Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - The Clutter Family, Robbery Gone Wrong Pt. 2

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

After the Clutter family was murdered in November, 1959, everyone in Holcomb, Kansas wanted to find out who killed them -- and why. The answer turned out to be more horrific than anyone imagined. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money and Murder to never miss a case! For Ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to Crime House+ on Apple Podcasts. Scams, Money and Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios 🎧 Need More to Binge?  Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Crime House Daily, Killer Minds, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts! Follow me on Social Instagram: @Crimehouse TikTok: @Crimehouse Facebook: @crimehousestudios X: @crimehousemedia YouTube: @crimehousestudios To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, Crime House community. It's Vanessa Richardson. Looking for another Crime House original podcast to add to your rotation, you will love Clues with Morgan Absher and Kaelin Moore. Every Wednesday, Morgan and Kaelin dig into the world's most notorious crimes, clue by clue, from serial killers to shocking murders. They follow the trail of clues, break down the evidence, and debate the theories. It's like hanging out with your smart and true crime-obsessed friends. Listen to Clues on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. After the Clutter family was murdered on November 15, 1959, life in Holcomb, Kansas was forever changed. People who had never hesitated to walk right up to their neighbor's doorsteps

now eyed each other with suspicion. By day, once friendly interactions were short and to the point, and at night doors that had once been unlocked were bolted shut. The people of Holcomb were surrounded by questions, and those questions ate at the community like poison. Why would something so awful, so savage, happened to a family who everybody loved. Who could have done it? And perhaps, worst of all, would it happen again? Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. It's not just a saying. It's a means of survival. because in the world we're entering trust is a trap, and betrayal is often fatal. I'm Carter Roy, and this is scams, money, and murder.

And I'm Vanessa Richardson. Every Thursday, we'll explore the story of a money-motivated crime gone wrong, whether it's a notorious con, fraud, burglary, or even murder. From the archives of Crime House, the show, Murder, True Crime Stories, and Killer Minds, These are some of our favorite cases that have kept us lying awake at night wondering, if money didn't make the world go round, could all this have been avoided? And as always, at Crime House, we want to express our gratitude to you, our community, for making this possible. Please support us by rating, reviewing, and following scams, money, and murder wherever you get your podcasts.

Today's case comes from the archives of murder, true crime stories. It's the second and final episode on the Clutter Family and how their murder in a botched burglary shook a small town and a nation to its core. Last time, we examined the clutter family, the horrific scene of their murders, and the beginning of the investigation into what happened. Today, we're going to look at the other side of this crime

and examine the murderers, their trial, and their ultimate fate. And we'll be trying to answer the question that has, has haunted a small town for generations. Why did they do it? All that and more coming up. Canada's Wonderland is bringing the holiday magic this season with Winterfest on select nights now through January 3rd. Step into a winter wonderland filled with millions of dazzling lights, festive shows, rides, and holiday treats. Plus, Coca-Cola is back.

Canada's Kindest Community, celebrating Acts of Kindness nationwide with a chance at 100,000 donation for the winning community and a 2026 holiday caravan stop. Learn more at canadaswunderland.com. On November 14, 1959, the morning before the clutter family was murdered, two men were preparing to drive 400 miles to the front door of River Valley Farm in Holcomb, Kansas. The story of their journey begins where part one of our story left off, where the prisoner named Floyd Wells and a chance encounter that would change hundreds of lives. Shortly before, the clutters were killed,

Wells was serving a three-to-five-year prison sentence for robbery in Kansas State Penitentiary, when he met a man named Richard Eugene Hickok, known as Dick, to his friends. As many criminals do, Hickok had a troubled past, although it hadn't started out that way. Even though Hickok came of age during the hardship of the Great Depression, he and his little brother Walter were able to play sports, go to school, and practice marksmanship. Dick was an incredible shot, and he was fond of showing off a trick where he shot a can of baby food off the top of his little brother's head. But then in 1950, at the age of 18 or 19, Hickok was in a car accident that came within a hair's breadth of killing him.

After the wreck, his eyes were off center, his smile was crooked, and he became impulsive and irrational in ways he hadn't been before. Following a days-long hospital stay, Hickok's medical bills began piling up, which slowly led him to. down a path of ever riskier behavior. He began gambling and passing bad checks to cover his debts. He got married, cheated, and got married again, fathering three children over two divorces before his crimes caught up with him, and he found himself in the state penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas for passing bad checks. It was there that he heard the name Clutter for the very first time. While he was in prison, Hickok was cellmates with Floyd Wells.

