← America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
The Clutter Family: Why They Were Killed For $50 and A Radio Pt. 2
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Hi, listeners, it's Katie Ring. Before we get into today's episode of America's Most Infamous Crimes, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhatt. Every Monday, Dr. Bot goes where history gets mysterious. Vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, paranormal phenomena, and events that science still can't fully explain. Dr. Bot treats these moments like open case files. Not myths, not superstition, just incomplete explanations waiting for a closer look. Hidden in History drops every Monday. Follow now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, so you never miss a mystery.
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This is Crime House.
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After the Clutter family was murdered on November 15, 1959, everyone in the town of Holcomb, Kansas, was left asking the question, why? Why would anyone do something this terrible to a family that everybody loved? Who could have done it? And the scariest question of all, would it happen again? The investigation was going nowhere until a prisoner in a Kansas jail heard a news report on the radio and realized he might know exactly who was responsible. Today, I'm taking you to the other side of this crime. I'll introduce you to the two men who drove 4, 400 miles to rob a family they'd never met and the investigation that finally tracked them down. Every crime tells a story about the people involved, the system that tried to stop it, and the nation that couldn't look away. Some cases are so shocking, so deeply woven into who we are, that decades later, we're still asking, how did this happen? Katie I'm Katie Ring, and this is America's Most Infamous Crimes. Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I'll take you deep into cases that have a lasting imprint on society and still haunt us today. I want to thank you for being a part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow America's Most Infamous Crimes wherever you get your podcasts and to get all episodes at once ad free. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Before I get started, please be advised that this episode contains descriptions of murder, violence and child abuse. So please listen with care. This is the second of our three episode series on the Clutter family murders. Today, I'll tell you about Dick Hickok and Perry Smith, the two men who killed Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter. I'll trace their troubled lives, the prison encounter that set everything in motion, and the investigation that brought them to justice.
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at the end of our last episode I told you about a prisoner named Floyd Wells who was listening to the radio in his cell at Kansas State Penitentiary when a news report about the Clutter family murders stopped him cold. Wells knew the Clutters. He'd worked as a farmhand at River Valley Farm when he was young. He remembered Herb Clutter as a good man, fair, hardworking and generous. The kind of boss who'd loan you a few bucks if you were short before payday. And based on that generosity, Wells had figured that the Clutters had a lot of money and that the farm was never short on cash. Now, here's where things took a dark turn. A few years before the murders, Wells had shared a cell with a man named Richard Eugene Hickok, Dick to the people who knew him. And during their time together, Wells had told Hickok all about the Clutter family. About the farm, about the house, about the layout of the rooms, and most importantly, about a safe that Wells thought Herb kept under his desk, supposedly holding the modern equivalent of about $100,000 in cash. Wells didn't think much of it at the time. Guys in prison talk. They tell stories, they brag, they pass the time. But Hickok didn't treat it like small talk. He became obsessed with the Clutter family. He made Wells describe the layout of the house over and over again until he had it memorized. He talked openly about driving out to River Valley Farm and robbing the place blind. Wells figured it was just the kind of thing that guys say to feel tough. And when Dick Hickok was eventually released, Wells forgot about him entirely. He never expected to hear that name again until he heard the news that four members of the Clutter family were dead. Wells was certain that Dick Hickok was responsible, and he was pretty sure another former inmate, a man named Perry Edward Smith, had been in on it, too. So let me tell you about these two men, because understanding who they were and how they ended up in that car together on the night of November 14, 1959, is essential to understanding why this crime happened at all. Let's start with Dick Hickok. Hickok's life actually started out pretty normal. He grew up during the great depression, but his family managed to get by. He and his little brother Walter went to school, played sports, and spent time outdoors. And Dick was also a very good shot. He actually had a trick where he'd shoot a can of baby food off the top of his little brother's head, which, although impressive, is quite concerning and probably should have been a red flag. But at the time, people just thought it was the kind of thing boys did in rural America. But when Hickok was 18 or 19 