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THE WATER TOWER still looms over the town much as it did on November 15, 1959, the longhorn adorning it (mascot of the local school) bearing silent witness to a half century of small-town life. The railroad tracks still split the town in two and the train still doesn't stop as it runs east and west hauling grain and other commodities produced in the area. Hartman's Café (located "up on the highway") is now the El Rancho Café, and the post office ("down by the depot") houses a grocery store. The old post office, a tiny, one-story affair, was once affectionately referred to as "the federal building" by respectful townsfolk. Tyson Foods has built an enormous meat-packing plant on the outskirts of town, and the Sunflower Electric generating station is nearby, but most outsiders are likely to see the wheat plains, the farms and ranches, and know that Holcomb, Kansas really hasn't changed all that much since the murder of the Clutter family forever altered American illusions of small-town serenity.
Nothing in the backgrounds of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith would cause one to predict the impossible notoriety later bestowed upon them. They were small-time "hoods," the kind of men that bloat the roster of parole caseloads across the country. Hickock, age 28 at the time of the murders, born to God-fearing parents in eastern Kansas, grows up on a farm deemed humble by Kansas standards, and dreams of a college football scholarship. He is considered to be of above average intelligence and a very good athlete, but is an underachieving student and a discipline problem. The scholarship never materializes and Hickock drifts through a variety of jobs-railroad worker, auto mechanic, ambulance driver-and two marriages. He is involved in a serious car accident in 1950, leaving his face slightly lopsided, his eyes asymmetrical. His criminal record is undistinguished, consisting mainly of bad check charges and petty theft. On March 15, 1958, he is sentenced to five years in the State Penitentiary at Lansing, Kansas for the burglary of a home in Johnson County in which a rifle is taken. Hickock's prison record is clean, and it is dutifully noted that he is "not dangerous" (original notes from Kansas State Parole 1959).
Perry Smith's story...