Perry Edward Smith

Family and early life

Perry Edward Smith was born in Huntington, Nevada, a now-abandoned community in Elko County. His parents, Florence Julia "Flo" Buckskin and John "Tex" Smith, were rodeo performers. Smith was of mixed Irish and Cherokee ancestry (from his father's and mother's side, respectively). The family moved to Juneau, Alaska, in 1929, where the elder Smith distilled bootleg whisky for a living. Smith's father abused his wife and four children, and in 1935 his wife left him, taking the children with her to San Francisco. Smith and his siblings were raised initially with their alcoholic mother. After Smith's mother died from choking on her own vomit when he was 13, he and his siblings were placed in a Catholic orphanage, where nuns allegedly abused him physically and emotionally for his lifelong problem of chronic bed wetting, a result of malnutrition. He was also placed in a Salvation Army orphanage, where one of the caretakers allegedly tried to drown him. In his adolescence, Smith reunited with his father and together they lived an itinerant existence across much of the western United States. He also spent time in different juvenile detention homes after joining a street gang and becoming involved in petty crime. Perry's father, Tex, moved to Cold Springs, Nevada, circa 1964-1967, where he lived to the age of 92 before committing suicide, distraught over poor health.

Two of Smith's siblings also committed suicide as young adults, and the remaining sister eliminated any contact with him.

Military service and life in Washington

At age 16, Smith joined the United States Merchant Marine. He joined the army in 1948, where he served in the Korean War. During his stint in the army, Smith spent weeks at a time in the stockade for public carousing and fighting with Korean civilians and other soldiers. In spite of his record, Smith received an honorable discharge in 1952 and was last stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington. He stayed with an Army friend for a time in the Tacoma area, where he was employed as a car painter. With one of his first paychecks, Smith bought a motorcycle. While riding, he lost control of the bike due to adverse weather conditions. Smith nearly died in the accident and spent six months in a Bellingham hospital. Because of the severe injuries, his legs were permanently disabled and he suffered chronic leg pains for the rest of his life. To help control the pain, he was known to consume copious amounts of aspirin.

The murders and life on death row

Perry Smith and Richard Hickock first met in the Kansas State Prison in Lansing, Kansas. Smith was eventually paroled, and the pair later resumed their acquaintance upon Hickock's release in November 1959. Hickock allegedly wrote to Smith, imploring him to violate his parole by returning to Kansas to assist Hickock with a robbery he had been planning. Smith claimed that his return was initially motivated not by meeting with Hickock, but by the chance to reunite with another former inmate, Willie-Jay, with whom he had developed an especially close bond while in prison; Smith soon discovered, however, that he had arrived in the Kansas City area just a few hours after Willie-Jay had left for the east coast.

Smith met with Hickock, and almost immediately the two set to work carrying out Hickock's plan. Driving west to Holcomb, they entered the Clutter home through an unlocked door late in the evening of November 14, 1959, whereupon they murdered the four family members present: Herbert Clutter and his wife Bonnie, and their younger children, Nancy and Kenyon. Hickock later testified that he had gotten the idea to rob the Clutters after being told by former cellmate Floyd Wells, who had worked as a farmhand for the Clutters, that there was a safe in the family's house containing $10,000. When they invaded the house, however, they discovered that there was no such safe. After six weeks at large, mostly spent idly roaming the country, Smith and Hickock were captured in Las Vegas, Nevada, on December 30, 1959, following an extensive manhunt which extended into Mexico.

Smith admitted to cutting the throat of the father, Herbert Clutter, as well as shooting both Herbert and Kenyon Clutter in the head with a shotgun at close range. Records show a dispute as to which of the two shot the women, Bonnie and Nancy Clutter. Alvin Dewey, chief investigator of the Clutter family murders, testified at the trial that Hickock insisted in his confession that Smith performed all four killings; Smith, however, first confessed that Hickock killed the women, but refused to sign his confession, and later claimed to have shot them himself. Although Smith's revised confession coincided with Hickock's initial statement, both Smith and Hickock refused to testify in court, leading to a lack of an official record detailing who killed the women.

While Smith had only a grade-school education, he maintained a strong interest in art, literature and music. His rough past regarding his family and abusive childhood led him to be somewhat distant from people. He read extensively, and during his time on death row, wrote poems and painted pictures for other inmates from photos of their family members.

Relationship with Truman Capote

During research for his novel In Cold Blood, Truman Capote extensively interviewed Smith and eventually befriended him. There has long been conjecture as to the exact nature of their relationship. While Capote never wrote anything to suggest that theirs was anything more than a platonic friendship, some accounts have suggested that perhaps a more intimate association had developed.

Execution

Smith and Hickock were executed by hanging on April 14, 1965. After hanging for twenty minutes, Hickock died at 12:41 am, with Smith following at 1:19 am. Warden Greg Seamon presided over the execution in Lansing.

Aftermath

Nearly fifty years after the executions, the bodies of the killers were exhumed from Mount Muncie Cemetery in Lansing, as authorities hoped to solve a 53-year-old cold case using DNA. Smith and Hickock had originally been questioned about the December 19, 1959 shooting murder in Osprey, Florida, of Cliff and Christine Walker and their two young children, as evidence indicated they had spent time just a few miles from the crime scene while at large after the Clutter murders. A polygraph administered at the time of their arrest cleared them of the murders, but by modern polygraph standards, their test results are no longer considered valid. On December 19, 2012, officials in Kansas exhumed the bodies of Smith and Hickock and retrieved bone fragments to compare their DNA to semen found in the pants of Christine Walker. In August 2013, the Sarasota County Sheriff's office announced they were unable to find a match between the DNA of Perry Smith or Richard Hickock and the samples in the Walker family murder. Only partial DNA could be retrieved, possibly due to degradation of the DNA samples over the decades or contamination in storage, making the outcome one of uncertainty (neither proving nor disproving the involvement of Smith and Hickock). Investigators have stated that Smith and Hickock still remain the most viable suspects.

Film portrayals

Smith was portrayed in the 1967 film version of In Cold Blood by Robert Blake, by Eric Roberts in the 1996 TV miniseries adaptation; by Clifton Collins Jr. in 2005's Capote; and by Daniel Craig in 2006's Infamous.

In Music

Bastille's 2016 album Wild World includes a song entitled 'Four Walls (The Ballad of Perry Smith)'. The lyrics describe the imprisonment and execution of Smith. "These four walls in Holcomb" tells of how Smith has "only these four walls before they, in cold blood, hang you up", and directly quotes a call from Kansas State Penitentiary where Smith says, "Being brought up one way and trying to see another way is very difficult."