Name______Period______Date______
In Cold Blood: The Answers
Summary of pages 159-165
The young man’s name was Floyd Wells, a convicted thief, which earned him five years in the Kansas State Penitentiary. On the evening of Tuesday, November 17, 1959, he was lying in his cell with a pair of radio earphones clamped to his head. He was dozing off, his drowsiness instantly vanished when he heard, “Officers investigating the tragic slaying of four members of the Herbert W. Clutter family have appealed to the public for any information which might aid in solving this baffling crime.” Wells was stunned. As he was eventually to describe his reaction, he “didn’t hardly believe it.” Yet he had good reason to, for not only had he known the murdered family, he knew very well who had murdered them.
At nineteen years old, Floyd Wells had worked the River Valley Farm. He stayed there for about a year and only left because he had decided to move on. “Not account of any quarrel with Mr. Clutter. He treated me fine, same as he treated everybody that worked for him. He paid good wages. The fact is I liked Mr. Clutter much as any man I ever met. Nancy and Kenyon were only five or six years old at the time, the other two, were already in high school. A nice family, real nice. I left there in 1949, I joined the army, got married, and got divorced. I ended up getting three to five years for stealing some lawn mowers, and that’s how I met Dick, he was the first fellow that I celled with. We were discussing different jobs we had over the years, and that’s when I first mentioned River Valley Farm, that it was a big spread, that Mr. Clutter once said it cost him ten thousand dollars a week to run his operation. After that Dick never stopped asking me about Mr. Clutter, if he was a wealthy man, and about the family, how many kids were there? What ages would the kids be now? How do you get to the house? How was it laid out? Did Mr. Clutter keep a safe? I won’t deny it, I told him he did. Because I seemed to remember a sort of cabinet, or safe, or something right behind the desk in the room Mr. Clutter used as an office. Next thing I knew Dick was talking about killing Mr. Clutter. Said him and Perry was gonna go out there and rob the place, and they were going to kill all the witnesses. I never thought for a minute he meant to carry it out, thought it was just all talk.”
Floyd Wells was too afraid to tell anyone his story; after all it was he who told Dick about Mr. Clutter and where the house was located. He was afraid of being an accessory to the crime, so he did nothing. November turned into December, tortured by what he knew, he eventually confided to another prisoner who convinced him to tell the authorities. “I told the warden my story, and while I was still sitting there, right there in Warden Hand’s office, he picked up the telephone.”
That evening, when Dewey left his office in the courthouse at Garden City, he took home with him a manila envelope. At home, as his wife Marie was describing an unhappy episode involving the family cat, Alvin Dewey opened the envelope and his wife could tell that he was elated. Without comment, he gave her the manila envelope; she opened the envelope, and took out photographs of a blond young man and a dark-haired, dark-skinned young man - police-made "mug shots." A pair of semi-coded dossiers accompanied the photographs.
The one for the fair-headed man read: Hickock, Richard Eugene (WM) 28.
KBI 97 093; FBI 859 273A. Address: Edgerton, Kansas. Birth-date 6-6-31. Birthplace:
K. C., Kans. Height: 5-10. Weight: 175. Hair: Blond. Eyes: Blue. Build: Stout. Comp:
Ruddy. Occup: Car Painter. Crime: Cheat & Defr. & Bad Checks. Paroled: 8-13-59. By:
So. K. C. K.
The second description read: Smith, Perry Edward (WM) 27-59. Birthplace:
Nevada. Height: 5-4. Weight: 156. Hair: D. Brn. Crime: B&E. Arrested:(blank). By:
(blank). Disposition: Sent KSP 3-13-56 from Phil-lips Co .5-10 yrs. Rec .3-14-56.
Paroled: 7-6-59.
Dewey told her Floyd Wells' story, and at the end he said, "Funny. The past three weeks, that's the angle we've concentrated on. Tracking down every man who ever worked on the Clutter place. Now, the way it's turned out, it just seems like a piece of luck. But a few days more and we would've hit this Wells. Found he was in prison. We would've got the truth then. Hell, yes." "Maybe it isn't the truth," Marie said. Dewey and the eighteen men assisting him had pursued hundreds of leads to barren destinations, and she hoped to warn him against another disappointment, for she was worried about his health. His state of mind was bad; he was emaciated; and he was smoking sixty cigarettes a day. "No. Maybe not," Dewey said. "But I have a hunch."