July 30, 2025 • 63 mins
In this haunting episode of The Guilty Files: Rewired, Dani pulls back the layers of the infamous Clutter family murders—not just to revisit the crime, but to reimagine the emotional and psychological shockwave it left behind.This isn’t a retelling of the facts—that’s already been done.
Instead, Dani dives deep into the psyche of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the two drifters whose fractured paths led them to one brutal night in Holcomb, Kansas. What made them tick? How did childhood trauma, cycles of poverty, and a hunger for significance culminate in the cold-blooded execution of a family they’d never met?But the story doesn’t end there.
Dani also explores the impact of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood—how it blurred the lines between journalism and narrative, empathy and exploitation. Was Capote shining a light on the forgotten corners of the justice system, or was he romanticizing killers for the sake of literary fame?
Through speculative storytelling, psychological analysis, and a few chilling “what ifs,” Dani rewires this case with fresh questions:
What if someone had intervened in Perry’s youth?
What if the Clutters had never opened their door that night?
What if In Cold Blood had never been written?This episode reimagines the Clutter murders not just as a crime—but as a mirror reflecting the fragility of safety, the failings of society, and the cost of trying to humanize the inhumane.
Content Warning: Contains discussion of murder, trauma, and speculative depictions of violence.
🎧 Listen now on your favorite podcast platform.
💭 For deeper dives and exclusive bonus content, join us on Patreon.
📘 Follow @TheGuiltyFiles for behind-the-scenes insights and upcoming episodes.
Instead, Dani dives deep into the psyche of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the two drifters whose fractured paths led them to one brutal night in Holcomb, Kansas. What made them tick? How did childhood trauma, cycles of poverty, and a hunger for significance culminate in the cold-blooded execution of a family they’d never met?But the story doesn’t end there.
Dani also explores the impact of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood—how it blurred the lines between journalism and narrative, empathy and exploitation. Was Capote shining a light on the forgotten corners of the justice system, or was he romanticizing killers for the sake of literary fame?
Through speculative storytelling, psychological analysis, and a few chilling “what ifs,” Dani rewires this case with fresh questions:
What if someone had intervened in Perry’s youth?
What if the Clutters had never opened their door that night?
What if In Cold Blood had never been written?This episode reimagines the Clutter murders not just as a crime—but as a mirror reflecting the fragility of safety, the failings of society, and the cost of trying to humanize the inhumane.
Content Warning: Contains discussion of murder, trauma, and speculative depictions of violence.
🎧 Listen now on your favorite podcast platform.
💭 For deeper dives and exclusive bonus content, join us on Patreon.
📘 Follow @TheGuiltyFiles for behind-the-scenes insights and upcoming episodes.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, true crime lovers, Welcome back to The Guilty Files
True Crime Rewired, the podcast where we take one crime,
two perspectives, and create endless intrigue. I'm Danny, your guide
for the second act of this case, where we take
the hard facts from earlier this week and twist them
into something unexpected, daring, and just a little wicked. Think
(00:30):
of me as your pilot through the tangled web of
true crime, with the side of sass and a dash
of drama to keep you hooked. At The Guilty Files
True Crime Rewritten. We believe every crime has two sides
to the story, and every listener deserves the thrill of both.
So sit back, lean in, and let's rewrite the narrative.
(00:52):
Because true crime isn't just meant to be solved, It's
meant to be explored. Let's get started. When we think
of American innocence, we picture wheat fields, Sunday dinners, a
(01:15):
father who works with his hands, a mother who keeps
a warm house, and kids with futures as bright as
the sun over Holcombe, Kansas. But in November of nineteen
fifty nine, that illusion was shattered, and in its place
a story that has haunted America for over sixty years.
(01:36):
Earlier this week, you just heard the truth meticulously laid
out by my co host Brian in The Guilty Files uncovered.
What happened to the Clutter Family was real, it was brutal,
it was senseless. But tonight we flip that file inside out.
Welcome to The Guilty Files. True Crime Rewired, the show
(01:58):
where we take real crimes, reimagine key moments, and examine
them through the lens of psychology, sociology, and yes entertainment.
I'm your host, Danny, former Atlanta beatcop, now fully rewired.
This isn't fan fiction. It's forensics meets possibility. It's not
(02:19):
about disrespecting the truth. It's about confronting the what ifs
and the what nows. Tonight we explore the Clutter Family
murders in a way you've never heard before. Ten Acts,
ten Alternate Lenses. Ten Rewired takes on one of America's
darkest nights. Some of what you're about to hear is true,
(02:42):
some of it is hypothetical, and all of it is
designed to get you thinking. So buckle in because we're
about to head back to River Valley Farm with fresh
eyes and open mind and no illusions. All right, before
we get theatrical, let's get grounded, because if we're going
to re wire this thing, we need to know what
(03:03):
we're rewiring now. Brian already took you through the Clutter
case like a man with a badge in one hand
and an evidence bag in the other. I mean that
man broke it down like a courtroom PowerPoint. But let
me do what I do best and give you the
too long, didn't read version Danny style. This was the
(03:23):
case that made the American Midwest clutch its pearls. Nineteen
fifty nine, Holcombe, Kansas. Picture it wide skies, tight values,
and the kind of town where people left their doors
unlocked because nothing like that ever happens here until it did.
Herb Clutter was the picture of respectability. A wealthy, church
(03:46):
going farmer with a reputation so clean you could eat
off it. His wife, Bonnie, was struggling silently with debilitating depression,
mostly confined to her bed. Their teenage kids, Nan and
Kenyon bright, kind, full of potential, and tragically on borrowed time.
(04:06):
Enter two ex cons, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, a
con man and a dreamer, one slick, one broken. Both dangerous.
They roll up on the Clutter home in the middle
of the night, chasing a prison rumor some fantasy about
a safe full of cash. Spoiler alert. There was no safe,
(04:28):
there was no fortune, there was no plan B. So
instead of a robbery, they left four people dead, bound, gagged,
executed in their own home. They walked in looking for
money and walked out with what forty bucks, a radio,
some binoculars, and four souls that never saw Sunday morning.
(04:49):
The nation lost its collective mind and holcombe. It never
really put itself back together. The killers were caught, tried,
and executed. Justice technically was served, but what they left
behind was more than just bloodstains and grief. They left
behind cracks in the system, in the psyche, in the narrative,
(05:12):
we tell ourselves about where evil lives and where it doesn't.
So yes, the Clutter murders were solved, but where they understood.
That's where I come in, because now that the foundations set,
we're gonna shake the walls. I've got ten acts, ten
fresh lenses, and a whole lot of SaaS queued up.
So grab your seat belt and your critical thinking cap,
(05:34):
because up next is Act one. The daughter who survived.
Let's rewire. So here's the question that's been scratching at
the inside of my skull since the first time I
read this case file. What if someone made it out?
I know, I know, that's not what the autopsy reports say,
that's not in Brian's files. But hear me out. We're
(05:57):
storytellers here on rewired stenographers, and sometimes what didn't happen
tells us just as much as what did. So in
tonight's opening act, I want to start with a ghost.
Only she's not dead, she's just missing. Welcome to Act one.
The daughter who survived. Let's imagine this. Evianna Clutter, the
(06:20):
oldest daughter, twenty three years old at the time of
the murders, newly married, newly pregnant, one foot in adulthood,
one still tethered to that house on the plains. Now,
historically she wasn't home that night, that's the record, But
what if she was. What if she had a falling
out with her husband, something small but earthshaking, a slammed door,
(06:46):
a drive that went too far, and she ends up
at River Valley Farm just after sunset, hoping no one's
still mad about whatever silly thing tore her loose. Only
she's not met with forgets. She's met with footsteps, rope, gun, metal,
whispered threats. So she hides, and I mean really hides.
(07:09):
Not under the bed, not in a closet. I'm talking
survival mode, crawling into the narrow crawl space under the
floorboards of her childhood bedroom, the one she used to
slide dolls into when she was supposed to be cleaning,
the one only she remembers. And from that dark space,
Evanna hears everything. Her father's calm voice, her mother's ragged breath,
(07:34):
Nancy's plea, Kenyon's silence, the shots, and then nothing. I
want you to sit with that for a second. Not
the drama, not the fiction, the psychology. Imagine the survivor's guilt,
the cognitive dissonance, the absolute fracture of identity. You're the oldest,
(07:56):
the one who was supposed to protect them. You're alive,
but everything that made you has been wiped off the
map like dust in the Kansas wind. Do you go
to the police?
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Hell?
Speaker 1 (08:07):
No, because what do you say, I hid while my
family was murdered? That confession doesn't buy you sympathy. That
buys you suspicion, headlines, possibly handcuffs. So you vanish new name,
new state, You dye your hair and grow callouses over
your memories. Now, let's talk sociology for a second. This
(08:31):
alternate reality plays on one of the strongest threads woven
through American mythology, family as safety. The Clutter family wasn't
just a Kansas success story. They were the model, the
blueprint to suggest that someone could live and still be broken,
beyond recognition that survival didn't mean salvation. That challenges everything
(08:55):
polite society likes to believe about strength and resilience. But
here's the truth. Trauma doesn't always look like shaking hands
and tears. Sometimes it looks like silence, disappearance, reinvention. And
that's where Evianna lives in this act. Not dead, not alive,
(09:16):
just rewired. So what happens when she resurfaces? Let's explore
that too. It's the early two thousands. A documentary crew
is filming a retrospective on Truman Capote's in Cold Blood.
