In Cold Blood (53 page)

Because of the many parallels between the background and personality of Perry Smith and the subjects of his study, Dr. Satten feels secure in assigning him to a position among their ranks. Moreover, the circumstances of the crime seem to him to fit exactly the concept of “murder without apparent motive.” Obviously, three of the murders Smith committed
were
logically motivated—Nancy, Kenyon, and their mother had to be killed because Mr. Clutter had been killed. But it is Dr. Satten’s contention that only the first murder matters psychologically, and that when Smith attacked Mr. Clutter he was under a mental eclipse, deep inside a schizophrenic darkness, for it was not entirely a flesh-and-blood man he “suddenly discovered” himself destroying, but “a key figure in some past traumatic configuration”: his father? the orphanage nuns who had derided and beaten him? the hated Army sergeant? the parole officer who had ordered him to “stay out of Kansas”? One of them, or all of them.

In his confession, Smith said, “I didn’t want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Softspoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” While talking to Donald Cullivan, Smith said, “They [the Clutters] never hurt me. Like other people. Like people have all my life. Maybe it’s just that the Clutters were the ones who had to pay for it.”

So it would appear that by independent paths, both the professional and the amateur analyst reached conclusions not dissimilar.

T
he aristocracy of Finney County had snubbed the trial. “It doesn’t do,” announced the wife of one rich rancher, “to seem curious about that sort of thing.” Nevertheless, the trial’s last session found a fair segment of the local Establishment seated alongside the plainer citizenry. Their presence was a courteous gesture toward Judge Tate and Logan Green, esteemed members of their own order. Also, a large contingent of out-of-town lawyers, many of whom had journeyed great distances, filled several benches; specifically, they were on hand to hear Green’s final address to the jury. Green, a suavely tough little septuagenarian, has an imposing reputation among his peers, who admire his stagecraft—a repertoire of actorish gifts that includes a sense of timing acute as a night-club comedian’s. An expert criminal lawyer, his usual role is that of defender, but in this instance the state had retained him as a special assistant to Duane West, for it was felt that the young county attorney was too unseasoned to prosecute the case without experienced support.

But like most star turns, Green was the last act on the program. Judge Tate’s level-headed instructions to the jury preceded him, as did the county attorney’s summation: “Can there be a single doubt in your minds regarding the guilt of these defendants? No! Regardless of who pulled the trigger on Richard Eugene Hickock’s shotgun, both men are equally guilty. There is only one way to assure that these men will never again roam the towns and cities of this land. We request the maximum penalty—death. This request is made not in vengeance, but in all humbleness. . . .”

Then the pleas of the defense attorneys had to be heard. Fleming’s speech, described by one journalist as “soft-sell,” amounted to a mild churchly sermon: “Man is not an animal. He has a body, and he has a soul that lives forever. I don’t believe man has the right to destroy that house, a temple, in which the soul dwells. . . .” Harrison Smith, though he too appealed to the jurors’ presumed Christianity, took as his main theme the evils of capital punishment: “It is a relic of human barbarism. The law tells us that the taking of human life is wrong, then goes ahead and sets the example. Which is almost as wicked as the crime it punished. The state has no right to inflict it. It isn’t effective. It doesn’t deter crime, but merely cheapens human life and gives rise to more murders. All we ask is mercy. Surely life imprisonment is small mercy to ask. . . .” Not everyone was attentive; one juror, as though poisoned by the numerous spring-fever yawns weighting the air, sat with drugged eyes and jaws so utterly ajar bees could have buzzed in and out.

Green woke them up. “Gentlemen,” he said, speaking without notes, “you have just heard two energetic pleas for mercy in behalf of the defendants. It seems to me fortunate that these admirable attorneys, Mr. Fleming and Mr. Smith, were not at the Clutter house that fateful night—very fortunate for them that they were not present to plead mercy for the doomed family. Because had they been there—well, come next morning we would have had more than four corpses to count.”

