In Cold Blood (54 page)

“The bad part was saying goodbye. When you knew where he was going, and what would happen to him. That squirrel of his, he sure misses Perry. Keeps coming to the cell looking for him. I’ve tried to feed him, but he won’t have anything to do with me. It was just Perry he liked.”

P
risons are important to the economy of Leavenworth County, Kansas. The two state penitentiaries, one for each sex, are situated there; so is Leavenworth, the largest Federal prison, and, at Fort Leavenworth, the country’s principal military prison, the grim United States Army and Air Force Disciplinary Barracks. If all the inmates in these institutions were let free, they could populate a small city.

The oldest of the prisons is the Kansas State Penitentiary for Men, a turreted black-and-white palace that visually distinguishes an otherwise ordinary rural town, Lansing. Built during the Civil War, it received its first resident in 1864. Nowadays the convict population averages around two thousand; the present warden, Sherman H. Crouse, keeps a chart which lists the daily total according to race (for example, White 1405, Colored 360, Mexicans 12, Indians 6). Whatever his race, each convict is a citizen of a stony village that exists within the prison’s steep, machine-gun-guarded walls—twelve gray acres of cement streets and cell blocks and workshops.

In a south section of the prison compound there stands a curious little building: a dark two-storied building shaped like a coffin. This establishment, officially called the Segregation and Isolation Building, constitutes a prison inside a prison. Among the inmates, the lower floor is known as The Hole—the place to which difficult prisoners, the “hardrock” troublemakers, are now and then banished. The upper story is reached by climbing a circular iron staircase; at the top is Death Row.

The first time the Clutter murderers ascended the staircase was late one rainy April afternoon. Having arrived at Lansing after an eight-hour, four-hundred-mile car ride from Garden City, the newcomers had been stripped, showered, given close haircuts, and supplied with coarse denim uniforms and soft slippers (in most American prisons such slippers are a condemned man’s customary footwear); then armed escorts marched them through a wet twilight to the coffin-shaped edifice, hustled them up the spiral stairs and into two of the twelve side-by-side cells that comprise Lansing’s Death Row.

The cells are identical. They measure seven by ten feet, and are unfurnished except for a cot, a toilet, a basin, and an overhead light bulb that is never extinguished night or day. The cell windows are very narrow, and not only barred but covered with a wire mesh black as a widow’s veil; thus the faces of those sentenced to hang can be but hazily discerned by passers-by. The doomed themselves can see out well enough; what they see is an empty dirt lot that serves in summer as a baseball diamond, beyond the lot a piece of prison wall, and above that, a piece of sky.

The wall is made of rough stone; pigeons nest inside its crevices. A rusty iron door, set into the part of the wall visible to the Row’s occupants, rouses the pigeons whenever it is opened, puts them in a flap, for the hinges creak so, scream. The door leads into a cavernous storage room, where on even the warmest day the air is moist and chilly. A number of things are kept there: stockpiles of metal used by the convicts to manufacture automobile license plates, lumber, old machinery, baseball paraphernalia—and also an unpainted wooden gallows that smells faintly of pine. For this is the state’s execution chamber; when a man is brought here to be hanged, the prisoners say he has “gone to The Corner,” or, alternatively, “paid a visit to the warehouse.”

In accordance with the sentence of the court, Smith and Hickock were scheduled to visit the warehouse six weeks hence: at one minute after midnight on Friday, May 13, 1960.

K
ansas abolished capital punishment in 1907; in 1935, due to a sudden prevalence in the Midwest of rampaging professional criminals (Alvin “Old Creepy” Karpis, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Clyde Barrow and his homicidal sweetheart, Bonnie Parker), the state legislators voted to restore it. However, it was not until 1944 that an executioner had a chance to employ his craft; over the next ten years he was given nine additional opportunities. But for six years, or since 1954, there had been no pay checks for a hangman in Kansas (except at the Army and Air Force Disciplinary Barracks, which also has a gallows). The late George Docking, Governor of Kansas from 1957 through 1960, was responsible for this hiatus, for he was unreservedly opposed to the death penalty (“I just don’t like killing people”).