A clip airs on local TV showing a reenactment of
Nancy Clutter's bedroom and Evanna, now living as Evelyn Grace
(09:40):
Miller sees it and something cracks. Maybe it's the yellow wallpaper,
maybe it's the stuffed animals she remembers placing on the shelf,
but her hands start to shake, her breath shortens, and
suddenly sixty years of silence are done playing nice. She
(10:00):
walks into a therapist's office and the story she tells
doesn't match anything in the police file. This is where
it gets messy, procedurally, legally, emotionally. How do we prove
the existence of a survivor when every scrap of physical
evidence is long gone and everyone who could corroborate her
(10:22):
story is under a headstone. This is where real world
policing hits its wall. And here's where I pull from
my own time in uniform, because you know what most
agencies would do with a woman like that, dismiss her,
label her a fantasist, mark her file delusional grief disorder,
(10:43):
and quietly shuffle her out of the building. And I've
seen that happen. I've watched real people, hurting people walk
into precincts trying to speak their truth, only to be
waved away because their story didn't fit the narrative. Because
policy doesn't always account for complexity, Because truth is inconvenient
(11:06):
when it takes sixty years and a nervous breakdown to
show up. Let's go deeper. What if her story isn't dismissed.
What if her account sends ripples through the town of Holcombe,
what's left of it? Imagine journalists knocking on every door,
Reddit threads exploding, a podcast, yeah like this one, digging
(11:28):
into it, dissecting every detail. Suddenly the sacred timeline of
the Clutter case is under threat. Suddenly the nation's most
iconic true crime story might have missed something. Suddenly the
survivor becomes the suspect. We're not just talking trauma here,
(11:48):
we're talking identity, public memory, collective myth making. Sociologically, this
becomes a war of narrative ownership. Psychologically, it's the reemergence
of repressed memory weaponized. Now I'm not saying this happened,
but I am saying it could have. And in this
(12:08):
reimagined lens, the story doesn't end in the basement. It lingers,
it hides, and maybe it's been waiting all along for
someone to listen. Coming up next, we're heading down a
dirt road with no GPS in an old chevy full
of bad Intentions Act two. The wrong Farm theory is
(12:30):
up next, But first check under your floorboards. You never
know who might still be down there. Let's twist the
knife a little deeper, shall we, Because if you think
the Clutter family was always the target, if you think
this crime had a plan beyond desperation, you're giving Dick
Hincock way too much credit. What if they got it wrong? No,
(12:50):
I mean literally, what if Dick and Perry drove four
hundred miles through the flat black Kansas dark, parked under
a cottonwood tree and pick the wrong damn house. Imagine
it just down the road from River Valley Farm sits
another patch of land. Let's call it the Dugan Place.
Fictional name, real type. You know, the house, porch, sagging chimney, leans,
(13:15):
a little one, curtain always closed even when the rest
are open. The kind of place your mother told you
not to trick or treat at. And she was right.
See Vernon Dugan isn't herb Clutter. He's not the face
of Kansas virtue. He's not shaking hands at church and
signing grain subsidies. No, Vernon's got skeletons in his barn,
(13:35):
and not the metaphorical kind. Here's where it starts to
feel like a horror story, because it is. Let's say
Dick's intel from Floyd Wells was jumbled. Maybe Wells got
the street wrong, or maybe Dick just didn't bother to
double check, because in his mind, all farmhouses look the
same once the porch lights out, So they pull into
(13:56):
the Dugan place midnight, no moon, just the rumble of
a forty nine Chevy and two broken men. Mistaking one
monster for another. They knock, no answer, They cut the
phone lines, standard procedure. They creep around to the back,
the doors unlocked inside a man, a woman, two sleeping kids,
(14:20):
just like the clutters, but not and the horror. They're
never supposed to die. They were never even part of
the story. Now here's where it gets chilling. Let's say
Vernon Dugan has secrets of his own, old debts, a
buried lock box, maybe even a history of hurting people
(14:42):
no one bothered to report. In our fictional rewire, Dick
and Perry tie the family up like they meant to,
But when they find Vernon's real stash, cash, weapons, maybe
something worse, they realize this isn't just the wrong farm.
This is the wrong kind of farmer, and Vernon he's
not the victim, He's the one who survives. Can we
(15:05):
pause and take in the absolute horror of that possibility
that the killers stumbled into the home of someone worse
than them, that the would be murderers became witnesses, and
then loose ends Because Vernon Dugan doesn't call the cops,
he doesn't report the break in, He takes the rope
(15:27):
they left behind, burns the blood stained carpet, and drags
the bodies to a drainage ditch five counties over.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Why.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Because Vernon's got no interest in justice. He's already had
his share of midnight visitors, and this one just cleaned
up a problem he was going to deal with eventually.
Let's talk sociology for a minute, because this isn't just
a campfire tale, this act. It explores the myth of
targeted violence. We like to think killers plan, that there's
(15:59):
a logic behind the bloodshed, that it only happens to
people who were part of the equation, But most crimes messy,
random and terrifyingly indifferent to who's on the other side
of the door, and procedurally, you think law enforcement would
have ever untangled that. Hell, no, this isn't CSI. This
(16:21):
is Kansas in the nineteen fifties. No digital databases, no DNA,
no fancy psychology profiles, just a sheriff, a clipboard, and
a half empty thermos of lukewarm coffee. The Dugan place
never even gets questioned because herb Clutter was the good guy,
and good guys make better headlines. Let me tell you
(16:42):
something from my time in uniform. When we knock on
the wrong door, it usually ends in paperwork. When monsters
knock on the wrong door, it ends in ghosts. And
if you don't think that happens, if you still believe
justice is blind and tragedy is targeted, then you haven't
seen what I've seen. There are people right now, living
(17:03):
in towns like Holcombe who have no idea how close
they came to becoming a headline, no idea how close
the night came to claiming them. They were saved by
a misread mailbox. That's it. And if that doesn't make
your blood run cold, rewind this act and try again.
So what does this act leave us with a family
(17:23):
that was supposed to die but didn't, A different one
that did, but maybe shouldn't have a killer who lost
track of his victims and a survivor who never knew
how lucky she was. We call this the wrong farm theory,
but maybe it's the random horror theory, the what if
(17:44):
that keeps the porch lights on and the doors double locked.
Coming up next, Act three, the reimagined trial if it
happened today. Let's take Perry and Dick out of nineteen
fifty nine and drop them straight into twenty twenty four,
with full psycha valves, TikTok juries, and a justice system
(18:04):
that's got more optics than objectivity. But until then, check
your mailbox. Make sure it's got your name on it,
because the night doesn't always know where it's going, and
sometimes it knocks twice. All right, let's do it. Welcome
to Act three. Let's take this nineteen fifty nine horror
show and shove it, kicking and bleeding into twenty twenty four.
(18:26):
Because if Hickock and Smith committed the Clutter murders today,
with modern science, twenty four to seven media, and a
courtroom obsessed with performance over principle, this trial would be
a psychological circus. And I mean psych ward meets red
carpet meets Reddit thread, because here's the truth. Back then,
(18:49):
these two were tried like villains in a Western Now
they'd be dissected like lab rats, and honestly, maybe they
should have been. Let's start with Perry Smith. The man
was a walking case study, an unresolved trauma, abuse, neglect,
institutional brutality, beaten in orphanages, nearly drowned by nuns, raised
(19:14):
in a war zone of parental alcoholism, racial identity conflict,
and unrelenting instability. You give me that case file today
and I'd slap a complex PTSD diagnosis on it before
you finished your coffee. Now here's where it gets interesting.
Perry wasn't just traumatized. He was fractured. He lived in
(19:34):
a half real world, part outlaw fantasy, part poetic delusion.
He believed he was destined for treasure hunting greatness. He
saw himself as both victim and hero. He was self
aware enough to describe his own shame and broken enough
to ignore it when the rage came. Let me make
(19:55):
it plain, Parry was dangerous.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
But not just because he was violent. Because he had
no consistent reality to return to after the violence passed.
In a modern court, that's exhibit A. The prosecution would
call it manipulation. The defense would call it dissociation disorder
with psychotic features. And I'd call it familiar, because I've
(20:27):
seen that look on the street, that blank stare, the
untraceable remorse, the kind that says, I know what I did,
but I don't know who I was when I did it.
Perry wasn't snapping. He was drifting in and out of control,
in and out of identity. One moment he's quoting poetry,
(20:47):
the next he's severing a man's throat and apologizing while
doing it. And in today's court, that duality becomes the defense.
It's not about getting him off, it's about asking is
he guilty or is his brain broken beyond repair. Now
let's slide Dick Hiccock onto the stand. Different profile, same stage.
(21:10):
Dick's psychology is slicker, sharper, less tragic, more terrifying, because
Hiccock wasn't disassociating, he was strategizing. He's what we'd now
call a high functioning anti social personality type, a sociopath
with just enough charm to get by and just enough
cruelty to think he's smarter than the law. Let me
(21:33):
tell you what gives guys like dick Away. They never
plan their exit. They think they're untouchable. That's the narcissism
peeking through. But here's where it gets psychological, real psychological.
Because after his car crash, people said Hickock changed impulsive, violent, uncaring.
(21:55):
Modern neurology would ask, did that crash cause frontal lobe
damp image? You know, the part of the brain responsible
for decision making, empathy, impulse control. There's precedent and plenty
of it. Throw in an MRI scan in twenty twenty four,
and suddenly the courtroom isn't just about motive. It's about
(22:16):
mapping the mind. You've got neural trauma on one side,
childhood trauma on the other. Two broken men, two different diagnoses,
one slaughtered family. But psychology doesn't happen in a vacuum.
This would be the trial of the decade. True crime
TikTok would be frothing Instagram. Defense attorneys would be offering
(22:38):
hot takes with a latte. There'd be podcasts, okay, other
podcasts speculating on Perry's meds and Dick's childhood handwriting samples.