As the two men got to know each other, Wells mentioned that he'd worked as a farmhand at a place called River Valley Farm. Wells had liked Herb Clutter and was impressed by his disciplined work ethic and his generosity. Wells would later recall that Herb was always willing to be. to loan his employees a few bucks if they needed an advance ahead of payday. Based on that, Wells gathered that the clutters were very rich, and crucially, that River Valley Farm was never short on cash. And when Wells spent some time in a cell with Dick Hickok in the 1950s, he told Hickok about the farmer, his family, and the safe her clutter allegedly kept under his desk

that contained the modern equivalent of $100,000 in cash. According to Wells, Hickok quickly became obsessed with the clutter family, forcing his cellmate to describe the layout of the house over and over again until he had it completely memorized. Hickok would talk about driving to River Valley Farm and robbing the place blind. Wells figured it was all talk. Hickok was eventually released,

and Wells forgot about him, until the day he heard on the radio that the clutter family had been murdered. Wells was certain that Dick Hickok was responsible for killing the clutters, and he was certain that another former inmate, a man named Perry Edward Smith, had been in on it too. Harry Smith was born in 1928 in Huntington, Nevada,

to violent, unpredictable parents who traveled the rodeo circuit. When Smith was six, his parents separated, and at first he followed his mother to San Francisco. Smith's life in California was just as unstable as his life on the road, if not more so. His mother suddenly seemed no longer interested in raising her children. Smith and his siblings found themselves in and out of foster care, where he was allegedly subjected to repeated abuse at the hands of the people entrusted with his well-being.

fleeing California, Smith followed his father across the western United States as a teenager, venturing as far afield as Alaska to search for gold. In some ways, it was an obvious improvement, but Smith's father, like his son, was prone to sudden aggressive outbursts and any calm between the two rarely lasted. It seemed like wherever Smith went, violence, and instability followed him. At the age of 16, Smith enlisted in the military, and he went on to serve in the Korean War. Upon his discharge in 1952, around the age of 24, he settled in the Pacific Northwest. But any sense of calm he might have acquired there was shattered by a moment.

motorcycle accident that broke his legs in five places. A six-month hospital stay ensued, followed by another six months on crutches and a year of rehab. But even after that, Smith's knees barely worked, and the pain in his limbs was often unbearable. Smith was constantly dosing himself with aspirin, and he was particularly fond of the candy-coated variety which he would crunch between his teeth like mints. By the time Smith was sent to the penitentiary in Lansing in 1956 for jailbreak, car theft, and grand larceny, he was permanently disabled. When Hickok first met Smith behind the bars of the Kansas State Penitentiary,

he didn't think too much of the other man. He thought he was too sensitive. But then one day Smith bragged to him about being. leading a man to death in Las Vegas, and Hickok's opinion changed. He saw Smith as a natural killer that he could use to his advantage. But perhaps he saw something else, too. Both men were scarred, damaged, and unpredictable, prone to dark thoughts and violent outbursts. Perhaps Hickok saw in Smith a perverse kind of kindred spirit.

it. Maybe that's why when it was time to put his plan to rob the clutters in motion, Perry Smith was the man that Hickok called on. That was how Dick Hickok and Perry Smith wound up in a car together, barreling down the highway with a plan to steal thousands of dollars and not leave a single witness behind. Sometime in late November of 1959, Kansas Bureau of Investigation Agent Alvin Dewey got a phone call from his boss, Logan Sanford. Dewey was leading the investigation into the clutter family murders,

and Sanford was about to help him crack the case right open. He just spoke in to Floyd Wells, who told Sanford all about Dick Higgins. Hickok and Perry Smith. As soon as he got off the phone, Dewey tracked down Hickok and Smith's mugshots and learned everything he could about them. Hickok was still living with his parents

in a town a few hundred miles away from Holcomb. Dewey sent one of his investigators over there right away. A few hours later, Agent Harold Nye was sitting in Hickok's parents' living room. The couple told Agent Nye that their son had been a fine boy who'd never dreamed of hurting anyone until he was sent to prison. They claimed that people there had put violent ideas in his head. The Hickox detested anyone their son knew from his time inside the state penitentiary,

particularly that short fellow he'd brought around a few times, the one with a dark complexion, and the habit of chewing aspirin like candy. Agent Nye guided the conversation to the weekend of the 14th when the clutters were killed. The Hickok said that their son had left town on Saturday and returned the next day, the 15th, ravenously hungry and too tired to stay awake for a basketball game on TV. As the Hickok family talked, Agent Nye's eyes wandered over to a 12-gauge shotgun propped up in the corner of the room.

