← America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
The Clutter Murders: The Trial, the Execution, and Capote's Obsession Pt. 3
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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 Dick Hickok and Perry Smith were arrested for murdering the Clutter family, justice came swiftly. And once they were convicted, the punishment was the harshest the state of Kansas could give. But this story doesn't end in a courtroom, because the murder of the Clutter family didn't just change Holcombe, Kansas. It changed the way America thinks about violence, about safety, and about the stories we tell about crime. It inspired one of the most famous books ever written that defined true crime as we know it. And it left scars that have never fully healed, even more than 60 years later. Today, I'm going to walk you through what happened at River Valley Farm, the trial that followed, and the lasting legacy of a crime that the country will never forget. 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? 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 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 this episode contains descriptions of murder and violence, so please listen with care. This is our third and final episode on the Clutter family murders. Today, I'll tell you exactly what happened inside that house based on the killer's own confessions. Then I'll cover the trial, the sentencing, and the punishments that followed. And finally, I'll talk about the writer who turned this tragedy into one of the most important books in American history and the price he paid for it.
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Last time I told you how Dick Hickok and Perry Smith were arrested in Las Vegas, interrogated by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and confronted with the boot print evidence that linked them to the Clutters farmhouse. Under that pressure, both men cracked and confessed to the Clutter family murders. Today I want to walk through what they actually said because the details of what happened at River Valley Farm on the night of November 14, 1959 are what turned this from a local tragedy into a crime that shook the entire country. And I want to warn you that what follows is difficult to hear. But I think it's important because the truth of what happened in that house is central to understanding what why this case still matters. According to Hickok and Smith's confessions. Here's what happened. When the two men arrived at River Valley Farm sometime after midnight, they entered through a door to Herb Clutter's unlocked office. Hickok was carrying a knife and Smith had a shotgun. The first thing they did was look for the safe. Hickok's old cellmate, Floyd Wells had been very specific about where it was supposed to be. At the back of the office, behind the desk, the two men searched everywhere. They pulled out drawers. They checked behind furniture. They went through the desk. But the safe was nowhere to be found. The fortune they had driven 400 miles for didn't exist. And that should have been the end of it. They could have turned around and walked out of the same door they came in. Nobody had seen them. Nobody had heard them. Hickok and Smith could have gotten back into the car and driven away, and the Clutters would have woken up the next morning without ever knowing anyone had been in their house. But they didn't leave. Because even though there was no big score, Hickok and Smith had made an agreement before they ever set foot in that house. No witnesses. The first member of the family they woke up was Herb. He came to with a flashlight shining in his face and two strangers standing over him. He was led into his office at gunpoint, where he calmly explained that there was no safe and there was no cash. He offered to give them the money in his wallet and to write them a check as long as they left his family alone. But that wasn't good enough for Hickok and Smith. Herb was taken down to the basement, where he was bound with rope and laid out on the concrete floor. Then the rest of the family was woken up one by one. Bonnie was bound and gagged and taken to the bathroom. Kenyon was marched downstairs to join his father, where he was tied up and placed on a sofa in a separate room. And Nancy was bound in her bed, her hands and feet tied while she lay in her nightgown. And then something strange happened. Something that investigators and writers and people who studied this case have been trying to make sense of for more than six decades. Once the Clutters were tied up and helpless, Hickok and Smith started doing little things to make them more comfortable. They gave Herb a cardboard box to lie on so he wasn't on the cold cement floor. They propped Kenyon's head up on pillows. They gave Bonnie a chair to sit on before tying her up in bed. And they tucked Nancy in, pulling the covers all the way up to her shoulders. Think about that for a second. These two men had just tied up an entire family at gunpoint. And in between the violence and the terror, they stopped to make sure a 15 year old boy had a pillow under his head. Honestly, it's such a strange detail. And it's the kind of thing that makes this case so hard to