Richard Hickock and Perry Smith Biography

Convicted murderers. Richard Eugene Hickock was born on June 6, 1931, in Kansas City, Kansas. Perry Smith was born on October 27, 1928, in Huntington, Nevada. Richard Hickock and Perry Smith murdered four members of the Clutter family on their Kansas farm on November 15, 1959. The murderers, their victims, and the crime became the subject of the 1966 best-selling book, In Cold Blood, written by Truman Capote.

The two criminals met at the Kansas State Penitentiary in 1958. From their backgrounds, they seemed an unlikely pair. Hickock had grown up in a stable family on a farm near Kansas City. Athletic and popular, he graduated high school in 1949. But his family did not have the money for him to go on to college. This disappointment gave way to a greater tragedy in 1950. He suffered head injuries from a car crash that year, which left his face a bit lopsided and his eyes unleveled. Or as Capote once wrote, it looked like his head had been “halved like an apple and then put together a fraction off center.”

For Smith, his troubles started at an early age. His parents scraped together a living on the rodeo circuit, performing as Tex & Flo. His father was a redheaded man of Irish ancestry while his mother was a full-blooded Cherokee. His parents eventually broke up over his mother’s drinking and philandering. At the age of six, Smith moved to San Francisco with his mother and three other siblings. She eventually put him in an orphanage where he was abused by nuns for his frequent bedwetting. A wild child, he spent time in other institutions and was caught stealing for the first time when he was eight. Later reunited with his father, Smith spent some time in Nevada and Alaska.

At sixteen, Smith joined the merchant marines and later went into the U.S. Army. He served in Japan and Korea. In 1952, Smith had a serious motorcycle accident, which permanently damaged his legs and left him in chronic pain. He spent months recovering from his injuries and then moved to Alaska to be with his father. The two had a falling out in 1955, and Smith started his life of crime later that year. He and a partner stole some office equipment from a business in Phillipsburg, Kansas. Caught by a police officer with the goods after they were pulled over for a traffic stop, the pair ended up in the Phillipsburg jail. They escaped through an open window and stole a car.

After splitting up, Smith made his way to Worcester, Massachusetts, and down to New York City where he eventually apprehended by the F.B.I. He went back to Kansas where he was tried and convicted on a series of charges. Sentenced to five to ten years, Smith was sent to the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing.

Hickock also found his way to the Kansas State Penitentiary because of theft. Married at 19, he worked a series of regular jobs—as an ambulance driver, a car painter, and a mechanic. The young couple had three sons together and began living beyond their means, and Hickock soon started supplementing his income by writing bad checks. After he had an affair, the couple split up and Hickock married his mistress. She, however, divorced him while he was serving time at the penitentiary for check fraud and other crimes.