We'd have graphic designers animating bullet trajectories for TikTok. There'd
be threads analyzing the defendant's courtroom outfits for signs of remorse.
(22:59):
The clutters would become hashtags, Nancy's diary entries turned into merch.
And you think the truth would survive that? You think
a jury twelve people with Wi Fi and baggage and
Instagram accounts would be able to make a clean call.
Let me ask you this, as someone who sat in
courtrooms for years as a cop, what does justice even
(23:21):
look like in a trial that becomes entertainment? Do we
sentence Perry Smith to death? Or do we sentence his childhood?
Do we punish Hiccock's narcissism or the crash that scrambled
his wiring? And here's the uncomfortable part. You don't have
to feel bad for them to recognize they were broken.
(23:41):
That's the gut punch psychology gives us. These weren't boogeymen.
They were men flesh and flaws and fire. They destroyed lives,
but they weren't built for peace either. And if that
makes you squirm, you're listening to the right podcast. So
what's the verdict. If this trial happened today, would it
(24:02):
be any less horrifying? Or would it just be louder?
Same blood, same bodies, but now with hashtags and expert
witnesses and thirty second clips of Perry's apology floating on
the for you page. And here's the twist. Maybe we
wouldn't get justice, but we'd sure as hell be content.
(24:23):
Coming up next Act four, The girl on the other line,
because before the Clutters were killed, someone was listening. And silence.
It's never just silence. You ever hang up the phone
and immediately think, wait, was something off. Now, imagine you're sixteen,
it's nineteen fifty nine, you're a girl in rural Kansas,
(24:47):
and the voice on the other end of the line,
the girl you call your best friend, pauses just a
second too long, a breath you weren't expecting, and then
she says good night. We don't know it then, but
that's the last time you'll ever hear her voice. Let
me reintroduce you to Susan Kidwell, historically she was Nancy
(25:08):
Clutter's best friend. Church Choir four h Club, The Wholesome,
Sweetest pie dynamic duo. She was also the one who,
alongside her father, discovered the bodies the next morning. But
let's freeze this story just a few hours earlier. Let's
live in that moment on the phone and in this
rewired lens. Let's imagine that Susan heard something, a sound,
(25:34):
a footstep, a voice that didn't belong in that house,
a strange stillness that crackled through the line. She didn't
know it yet, but the call wasn't just a conversation.
It was a warning, a whisper of death moving through
the house. And what did Susan do? She said, good night?
(25:54):
Now before you judge her, and I know someone out
there is already doing it, let's zoom out, because this
isn't just a missed opportunity. It's a case study in
socialized silence. Let's talk about sociology. Let's talk about gender norms,
teenage politeness, and the invisible pressure cooker we call American femininity.
(26:17):
In nineteen fifty nine, young women were trained in restraint,
in being good girls. You didn't interrupt, you didn't overreact,
You did not call the cops unless blood was already
soaking the carpet, and you sure as hell didn't tell
an adult something felt weird, because feeling weird isn't evidence,
(26:38):
it's drama, and drama that's for hysterical women. So Susan
kept quiet because silence was survival. Sociologist Irving Goffman would
call this front stage performance. It's how we play the
roles society writes for us, even when our instincts scream otherwise.
(26:59):
In that moment, Susan wasn't just Nancy's friend. She was
a product of her social conditioning, a performer in a
morality play she didn't sign up for. And that's what
makes this so damn tragic, because if this were today,
she might have sent a text, might have dropped a pin,
(27:19):
might have dmd someone with a hey, can you check
on Nancy? But in nineteen fifty nine, all she had
was a rotary phone, a polite goodbye, and a lifelong burden.
Let me speak as someone who's been on the receiving
end of a too quiet call. As a cop, I
learned early that people rarely scream when they should, and
(27:41):
they almost never report intuition because society tells them it's
not valid unless it's visible, measurable, actionable. But listen to me. Clearly,
sociology kills more than bullets. Ever could the pressure to
be normal, to avoid making a scene, to be the
(28:02):
good girl, the calm neighbor, the silent bystander, Those roles
are deadly. Now let's take this one step further. What
if Susan did say something. What if she went to
her parents that night and said, Nancy sounded scared. Would
they have believed her? Or would they have tucked her in,
kissed her on the forehead and told her it was
(28:23):
just nerves. Because communities like Holcombe, tight knit, god fearing,
image obsessed, don't want to believe evil is nearby. They can't.
That's not just small town pride, that's social cohesion at work.
Sociologist Emil Durkheim would say that when collective morality is threatened,
(28:45):
societies don't protect the truth. They protect the illusion of peace.
So in this act, Susan's silence isn't just personal, it's cultural,
it's institutional. It's a byproduct of America's great myth that
evil is out there and safety is in here. And
(29:05):
that's the part that haunts me, that maybe someone heard something,
but they didn't scream, They didn't act because society trained
them not to. That's not negligence, that's programming. And if
we don't name it, we can't change it. So when
people ask me why I care about the sociology of crime,
why I dig into the why didn't they? Questions? I
(29:27):
tell them this because Nancy Clutter may have died from
a shotgun blast, but she was killed in part by silence,
and that silence had rules. Coming up next Act five,
the Executioner's Journal, we step into the shoes of the
man who pulled the lever and ask what it does
(29:49):
to your soul to carry out justice with your own hands.
But before that, go back and listen to the silence
in your own life. Sometimes it's the loudest sound in
the story. I want to introduce you to someone who
never made it into the spotlight. He wasn't in Capote's book,
(30:10):
he didn't get a Netflix dramatization, but he was there
at the end. Let's call him Ray Doyle. Fictional name,
real role, the state executioner who carried out the death
sentences for Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, and in this
act were telling his story from my side of the badge.
(30:32):
Because This one's for the cops, the guards, the ones
in the system who don't just write reports or testify
in court. This one's for the man who has to
kill a killer and then go home and make himself dinner. See,
people think executing someone is a sterile process, Ropes Protocol
(30:53):
one and done. What they don't understand, and what I
didn't understand until I wore a badge is this. When
the state kills someone, it doesn't use a courtroom. It
uses people. People like Ray, a former marine turned Kansas
corrections officer, clean record steady hands pick to pull the
(31:14):
lever because he wouldn't flinch. But here's the part the
public doesn't want to talk about. Ray didn't sleep the
night before, didn't eat the morning of. He watched his
wife butter toast while he tried not to picture blood
soaking through a collar. Let me get real here. As
a cop, you're trained to see death car rex shootings, suicides,
(31:38):
but you're not trained to deliver it. And even if
it's legal, even if the chain of command, the procedure,
the press conferences all say it's righteous, it still lives
under your fingernails. I remember a sergeant wants telling me
you can't wash off that moment. Doesn't matter. If it
was policy you touched death. Ray Doyle didn't just touch it.
(32:00):
He flipped the switch on it. And the thing that
kept him up the most, it wasn't Perry's speech, It
wasn't Dick's smirk. It was that brief, fractional second when
nothing happened, when the lever dropped, but they were still alive.
And in that space between policy and outcome, Ray saw
(32:22):
himself not as the arm of justice, but as the
instrument of state violence. This is where I get personal,
because what they don't tell you at the academy, what
no sergeant or watch commander ever says out loud, is
that law enforcement carries contradictions. They hand you a badge
and a radio and tell you to enforce justice, but
(32:45):
they don't tell you that sometimes the definition of justice
shifts depending on the zip code, the budget, or who
just got re elected DA. They don't train you for
the emotional whiplash of seeing a kid dead in a
ditch one day and escorting a death row inmate the next.
They don't give you therapy. They give you administrative leave,
(33:07):
and you learn real fast that justice isn't a finish line.
It's a tightrope walk, and most of us were one
bad shift away from falling off. In our fictionalized world.
Ray kept a private journal. He didn't write in it often,
just on big nights, and on the night of April fourteenth,
(33:27):
nineteen sixty five, he wrote this. They asked me if
I wanted to say a prayer. I said no, because
I wasn't afraid of God. I was afraid of remembering
their faces too clearly, Perry cried a little Dick was quiet.
When the trap door opened, it made a sound like
my marriage ending. I don't think my wife knows. I
(33:50):
still smell bleach on my hands. It's been hours. It's
not leaving you feel that. That's not guilt. That's the
splinter left behind when policy collides with the soul. Here's
the thing we ask a lot of the people inside
this system. We ask them to be robot and priest,
to enforce the law and live with its consequences, to
(34:12):
do the dirty work and stay clean. But the truth,
the system doesn't care what it does to the people
who keep it running. It'll burn through you and call
it justice. It'll hand you trauma and call it duty.
Ray was never the same. He retired early, grew quiet,
started drinking his coffee black and staring too long out
(34:33):
the kitchen window. The system labeled him effective, but the
human inside him he died with Perry and Dick that night,
just slower. So here's what I want you to think about,
not just the clutters, not just the killers, but the handlers,
(34:53):
the officers, the men and women who carry out policy
with shaking hands and lock jaws. Because behind every clean
execution is a dirty secret. We put human beings in
charge of doing the unthinkable, and then we pretend they're okay.
(35:15):
Coming up next act six, the letter from Mexico, a
confession that was never mailed, a truth that was never heard,
and a killer trying to rewrite his ending in pen
and heartbreak. But before that, spare a thought for Ray Doyle,
because sometimes it's not the bullet or the rope that
kills you, it's the job. Let me tell you something
(35:37):
nobody prepared me for when I put on a badge.
It wasn't the first dead body. It wasn't the screams.