years old, everything changed. He was in a car accident that nearly killed him. And when he came out of it, he was different physically and mentally. His eyes were off center, his smile was crooked, and something in his personality had shifted. He was more impulsive, more reckless, more willing to take risks that made no sense. Whether that was because of actual brain damage from the accident or because of the emotional toll of going through something that traumatic, nobody knew for sure. Then he got married again and ended up fathering three children over the course of two marriages, both of which fell apart. His whole life became the cycle of short term fixes and long term disasters. Eventually, the bad checks caught up with him, and Hickok ended up in the state penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas. And that's where he met Floyd Wells and where the seeds of what would happen at River Valley farm were planted. But Hickok needed a partner, Someone who could do the things he couldn't. Someone with a harder edge. Someone who wouldn't freeze up when things got violent. That's where Perry Smith came in. Perry Edward Smith was born in 1928 in Elko County, Nevada. And honestly, his childhood reads like a catalog of everything that can go wrong in a young person's life. His parents were violent and unpredictable. They traveled the rodeo circuit, dragging their kids from place to place with no real stability. And when Smith was about six Years old, his parents separated. He went with his mother to San Francisco, and for a while, it seemed like maybe things would get better. But unfortunately, they didn't. Once they got to California, Smith's mom seemed to lose interest in raising her children. Smith and his siblings bounce in and out of foster homes and children's shelters, where he was allegedly subjected to repeated abuse by the very people who were supposed to be taking care of him. I want to be careful here because nothing about Perry Smith's childhood excuses what he went on to do. But it does help explain how a person can end up so damaged and disconnected from the normal human responses that keep most of us from crossing certain lines. As a teenager, Smith ended up following his dad across the western United States. They went as far as Alaska, at one point searching for gold. And in some ways, that life was an improvement over the foster homes. But Smith's dad was prone to the same violent outbursts that had defined Smith's entire childhood. Wherever Smith went, instability and violence seemed to follow. At 16, Smith enlisted in the military and went on to serve in Korea. When he came home in 1952, he settled in the Pacific Northwest for a while. But whatever peace he'd managed to find was shattered by a motorcycle accident that broke his legs in five places. Like Dick Hickok, the accident changed Perry Smith's life in ways that went far beyond the physical injuries. He spent six months in the hospital, followed by another six months on crutches, followed by a full year of rehab. And even after all of that, his knees barely worked. The pain was constant and unbearable. Smith was always popping aspirin to manage it, and he had a habit of crunching the candy coated kind between his teeth like they were mints. It became one of the things people remembered about him. By the time Smith ended up in the state penitentiary in Lansing in 1956 for jailbreak, car theft, and grand larceny, he was permanently disabled, emotionally scarred, and carrying around a lifetime of unprocessed pain. And that's where he met Dick Hickok. At first, Hickok didn't think much of Perry Smith. He thought Smith was too sensitive, too moody, and too caught up in his own feelings. But then one day, Smith told Hickok a story about beating a man to death in Las Vegas. And just like that, Hickok's opinion changed completely. Now, it's worth pausing here to note that whether this story was even true is debatable. Perry Smith was known for exaggerating, and there's never been any confirmed record of that happening. But it didn't matter whether it was real. What mattered was that Dick Hickok believed it was. He saw Smith as a natural killer, someone cold enough and tough enough to do what needed to be done when the time came. And maybe Hickok saw something else in Smith, too. Both of these men were scarred. Both were damaged. Both were prone to dark thoughts and unpredictable behavior. Maybe Hickok recognized a twisted kind of kindred spirit in Perry Smith, Someone who, like him, had been knocked around by life enough times that the normal rules didn't seem to apply anymore. Whatever the connection was, it was enough. When Hickok was released from prison and started putting together his plan to rob the Clutters, Smith was the guy he called. And on November 14, 1959, the two of them climbed into a car and began a 400 mile drive towards River Valley Farm. Hickok had a knife. Smith had a shotgun, and they had one clear agreement between them. They weren't going to leave any witnesses. Do you want to sneak past the crime scene tape to explore the key evidence behind some of the most gripping true crime cases? Morgan I'm Morgan Absher. And I'm Kalyn Moore. And we'd love for you to check out our new show, clues. Each Wednesday, I piece together the timelines and break down the hard facts, digging into forensic details, investigative techniques, and everything that led to justice or didn't. And while Caitlin dives into the