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By Root 511 0

had happened to a neighbor and his wife and children. It amazed them, it made them angry, and several of them - the pharmacist, the manager of the bowling alley - stared at the defendants with total contempt. The elder Mr. Hickock, wearily wagging his head, again and again murmured, "No sense. Just no sense having a trial." As the day's final witness, the prosecution had promised to pro-duce a "mystery man." It was the man who had supplied the information that led to the arrest of the accused: Floyd Wells, Hickock's former cellmate. Because he was still serving a sentence at Kansas State Penitentiary, and therefore was in danger of retaliation from other inmates, Wells had never been publicly identified as the informer. Now, in order that he might safely testify at the trial, he had been removed from the prison and lodged in a small jail in an adjacent county. Nevertheless, Wells' passage across the courtroom toward the witness stand was oddly stealthy - as though he expected to encounter an assassin along the way - and, as he walked past Hickock, Hickock's lips writhed as he whispered a few atrocious words. Wells pretended not to notice; but like a horse that has heard the hum of a rattlesnake, he shied away from the betrayed man's venomous vicinity. Taking the stand, he stared straight ahead, a somewhat chinless little farm boyish fellow wearing a very decent dark-blue suit which the State of Kansas had bought for the occasion - the state being concerned that its most important witness should look respectable, and consequently trustworthy. Wells' testimony, perfected by pre-trial rehearsal, was as tidy as his appearance. Encouraged by the sympathetic promptings of Logan Green, the witness acknowledged that he had once, for approximately a year, worked as a hired hand at River Valley Farm; he went on to say that some ten years later, following his conviction on a burglary charge, he had become friendly with another imprisoned burglar, Richard Hickock, and had described to him the Clutter farm and family.

"Now," Green asked, "during your conversations with Mr. Hickock what was said about Mr. Clutter by either of you?"

"Well, we talked quite a bit about Mr. Clutter. Hickock said he was about to be paroled, and he was going to go West looking for a job; he might stop to see Mr. Clutter to get a job. I was telling him how wealthy Mr. Clutter was."

"Did that seem to interest Mr. Hickock?"

"Well, he wanted to know if Mr. Clutter had a safe around there."

"Mr. Wells, did you think at the time there was a safe in the Clutter house?"

"Well, it has been so long since I worked out there. I thought there was a safe. I knew there was a cabinet of some kind. . . .The next thing I knew he [Hickock] was talking about robbing Mr. Clutter."

"Did he tell you anything about how he was going to commit the robbery?"

"He told me if he done anything like that he wouldn't leave no witnesses."

"Did he actually say what he was going to do with the witnesses?"

"Yes. He told me he would probably tie them up and then rob them and then kill them." Having established premeditation of great degree, Green left the witness to the ministrations of the defense. Old Mr. Fleming. a classic country lawyer more happily at home with land deeds than ill deeds, opened the cross-examination. The intent of his queries as he soon established, was to introduce a subject the prosecution had emphatically avoided: the question of Wells' own role in the murder plot, and his own moral liability.

"You didn't," Fleming said, hastening to the heart of the matter, "say anything at all to Mr. Hickock to discourage him from coming out here to rob and kill the Clutter family?"

"No. Anybody tells you anything about that up there [ Kansas State Penitentiary], you don't pay any attention to it because you think they are just talking anyway."

"You mean you talked that way and didn't mean anything? Didn't you mean to convey to him [Hickock] the idea that Mr. Clutter had a safe? You wanted Mr. Hickock to believe that, did you not?' In his quiet way, Fleming was giving the