As a boy in his native Kentucky, Green was called Pinky, a nickname he owed to his freckled coloring; now, as he strutted before the jury, the stress of his assignment warmed his face and splotched it with patches of pink. “I have no intention of engaging in theological debate. But I anticipated that defense counsel would use the Holy Bible as an argument against the death penalty. You have heard the Bible quoted. But
I
can read, too.” He slapped open a copy of the Old Testament. “And here are a few things the Good Book has to say on the subject. In Exodus Twenty, Verse Thirteen, we have one of the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ This refers to
unlawful
killing. Of course it does, because in the
next
chapter, Verse Twelve, the penalty for disobedience of that Commandment reads: ‘He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death.’ Now, Mr. Fleming would have you believe that all this was changed by the coming of Christ. Not so. For Christ says, ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.’ And finally—” Green fumbled, and seemed to accidentally shut the Bible, whereupon the visiting legal dignitaries grinned and nudged each other, for this was a venerable courtroom ploy—the lawyer who while reading from the Scriptures pretends to lose his place, and then remarks, as Green now did, “Never mind. I think I can quote from memory. Genesis Nine, Verse Six: ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.’

“But,” Green went on, “I see nothing to be gained by arguing the Bible. Our state provides that the punishment for murder in the first degree shall be imprisonment for life or death by hanging. That is the law. You, gentlemen, are here to enforce it. And if ever there was a case in which the maximum penalty was justified, this is it. These were strange, ferocious murders. Four of your fellow citizens were slaughtered like hogs in a pen. And for what reason? Not out of vengeance or hatred. But for money.
Money
. It was the cold and calculated weighing of so many ounces of silver against so many ounces of blood. And how cheaply those lives were bought! For forty dollars’ worth of loot! Ten dollars a life!” He whirled, and pointed a finger that moved back and forth between Hickock and Smith. “They went armed with a shotgun and a
dag
ger. They went to rob and kill—” His voice trembled, toppled, disappeared, as though strangled by the intensity of his own loathing for the debonair, gum-chewing defendants. Turning again to the jury, he hoarsely asked, “What are you going to do? What are you going to do with these men that bind a man hand and foot and cut his throat and blow out his brains? Give them the
minimum
penalty? Yes, and that’s only one of four counts. What about Kenyon Clutter, a young boy with his whole life before him, tied helplessly in sight of his father’s death struggle. Or young Nancy Clutter, hearing the gunshots and knowing her time was next. Nancy, begging for her life: ‘Don’t. Oh, please don’t. Please. Please.’ What agony! What unspeakable torture! And there remains the mother, bound and gagged and having to listen as her husband, her beloved children died one by one. Listen until at last the killers, these defendants before you, entered her room, focused a flashlight in her eyes, and let the blast of a shotgun end the existence of an entire household.”

Pausing, Green gingerly touched a boil on the back of his neck, a mature inflammation that seemed, like its angry wearer, about to burst. “So, gentlemen, what are you going to do? Give them the minimum? Send them back to the penitentiary, and take the chance of their escaping or being paroled? The next time they go slaughtering it may be
your
family. I say to you,” he solemnly said, staring at the panel in a manner that encompassed and challenged them all, “some of our enormous crimes only happen because once upon a time a pack of chickenhearted jurors refused to do their duty. Now, gentlemen, I leave it to you and your consciences.”

He sat down. West whispered to him, “That was masterly, sir.”

But a few of Green’s auditors were less enthusiastic; and after the jury retired to discuss the verdict, one of them, a young reporter from Oklahoma, exchanged sharp words with another newsman, Richard Parr of the Kansas City
Star
. To the Oklahoman, Green’s address had seemed “rabble-rousing, brutal.”

“He was just telling the truth,” Parr said. “The truth can be brutal. To coin a phrase.”

“But he didn’t have to hit that hard. It’s unfair.”

“What’s unfair?”

“The whole trial. These guys don’t stand a chance.”

“Fat chance they gave Nancy Clutter.”

“Perry Smith. My God. He’s had such a rotten life—”

Parr said, “Many a man can match sob stories with that little bastard. Me included. Maybe I drink too much, but I sure as hell never killed four people in cold blood.”

“Yeah, and how about hanging the bastard? That’s pretty goddam cold-blooded too.”