It wasn't even the silence after a suicide, when you're
the first to arrive and the last to leave. It
was the moment I realized that some people confess and
(35:58):
no one listens, no matter how many reports you write,
no matter how buy the book you play it. There
are moments in this job where the truth arrives too
late and the damage is already done. And that's what
this next act is about. A letter that maybe never existed,
(36:18):
a moment of honesty that might have happened in the
middle of nowhere, on a beach in Mexico, written in desperation,
and never mailed. This is Perry Smith's unsent confession, but
really it's a letter for all of us. Picture this.
It's late nineteen sixty. Perry and Dick are hiding in
Mexico after the murders, bouncing between cheap motels, tourist scams,
(36:43):
and watered down whiskey. But late one night, let's say,
Perry's alone, hunched over a table, drunk enough to be
honest but sober enough to write. He grabs a pad
of paper from the hotel lobby and starts writing. And
here's what that letter might have said to whoever reads this.
I need to tell the truth, not to be forgiven,
(37:05):
not even to be understood, but because carrying it is
killing me more than prison ever could. I didn't think
we'd actually do it. That's the part nobody gets. People
think murder starts with hate or rage or evil. Sometimes
it starts with boredom, and a man like me, boredom
(37:26):
and shame are the same thing. I hated myself before
we stepped into that house, but after I hated the
world for letting me get that far, for watching me
drown and calling it personality. I don't know why I
killed them, not exactly, but I know I didn't stop myself,
and maybe that's worse. And then he folds it, tucks
(37:51):
it into an envelope, but never sends it, because even
killers know some truths are too fragile for daylight. That
letters no. But I've read versions of it. I've read
it in the eyes of men i've arrested. I've seen
it in the hesitation of a suspect who almost said something,
almost before the lawyer stepped in. And I've felt it
(38:14):
in myself. Yeah, let's talk about that for a second.
There's something no one tells you. When you join law enforcement.
You don't just enforce the law. You become part of
someone's worst day. Even if you do everything right, even
if your use of force is textbook, even if you
follow protocol to the letter, you still walk away with
(38:37):
blood on your boots and silence in your throat. I
remember this one call domestic disturbance routine dispatch didn't even
sound urgent, But when I got there, the guy had
already slammed his girlfriend into a wine rack, broken bottles everywhere,
(38:59):
Her arms were shredded, blood soaking through her dress, like
the whole scene was painted in violence. I cuffed him,
sat her down, applied pressure until ems arrived. She kept
saying I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, And I remember thinking,
what the hell kind of world makes a victim apologize
(39:20):
for being attacked? And then I realized it's this one.
It's our world, where we don't mail the letters, We
just bleed through them. Perry was broken long before he
pulled the trigger. Abuse, neglect, shame, a brain wired like
a radio that couldn't find the right frequency. But I'm
(39:42):
not making excuses, I'm making space because we don't need
fewer consequences, we need more context. Context is what separates
understanding from judgment, and in law enforcement, we're trained to
judge fast, hard, without hesitation.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
But when you spend enough time in the system, when
you've seen enough trauma passed off as resisting arrest or
non compliance, you start to realize something. Most people are
just trying to survive their own story, and Perry he
didn't survive his. If I could write that letter for him,
it wouldn't be a confession, it'd be a mirror that
(40:29):
would read you weren't born a monster, but you weren't
saved either, And somewhere between those two truths, a family died.
What you did can't be undone, but maybe it can
be understood, and maybe that's enough to keep someone else
from picking up the gun. Perry Smith never mailed that
letter because there's no return address for a soul that
(40:51):
lost its way. But maybe the point of rewired isn't
to find closure. Maybe it's to open things up, to
sit in the mess to admit that crime isn't just evil,
it's human, and humans. We lie, we hide, we bleed
in private, but every so often we write a letter.
(41:11):
Coming up next Act seven, the survivor who never spoke,
We imagine a different clutter child, one who didn't die
that night, but live to carry the weight of the
world's fascination. What happens when your tragedy becomes everyone's favorite story.
You'll find out next. There's a detail in every crime
(41:33):
scene that no one talks about. Not the blood, not
the bodies, not even the silence. It's the flash, that cold,
artificial burst of light, turning horror into documentation. It doesn't
care who died, it doesn't care how they lived. And
that's where we go. Now into the eyes behind the lens,
(41:56):
the one person in the room who's not supposed to
feel any thing, but sees everything. This is the story
of the crime scene photographer who walked into the clutterhouse
and never walked out the same. Let's imagine it's just
before dawn November fifteenth, nineteen fifty nine. A rookie photographer
from the Finny County Sheriff's Office is called in. He's
(42:19):
only been on the job six months, took the gig
to pay off student loans. Thought he'd be shooting DUIs
and petty theft, maybe the occasional bar brawl aftermath. Instead,
he's handed a tripod and told you're documenting a family.
He doesn't know yet that documenting a family means photographing
(42:40):
them dead, sprawled across their home, like someone rearranged furniture
and forgot the rules of mercy. He steps inside the clutterhouse.
The air smells like copper and Sunday pot roast. There's
a coffee cup still sitting in the kitchen, sink half full,
a radio left on Nancy's perfume, hanging faint in the
(43:03):
hallway like she just walked through. Then he sees Kenyon
sprawled out in the basement wreck room, hands bound, face turned,
a teenage boy with a future stolen. Mid sentence, he
lifts the camera, clicks, no do overs, no autofocus, no
fix it in post, just light, blood and permanence, and
(43:28):
something cracks in him right there, because in that moment,
the camera isn't a tool. It's a scalpel. There's a
name for what starts to happen, and people who witness
atrocity from behind a lens perpetration by proxy. You're not
committing the crime, but you're complicit in how it's remembered. Photographers,
(43:50):
especially crime scene texts, carry a strange kind of trauma
they don't get to scream, they don't get to look away,
and they sure as hell don't get to forget. He
would later tell his wife years later, Whiskey in hand,
kids Asleep, that there was something worse than what he saw.
(44:11):
It's that I had to decide what mattered, which angles,
which frame, what to leave out. I became the editor
of someone else's last chapter. Look, I've walked crime scenes,
not as a photographer, but as the first responder. And
let me tell you something. It's not the blood that
gets you. It's the toothbrush still wet, the open closet door,
(44:33):
the shoes lined up by the bed like the dead
were planning to leave the house again. It's the life
around the death that haunts you. And the crime scene
photographer he doesn't just see the aftermath, He curates it.
He decides what evidence gets remembered and what trauma gets
cropped out. What does that do to a man to
(44:56):
witness murder through a lens and then live with the
that your photograph might be the only proof a victim
ever existed. Because here's the truth we don't talk about
in true crime. Sometimes the most horrifying thing in the
room is the one who doesn't get a name, not
(45:16):
the killer, not the victim, but the witness, the one
who saw and kept it to himself. So maybe there
was no rookie photographer in Holcombe. Maybe the photos were
taken by someone older, someone seasoned, someone already numb. But
I like to imagine there was someone new, someone who
(45:37):
saw what we now obsess over in documentaries and books
and podcasts, and had to swallow the horror hole without
the luxury of telling their side, and that side it matters.
Next up Act eight, the rewired forensics file. All right,
time to flip the lab lights on and grab the gloves,
(45:59):
because in this app we're tossing out the nineteen fifty
nine playbook. No more hunches, no more bootstraps and cigarettes
crime solving. We're running this case through the forensic filter
of today, digital automated, hyper precise. But here's the twist.
When you put nineteen fifty nine under a twenty twenty
four microscope, the evidence starts talking back. Let's open the
(46:23):
rewired forensics file. Picture it a rural Kansas farmhouse, no
forced entry, four victims, all bound, all shot. Back in
the day, this was solved on confessions and a tip
from an ex con. But if that same crime scene
happened today, oh honey, it wouldn't just be a detective's
(46:44):
gut instinct to guiding the case. It'd be a data tsunami. Because,
let's be real, Perry and Dick would have left a
digital blood trail a mile long, and even if they hadn't,
modern forensics wouldn't need them to talk. The evidence would scream.
Let's start with the crime scene ballistics analysis. Every bullet
(47:05):
fired could be matched to a digital fingerprint. The twelve
gauge and shotgun shells left at the scene wouldn't just
maybe connect to a weapon, They'd be laser mapped, database matched,
and timeline locked. Touch DNA rope fibers on the wrists,
skin cells left behind. Perry tied Nancy up with a
(47:28):
piece of cord. You don't think he left one cell behind.
That rope would be a gold mine today. Luminol plus
blood spatter trajectory, this would be a full scale three
D crime scene reconstruction. Not just he was laying this way.
We're talking velocity, angle force, and shooter location down to
(47:49):
millimeter science. Perry said he shot herb point blank. That
trajectory could be proven or disproven in a lab within
twenty four hours. Digital forensics. Okay, let's be creative. Say
Perry and Dick are millennials instead of baby boomers. You
know Dick is texting someone shady. Perry's Google history is
(48:12):
a Reddit thread come to life. They're watching YouTube clips
of shotgun tutorials and printing maps of the clutter property.
Modern tech wouldn't need a confession. It would hand deliver
motive and intent via screen time and location metadata. Let's
also call out what nineteen fifty nine missed. The mattress
(48:33):
herb clutter was found on, never tested for blood spatter directionality,
the rope filed away, no one thought to check if
it matched local hardware stores. And I'm not judging the
investigators of the time. They worked with what they had.
But here's the bitter truth. Justice in nineteen fifty nine
depended on luck. Today it depends on labs, and even that,
(48:58):
let's be honest, still fails plenty of folks. This is
where my inner sociologist kicks in because forensic tech has
exploded since the nineteen sixties, but not evenly. You think Holcombe,
Kansas has access to a rapid DNA machine. You think
every rural department is running toxicology screens on trace evidence
(49:22):
from dirt floor basements. Please, the tech divide is real.