facts, I'm pulling out the threads, digging through the Internet theories and looking at the details that may or may not add up. From serial killers to shocking cold cases, we shine a light on the stories that have been waiting, sometimes for decades, to finally be heard. So join us as we uncover the breakthroughs, the heartbreak, and the relentless pursuit of answers behind the world's most unforgettable investigations. Come open a case file with us every Wednesday and listen to clues. Wherever you get your podcasts, I want to quickly fast forward to after the murders. While Hickok and Smith were on the run and the people of HUL were living under a cloud of fear, one person who wasn't in Kansas yet was about to play a huge role in the story. Back in New York City, a writer named Truman Capote had come across a short newspaper article about the Clutter family murders. Something about it grabbed him. Maybe it was the contrast. This idyllic farming family in the middle of nowhere, destroyed by sudden, senseless violence. Maybe it was the mystery. Or maybe Capote just had an instinct for the kind of story that would Define his career, whatever it was. Capote decided that this would be the subject of his next piece. He booked a train ticket to Kansas and brought along his childhood friend, Harper Lee. Now, Lee wasn't just some casual travel companion. She'd just finished the manuscript for a book you might have heard of To Kill a Mockingbird. She was a serious writer in her own right, and she agreed to come along as a kind of research partner. When the two of them arrived in Holcomb, they didn't exactly blend in. Capote was 5 foot 4 and openly gay, with a high pitched voice and a flashy wardrobe In a small Kansas farming town in 1959. He stood out like a sore thumb. Bobby Rupp, Nancy Clutter's boyfriend, was one of the first people Capote approached for an interview. Bobby's impression, he later said, that Capote was, quote, not the kind of person I wanted to spend time with. Harper Lee, on the other hand, was a different story. She'd grown up in a small town in Alabama, and she still had those easy, down to earth manners that made people in places like Holcombe feel comfortable. Where Capote could come across as pushy or eccentric, Lee was warm and approachable. She asked good questions, she listened. And the people opened up to her in ways they wouldn't for Capote alone. Together, the two of them made an oddly effective team. Lee's people skills opened doors and Capote's relentless curiosity kept them there. Over time, they worked their way into the community's good graces. Capote even bragged to a friend back in New York that he'd become, quote, practically the mayor. But Capote's most important relationship in Holcomb wasn't with the townspeople. It was with the man leading the investigation, KBI agent Alvin Dewey. Capote and Dewey formed an unusual friendship. The flashy New York writer and the no nonsense Kansas lawman. And it gave Capote a level of insider access to the case that no other journalist had. Dewey trusted Capote enough to share details about the investigation as it unfolded. And in return, Capote gave Dewey something he probably needed in those long, frustrating weeks. Someone from the outside world who understood just how significant this story was. Because at that point, the investigation was stalling. Dewey and his team had chased down every lead they could find and nothing was sticking. The people of Holcomb were getting more scared by the day, and the pressure on the KBI to deliver results was enormous. And then Floyd Wells came forward. Sometime in late November of 1959, Agent Dewey got a fourth phone call. From his boss, Logan Sanford. Sanford had just spoken to Floyd Wells, and Wells had told him everything. About his time working for the Clutters. About sharing a cell with Dick Hickok, about the stories he'd told Hickok, about the River Valley farm and the safe full of money. And about how he knew exactly who had done it. The moment he heard the news on the radio, Dewey jumped into action. He tracked down the mug shots of both Hickok and Perry Smith, and he started learning everything he could about them. Hickok was still living with his parents in a town a few hundred miles from Holcomb. Dewey sent Agent Harold Nye out there right away. A few hours later, Nye was sitting in the Hickok's living room. Dick wasn't there, but his parents told the agent that their son had been a perfectly fine young man until he was incarcerated. They insisted it was the people in prison who'd put violent ideas in his head. They said they couldn't stand anyone Dick had met inside, Particularly that short fellow he'd brought around a few times. The one with the dark complexion and the strange habit of chewing aspirin like candy. It was Perry Smith. They didn't know his name, but they just described him perfectly. As the conversation continued, Nye's eyes drifted to something in the corner of the room. A 12 gauge shotgun propped up casually against the wall. Mr. Hickok told NYE that the gun belonged to his son. Nye picked it up, turned it over in his hands, and then set it back down. He didn't say anything about it, but as he walked out of that house, he was sure that he'd just been holding a murder weapon. Agent Nye also guided the conversation to the weekend of November 14, the night the Clutters were killed. Dick's parents said that their son had left town on that Saturday and came back home