Now, at that time—April, 1960—there were in United States prisons one hundred and ninety persons awaiting civil execution; five, the Clutter killers included, were among the lodgers at Lansing. Occasionally, important visitors to the prison are invited to take what one high official calls “a little peek at Death Row.” Those who accept are assigned a guard who, as he leads the tourist along the iron walkway fronting the death cells, is likely to identify the condemned with what he must consider comic formality. “And this,” he said to a visitor in 1960, “this is Mr. Perry Edward Smith. Now next door, that’s Mr. Smith’s buddy, Mr. Richard Eugene Hickock. And over here we have Mr. Earl Wilson. And after Mr. Wilson—meet Mr. Bobby Joe Spencer. And as for this last gentleman, I’m sure you recognize the famous Mr. Lowell Lee Andrews.”

Earl Wilson, a husky, hymn-singing Negro, had been sentenced to die for the kidnaping, rape, and torture of a young white woman; the victim, though she survived, was left severely disabled. Bobby Joe Spencer, white, an effeminate youth, had confessed to murdering an elderly Kansas City woman, the owner of a rooming house where he lived. Prior to leaving office in January, 1961, Governor Docking, who had been defeated for re-election (in large measure because of his attitude toward capital punishment), commuted the sentences of both these men to life imprisonment, which generally meant that they could apply for parole in seven years. However, Bobby Joe Spencer soon killed again: stabbed with a shiv another young convict, his rival for the affections of an older inmate (as one prison officer said, “Just two punks fighting over a jocker”). This deed earned Spencer a second life sentence. But the public was not much aware of either Wilson or Spencer; compared to Smith and Hickock, or the fifth man on the Row, Lowell Lee Andrews, the press had rather slighted them.

Two years earlier Lowell Lee Andrews, an enormous, weak-eyed boy of eighteen who wore horn-rimmed glasses and weighed almost three hundred pounds, had been a sophomore at the University of Kansas, an honor student majoring in biology. Though he was a solitary creature, withdrawn and seldom communicative, his acquaintances, both at the university and in his home town of Wolcott, Kansas, regarded him as exceptionally gentle and “sweet-natured” (later one Kansas paper printed an article about him entitled: “The Nicest Boy in Wolcott”). But inside the quiet young scholar there existed a second, unsuspected personality, one with stunted emotions and a distorted mind through which cold thoughts flowed in cruel directions. His family—his parents and a slightly older sister, Jennie Marie-would have been astounded had they known the daydreams Lowell Lee dreamed throughout the summer and autumn of 1958; the brilliant son, the adored brother, was planning to poison them all.

The elder Andrews was a prosperous farmer; he had not much money in the bank, but he owned land valued at approximately two hundred thousand dollars. A desire to inherit this estate was ostensibly the motivation behind Lowell Lee’s plot to destroy his family. For the secret Lowell Lee, the one concealed inside the shy churchgoing biology student, fancied himself an ice-hearted master criminal: he wanted to wear gangsterish silk shirts and drive scarlet sports cars; he wanted to be recognized as no mere bespectacled, bookish, overweight, virginal schoolboy; and while he did not dislike any member of his family, at least not consciously, murdering them seemed the swiftest, most sensible way of implementing the fantasies that possessed him. Arsenic was the weapon he decided upon; after poisoning the victims, he meant to tuck them in their beds and burn down the house, in the hope that investigators would believe the deaths accidental. However, one detail perturbed him: suppose autopsies revealed the presence of arsenic? And suppose the purchase of the poison could be traced to him? Toward the end of summer he evolved another plan. He spent three months polishing it. Finally, there came a near-zero November night when he was ready to act.

It was Thanksgiving week, and Lowell Lee was home for the holidays, as was Jennie Marie, an intelligent but rather plain girl who attended a college in Oklahoma. On the evening of November 28, somewhere around seven, Jennie Marie was sitting with her parents in the parlor watching television; Lowell Lee was locked in his bedroom reading the last chapter of
The Brothers Karamazov.
That task completed, he shaved, changed into his best suit, and proceeded to load both a semi-automatic .22-caliber rifle and a Ruger .22-caliber revolver. He fitted the revolver into a hip holster, shouldered the rifle, and ambled down a hall to the parlor, which was dark except for the flickering television screen. He switched on a light, aimed the rifle, pulled the trigger, and hit his sister between the eyes, killing her instantly. He shot his mother three times, and his father twice. The mother, eyes gaping, arms outstretched, staggered toward him; she tried to speak, her mouth opened, closed, but Lowell Lee said: “Shut up.” To be certain she obeyed him, he shot her three times more. Mr. Andrews, however, was still alive; sobbing, whimpering, he thrashed along the floor toward the kitchen, but at the kitchen’s threshold the son unholstered his revolver and discharged every chamber, then reloaded the weapon and emptied it again; altogether, his father absorbed seventeen bullets.