And sometimes it's not that we can't solve old cases,
it's that no one budgets for the dead. Let's say
Perry and Dick stood trial today, their defense team would
come hard with alternate theories. No fingerprints match conclusively, the
(49:46):
timeline doesn't hold under phone tower pings, the trajectory of
the bullet doesn't align with Perry's confession. Touch DNA is present,
but we can't rule out third party contamination.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
Boom.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
Just like that, the jury's second guessing what we thought
was rock solid. Because science doesn't tell you who pulled
the trigger. It just tells you what happened and lets
lawyers do get out, Which brings me to this uncomfortable idea.
In a case like this, would the forensics help or confuse?
Would it clarify a motive or just turn tragedy into
(50:24):
technical noise? Because here's the real twist. Sometimes forensics doesn't
give us closure, It just gives us clarity about how
murky the truth really is. So what does the rewired
forensics file tell us that in twenty twenty four, the
Clutter murders might have been solved faster, or maybe not
(50:45):
at all. That maybe Perry's confession wouldn't have held up.
That maybe Dick would have argued tech planted the evidence,
and maybe our modern systems would have unraveled under the
weight of their own data. Because when every answer comes
with four more questions, the crime doesn't get solved, it
gets digitized. Up next act nine, the brother nobody knew.
(51:09):
If you've been listening closely, and I know you have,
then you probably already clocked the name tex Smith, Perry's
older brother. He wasn't a focus of the original investigation.
He wasn't questioned publicly, he wasn't mentioned in Capote's literary dissection,
but he existed. He lived in the margins of Perry's file,
(51:32):
in the hush of family shame. In that place we
bury our most complicated siblings. So in this act we're
going to do something radical. We're going to shine a
light on the relative who lived in the shadow. Because
in every notorious crime, there's always a ripple effect. And
if Perry Smith was the stone that hit the water,
(51:55):
Texts was the ripple that never broke the surface. Let's
imagine Texts grew up just like Perry, same father, same beatings,
same howling silences. But where Perry turned inward, Text turned
rigid and structured. Maybe he joined the military early. Maybe
he became a factory foreman or a long haul trucker,
(52:18):
something that kept him moving and far from home. But
that doesn't mean the past didn't ride shotgun. He watched
Perry spiral from a distance, watched the headlines roll In four,
murdered in Kansas, two men on the run, names revealed,
and when he saw his last name under those mugshots,
(52:39):
something inside him detonated. This is where psychology gets interesting.
There's a specific trauma that siblings of killers endure. It's
called vicarious moral injury, the guilt of association. You didn't
pull the trigger, you didn't know, but you feel complicit anyway.
(53:00):
Text might have had nightmares where he was back in
the house, hearing the belts, the boots, the fights. Might
have wondered did I miss something? Could I have stopped him?
Was there ever a version of me that became him?
And worse, do people think I am him? Because the
truth is, we don't give families of killers a script.
(53:23):
We give them shame, isolation, and an unspoken job disappear quietly.
Let's pretend Perry didn't die in nineteen sixty five. Let's
pretend he got a stay of execution, life in prison,
forty years behind bars, and let's pretend text showed up
at the prison every few years, sat across from his brother,
(53:48):
asked the hard questions, why them? Did you ever feel sorry?
Were we born this way? Or made this way? That's
the story we never got. Because Perry did and leave
a will. He didn't leave peace. He left Texas a
brother with a different path, but the same blood. Let
me step out of the narration and speak straight from
(54:10):
the badge for a second. We always talk about the
purp and the victim because those are the columns on
the police report. But there's no checkbox for sibling of suspect,
no room on the form for brother who never came
forward because he didn't want to torch his own life
with someone else's sins. We don't train for that, and
(54:32):
frankly we should, because the brother nobody knew might be
the last person who could have told us who Perry
Smith really was. Now, let me offer you a theory.
What if TeX's wrote a letter to the warden after
Perry died, not for sympathy, not for attention, but to
purge I remember him when he was seven. He used
(54:54):
to sing to our baby sister, Our father broke his
jaw once and never said sorry. Not because it justifies anything,
but because it complicates everything.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (55:13):
And in true crime, complication is truth. So maybe texts
never spoke. Maybe he burned every letter Parry sent. Maybe
he changed his name, dyed his hair, left the state,
and let history have its one dimensional villain. But maybe
there was a night he pulled off on the side
(55:34):
of a desert road, stared out at nothing and whispered
I knew him and I didn't, Because sometimes that's all
that's left. We've nearly reached the end, but before we
close the file, we have one final stop. Not in
the courtroom, not in the lab, not even in the family.
(55:56):
We're going inside the absence that hollow space crime leaves behind,
the one that reshapes people, towns and time. Up next
Act ten, the shadow that stayed hold tight because some
things don't follow you they become you if you've made
(56:16):
it this far. First of all, I respect your stamina
and your slightly twisted curiosity. Welcome to the club. We've
walked through confessions, crime scenes, courtrooms and hypotheticals. We've dragged
nineteen fifty nine kicking and screaming into twenty twenty four,
one forensic detail and psychological meltdown at a time. But
(56:39):
now we sit with the shadow, because every crime leaves one,
not a ghost, not a boogeyman, but something quieter, a
change in temperature, a crease in time, a shift in
the way the world used to feel. Polcom didn't burn
to the ground after the Clutter's people still went to church,
(57:02):
kids still played in the wheat fields. The towns still
hosted bake sales and PTA meetings and high school dances.
But something fundamental changed, a psychic fracture. Because once you
know that a quiet farmhouse on the edge of town
can hold that much horror, you never look at porches
the same way. Again, let's talk about the people. We
(57:26):
forget the ones who didn't die but stopped living. Nancy's
best friend who had to testify in court and then
go back to geometry class like she didn't just relive
her trauma under oath. The surviving clutter relatives left to
grapple with headlines that called their loved ones characters in
(57:47):
a literary masterpiece. The investigators, the neighbors, the undertaker who
had to prepare four bodies for one funeral, even the judge,
the bailiff, the woman who did the laundry for the
jail and saw pair Mary Smith's socks. That's the thing
about murder. It doesn't just kill people. It reconfigures them
(58:07):
from a sociological lens. A murder like this doesn't just
happen to a family. It happens to a system. And
when the system is small, like rural Kansas in the
nineteen fifties, the aftershock lasts generations. The town learned something
that year. It never unlearned that violence doesn't care about respectability, religion,
(58:30):
or a good harvest. It walks in, unannounced, uncaring, and unearned.
And then it leaves. But the shadow doesn't. It sinks
into the soil, It seasons the gossip. It rewrites the
rules for what normal means. Even decades later, as a
(58:50):
former cop, I used to think closure came from cuffs,
from the slam of the cell door from the wrap
up report and the case fileting that final stamp closed.
But now I know better. The file might close, but
the people never do. That's what true crime doesn't always
(59:12):
tell you that healing isn't a verdict. It's a daily ritual,
and some days you don't heal, You just carry. The
Clutter family never asked to be remembered like this, but
they are not just because they died, but because they
lived quietly and died loudly. And in between those two truths,
(59:36):
a shadow grew and stayed. So what did we just do?
We took a story that's been dissected in courtrooms, immortalized
in literature, and tucked away in high school syllabi and
flipped it inside out. We rewired it not to rewrite history,
but to re examine its angles through the eyes of
(59:59):
a cop, scholar, and someone who knows that justice doesn't
always end in handcuffs and closure doesn't come with a verdict.
This episode wasn't about the guilt we already knew. It
was about the guilt that lingers, the systems that allowed it,
the silence that covered it, and the shadows that grew
(01:00:23):
from it. We looked at Perry Smith not just as
a killer, but as a product of violence, of poverty,
of trauma, unspoken and untreated. We explored the town, the trial,
the people left behind, and the brother who never made
it into the spotlight. And we asked the kind of
(01:00:44):
questions that don't have tidy answers, because real justice rarely does.
For me, this case hits like a scar under the surface,
because as a former cop, I know how routine can
dull your humanity, how policies often fail the people they
were meant to protect, and how the official version of
(01:01:04):
events doesn't always reflect what really happened. And as someone
who's studied people, who's obsessed with the why behind the what,
I know that a bullet might end a life, but
it doesn't end a story. It's the ripples that matter,
the way grief reshapes a town, the way trauma skips generations,
(01:01:26):
the way a farmhouse in Kansas can still echo through
true crime podcasts sixty five years later. That's why I
do this, to dig deeper, to challenge the script, to
rewire what justice means and who gets to define it.
If your mind's racing, if your heart's a little heavy,
if you've got questions I haven't answered yet. Good because
(01:01:50):
we're not done. This Friday, join me and Brian for
our co hosted finale of the Clutter family case file
on The Guilty Files Revisited. Will break down what we've
uncovered and what we've reimagined. We'll argue a little, probably
laugh inappropriately, and maybe even change each other's minds. You
don't want to miss it. That was The Guilty Files
(01:02:13):
True Crime Rewired. I'm Danny. You're investigator of the uncomfortable,
you're sociologist of the sinister, and your guide through the
places most people don't want to go until next time.
Stay curious, stay sharp, and remember justice might be blind,
but on this show we always keep one eye open.
Hello, true crime lovers, Welcome back to The Guilty Files
True Crime Rewired, the podcast where we take one crime,
two perspectives, and create endless intrigue. I'm Danny, your guide
for the second act of this case, where we take
the hard facts from earlier this week and twist them
into something unexpected, daring, and just a little wicked. Think
(00:30):
of me as your pilot through the tangled web of
true crime, with the side of sass and a dash
of drama to keep you hooked. At The Guilty Files
True Crime Rewritten. We believe every crime has two sides
to the story, and every listener deserves the thrill of both.
