Richard Hickock

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Richard (Dick) Eugene Hickock (June 6, 1931 – April 14, 1965) was one of two ex-convicts who murdered the four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas on 15 November 1959, a crime made famous by Truman Capote in his 1966 non-fiction novel In Cold Blood. Together with Perry Smith, Hickock launched an invasion of the Clutter farmhouse, mistakenly believing that a large amount of money was kept in a safe.

[edit] The murders

Capote portrayed Hickock as the more hardened criminal of the pair, a sociopath who took sadistic pleasure in killing dogs and harbored (and frequently acted upon) pedophilic desires for pre-pubescent girls. According to Capote, who interviewed Hickock and Smith extensively from their initial imprisonment until their execution, Hickock enlisted Smith in the robbery because he did not want to leave witnesses, but thought himself incapable of killing; he was impressed by Smith's (fabricated) story of killing a black man on impulse, and thought he had found someone to do the dirty work for him.

Hickock first implicated Smith as responsible for all four murders, while Smith only admitted to cutting the throat of the father, Herbert Clutter, and to shooting both Herbert and Kenyon Clutter in the head with a shotgun at close range. Smith initially implicated Hickock as responsible for the murders of the women, Bonnie and Nancy Clutter. Alvin Dewey, the chief investigator of the murders, testified in court that Hickock insisted in his confession that Smith performed all the killings, while Smith first claimed Hickock killed the women, but later claimed to have shot them himself. Although Smith's revised confession coincided with Hickock's initial statement, Smith refused to testify in court (Hickock did the same) leading to a lack of an official record of who killed the women aside from Dewey's testimony outlining Hickock's confession, Smith's confession, and Smith's subsequent revision.

Hickock was captured in Las Vegas, Nevada in early January 1960. Hickock and Smith were executed by hanging on April 14, 1965 in Lansing, Kansas, after several appeals.

[edit] Film portrayals

Hickock was portrayed by Scott Wilson in the 1967 film version of In Cold Blood, Anthony Edwards in the 1996 miniseries adaptation of the original film, by Mark Pellegrino in 2005's Capote and by Lee Pace in 2006's Infamous.