the next day. When he got home, he was ravenously hungry and so exhausted that he fell asleep before a basketball game came on tv. They didn't think anything of it at the time. And then he'd hit the road and hadn't come back tonight. It fit perfectly. A man leaves town on a Saturday, drives 400 miles, commits a crime in the middle of the night, and comes home Sunday completely drained. It all tracked. For the next few weeks, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation quietly pursued Dick Hickok and Perry Smith across North America. I want to emphasize the word quietly because that was the key to Agent Dewey's entire strategy. The two men had no idea they'd been identified as suspects. They didn't know that Floyd Wells had talked. They didn't know that the KBI had visited Hickok's parents. As far as Hickok and Smith were concerned, they'd gotten away clean. And Dewey wanted to keep it that way. He told his colleagues that the safer Hickok and Smith felt, the sooner the KPI would grab them. If they found out they were being hunted, they'd disappear. These were men who knew how to run, men who'd spent their lives moving place to place, dodging consequences. If they got spooked, Dewey might never find them. So the investigation stayed quiet. And the people of Holcomb stayed in the dark, left to wonder and worry and speculate while the agents did their work behind the scenes. Meanwhile, Truman Capote and Harper Lee were still in town, interviewing everyone they could find. They talked to the Clutter's neighbors. They talked to Nancy's friends. They talked to Bobby Rupp, to the Ewalts, to Larry Hendricks. They were building a picture of the Clutter family and the community around them that would eventually become one of the most celebrated pieces of writing in American history. But at the time, it was just two writers in a small town asking questions alongside a team of agents who were running out of patience. And then, just before Christmas, came the break everyone had been waiting for. Agent Dewey and his wife were at home one evening in December of 1959 when the phone rang. Truman Capote and Harper Lee happened to be visiting at that time. Dewey picked it up, and on the other end of the line was the Las Vegas Police Department. They just picked up two men who'd been caught driving a stolen car. Their names were Dick Hickok and Perry Smith. Now, at this point, Hickok and Smith still had no idea that any of this was connected to the Clutter murders. As far as they knew, they were being held for the stolen car and a stranger string of bad checks. So when the Kansas agents flew out to Nevada as fast as they could, they decided to keep the real reason for their visit under wraps for as long as possible. They had a major piece of evidence on their side. When Smith was arrested, the police recovered a box he'd mailed to himself at a Nevada post office. Inside, among other things, was an old pair of boots. Those boots were about to become very important. The agent split the two men up for questioning. Agents Harold Nye and Roy Church took Dick Hickok, while Agents Alvin Dewey and Clarence Dunce sat down with Perry Smith. They started slowly, casual, letting both Men talk. And talk they did. Hickok, in particular, prided himself on his memory. He loved showing off how well he could remember even the smallest details of his life. The agents were happy to let him go on and on. And then Agent Church dropped the hammer. After letting Hickok run through a particularly long story about his recent travels, Church leaned back, put his hands together, and said very casually, I guess you know why we're here. In his report, Agent Nye would later write that Hickok had an intense, visible reaction to being confronted with the Clutter murders. Whatever cool he had been projecting, it evaporated in an instant. One room over, Perry Smith was getting the same treatment. Agents Dewey and Dunst had been circling the point for hours. And then Dunst leaned in and told Smith directly that they knew he had murdered the Clutters. Smith was just as stunned as Hickok had been. But neither man confessed. So both suspects were sent back to their cells, and the Kansas agents were perfectly happy to let them sit overnight and wonder what the other one was saying. To imagine the walls closing in. Because here's the thing. Dewey and his team knew that without a confession, they barely had a case. The physical evidence they had was thin. They needed one of these men to crack. And to make that happen, they were going to have to show their hand. The next day, Agents Church and Nye went back at Dick Hickok. For nearly three hours, they circled and probed and pushed. And then, when they felt the time was right, they showed him two things. The first was a photograph from the crime scene. It showed a set of boot prints on the basement floor of the Clutterhouse, right where Herb and Kenyon had been found. The second was a pair of boots that had been recovered from Perry Smith's box at the post office. The prints from the basement matched the boots perfectly. And those boots. They belonged to Dick Hickok. This was the only real card the agents had to play. Showing the boots to Hickok was a gamble. If he called their bluff, they were out of moves. But he folded. And once Hickok started talking, Smith did, too. Both men confessed to killing the Clutter family, and the details they shared were more horrifying than anyone could have imagined. But