol, he strangled five of the young women and stabbed only three. He also sexually assaulted one, Gloria Davy, who bore a tragic resemblance to Speck's former wife. The terror-stricken student nurses could hear the last gasps of each victim as she died. After each murder, Speck paused to wash his hands, so that the young women were conditioned to expect Speck's return for another victim every time the lavatory faucet was turned onthen off. The ninth intended victim, Corazon Amurao, maneuvered herself under a bed where she hid for several terrifying hours. Speck apparently lost count of his victims and overlooked her. At 5:00
A.M.
she heard the familiar ring of an alarm clock. Ms. Amurao remained hidden beneath the bed in the still and eerily quiet apartment. At 7:00
A.M.
after managing to free herself of the strips of bedding that Speck had used to tie her, she crawled out to find three of her dead friends in the next room; she pushed out a window screen and stepped out onto a second floor ledge, where her screams alerted the neighborhood to the grisly tragedy.
3
Chicago officials called the murder of the young women the "Crime of the Century." It paralyzed the city. Unlike the victims of Chicago's other notorious mass murder, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, these victims were beautiful young women, innocent students engaged in the laudable work of easing the pain of others. One of the most intense manhunts in American history ensued, and Richard Speck was arrested a few days later in a cheap hotel after he attempted to commit suicide by slashing his wrists.
The
In Cold Blood
murderers, Richard E. Hickock and Perry E. Smith, and Chicago's Richard Speck reinforced a neat, albeit erroneous, stereotype many Americans had of murderers as creepy-looking drifters, the kind who could be seen and avoided because they
looked
like murderers. They were brutal animals with no conscience who relished the terror they induced in their victims. Their sick and sa-
 
Page 80
distic crimes could never happen in public places where civilization takes the form of righteous witnesses and law enforcement. Hickock, Smith and Speck were seen as fugitives who valued their lives. They were melodramatic movie-like demons interested in surviving; they were not normal-looking people living and working among us. And they were ugly and probably stupid, too. Capote's vivid depiction of Richard Hickock's tattoos reinforced the commonly-accepted image of mass murderers in America:
The tattooed face of a cat, blue and grinning, covered his right hand; on one shoulder a blue rose blossomed. More markings, self-designed and self-executed, ornamented his arms and torso: the head of a dragon with a human skull between its open jaws; bosomy nudes; a gremlin brandishing a pitchfork; the word PEACE accompanied by a cross radiating, in the form of crude strokes, rays of holy light; and two sentimental concoctionsone a bouquet of flowers dedicated to MOTHERDAD, the other a heart that celebrated the romance of DICK and CAROL, the girl whom he had married when he was nineteen, and from whom he had separated six years later in order to "do the right thing" by another young lady, the mother of his youngest child.
4
Perry E. Smith's tattoos received less attention:
While he had fewer tattoos than his companion, they were more elaboratenot the self-inflicted work of an amateur but epics of the art contrived by Honolulu and Yokahama masters. COOKIE, the name of a nurse who had been friendly to him when he was hospitalized, was tattooed on his right biceps. Blue-furred, orange-eyed, red-ranged, a tiger snarled upon his left biceps; a spitting snake, coiled around a dagger, slithered down his arm; and elsewhere skulls gleamed, a tombstone loomed, a chrysanthemum flourished.
5

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