The Garden City Telegram
Email this story | Add Your Comment
| Read (0) Comments
'A moral imperative'
Published 11/13/2009 in Local News
By SHAJIA AHMAD
In author Truman Capote's words, residents at the murder trial of Richard Hickock and Perry Edward Smith couldn't believe that Don Cullivan -- a staid Catholic, successful engineer and father of three -- would travel 1,900 miles from Boston to stand on the side of an accused murderer.
Click to Purchase Photo Reprints!
Don Cullivan, of Boston, in a recent portrait. Cullivan, 80, still vividly remembers his time in Garden City in March 1960, when he was called as a character witness for murder suspect Perry Smith.
Click to Purchase Photo Reprints!
Nearly 50 years after he paid his own way to befriend an ex-convict on trial for four counts of first-degree murder, the now 80-year-old Cullivan returned to Garden City in July, to revisit old places and in the hopes of running across a few old faces.
Cullivan, described in Capote's "In Cold Blood," which chronicles the Clutter murders and ensuing trial, ¬ remembers being ignored by much of the community in March 1960, when he stood as a character witness for Smith, an old Army acquaintance, at the request of Smith's attorney, Arthur Fleming.
Some of those faces would not include the writer Truman Capote, Fleming, or Wendell and Josie Meiers, the undersheriff and his wife at the time of the March 1960 trial who lived in the top floor of the Finney County Courthouse, which once housed the jail where Smith and Hickock were locked away.
It was in that jail cell that Cullivan shared a dinner with his old friend, known to everyone else as a cold-blooded murderer, and in that jail cell that the man hanged by the state attempted to explain why he drove across Kansas to rob a prominent Holcomb farmer and ended up killing four innocent people in the process, he said.
"I believe Perry had aspirations that exceeded his situation," Cullivan explained. "He was an insurmountable dreamer and intent on finding buried treasure."
A "Time" magazine article on the murderous events in Holcomb and Hickock and Smith's Las Vegas, Nev., arrests that published before the trial had caught Cullivan's eye. He was startled and began to think back to the days when he knew Smith in the fall of 1951, when they were assigned to the 761st Engineer Light Equipment Company in Fort Lewis, Wash.
As Cullivan wrote in a letter to Smith, reprinted in Capote's book, the visitor wanted to help in any way that he could.
And he did, he recalls now, because he felt a "moral imperative to do so."
"I asked my boss to allow me the time off to come here for the trial. He was a preacher, sympathetic, and a charitable Christian," Cullivan said. "Perry was so starved for friendship. Anyone who put a hand out to him, he would probably have taken it."
As Capote recounted, Cullivan's first letter arrived at Smith's cell one mid-February morning in 1960, post-marked Reading, Mass.:
"The name meant nothing, but Perry at once recognized the face in the photograph of a young soldier with crew-cut hair and round, very earnest eyes. He read the letter many times; though he found the religious allusions unpersuasive ... he was thrilled by it. Here was someone offering help, a sane and respectable man who had once known and liked him, a man who signed himself friend.
Gratefully, in great haste, he started a reply: "Dear Don, Hell yes I remember Don Cullivan..."
A small role
Cullivan, now the father of five grown children and a retiree who still hails from Massachusetts, got several pages in Capote's novel detailing his visit to Garden City during the trial and his time with Smith in his cell.
However, the character witness with "a face rather difficult to recall" by Capote had only a mere few minutes on the witness stand during a testimony that prosecutors ruled as irrelevant and immaterial, and perhaps "immoral," Cullivan speculated.
"I expect (the prosecution) would remember me as one of the two useless witnesses for Perry at the trial. The other was Perry's Indian friend, Joe James I believe his name was," Cullivan wrote in an e-mail.
Bob Greer, a former Telegram reporter who covered the famous murder trial six months after having moved to Garden City, remembers the methodical and "rather short" defense case for the two murderers on trial.
Greer, who stayed with the daily newspaper for the following 18 years, said he spoke with Cullivan one afternoon during the trial and was surprised to meet a fellow "who was very positive toward Perry Smith."
"He was very religious, just like pretty much everyone else in the area," said Greer, who is now 83 and the publisher of a weekly newspaper out of Protection. "He knew (Smith) before all of this, and it seemed like he was here to help in any way he could."
Visiting hours
It may have been Don Cullivan's intention to help his old friend spiritually when he flew to Kansas five decades ago, but his more recent journey can only be described as nostalgic and sentimental.
During his trip to Garden City in July, Cullivan drove with his grown son, Brian, to see familiar sites, including the still-standing Windsor Hotel where Smith's attorney booked Cullivan a room; the Finney County Courthouse, where he sat and spoke with Smith during recesses of a heated weeklong trial; the now-shuttered Warren Hotel, where a chance meeting with Capote and Harper Lee, who accompanied her writing colleague, took place; the Valley View Cemetery, where the Clutter family is laid to rest; and the home of longtime Garden City residents Clifford Hope Jr. and Dolores Hope, the former who was Herb Clutter's attorney and the latter who was also once a former Telegram reporter and was well-acquainted with her husband's legal client.