I'm going to save those details for our final episode. Because what happened inside that house, the specific sequence of events, the moments of cruelty mixed with those strange flashes of kindness, and the question of who actually pulled the trigger all deserve their own time. What I will tell you is this. On the night of November 14, 1959, two broken men drove 400 miles based on a lie. There was no safe. The fortune that Floyd Wells had described to Dick Haycock in that prison cell did. Didn't exist. And Herb Clutter was known throughout Holcomb for never carrying cash on himself or in his house. And yet four people died anyway. Hickok and Smith killed the entire Clutter family over what turned out to be about 40 or $50 in cash and a radio. That was it. That was the sum total of what they took from a home that held everything a family could need. In the first few weeks of January 1960, the residents of Holcomb heard the names Dick Hickok and Perry Smith for the very first time. It was announced on the radio that both men would be brought back to Kansas to stand trial for the murder of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon Clutter. And for the people of Holcombe, that announcement carried a strange mix of emotions. Relief that it was over, fury at the men who'd done this, and a deep, lingering sadness that wouldn't go away because knowing who had killed the Clutters didn't answer the question that really haunted them. Why? At the end of each episode, I like to take a moment to share my thoughts on the case and to answer any questions you might have, so make sure to comment below. Something that stuck out to me is that the whole crime was based on a lie Floyd Wells told Hickok. There was a safe full of money, and there wasn't four people died for nothing. I think this is one of the most devastating parts of this case, that it was quite literally all for nothing. An entire family was slaughtered over 40 or $50. The fact that they were such good people stings a little more as well. This was a family that truly cared about their neighbors, that gave back to the community, that would take money out of their own pockets to help others in need. And again, all of that was taken away for nothing. One of the things that bothers me about Wells, though, is that he did call the police. But I also feel like he frames himself as totally innocent and that he loved working for the Clutters and talked about how they were such good people, but at the same time, he was literally laying out his plan step by step, of how he was going to rob them once he got out and only came forward because they beat him to it. Maybe he did really care for them, but needed the money. Or maybe he truly didn't think Hickok would ever act on what he was saying. But it does raise some serious suspicions for me. I wonder the same. You probably wouldn't tell someone your whole scheme if you thought they were going to carry it out. So was it just jailhouse bragging, or was Wells really planning on doing it himself? What are your thoughts on Hickok and Smith? As a pretty empathetic person, I do sometimes struggle when it comes to these kinds of characters. And in true crime, especially with serial killers, they almost always, always experience abuse, neglect, and a variety of conditions that no child should ever have to bear. Perry Smith's childhood was genuinely horrific. The abuse, the instability, the total lack of anyone who cared enough to step in and help. And Dick Hickok's personality seemed to fundamentally change after that car accident. People who knew him before said he was a completely different person afterward. Now, to be clear, none of that excuses what they did. Plenty of people survive terrible childhoods and brain injuries without becoming killers. But I do think it's important to understand how people end up in a place where something like this becomes possible. Because if we just write it off as pure evil and refuse to look any deeper, we do miss an opportunity to learn anything from it. But again, the majority of people who survive terrible childhoods or traumatic brain injuries don't become cold blooded killers. So I say I have empathy for the children and the circumstances they grew up in, but not for the human they become once they make those choices to take the lives of four innocent people. And at the end of the day, the realities of what they experienced may explain their actions, but it does not excuse them. What do you think Truman Capote saw in the story? We will get a little more into this in tomorrow's episode, but I don't think the story was just about crime for Capote. I think it was a convergence of a few things. How this case shattered the sense of safety of a lot of people in small towns. I think part of it was the Clutters themselves and how beloved the family was in the community and partially the background of the suspects and how everything came to be a whole family gone because a few conversations that happened in prison where one inmate laid out his plan to rob his former employer to another inmate he didn't realize was listening a little too closely. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. Make sure to rate, review and follow America's most infamous crimes so we can keep building this community together and to get all episodes at once. Ad free. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Come back tomorrow for our final episode on the Clutter family Murders.