The Reverend Post, overhearing the conversation, joined in. “Well,” he said, passing around a snapshot reproduction of Perry Smith’s portrait of Jesus, “any man who could paint this picture can’t be one hundred percent bad. All the same it’s hard to know what to do. Capital punishment is no answer: it doesn’t give the sinner time enough to come to God. Sometimes I despair.” A jovial fellow with gold-filled teeth and a silvery widows peak, he jovially repeated, “Sometimes I despair. Sometimes I think old Doc Savage had the right idea.” The Doc Savage to whom he referred was a fictional hero popular among adolescent readers of pulp magazines a generation ago. “If you boys remember, Doc Savage was a kind of superman. He’d made himself proficient in every field—medicine, science, philosophy, art. There wasn’t much old Doc didn’t know or couldn’t do. One of his projects was, he decided to rid the world of criminals. First he bought a big island out in the ocean. Then he and his assistants—he had an army of trained assistants—kidnaped all the world’s criminals and brought them to the island. And Doc Savage operated on their brains. He removed the part that holds wicked thoughts. And when they recovered they were all decent citizens. They
couldn’t
commit crimes because that part of their brain was out. Now it strikes me that surgery of this nature might really be the answer to—”

A bell, the signal that the jury was returning, interrupted him. The jury’s deliberations had lasted forty minutes. Many spectators, anticipating a swift decision, had never left their seats. Judge Tate, however, had to be fetched from his farm, where he had gone to feed his horses. A hurriedly donned black robe billowed about him when at last he arrived, but it was with impressive sedateness and dignity that he asked, “Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached your verdicts?” Their foreman replied: “We have, Your Honor.” The court bailiff carried the sealed verdicts to the bench.

Train whistles, the fanfare of an approaching Santa Fe express, penetrated the courtroom. Tate’s bass voice interlaced with the locomotive’s cries as he read: “ ‘Count One. We the jury find the defendant, Richard Eugene Hickock, guilty of murder in the first degree, and the punishment is death.’ ” Then, as though interested in their reaction, he looked down upon the prisoners, who stood before him handcuffed to guards; they stared back impassively until he resumed and read the seven counts that followed: three more convictions for Hickock, and four for Smith.

“—and the punishment is death”; each time he came to the sentence, Tate enunciated it with a dark-toned hollowness that seemed to echo the train’s mournful, now fading call. Then he dismissed the jury (“You have performed a courageous service”), and the condemned men were led away. At the door, Smith said to Hickock, “No chicken-hearted jurors, they!” They both laughed loudly, and a cameraman photographed them. The picture appeared in a Kansas paper above a caption entitled: “The Last Laugh?”

A
week later Mrs. Meier was sitting in her parlor talking to a friend. “Yes, it’s turned quiet around here,” she said. “I guess we ought to be grateful things have settled down. But I still feel bad about it. I never had much truck with Dick, but Perry and I got to know each other real well. That afternoon, after he heard the verdict and they brought him back up here—I shut myself in the kitchen to keep from having to see him. I sat by the kitchen window and watched the crowd leaving the courthouse. Mr. Cullivan—he looked up and saw me and waved. The Hickocks. All going away. Just this morning I had a lovely letter from Mrs. Hickock; she visited with me several times while the trial was going on, and I wished I could have helped her, only what can you say to someone in a situation like that? But after everybody had gone, and I’d started to wash some dishes—I heard him crying. I turned on the radio. Not to hear him. But I could. Crying like a child. He’d never broke down before, shown any sign of it. Well, I went to him. The door of his cell. He reached out his hand. He wanted me to hold his hand, and I did, I held his hand, and all he said was, ‘I’m embraced by shame.’ I wanted to send for Father Goubeaux—I said first thing tomorrow I’d make him Spanish rice—but he just held my hand tighter.

“And that night, of all nights, we had to leave him alone. Wendle and I almost never go out, but we had a long-standing engagement, and Wendle didn’t think we ought to break it. But I’ll always be sorry we left him alone. Next day I did fix the rice. He wouldn’t touch it. Or hardly speak to me. He hated the whole world. But the morning the men came to take him to the penitentiary, he thanked me and gave me a picture of himself. A little Kodak made when he was sixteen years old. He said it was how he wanted me to remember him, like the boy in the picture.