In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [159]
returned it with an indignant note: "Degenerate filth for filthy degenerate minds!"), and law literature. He consumed hours each day leafing through law books, compiling research that he hoped would help reverse his conviction. Also, in pursuit of the same cause he fired off a cannonade of letters to such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Kansas State Bar Association - letters attacking his trial as a "travesty of due process," and urging the recipients to aid him in his quest for a new trial. Perry was persuaded to draft similar pleas, but when Dick suggested that Andy follow their example by writing protests in his own behalf, Andrews replied, "I'll worry about my neck and you worry about yours." (Actually, Dick's neck was not the part of his anatomy that most immediately troubled him. "My hair is coming out by the handfuls," he confided in yet another letter to his mother. "I'm frantic. Nobody in our family was bald headed as I can recall, and it makes me frantic the idea of being an ugly old baldhead.") The Row's two night guards, arriving at work on an autumn evening in 1961, had a piece of news. "Well," one of them announced, "seems like you boys can expect company." The import of the remark was clear to his audience: it meant that two young soldiers, who had been standing trial for the murder of a Kansas railroad worker, had received the ultimate sentence. "Yessir," the guard said, confirming this, "they got the death penalty." Dick said, "Sure. It's very popular in Kansas. Juries hand it out like they were giving candy to kids." One of the soldiers, George Ronald York, was eighteen; his companion, James Douglas Latham, was a year older. They were both exceptionally personable, which perhaps explains why hordes of teen-aged girls had attended their trial. Though convicted of a single slaying, the pair had claimed seven victims in the course of a cross-country murder spree. Ronnie York, blond and blue-eyed, had been born and raised in Florida, where his father was a well-known, well-paid deep-sea diver. The Yorks had a pleasantly comfortable home life, and Ronnie, overloved and overpraised by his parents and a worshipful younger sister, was the adored center of it. Latham's back-ground was at the opposite extreme, being every bit as bleak as Perry Smith's. Born in Texas, he was the youngest child of fertile, moneyless, embattled parents who, when finally they separated, left their progeny to fend for themselves, to scatter hither and thither, loose and unwanted as bundles of Panhandle tumbleweed. At seventeen, in need of a refuge, Latham enlisted in the Army; two years later, found guilty of an AWOL offense, he was imprisoned in the stockade at Fort Hood, Texas. It was there that he met Ronnie York, who was also under sentence for having gone AWOL. Though they were very unlike - even physically, York being tall and phlegmatic, whereas the Texan was a short young man with foxy brown eyes animating a compact, cute little face - they found they shared at least one firm opinion: the world was hateful, and everybody in it would be better off dead. "It's a rotten world," Latham said. "There's no answer to it but meanness. That's all anybody understands - meanness. Burn down the man's barn - he'll understand that. Poison his dog. Kill him." Ronnie said Latham was "one hundred percent correct," adding, "Anyway, anybody you kill, you're doing them a favor." The first person they chose to so favor were two Georgia women, respectable housewives who had the misfortune to encounter York and Latham not long after the murderous pair escaped from the Fort Hood stockade, stole a pickup truck, and drove to Jacksonville, Florida, York's home town. The scene of the encounter was an Esso station on the dark outskirts of Jacksonville; the date was the night of May 29, 1961. Originally, the absconding soldiers had traveled to the Florida city with the intention of visiting York's family; once there, however, York decided it might be unwise to contact his parents; his father sometimes had quite a temper. He and Latham