wrap your head around. Because those small moments show at least one of these men, probably Perry Smith, based on the accounts, was capable of seeing the Clutters as human beings. He could recognize that they were scared. He could recognize that they were uncomfortable. And some part of him responded to that. But then he killed them anyway. Dick Hickok had always been the Planner, the talker, the one with the ideas. But when it came to actually doing what they'd agreed to, he froze. He had the knife, but he couldn't bring himself to use it on Herb Clutter. So Perry Smith took the knife. And for all of the stories he told in prison about being tough enough to kill, he didn't want to do it either. But Hickok didn't stop him. He didn't say, let's just leave. He stood there. So Perry Smith murdered Herb Clutter. From there, the two men moved through the house. Kenyon was next killed, where he lay on the sofa. Then upstairs to Nancy, who was still in her bed with the covers pulled up to her shoulders. And then Bonnie, who'd been led gently back to her bedroom. When it was over, Hickok and Smith went back outside into the darkness, got in their car and drove away, leaving behind a bloody boot print, some tire tracks, and four people who should have been alive the next morning. The total amount of money they took from the Clutterhouse was somewhere between 40 and $50. They also grabbed a radio. That was it. That was the price of four human lives. I keep coming back to that number. 40 or $50. That's what Herb Clutter's life was worth to Dick Hickok and Perry Smith. That's what Bonnie's life was worth. Nancy's Kenyons, a 16 year old girl who baked pies for her neighbors and sewed her own dresses and had her whole life ahead of her. A 15 year old boy who liked to work with his hands and was still quietly grieving the loss of his horse. All of it gone for pocket change. And the thing that makes it even worse is that it didn't have to happen. If Floyd Wells had never mentioned the Clutters to Dick Hickok. If Hickok had dismissed it as prison talk. If they'd found the office empty and just left. If either one of them at any point during that long night had said, this isn't worth it. There were so many moments where this could have ended differently. And every single time, they chose the wrong one. After the killings, Hickok and Smith drove through the night and crossed into Oklahoma. Over the following weeks, they drifted across the country, passing bad checks, stealing cars, living off whatever they could grab. They went to Mexico for a while before moving through Texas, then Florida and back across the Midwest. They weren't running from anything specific because as far as they knew, nobody was looking for them. They were just doing what they'd always done, moving drifting, staying one step ahead of the consequences they'd left behind them. But those consequences were closing in, and the men who would bring them to justice were already on their trail. 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 Kaelyn 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 Kaelyn 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. In the first weeks of January 1960, the residents of Holcomb heard the names Dick Hickok and Perry Smith for the first time when it was announced on the radio that both men would be brought back to Kansas to stand trial. For the people of Holcomb, that news was a complicated kind of relief. Yes, the killers had been caught. Yes, there would be a trial. But knowing who had done it didn't erase the damage that had already been done to the community. The trust was still broken. The fear was still there. And the Clutters were still gone. For the Clutter's two surviving daughters, Evanna and Beverly, Hickok and Smith's arrest opened a new and painful chapter. These were young women in their early 20s who'd lost their parents and both of their younger siblings in a single night. They were now left to carry the weight of that loss while the rest of the world turned their family's tragedy into a new story. The attention was relentless, and neither sister had asked for any of it. And when the trial started on March 22, 1960, things only got louder. Even though both men had already confessed, the big question hanging over the proceedings was whether they'd received the death penalty. Kansas had capital punishment, but the state hadn't executed anyone in over a decade, and there was genuine debate about whether the court would go that far. But the prosecution was going to try. Over the course of the trial, they laid out exactly what had happened at River Valley Farm. They walked the jury through the confessions, the evidence and the timeline. They described how two men had driven 400 miles to rob a family based on a rumor from a prison cell, found nothing worth taking, and killed everyone in the house anyway. The defense didn't have a lot to work with. Dick Hickok and Perry Smith had confessed. The physical evidence, the boot prints, the shotgun, the tire tracks backed up those confessions. There was no alternative theory to present, no other suspect to point to. The best the defense could do was argue that the killer's troubled backgrounds and psychological issues should be considered as factors