added, pleading with the judge quite directly, "has matured rapidly in the past twenty years. The Federal courts are beginning to keep in tune with this science as related to people charged with criminal offenses. It just seems to me we have a golden opportunity to face up to the new concepts in this field." It was an opportunity the judge preferred to reject, for as a fellow jurist once remarked, "Tate is what you might call a law-book lawyer, he never experiments, he goes strictly by the text"; but the same critic also said of him, "If I were innocent, he's the first man I'd want on the bench; if I was guilty, the last." Judge Tate did not entirely deny the motion; rather, he did exactly all the law demanded by appointing a commission of three Garden City doctors and directing them to pronounce a verdict upon the mental capacities of the prisoners. (In due course the medical trio met the accused and, after an hour or so of conversational prying, announced that neither man suffered from any mental disorder. When told of their diagnosis, Perry Smith said, "How would they know? They just wanted to be entertained. Hear all the morbid details from the killer's own terrible lips. Oh, their eyes were shining." Hickock's attorney was also angry; once more he traveled to Lamed State Hospital, where he appealed for the unpaid services of a psychiatrist willing to go to Garden City and interview the defendants. The one man who volunteered, Dr. W. Mitchell Jones, was exceptionally competent; not yet thirty, a sophisticated specialist in criminal psychology and the criminally insane who had worked and studied in Europe and the United States, he agreed to examine Smith and Hickock, and, should his findings warrant it, testify in their behalf.) On the morning of March 14 counsels for the defense again stood before Judge Tate, there on this occasion to plead for a postponement of the trial, which was then eight days distant. Two reasons were given, the first was that a "most material witness," Hickock's father, was at present too ill to testify. The second was a subtler matter. During the past week a boldly lettered notice had begun to appear in the town's shop windows, and in banks, restaurants, and at the railroad station; and it read: H. W. CLUTTER ESTATE AUCTION SALE 21 MARCH 1960 AT THE CLUTTER HOMESTEAD. "Now," said Harrison Smith, addressing the bench, "I realize it is almost impossible to prove prejudice. But this sale, an auction of the victim's estate, occurs one week from today - in other words, the very day before the trial begins. Whether that's prejudicial to the defendants I'm not able to state. But these signs, coupled with newspaper advertisements, and advertisements on the radio, will be a constant reminder to every citizen in the community, among whom one hundred and fifty have been called as prospective jurors." Judge Tate was not impressed. He denied the motion without comment.
Earlier in the year Mr. Clutter's Japanese neighbor, Hideo Ashida, had auctioned his farming equipment and moved to Nebraska. The Ashida sale, which was considered a success, attracted not quite a hundred customers. Slightly more than five thousand people attended the Clutter auction. Holcomb's citizenry expected an unusual turnout - the Ladies' Circle of the Holcomb Community Church had converted one of the Clutter barns into a cafeteria stocked with two hundred homemade pies, two hundred and fifty pounds of hamburger meat, and sixty pounds of sliced ham - but no one was prepared for the largest auction crowd in the history of western Kansas. Cars converged on Holcomb from half the counties in the state, and from Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas, Nebraska. They came bumper to bumper down the lane leading to River Valley Farm. It was the first time the public had been permitted to visit the Clutter place since the discovery of the murders, a circumstance which explained the presence of perhaps a third of the immense congregation - those who had come out of curiosity. And of course the weather was an aid to attendance, for by mid-March winter's high