So sit back, lean in, and let's rewrite the narrative.
(00:52):
Because true crime isn't just meant to be solved, It's
meant to be explored. Let's get started. When we think
of American innocence, we picture wheat fields, Sunday dinners, a
(01:15):
father who works with his hands, a mother who keeps
a warm house, and kids with futures as bright as
the sun over Holcombe, Kansas. But in November of nineteen
fifty nine, that illusion was shattered, and in its place
a story that has haunted America for over sixty years.
(01:36):
Earlier this week, you just heard the truth meticulously laid
out by my co host Brian in The Guilty Files uncovered.
What happened to the Clutter Family was real, it was brutal,
it was senseless. But tonight we flip that file inside out.
Welcome to The Guilty Files. True Crime Rewired, the show
(01:58):
where we take real crimes, reimagine key moments, and examine
them through the lens of psychology, sociology, and yes entertainment.
I'm your host, Danny, former Atlanta beatcop, now fully rewired.
This isn't fan fiction. It's forensics meets possibility. It's not
(02:19):
about disrespecting the truth. It's about confronting the what ifs
and the what nows. Tonight we explore the Clutter Family
murders in a way you've never heard before. Ten Acts,
ten Alternate Lenses. Ten Rewired takes on one of America's
darkest nights. Some of what you're about to hear is true,
(02:42):
some of it is hypothetical, and all of it is
designed to get you thinking. So buckle in because we're
about to head back to River Valley Farm with fresh
eyes and open mind and no illusions. All right, before
we get theatrical, let's get grounded, because if we're going
to re wire this thing, we need to know what
(03:03):
we're rewiring now. Brian already took you through the Clutter
case like a man with a badge in one hand
and an evidence bag in the other. I mean that
man broke it down like a courtroom PowerPoint. But let
me do what I do best and give you the
too long, didn't read version Danny style. This was the
(03:23):
case that made the American Midwest clutch its pearls. Nineteen
fifty nine, Holcombe, Kansas. Picture it wide skies, tight values,
and the kind of town where people left their doors
unlocked because nothing like that ever happens here until it did.
Herb Clutter was the picture of respectability. A wealthy, church
(03:46):
going farmer with a reputation so clean you could eat
off it. His wife, Bonnie, was struggling silently with debilitating depression,
mostly confined to her bed. Their teenage kids, Nan and
Kenyon bright, kind, full of potential, and tragically on borrowed time.
(04:06):
Enter two ex cons, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, a
con man and a dreamer, one slick, one broken. Both dangerous.
They roll up on the Clutter home in the middle
of the night, chasing a prison rumor some fantasy about
a safe full of cash. Spoiler alert. There was no safe,
(04:28):
there was no fortune, there was no plan B. So
instead of a robbery, they left four people dead, bound, gagged,
executed in their own home. They walked in looking for
money and walked out with what forty bucks, a radio,
some binoculars, and four souls that never saw Sunday morning.
(04:49):
The nation lost its collective mind and holcombe. It never
really put itself back together. The killers were caught, tried,
and executed. Justice technically was served, but what they left
behind was more than just bloodstains and grief. They left
behind cracks in the system, in the psyche, in the narrative,
(05:12):
we tell ourselves about where evil lives and where it doesn't.
So yes, the Clutter murders were solved, but where they understood.
That's where I come in, because now that the foundations set,
we're gonna shake the walls. I've got ten acts, ten
fresh lenses, and a whole lot of SaaS queued up.
So grab your seat belt and your critical thinking cap,
(05:34):
because up next is Act one. The daughter who survived.
Let's rewire. So here's the question that's been scratching at
the inside of my skull since the first time I
read this case file. What if someone made it out?
I know, I know, that's not what the autopsy reports say,
that's not in Brian's files. But hear me out. We're
(05:57):
storytellers here on rewired stenographers, and sometimes what didn't happen
tells us just as much as what did. So in
tonight's opening act, I want to start with a ghost.
Only she's not dead, she's just missing. Welcome to Act one.
The daughter who survived. Let's imagine this. Evianna Clutter, the
(06:20):
oldest daughter, twenty three years old at the time of
the murders, newly married, newly pregnant, one foot in adulthood,
one still tethered to that house on the plains. Now,
historically she wasn't home that night, that's the record, But
what if she was. What if she had a falling
out with her husband, something small but earthshaking, a slammed door,
(06:46):
a drive that went too far, and she ends up
at River Valley Farm just after sunset, hoping no one's
still mad about whatever silly thing tore her loose. Only
she's not met with forgets. She's met with footsteps, rope, gun, metal,
whispered threats. So she hides, and I mean really hides.
(07:09):
Not under the bed, not in a closet. I'm talking
survival mode, crawling into the narrow crawl space under the
floorboards of her childhood bedroom, the one she used to
slide dolls into when she was supposed to be cleaning,
the one only she remembers. And from that dark space,
Evanna hears everything. Her father's calm voice, her mother's ragged breath,
(07:34):
Nancy's plea, Kenyon's silence, the shots, and then nothing. I
want you to sit with that for a second. Not
the drama, not the fiction, the psychology. Imagine the survivor's guilt,
the cognitive dissonance, the absolute fracture of identity. You're the oldest,
(07:56):
the one who was supposed to protect them. You're alive,
but everything that made you has been wiped off the
map like dust in the Kansas wind. Do you go
to the police?
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Hell?
Speaker 1 (08:07):
No, because what do you say, I hid while my
family was murdered? That confession doesn't buy you sympathy. That
buys you suspicion, headlines, possibly handcuffs. So you vanish new name,
new state, You dye your hair and grow callouses over
your memories. Now, let's talk sociology for a second. This
(08:31):
alternate reality plays on one of the strongest threads woven
through American mythology, family as safety. The Clutter family wasn't
just a Kansas success story. They were the model, the
blueprint to suggest that someone could live and still be broken,
beyond recognition that survival didn't mean salvation. That challenges everything
(08:55):
polite society likes to believe about strength and resilience. But
here's the truth. Trauma doesn't always look like shaking hands
and tears. Sometimes it looks like silence, disappearance, reinvention. And
that's where Evianna lives in this act. Not dead, not alive,
(09:16):
just rewired. So what happens when she resurfaces? Let's explore
that too. It's the early two thousands. A documentary crew
is filming a retrospective on Truman Capote's in Cold Blood.
A clip airs on local TV showing a reenactment of
Nancy Clutter's bedroom and Evanna, now living as Evelyn Grace
(09:40):
Miller sees it and something cracks. Maybe it's the yellow wallpaper,
maybe it's the stuffed animals she remembers placing on the shelf,
but her hands start to shake, her breath shortens, and
suddenly sixty years of silence are done playing nice. She
(10:00):
walks into a therapist's office and the story she tells
doesn't match anything in the police file. This is where
it gets messy, procedurally, legally, emotionally. How do we prove
the existence of a survivor when every scrap of physical
evidence is long gone and everyone who could corroborate her
(10:22):
story is under a headstone. This is where real world
policing hits its wall. And here's where I pull from
my own time in uniform, because you know what most
agencies would do with a woman like that, dismiss her,
label her a fantasist, mark her file delusional grief disorder,
(10:43):
and quietly shuffle her out of the building. And I've
seen that happen. I've watched real people, hurting people walk
into precincts trying to speak their truth, only to be
waved away because their story didn't fit the narrative. Because
policy doesn't always account for complexity, Because truth is inconvenient
(11:06):
when it takes sixty years and a nervous breakdown to
show up. Let's go deeper. What if her story isn't dismissed.
What if her account sends ripples through the town of Holcombe,
what's left of it? Imagine journalists knocking on every door,
Reddit threads exploding, a podcast, yeah like this one, digging
(11:28):
into it, dissecting every detail. Suddenly the sacred timeline of
the Clutter case is under threat. Suddenly the nation's most
iconic true crime story might have missed something. Suddenly the
survivor becomes the suspect. We're not just talking trauma here,
(11:48):
we're talking identity, public memory, collective myth making. Sociologically, this
becomes a war of narrative ownership. Psychologically, it's the reemergence
of repressed memory weaponized. Now I'm not saying this happened,
but I am saying it could have. And in this
(12:08):
reimagined lens, the story doesn't end in the basement. It lingers,
it hides, and maybe it's been waiting all along for
someone to listen. Coming up next, we're heading down a
dirt road with no GPS in an old chevy full
of bad Intentions Act two. The wrong Farm theory is
(12:30):
up next, But first check under your floorboards. You never
know who might still be down there. Let's twist the
knife a little deeper, shall we, Because if you think
the Clutter family was always the target, if you think
this crime had a plan beyond desperation, you're giving Dick
Hincock way too much credit. What if they got it wrong? No,
(12:50):
I mean literally, what if Dick and Perry drove four
hundred miles through the flat black Kansas dark, parked under
a cottonwood tree and pick the wrong damn house. Imagine
it just down the road from River Valley Farm sits
another patch of land. Let's call it the Dugan Place.
Fictional name, real type. You know, the house, porch, sagging chimney, leans,
(13:15):
a little one, curtain always closed even when the rest
are open. The kind of place your mother told you
not to trick or treat at. And she was right.