when deciding on punishment. In essence, they were asking for the jury to show mercy. Those pleas landed on deaf ears. After hearing all of the evidence, it took the jury just 40 minutes to make their decision. That tells you everything you need to know about how the people in that courtroom feel. Felt about what Hickok and Smith had done. The verdict was guilty on all four counts, and the sentence was death. Now, that wasn't the end of the legal process. Far from it. Hickok and Smith spent the next five years on death row, appealing their sentences through every channel available to them. Their case went all the way up to the Kansas Supreme Court, which upheld the convictions and the death sentences. Hickok and Smith also tried their luck with federal appeals, but none of them succeeded. During those five years on death row, something unusual happened. Truman Capote, the writer who came to Kansas to research the case, developed a complicated and deeply personal relationship with both convicted men, especially Perry Smith. Capote visited them in prison. He wrote them letters. He provided early assistance with their appeals. And by many accounts, he and Perry Smith formed a bond that went beyond what you'd normally expect between a writer and his subject. People speculated about the nature of that relationship for years. Some suggested it was romantic. Others thought it was more of an emotional dependency. That Capote saw something of himself and Perry's sensitivity and pain. And that Perry, in turn, saw Capote as one of the few people in his life who treated him as fully human. Whatever it was, it put Capote in a weird position. Because here's the thing. He needed an ending to his book, and the ending he needed was the execution. That's a brutal thing to come to terms with. The writer who'd spent years getting to know these men, who'd formed real relationships with them, who'd listened to their life and stories and fears and regrets. That same writer needed them to die in order for his book to have a real conclusion. Some people believe that's exactly why Capote eventually stopped helping with their appeals. Not because he'd given up hope, but because he needed the story to end. I don't know if that's true. I'm not sure anyone knows. But it's the kind of question that haunted Capote for the rest of his life. On April 14, 1965, more than five years after the murders, Dick Hickok and Perry Smith were escorted to the gallows at the Kansas State Penitentiary. Both men were hanged. Hickok went first. According to reports, he was calm and composed. Smith went shortly after. According to the people who were there, his last words were an apology, not specifically to the Clutter family, but a general expression of regret for what he'd done. Whether that apology was genuine or performative, I honestly can't say. But I do think it's telling that even at the end, Perri Smith was the one who showed something that at least looked like feeling. The same man who tucked Nancy Clutter into bed before killing her. The same man who'd given a teenage boy a pillow. There was something in Perry Smith that could recognize the humanity of other people. And that's what makes his story so deeply, deeply unsettling. Because he recognized it. And it still wasn't enough to stop him. The executions of Dick Hickok and Perry Smith brought a kind of legal closure to the Clutter case. But the ripple effect of what happened at River Valley Farm kept spreading through Holcombe, through Kansas, and eventually through the entire country. Let's start with the book, because you really can't talk about the Clutter family murders without talking about In Cold Blood. Not just because of its impact on the case, but because of how it changed the foundation of literature itself and led to the true crime genre as we know it. On a quiet Saturday morning, five women walked into Elaine Bryant store and never came home. The man responsible for their deaths was heard and even described by the lone survivor. But despite nearly being caught, he vanished into thin air. In the years since, new technology, new investigators, and new questions have changed what's possible. But the families are still waiting for answers. The evidence is still there, and this case isn't cold. It's unfinished. Listen to Counterclock, Season eight, wherever you get your podcasts. Truman Capote published In cold blood in 1966, about a year after Dick Hickok and Perry Smith were executed. The book was a sensation. It told the story of the Clutter family, the murders, the investigation, and the trial in a way that read like a novel, but was Grounded in years of painstaking research and hundreds of interviews, it was a new kind of writing, what Capote called a nonfiction novel. And it essentially created the true crime genre as we know it today. Before In Cold Blood, true crime was mostly confined to pulpy detective magazines and dry newspaper accounts. What Capote did was take a real crime and tell it with the emotional depth, the pacing, and the literary craft of serious fiction. He made readers feel the Clutter's loss. He made them understand the people of Holcomb's fear. And he made them sit with the uncomfortable, complex complexity of the killers themselves. The damage