Agent Nye picked it up, and Mr. Hickok told him the gun belonged to his son. Returning to the conversation, Nye put the gun back where he'd found it, even though he felt certain that it was a murder weapon. For the next several weeks, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation team led by Agent Dewey quietly pursued Hickok and Smith across North America. The two men were hard to track, and Dewey didn't want them to know he was on their trail. Hickok and Smith had no idea they'd been identified. If they found out, Dewey feared they'd disappear completely, as he told his colleagues,

quote, the safer they feel, the sooner will grab them. And so Agent Dewey kept the people of Holcomb in the dark, leaving them to speculate about the case. For the rest of 1959, the Clutter family murder was all the people in town could talk about, and that proved very useful to a new arrival on Holcomb, an author named Truman Capote. Back home in New York, the story of what happened to the clutters, caught Capote's attention, and he traveled halfway across the country to write about it. At first, the people of Hulcom didn't quite know what to make of Truman Capote. He was five foot four inches and openly gay, with a high, squeaky, and flashy voice.

Nancy Clutter's boyfriend, Bobby Rupp, was one of the first people to talk to the author and said that, quote, he was not the kind of person I wanted to spend time with. Capote's companion, on the other hand, made a better first impression. Harper Lee had been a friend of Capote's since childhood. She had agreed to accompany him as a sort of research assistant, despite having recently filed the final manuscript for her soon-to-be famous book to kill a mockingbird.

Unlike her big-city companion, Lee could still easily tap into the small-town mannerisms from her childhood spent in Alabama. The people of Holcomb found Lee a little easier to talk to, and her diplomatic approach netted Capote a number of interviews. In fact, for the only interview Bobby Rupp ever gave to Truman Capote, he remembered Lee asking most of the questions. Working together, the pair eventually worked their way into the town's good graces.

They eventually got so popular, Capote bragged to a friend back in New York that he was, quote, practically the mayor. But without a doubt, the writer's most valuable friendship in town was the one he forged with Agent Alvin Dewey. That was how he was able to gain so much insider access into the investigation, and the search for the two men Dewey believed were responsible for killing the clutters. and it was how Capote and Lee wound up in the Dewey family living room one late December night when Dewey got a call from the Las Vegas police. They had news about two men who'd been caught driving a stolen car. Earlier that day, Dick Hickok and Perry Smith had been recognized by two police officers outside of a Nevada post office.

Smith had been inside retrieving a box he'd mailed himself, which included, among other things, an old pair of boots. When the Kansas agents arrived a few days later, Hickok and Smith still believed they were being held over a stolen car and a string of bad checks. They had no idea the agent suspected them for the clutter family murders, and the agents wanted to keep it that way. After splitting the two men up, Agent Harold Nye and Roy Church questioned Dick Hickok for several hours. They let him run through the events of the last several weeks, months, even years of his life. Hickok prided himself on his excellent recall of even the most minor details, and the agents were happy to let him show off. That is, until he arrived at the end of a particularly little.

long story, and Agent Church lazily put his hands together and said, My guess you know I were here. In his report, Agent Nye would later write that Hickok had a, quote, intense visible reaction to being accused of killing the clutters, and Perry Smith was about to receive a similar shock in the interrogation cell just one room over. Smith was in the middle of an interrogation with agents Alvin Dewey and Clarence Dunst. And just like Hickok, Smith was caught completely off guard when Agent Dunst leaned in and told him they knew he'd murdered the clutters.

Neither suspect confessed that day, and so both men were sent back to separate cells where the agents from Kansas were perfectly content to let them. them stew overnight. Agent Dewey and his team still knew that without a confession, they barely had a case. And in order to get it, they had to reveal the only physical evidence they had collected so far. For almost three hours the next day, Church and Nye circled around their point with Hickok. Once they believed the time was right, they showed the suspect two things. The first was a photograph from the crime scene, showing a set of boot prints in the basement where Herb and Kenyan clutter were murdered. The second was the pair of boots that Smith had picked up at the

post office the day they were arrested. The police were able to confirm that these boots matched the prints in the basement, and they belonged to Dick Hickok. Nye and Church were taking a risk. This was the only card they had to play, showing them that Hickok was a gamble. And it paid off. Hickok and Smith told the investigators everything. They admitted to killing the clutters and what happened at River Valley Farm during the early morning hours of November 15, 1959. And the truth was more horrifying than anyone could imagine. It's one of Britain's most notorious crimes, the killing of a wealthy family at White House Farm.

