Outlaws and Inlaws

Richard Hickok and Perry Smith (on left);  Robert Blake and Scott Wilson (on right)

On August 14, 1965, Richard Hickok and Perry Smith were hanged in Lansing, Kansas for the murders of Herb and Bonnie Clutter, and the Clutter's teenage kids, Nancy & Kenyon.   On November 15, 1959, ex-con's Hickok and Smith murdered the Clutter family after breaking into their rural Kansas home.  Falsely believing Herb Clutter kept a lot of cash around his farm home, Hickok and Smith fled the Clutter home after the murders with what they had hoped would be $10,000 and headed to Florida with what turned out to be only about $40 they had found in the Clutter home.   Truman Capote's 1966 book documenting the horrendous crime, In Cold Blood, put the Clutter's hometown of Holcomb, Kansas on the map in an unenviable way.

A little known fact is that I have a tie to the In Cold Blood killers by marriage.

On December 19, 1959, another horrendous crime took place in Osprey, Florida.  Cliff and Christine Walker, along with their two young children, were murdered in their Osprey home, located not far from Sarasota.  Though Smith and Hickok were captured in Las Vegas later that month, witnesses placed them in Sarasota on the day the Walker's were murdered.

Last week, the bones of the In Cold Blood killers were unearthed in Kansas.  Though it didn't mean much at the time, evidence found Walker home in 1959, including hair follicles and semen, can now be matched against DNA samples taken from the killers bone fragments last week.

In 1967, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood book chronicling the sad tale of the Clutter murders spawned a movie by the same name.  In that movie, Robert Blake portrayed Perry Smith and Scott Wilson portrayed Richard Hickok.  Thankfully, THAT is my distant link to the killers.  Actor Scott Wilson is married to Heavenly Wilson, one of my wife's cousins.  Though Scott and Heavenly live in Hollywood, I met them in 2005 when they traveled to Missouri to film Saving Shiloh, the third in a series of movies featuring a precocious beagle named Shiloh.  In  that movie, Scott played Judd Travers, a grouchy, tobacco-spitting codger who didn't want Shiloh on his property.  (Insiders note - no real tobacco juice was spat in the film. Scott chewed black licorice instead, which produces a very tobacco-juice realistic stream of saliva.)

Throughout the years, Scott has appeared in dozens of well-known movies and TV shows, including In the Heat of the Night, Pearl Harbor, G.I. Jane, Monster, and The Last Samurai. He also played a casino owner in CSI-Las Vegas, a show my wife rarely missed. 

Scott is currently starring in a TV zombie show, The Walking Dead.  On that AMC drama, Scott portrays Hershel, a recovering alcoholic and farmer who is one of only a few survivors of a zombie apocalypse.  (My gosh, these days if the Mayans don't get you, the zombies will!)

So . . . as Scott stars in The Walking Dead, the bones of Perry Smith and the real Richard Hickok that Scott portrayed in 1967 may become "the talking dead", either exonerating them from the Walker murders or solving the 53-year-old murder case.

If you haven't seen the black and white classic In Cold Blood (and don't mind sleeping with the lights on for a few weeks), it is available on DVD.  Not exactly a holiday classic, but it is in the news these days.  And it might just reinforce why it's not a bad idea to keep a gun around the house for self-defense. 

Or possibly install a high-tech burglar alarm.

Or a moat filled with hungry alligators.