in their pasts, the fleeting moments of humanity, and the unforgivable acts they committed. Anyway, the book became one of the best selling nonfiction works of the 20th century. It's been adapted into films, studied in classrooms, and cited as an influence by virtually every true crime writer who's come after Capote. In a very real sense, this show exists in a tradition that In Cold Blood helped create. But the book came at a cost. And I'm not talking about the years Capote spent researching it or the emotional toll of embedding himself in a community's grief. I'm talking about what it did to him afterward. After In Cold Blood was published, Truman Capote never finished another major book. He started projects. He talked about ideas. He promised publishers that the next great work was coming. But nothing ever came together. The man who'd written one of the most celebrated books of his generation seemed to lose the ability or the will to do it again. People speculated endlessly about why. Some thought it was the pressure of trying to follow up a masterpiece. Some thought it was the guilt of profiting from other people's tragedy. And some believed it was the memory of Perry Smith, that Capote had allowed himself to get too close to a condemned man, that the emotional bond between them had left him permanently scarred. And that watching Perry walk to the gallows had broken something inside of him that never healed. What we do know is that Capote's drinking, which had always been an issue, got a lot worse after the book came out. His personal relationships fell apart. His health declined. And in 1984, at the age of 59, Truman Capote died from complications related to alcoholism and drug abuse. The story of the Clutter family was the last great work of his life, and in a way, it consumed him. But the legacy of the Clutter case goes far beyond one book and one writer, starting with the people of Holcomb, Kansas. That feeling of safety, of trust, of open doors and easy Friendships. It never fully came back. People who lived through it said the murders left a kind of permanent shadow over the town. Even decades later, when the faces had changed and a new generation had grown up, the Clutter name still carried weight in Holcomb, not just as a memory of what was lost, but as a reminder that the worst thing in life can arrive without warning and without reason. And those scars went beyond Holcomb. The Clutter murder sent a ripple of unease through rural communities across the country. Before November of 1959, people in small towns genuinely believed that violent crime was a big city problem, something that happened in Chicago or New York or la, not on a wheat farm in western Kansas. The Clutter family murder shattered that belief. And once it was gone, it was gone for good. Suddenly, people everywhere were asking themselves if it could happen to the Clutters. In a town of 270 people, where everybody knew everybody, could it happen to us? That question changed how Americans thought about their own safety. It changed how they thought about their neighbors. And in a way, it marked the beginning of a shift in American culture from a time when people trusted the world around them to a time when they started locking their doors and wondering what the person next to them might be capable of. And the murders had a huge impact on a personal level, too. Dick Hickok's family suffered from coming to terms with what he'd done. His brother Walter, spent the rest of his life dealing with the fallout of sharing a last name with a convicted murderer. He was passed over for jobs. He was shunned by neighbors. He carried a burden he'd done nothing to earn simply because of who his brother was. That's one of the things that often gets lost in stories like this. The killer's own families become collateral damage. They didn't choose what happened. They didn't participate. But they carry the weight of it for the rest of their lives. Then there's the witnesses. Larry Hendricks, the English teacher who'd been one of the first adults to enter the Clutterhouse that morning, eventually left Holcomb altogether. He moved to Alaska, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the memories of what he'd seen in that basement. There's also the question that has never been fully answered. To this day, people wonder whether Hickok and Smith were responsible for another crime. In December of 1959, less than a month after the Clutter murders, the Walkers, a family of four in Florida, were killed in a distorted, disturbingly similar way. Bound and shot at close range in their own home. That case has never been solved. And the timing, the method, and the fact that Hickok and Smith were traveling through the southern United States during that period have led investigators to wonder if the Clutter murders weren't the only ones these two men committed. We may never know the answer to that question, but the fact that it's still being asked tells you something about the weight this case still carries. So where does that leave us? At their core, the murders of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter are a story about randomness, about what happens when two desperate, damaged men act on a rumor from a prison cell and destroy a