See Vernon Dugan isn't herb Clutter. He's not the face
of Kansas virtue. He's not shaking hands at church and
signing grain subsidies. No, Vernon's got skeletons in his barn,
(13:35):
and not the metaphorical kind. Here's where it starts to
feel like a horror story, because it is. Let's say
Dick's intel from Floyd Wells was jumbled. Maybe Wells got
the street wrong, or maybe Dick just didn't bother to
double check, because in his mind, all farmhouses look the
same once the porch lights out, So they pull into
(13:56):
the Dugan place midnight, no moon, just the rumble of
a forty nine Chevy and two broken men. Mistaking one
monster for another. They knock, no answer, They cut the
phone lines, standard procedure. They creep around to the back,
the doors unlocked inside a man, a woman, two sleeping kids,
(14:20):
just like the clutters, but not and the horror. They're
never supposed to die. They were never even part of
the story. Now here's where it gets chilling. Let's say
Vernon Dugan has secrets of his own, old debts, a
buried lock box, maybe even a history of hurting people
(14:42):
no one bothered to report. In our fictional rewire, Dick
and Perry tie the family up like they meant to,
But when they find Vernon's real stash, cash, weapons, maybe
something worse, they realize this isn't just the wrong farm.
This is the wrong kind of farmer, and Vernon he's
not the victim, He's the one who survives. Can we
(15:05):
pause and take in the absolute horror of that possibility
that the killers stumbled into the home of someone worse
than them, that the would be murderers became witnesses, and
then loose ends Because Vernon Dugan doesn't call the cops,
he doesn't report the break in, He takes the rope
(15:27):
they left behind, burns the blood stained carpet, and drags
the bodies to a drainage ditch five counties over.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Why.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Because Vernon's got no interest in justice. He's already had
his share of midnight visitors, and this one just cleaned
up a problem he was going to deal with eventually.
Let's talk sociology for a minute, because this isn't just
a campfire tale, this act. It explores the myth of
targeted violence. We like to think killers plan, that there's
(15:59):
a logic behind the bloodshed, that it only happens to
people who were part of the equation, But most crimes messy,
random and terrifyingly indifferent to who's on the other side
of the door, and procedurally, you think law enforcement would
have ever untangled that. Hell, no, this isn't CSI. This
(16:21):
is Kansas in the nineteen fifties. No digital databases, no DNA,
no fancy psychology profiles, just a sheriff, a clipboard, and
a half empty thermos of lukewarm coffee. The Dugan place
never even gets questioned because herb Clutter was the good guy,
and good guys make better headlines. Let me tell you
(16:42):
something from my time in uniform. When we knock on
the wrong door, it usually ends in paperwork. When monsters
knock on the wrong door, it ends in ghosts. And
if you don't think that happens, if you still believe
justice is blind and tragedy is targeted, then you haven't
seen what I've seen. There are people right now, living
(17:03):
in towns like Holcombe who have no idea how close
they came to becoming a headline, no idea how close
the night came to claiming them. They were saved by
a misread mailbox. That's it. And if that doesn't make
your blood run cold, rewind this act and try again.
So what does this act leave us with a family
(17:23):
that was supposed to die but didn't, A different one
that did, but maybe shouldn't have a killer who lost
track of his victims and a survivor who never knew
how lucky she was. We call this the wrong farm theory,
but maybe it's the random horror theory, the what if
(17:44):
that keeps the porch lights on and the doors double locked.
Coming up next, Act three, the reimagined trial if it
happened today. Let's take Perry and Dick out of nineteen
fifty nine and drop them straight into twenty twenty four,
with full psycha valves, TikTok juries, and a justice system
(18:04):
that's got more optics than objectivity. But until then, check
your mailbox. Make sure it's got your name on it,
because the night doesn't always know where it's going, and
sometimes it knocks twice. All right, let's do it. Welcome
to Act three. Let's take this nineteen fifty nine horror
show and shove it, kicking and bleeding into twenty twenty four.
(18:26):
Because if Hickock and Smith committed the Clutter murders today,
with modern science, twenty four to seven media, and a
courtroom obsessed with performance over principle, this trial would be
a psychological circus. And I mean psych ward meets red
carpet meets Reddit thread, because here's the truth. Back then,
(18:49):
these two were tried like villains in a Western Now
they'd be dissected like lab rats, and honestly, maybe they
should have been. Let's start with Perry Smith. The man
was a walking case study, an unresolved trauma, abuse, neglect,
institutional brutality, beaten in orphanages, nearly drowned by nuns, raised
(19:14):
in a war zone of parental alcoholism, racial identity conflict,
and unrelenting instability. You give me that case file today
and I'd slap a complex PTSD diagnosis on it before
you finished your coffee. Now here's where it gets interesting.
Perry wasn't just traumatized. He was fractured. He lived in
(19:34):
a half real world, part outlaw fantasy, part poetic delusion.
He believed he was destined for treasure hunting greatness. He
saw himself as both victim and hero. He was self
aware enough to describe his own shame and broken enough
to ignore it when the rage came. Let me make
(19:55):
it plain, Parry was dangerous.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
But not just because he was violent. Because he had
no consistent reality to return to after the violence passed.
In a modern court, that's exhibit A. The prosecution would
call it manipulation. The defense would call it dissociation disorder
with psychotic features. And I'd call it familiar, because I've
(20:27):
seen that look on the street, that blank stare, the
untraceable remorse, the kind that says, I know what I did,
but I don't know who I was when I did it.
Perry wasn't snapping. He was drifting in and out of control,
in and out of identity. One moment he's quoting poetry,
(20:47):
the next he's severing a man's throat and apologizing while
doing it. And in today's court, that duality becomes the defense.
It's not about getting him off, it's about asking is
he guilty or is his brain broken beyond repair. Now
let's slide Dick Hiccock onto the stand. Different profile, same stage.
(21:10):
Dick's psychology is slicker, sharper, less tragic, more terrifying, because
Hiccock wasn't disassociating, he was strategizing. He's what we'd now
call a high functioning anti social personality type, a sociopath
with just enough charm to get by and just enough
cruelty to think he's smarter than the law. Let me
(21:33):
tell you what gives guys like dick Away. They never
plan their exit. They think they're untouchable. That's the narcissism
peeking through. But here's where it gets psychological, real psychological.
Because after his car crash, people said Hickock changed impulsive, violent, uncaring.
(21:55):
Modern neurology would ask, did that crash cause frontal lobe
damp image? You know, the part of the brain responsible
for decision making, empathy, impulse control. There's precedent and plenty
of it. Throw in an MRI scan in twenty twenty four,
and suddenly the courtroom isn't just about motive. It's about
(22:16):
mapping the mind. You've got neural trauma on one side,
childhood trauma on the other. Two broken men, two different diagnoses,
one slaughtered family. But psychology doesn't happen in a vacuum.
This would be the trial of the decade. True crime
TikTok would be frothing Instagram. Defense attorneys would be offering
(22:38):
hot takes with a latte. There'd be podcasts, okay, other
podcasts speculating on Perry's meds and Dick's childhood handwriting samples.
We'd have graphic designers animating bullet trajectories for TikTok. There'd
be threads analyzing the defendant's courtroom outfits for signs of remorse.
(22:59):
The clutters would become hashtags, Nancy's diary entries turned into merch.
And you think the truth would survive that? You think
a jury twelve people with Wi Fi and baggage and
Instagram accounts would be able to make a clean call.
Let me ask you this, as someone who sat in
courtrooms for years as a cop, what does justice even
(23:21):
look like in a trial that becomes entertainment? Do we
sentence Perry Smith to death? Or do we sentence his childhood?
Do we punish Hiccock's narcissism or the crash that scrambled
his wiring? And here's the uncomfortable part. You don't have
to feel bad for them to recognize they were broken.
(23:41):
That's the gut punch psychology gives us. These weren't boogeymen.
They were men flesh and flaws and fire. They destroyed lives,
but they weren't built for peace either. And if that
makes you squirm, you're listening to the right podcast. So
what's the verdict. If this trial happened today, would it
(24:02):
be any less horrifying? Or would it just be louder?
Same blood, same bodies, but now with hashtags and expert
witnesses and thirty second clips of Perry's apology floating on
the for you page. And here's the twist. Maybe we
wouldn't get justice, but we'd sure as hell be content.
(24:23):
Coming up next Act four, The girl on the other line,
because before the Clutters were killed, someone was listening. And silence.
It's never just silence. You ever hang up the phone
and immediately think, wait, was something off. Now, imagine you're sixteen,
it's nineteen fifty nine, you're a girl in rural Kansas,
(24:47):
and the voice on the other end of the line,
the girl you call your best friend, pauses just a
second too long, a breath you weren't expecting, and then
she says good night. We don't know it then, but
that's the last time you'll ever hear her voice. Let
me reintroduce you to Susan Kidwell, historically she was Nancy
(25:08):
Clutter's best friend. Church Choir four h Club, The Wholesome,
Sweetest pie dynamic duo. She was also the one who,
alongside her father, discovered the bodies the next morning. But
let's freeze this story just a few hours earlier. Let's
live in that moment on the phone and in this
rewired lens. Let's imagine that Susan heard something, a sound,
(25:34):
a footstep, a voice that didn't belong in that house,
a strange stillness that crackled through the line. She didn't
know it yet, but the call wasn't just a conversation.
It was a warning, a whisper of death moving through
the house. And what did Susan do? She said, good night?
(25:54):
Now before you judge her, and I know someone out
there is already doing it, let's zoom out, because this
isn't just a missed opportunity. It's a case study in
socialized silence. Let's talk about sociology. Let's talk about gender norms,
teenage politeness, and the invisible pressure cooker we call American femininity.
(26:17):
In nineteen fifty nine, young women were trained in restraint,
in being good girls. You didn't interrupt, you didn't overreact,
You did not call the cops unless blood was already
soaking the carpet, and you sure as hell didn't tell
an adult something felt weird, because feeling weird isn't evidence,
(26:38):
it's drama, and drama that's for hysterical women. So Susan
kept quiet because silence was survival. Sociologist Irving Goffman would
call this front stage performance. It's how we play the
roles society writes for us, even when our instincts scream otherwise.