In the quaint, one-and-a-half story bungalow on Gillespie Place where beautiful old homes and majestic trees line the Garden City street, Cullivan, his son and the Hopes gathered to share stories about the people and events that chanced their July meeting.
It was right after he arrived by bus to Garden City from Wichita in the early morning hours of March 24, 1960, that Cullivan took a quick shower at his Windsor Hotel room before heading to the courthouse, already two days into the trial, Cullivan told the Hopes.
Inside the crowded main courtroom, Cullivan greeted the man he once described as "short, solidly built, dark with a heavy shock of black hair," and whom some Army colleagues would call "Eskimo."
"I sat down right next to him. I hadn't seen him in more than seven years," Cullivan said. "This guy had to be one of the loneliest guys I've ever seen."
Over the course of the trial, Cullivan met with Smith in his cell three times. Sometimes they talked about non-issues to distract themselves or reminisced about their days together at Fort Lewis.
During one of his lengthier visits with Smith -- which Capote also chronicled in his account -- Josie Meier, the undersheriff's wife, cooked the pair a goose dinner and lent them her best linens. Cullivan and Smith ate side-by-side inside the cell because there were no chairs, Cullivan recalled. And during that visit, Smith walked his only friend through the disastrous turn of events on the evening of Nov. 15, 1959.
"He said he became overwhelmed and burdened and that the whole thing was a fiasco. He realized there was no safe and no money while Herb Clutter was down in the cellar," Cullivan said. "He said, 'Why am I doing this? Why? Because Dick is saying we got to.' There's no way I can convey to you how I felt. He was so angry, and he told me it's like it was Dick, that he was Dick, when he grabbed the shotgun from Dick and before everything turned into a mad, horrible mess."
Cullivan said Smith -- the man he once wrote to and described as having "a grin on (his) face almost all the time" during their Army days and with "a wild streak in (him)," as well -- confessed he came close to shooting Hickock, his partner in crime, as well, but decided not to lest it connect him to the Clutter murders.
"He told me he couldn't explain any of it, that it was such an irrational thing to do," Cullivan said.
A soul worth saving
Among the pictures, correspondences and newspaper clippings Cullivan has saved over the decades, he pulled out a black-and-white photograph taken sometime in the 1950s of Smith smiling in front of the lodge he helped his father, John "Tex" Smith, build on the old Alaskan-Canadian Highway at the Hopes' home in Garden City.
On the back of the faded image, an inscription written in dark ink and ornate cursive letters reads as follows: "To my unforgettable friend 'Don.' I'll always remember! 'Perry.'" The message is dated March 28, 1960, one day before an all-male jury handed Smith and Hickock guilty verdicts and fatal sentences: death by hanging.
When the trial was over a week after it had begun, Cullivan prepared to catch a reserved bus back to Wichita and hop on a plane to Boston.
"They let me go up and see Perry one last time, and I remember our meeting," he told the Hopes in July. "We held hands through the bars. He gritted his teeth, and his head went down. And that was the last time I saw him."
Cullivan said he was able to write to Smith during his nearly five years of detention at the Lansing Correctional Facility, depending on the attitude of the warden, though they exchanged few letters before Smith and Hickock were hanged April 14, 1965.
"Perry always said the nuns and priests had had their chance with him," Cullivan wrote in an e-mail, referring to the dysfunctional life of a man of mixed Irish and Cherokee ancestry, the son of an abusive father and an alcoholic mother who died when he was 13. At least two and perhaps three of Smith's siblings committed suicide as young adults, and he was raised in Catholic orphanages and detention homes, where he allegedly suffered physical and emotional abuse, he told Capote.
Though Cullivan admitted there would probably never be any kind thoughts about the troubled man in Holcomb or Garden City, there was another side to Smith that few people knew, he said.¬
"The artist, the classic handwriting, the poet, the dreamer and gatherer of treasure maps, the defender of Nancy Clutter from the would-be rapist that night ... I always wondered, in our long talks in his cell, how I would have turned out as a human being if I had lived his life," Cullivan said in an e-mail.¬ Dolores Hope agreed.
"How the whole thing happened out of these two guys having this idea," she said to Cullivan in July before her words trailed off. "Even though they killed, they had some soul worth saving."
Cullivan said he believes Capote, who extensively interviewed and befriended Smith and also befriended Cullivan during his time in Garden City, had similar sentiments and "such empathy for Perry."
A planned encounter between Cullivan, his wife and Capote at a New York City nightclub, Trudy Heller's, in June 1965, was a pleasant surprise for the couple who toured the town with the famous writer.
"He hunched down, he looked up at us, and there was a tear rolling down his face. And he said, 'What a wasted life,'" Cullivan recalled. "'If any one of us had to go through that life, I don't know if we'd have turned out much better.'"
Found 0 comment(s)!
Twitter Updates