Andrews, according to statements credited to him, “didn’t feel anything about it. The time came, and I was doing what I had to do. That’s all there was to it.” After the shootings he raised a window in his bedroom and removed the screen, then roamed the house rifling dresser drawers and scattering the contents: it was his intention to blame the crime on thieves. Later, driving his father’s car, he traveled forty miles over snow-slippery roads to Lawrence, the town where the University of Kansas is located; en route, he parked on a bridge, dismantled his lethal artillery, and disposed of it by dropping the parts into the Kansas River. But of course the journey’s true purpose was to arrange an alibi. First he stopped at the campus house where he roomed; he talked with the landlady, told her that he had come to pick up his typewriter, and that because of the bad weather the trip from Wolcott to Lawrence had taken two hours. Departing, he visited a movie theater, where, uncharacteristically, he chatted with an usher and a candy vendor. At eleven, when the movie let out, he returned to Wolcott. The family’s mongrel dog was waiting on the front porch; it was whining with hunger, so Lowell Lee, entering the house and stepping across his father’s corpse, prepared a bowl of warm milk and mush; then, while the dog was lapping it up, he telephoned the sheriff’s office and said, “My name is Lowell Lee Andrews. I live at 6040 Wolcott Drive, and I want to report a robbery—”

Four officers of the Wyandotte County Sheriff’s Patrol responded. One of the group, Patrolman Meyers, described the scene as follows: “Well, it was one in the morning when we got there. All the lights in the house was on. And this big dark-haired boy, Lowell Lee, he was sitting on the porch petting his dog. Patting it on the head. Lieutenant Athey asked the boy what happened, and he pointed to the door, real casual, and said, ‘Look in there.’ ” Having looked, the astonished officers summoned the county coroner, a gentleman who was also impressed by young Andrews’ callous nonchalance, for when the coroner asked him what funeral arrangements he wished to have made, Andrews replied with a shrug, “
I
don’t care what you do with them.”

Shortly, two senior detectives appeared and began to question the family’s lone survivor. Though convinced he was lying, the detectives listened respectfully to the tale of how he had driven to Lawrence to fetch a typewriter, gone to a movie, and arrived home after midnight to find the bedrooms ransacked and his family slain. He stayed with the story, and might never have altered it if, subsequent to his arrest and removal to the county jail, the authorities had not obtained the aid of the Reverend Mr. Virto C. Dameron.

The Reverend Dameron, a Dickensian personage, an unctuous and jolly brimstone-and-damnation orator, was minister of the Grandview Baptist Church in Kansas City, Kansas, the church the Andrews family attended regularly. Awakened by an urgent call from the county coroner, Dameron presented himself at the jail around 3:00
A.M.
, whereupon detectives, who had been strenuously but abortively interrogating the suspect, withdrew to another room, leaving the minister to consult privately with his parishioner. It proved a fatal interview for the latter, who many months afterward gave this account of it to a friend: “Mr. Dameron said, ‘Now, Lee, I’ve known you all your life. Since you were just a little tadpole. And I knew your daddy all his life, we grew up together, we were childhood friends. And that’s why I’m here—not just because I’m your minister, but because I feel like you’re a member of my own family. And because you need a friend that you can talk to and trust. And I feel terrible about this terrible event, and I’m every bit as anxious as you are to see the guilty party caught and punished.’

“He wanted to know was I thirsty, and I was, so he got me a Coke, and after that he’s going on about the Thanksgiving vacation and how do I like school, when all of a sudden he says, ‘Now, Lee, there seems to be some doubt among the people here regarding your innocence. I’m sure you’d be willing to take a lie detector and convince these men of your innocence so they can get busy and catch the guilty party.’ Then he said, ‘Lee, you didn’t do this terrible thing, did you? If you did, now is the time to purge your soul.’ The next thing was, I thought what difference does it make, and I told him the truth, most everything about it. He kept wagging his head and rolling his eyes and rubbing his hands together, and he said it was a terrible thing, and I would have to answer to the Almighty, have to purge my soul by telling the officers what I’d told him, and would I?” Receiving an affirmative nod, the prisoner’s spiritual adviser stepped into an adjacent room, which was crowded with expectant policemen, and elatedly issued an invitation: “Come on in. The boy’s ready to make a statement.”