But I got a tip that the story of this famous case might be all wrong. I know there's going to be a twist, won't they, a massive twist. At every level of the criminal justice system, there's been a cover-up in this case. I'm Heidi Blake. Blood Relatives is a new series from In the Dark and the New York. find it now in the in the dark podcast feed in the first few weeks of january 1960 the residents of holcomb heard the names dick hickok and perry smith for the first time when it was announced on the radio that they'd been extradited back to kansas to stand trial for killing the clutters the trial began on march 22nd

1960. Even though the two men had confessed, there was still the question of whether they'd be given the death penalty. The details that emerged finally helped answer the questions that had been consuming the town of Holcomb for over four months. Over the course of the trial, the prosecution revealed exactly what happened at River Valley Farm in those early morning hours of November 15th, 1959. According to Hickok and Smith's confessions, when the two men arrived at the clutter's home that night, they entered through a door to Herb's office. It wasn't locked. Hickok was carrying a knife while Smith held a shotgun. Floyd Wells had been very specific about where the safe was at the back of the office behind the desk. A try as the two-interested.

intruders might, they couldn't find it. There was no safe. There was no $10,000. But even though there would be no big score for Dick Hickok and Perry Smith, they were determined to not leave any witnesses. The first member of the clutter family to be awoken was Herb, who came to with a flashlight shining in his face. He was led into the office. at gunpoint, where he explained, again, that there was no safe and there was no cash. He offered to give the criminals the money in his wallet and write them a check so long as they left his family in peace, but that wasn't good enough for Dick Hickok and Perry Smith. Herb was led into the basement, where he was hog-tied and laid out on the concrete floor

while the rest of his family was woken up one by one. His wife Bonnie was bound and gagged and led to the bathroom. His son Kenyon was marched downstairs to join his father before being bound and laid out on a sofa in a separate room. And Herb's daughter Nancy had her hands and feet tied while she lay in bed in her nightgown. A strange thing began to happen though. once the criminals had control of the family,

there were small moments where they tried to make the clutters more comfortable. They gave Bonnie a chair. They gave Kenyon a pillow. Herb got some cardboard to lie on, and Nancy was tucked into bed. It was almost as if Hickok and Smith's better natures were fighting with their darkest impulses. But tragically, the latter won out. Hickok had always been the talker, the planner, but he wasn't much of a doer, especially when it came to violence.

That was where Smith came in. Hickok had the knife, but he couldn't bring himself to cut Herb's throat. And when he hesitated, Smith took the knife and went to do it himself. But for all his bravado, Smith didn't want to do it either. Hickok didn't intervene, and Smith took Herb Clutter's life. From there, the killers went from room to room. Next was Kenyon, killed where he lay on the sofa. Then it was back upstairs, where Nancy Clutter lay in bed with the covers drawn up to her

shoulders. And then finally, Bonnie, having been led gently back into her bedroom, was killed in her bed. The two men went back outside into the night. Whatever else transpired, at least one thing had gone according to plan. They hadn't left any witnesses. But in the process,

they had left behind a bloody boot print and some tire tracks. And in the end, that was all the investigators needed to catch them. Once the defense and the prosecution had made their arguments, it only took the jury 40 minutes to make a decision. When the 12 men returned, the verdict was read by the judge. Guilty on all four counts. The sentence?

Death. Hickok and Smith spent the next five years appealing the decision. They received early assistance in their efforts from Truman Capote. who became almost friendly with the two men despite writing a book about their crimes. For years afterward, people would speculate about his relationship with Perry Smith, with some even whispering that it was romantic or sexual in nature, whatever the case. It's possible that in his quest to write the story of the clutter murders, Capote allowed himself to become a part of it.

but despite the involvement of a famous author, in the end, Hickok and Smith's luck ran out. Both men were escorted to the gallows and hanged on April 14th, 1965. Even after the bodies of Hickok and Smith were taken down from the gallows, the events of November 15, 1959, continued to reverberate. To this day,

people wonder whether Hickok and Smith were responsible for another crime in Florida, where a family of four were all shot at close range. That case remains unsolved. Dick Hickok's brother would describe decades later how he was passed over for jobs and shunned by his neighbors, just because of his last name, Larry Hendricks, the high school English teacher who discovered the bodies of Herb, Kenyan, Nancy and Bonnie Clutter, would leave Holcomb for Alaska. And Truman Capote, who captured the story of what happened to the clutters so beautifully

in his book, In Cold Blood, would die years later from complications due to alcoholism. People speculated that he drank himself to death because he was haunted by the memory of Perry Smith and how close he'd let himself become to a condemned man. others would say it was guilt from profiting off the misery of others. Whatever the circumstances were, the story of the clutters was his last book. The murders of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon clutter are a tragic example of how suddenly a violent crime can tear the fabric of a community. The sheer senselessness of it all taught the people of Holcomb, Kansas, to never take anything for granted. Herb and Bonnie should have grown old, surrounded by their children and grandchildren.

Nancy and Kenyon should have gone off to college with a chance to experience the world beyond River Valley Farm. Instead, the clutter family lost their lives because two greedy men couldn't control. their worst impulses, and the scars left from their deaths will never truly heal. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Scans, Money, and Murder. If you enjoyed this episode, you can check out more just like it by searching for Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcast. Cams, Money, and Murder is a Crime House original. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram.

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