family that had done nothing wrong. There was no grudge. There was no feud. The Clutters didn't have any enemies. They were just there in the wrong place, in their own home on the wrong night. And that's what makes this case so hard to let go of. Because most of us walk through life believing that if we do the right thing, if we're kind, if we work hard, if we build something good, then we'll be safe. The Clutters did all of that. They did everything right. And it wasn't enough. Herb and Bonnie should have grown old surrounded by their children and grandchildren. Nancy should have gone off to Kansas State and studied art and built the future she'd been dreaming about seeing since she was a kid. Kenyon should have had the chance to grow into the quiet, steady man he was already becoming. Instead, all of this was taken away in a single night by two men who drove 400 miles over a lie. The Clutter family deserved so much more than what they got. And I hope that in telling their story, we can honor not just the way they died, but the way they lived, because they lived beautifully, and the world was worse off for losing them. At the end of each episode, I like to take a moment to share my thoughts on the case and answer any questions you may have, so make sure to comment below. The death penalty question is interesting here. Do you think the sentence was justified? The thing that shocked me the most about the sentence was that it was carried out through hanging. And the late 60s wasn't that long ago. Apparently, the last execution by hanging was only in 1966, which is kind of crazy to me. Obviously, the death penalty is a hugely debated topic, and I respect that people have strong feelings on both sides. I wouldn't argue against the death penalty for men who took the lives of four innocent people, including two teenagers who had their entire lives in front of them. However, and this is extremely counterintuitive the death penalty is significantly more expensive for taxpayers than life in prison. Personally, the most important thing to me is that these people are never allowed in public again to cause harm to anyone else. And I think taking away their freedom for the rest of their lives is also fair. What I will say is that the five years between the conviction and the executions were significant. That's five years of appeals, five years of legal processes, five years of Capote visiting them and forming relationships with them, which makes sense why it is so expensive with all of the appeals. And I think that time made the whole thing more complicated than anyone expected, because by the time they were actually executed, these weren't just faceless killers to the people who'd gotten to know them. They were real complicated human beings. And taking a human life, even the life of someone who's done something terrible, is never simple. What do you think the legacy of this case really is? I think the legacy is twofold. First, it's about the loss of innocence, not just in Holcomb, but in America in general. This was a case that showed people that violence could happen anywhere, to anyone, for no reason, really at all. Before the Clutter murders, people in small towns like Holcomb genuinely believed that they were safe from the kind of crime that happened in big cities. And after the Clutters, that belief was gone. And I don't think it ever fully came back. The second part for me is about how we tell stories about crime. Capote showed that a true crime story could be treated with the same seriousness and emotional depth as great literature. He showed that the victims, the community, and even the killers themselves deserve to be understood as full human beings, not just characters in a horror story. And that's a standard that I think everyone in the space should be striving for. In Cold Blood is one of those rare books that changes the way people think about the entire genre. Without it, true crime as we know it, including this show, probably looks completely different. But the process of creating it also seems to have destroyed Capote. And I think there's a real conversation to be had about the cost of getting that close to a story like this, because Capote didn't just report on the Clutter case from a distance, he lived in it. He befriended the investigators, the townspeople, and the killers themselves. He spent years inside the story, and when it was over, he couldn't really get out. So it makes me think about everyone who works in true Crime. Writers, podcasters, journalists, investigators. And there's a real emotional toll that comes with spending this much time inside other people's worst moments. And I think Capote is kind of a cautionary tale about what happens when you don't protect yourself from that. At the end of the day, this is a story about a family that was taken from us. Her, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter were real people who lived real lives, and they deserve to be remembered for who they were, not just for how they died. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. Make sure to rate, review and follow America's Most Infamous Crime 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 next week for another deep dive into a true crime that changed America.