In Cold Blood - The Nevada Connection
On December 30, 1959, the Las Vegas Police Department captured two of the most notorious criminals in the history of our nation. The event was later immortalized in Truman Capote's famous novel In Cold Blood. The book, which was later made into a movie thriller, profiled the vicious murder of the Herbert Clutter family at their farm house in Holcomb, Kansas.
Las Vegas Police had received information that the suspects were in a stolen car and had fled towards the west coast. On December 30, shortly after 5:00 PM, two LVPD patrolmen, Ocie Pigford and Francis Macauley, spotted the stolen 1956 Chevrolet twenty minutes after it arrived in town. Their car stop lead to the arrests of Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith and ended the six-week, nationwide manhunt.
The crime occurred on November 15, 1959, during a robbery attempt by Hickock and Smith, two cons who had recently been paroled from the Kansas State prison system. The Clutter family included two children: a son, age 16 (Kenyon) and a daughter, age 15 (Nancy). Mr. Clutter (48 years old) was a highly respected member of his community who had made his wealth from his wheat farm. Mrs. Clutter's first name was Bonnie. Herb Clutter was killed first. His throat was cut by Smith who then shot him in the head with a shotgun. Kenyon was the 2nd to die. The crime scene was shocking; investigators discovered each victim had been brutally shot at point-blank range by shotgun blasts.
B. J. Handlon, the tough "bulldog" Chief of Detectives in Las Vegas, was involved in obtaining a confession from one of the killers a short time following the arrest. Handlon's detectives found a key piece of evidence, a pair of boots that matched muddy footprints at the crime scene in Kansas. This picture ran in the Las Vegas Sun newspaper on January 10, 1966, and is entitled "Killer Collapses." It shows Richard Eugene Hickock moments after confessing to the murder, flanked by Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent Clarence Duntz on the left and B. J. Handlon on the right. The picture was taken by Sun staff photographer Frank Maggio.
Both suspects were later transported back to Kansas where they were tried, convicted and sentenced to death. They appealed the convictions with the assistance of five different attorneys who deftly worked the State and Federal court systems. The last two attorneys, Joseph Jenkins and Robert Bingham, succeeded in taking this case three times to the United States Supreme Court, but each time the Court denied certiorari without comment. After avoiding at least four planned execution dates, Hickock and Smith were finally hung at the Kansas State Penitentiary on April 14, 1965.
The execution was attended by the four Kansas Bureau of Investigation agents who had worked long and hard to identify, capture and convict the duo: Clarence Duntz (pictured here on the left), Roy Church, Harold Nye and Alvin Dewey. The Kansas City Star newspaper carried this account written by an Associated Press reporter. "Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, partners in crime, died on the gallows at the State Prison early today for one of the bloodiest murders in Kansas criminal annals. Hickock, 33 years old, died first, at 12:41 A.M.; Smith, 36, died at 1:19...."
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