(26:59):
In that moment, Susan wasn't just Nancy's friend. She was
a product of her social conditioning, a performer in a
morality play she didn't sign up for. And that's what
makes this so damn tragic, because if this were today,
she might have sent a text, might have dropped a pin,
(27:19):
might have dmd someone with a hey, can you check
on Nancy? But in nineteen fifty nine, all she had
was a rotary phone, a polite goodbye, and a lifelong burden.
Let me speak as someone who's been on the receiving
end of a too quiet call. As a cop, I
learned early that people rarely scream when they should, and
(27:41):
they almost never report intuition because society tells them it's
not valid unless it's visible, measurable, actionable. But listen to me. Clearly,
sociology kills more than bullets. Ever could the pressure to
be normal, to avoid making a scene, to be the
(28:02):
good girl, the calm neighbor, the silent bystander, Those roles
are deadly. Now let's take this one step further. What
if Susan did say something. What if she went to
her parents that night and said, Nancy sounded scared. Would
they have believed her? Or would they have tucked her in,
kissed her on the forehead and told her it was
(28:23):
just nerves. Because communities like Holcombe, tight knit, god fearing,
image obsessed, don't want to believe evil is nearby. They can't.
That's not just small town pride, that's social cohesion at work.
Sociologist Emil Durkheim would say that when collective morality is threatened,
(28:45):
societies don't protect the truth. They protect the illusion of peace.
So in this act, Susan's silence isn't just personal, it's cultural,
it's institutional. It's a byproduct of America's great myth that
evil is out there and safety is in here. And
(29:05):
that's the part that haunts me, that maybe someone heard something,
but they didn't scream, They didn't act because society trained
them not to. That's not negligence, that's programming. And if
we don't name it, we can't change it. So when
people ask me why I care about the sociology of crime,
why I dig into the why didn't they? Questions? I
(29:27):
tell them this because Nancy Clutter may have died from
a shotgun blast, but she was killed in part by silence,
and that silence had rules. Coming up next Act five,
the Executioner's Journal, we step into the shoes of the
man who pulled the lever and ask what it does
(29:49):
to your soul to carry out justice with your own hands.
But before that, go back and listen to the silence
in your own life. Sometimes it's the loudest sound in
the story. I want to introduce you to someone who
never made it into the spotlight. He wasn't in Capote's book,
(30:10):
he didn't get a Netflix dramatization, but he was there
at the end. Let's call him Ray Doyle. Fictional name,
real role, the state executioner who carried out the death
sentences for Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, and in this
act were telling his story from my side of the badge.
(30:32):
Because This one's for the cops, the guards, the ones
in the system who don't just write reports or testify
in court. This one's for the man who has to
kill a killer and then go home and make himself dinner. See,
people think executing someone is a sterile process, Ropes Protocol
(30:53):
one and done. What they don't understand, and what I
didn't understand until I wore a badge is this. When
the state kills someone, it doesn't use a courtroom. It
uses people. People like Ray, a former marine turned Kansas
corrections officer, clean record steady hands pick to pull the
(31:14):
lever because he wouldn't flinch. But here's the part the
public doesn't want to talk about. Ray didn't sleep the
night before, didn't eat the morning of. He watched his
wife butter toast while he tried not to picture blood
soaking through a collar. Let me get real here. As
a cop, you're trained to see death car rex shootings, suicides,
(31:38):
but you're not trained to deliver it. And even if
it's legal, even if the chain of command, the procedure,
the press conferences all say it's righteous, it still lives
under your fingernails. I remember a sergeant wants telling me
you can't wash off that moment. Doesn't matter. If it
was policy you touched death. Ray Doyle didn't just touch it.
(32:00):
He flipped the switch on it. And the thing that
kept him up the most, it wasn't Perry's speech, It
wasn't Dick's smirk. It was that brief, fractional second when
nothing happened, when the lever dropped, but they were still alive.
And in that space between policy and outcome, Ray saw
(32:22):
himself not as the arm of justice, but as the
instrument of state violence. This is where I get personal,
because what they don't tell you at the academy, what
no sergeant or watch commander ever says out loud, is
that law enforcement carries contradictions. They hand you a badge
and a radio and tell you to enforce justice, but
(32:45):
they don't tell you that sometimes the definition of justice
shifts depending on the zip code, the budget, or who
just got re elected DA. They don't train you for
the emotional whiplash of seeing a kid dead in a
ditch one day and escorting a death row inmate the next.
They don't give you therapy. They give you administrative leave,
(33:07):
and you learn real fast that justice isn't a finish line.
It's a tightrope walk, and most of us were one
bad shift away from falling off. In our fictionalized world.
Ray kept a private journal. He didn't write in it often,
just on big nights, and on the night of April fourteenth,
(33:27):
nineteen sixty five, he wrote this. They asked me if
I wanted to say a prayer. I said no, because
I wasn't afraid of God. I was afraid of remembering
their faces too clearly, Perry cried a little Dick was quiet.
When the trap door opened, it made a sound like
my marriage ending. I don't think my wife knows. I
(33:50):
still smell bleach on my hands. It's been hours. It's
not leaving you feel that. That's not guilt. That's the
splinter left behind when policy collides with the soul. Here's
the thing we ask a lot of the people inside
this system. We ask them to be robot and priest,
to enforce the law and live with its consequences, to
(34:12):
do the dirty work and stay clean. But the truth,
the system doesn't care what it does to the people
who keep it running. It'll burn through you and call
it justice. It'll hand you trauma and call it duty.
Ray was never the same. He retired early, grew quiet,
started drinking his coffee black and staring too long out
(34:33):
the kitchen window. The system labeled him effective, but the
human inside him he died with Perry and Dick that night,
just slower. So here's what I want you to think about,
not just the clutters, not just the killers, but the handlers,
(34:53):
the officers, the men and women who carry out policy
with shaking hands and lock jaws. Because behind every clean
execution is a dirty secret. We put human beings in
charge of doing the unthinkable, and then we pretend they're okay.
(35:15):
Coming up next act six, the letter from Mexico, a
confession that was never mailed, a truth that was never heard,
and a killer trying to rewrite his ending in pen
and heartbreak. But before that, spare a thought for Ray Doyle,
because sometimes it's not the bullet or the rope that
kills you, it's the job. Let me tell you something
(35:37):
nobody prepared me for when I put on a badge.
It wasn't the first dead body. It wasn't the screams.
It wasn't even the silence after a suicide, when you're
the first to arrive and the last to leave. It
was the moment I realized that some people confess and
(35:58):
no one listens, no matter how many reports you write,
no matter how buy the book you play it. There
are moments in this job where the truth arrives too
late and the damage is already done. And that's what
this next act is about. A letter that maybe never existed,
(36:18):
a moment of honesty that might have happened in the
middle of nowhere, on a beach in Mexico, written in desperation,
and never mailed. This is Perry Smith's unsent confession, but
really it's a letter for all of us. Picture this.
It's late nineteen sixty. Perry and Dick are hiding in
Mexico after the murders, bouncing between cheap motels, tourist scams,
(36:43):
and watered down whiskey. But late one night, let's say,
Perry's alone, hunched over a table, drunk enough to be
honest but sober enough to write. He grabs a pad
of paper from the hotel lobby and starts writing. And
here's what that letter might have said to whoever reads this.
I need to tell the truth, not to be forgiven,
(37:05):
not even to be understood, but because carrying it is
killing me more than prison ever could. I didn't think
we'd actually do it. That's the part nobody gets. People
think murder starts with hate or rage or evil. Sometimes
it starts with boredom, and a man like me, boredom
(37:26):
and shame are the same thing. I hated myself before
we stepped into that house, but after I hated the
world for letting me get that far, for watching me
drown and calling it personality. I don't know why I
killed them, not exactly, but I know I didn't stop myself,
and maybe that's worse. And then he folds it, tucks
(37:51):
it into an envelope, but never sends it, because even
killers know some truths are too fragile for daylight. That
letters no. But I've read versions of it. I've read
it in the eyes of men i've arrested. I've seen
it in the hesitation of a suspect who almost said something,
almost before the lawyer stepped in. And I've felt it
(38:14):
in myself. Yeah, let's talk about that for a second.
There's something no one tells you. When you join law enforcement.
You don't just enforce the law. You become part of
someone's worst day. Even if you do everything right, even
if your use of force is textbook, even if you
follow protocol to the letter, you still walk away with
(38:37):
blood on your boots and silence in your throat. I
remember this one call domestic disturbance routine dispatch didn't even
sound urgent, But when I got there, the guy had
already slammed his girlfriend into a wine rack, broken bottles everywhere,
(38:59):
Her arms were shredded, blood soaking through her dress, like
the whole scene was painted in violence. I cuffed him,
sat her down, applied pressure until ems arrived. She kept
saying I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, And I remember thinking,
what the hell kind of world makes a victim apologize
(39:20):
for being attacked? And then I realized it's this one.
It's our world, where we don't mail the letters, We
just bleed through them. Perry was broken long before he
pulled the trigger. Abuse, neglect, shame, a brain wired like
a radio that couldn't find the right frequency. But I'm
(39:42):
not making excuses, I'm making space because we don't need
fewer consequences, we need more context. Context is what separates
understanding from judgment, and in law enforcement, we're trained to
judge fast, hard, without hesitation.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
But when you spend enough time in the system, when
you've seen enough trauma passed off as resisting arrest or
non compliance, you start to realize something. Most people are
just trying to survive their own story, and Perry he
didn't survive his. If I could write that letter for him,
it wouldn't be a confession, it'd be a mirror that
(40:29):
would read you weren't born a monster, but you weren't
saved either, And somewhere between those two truths, a family died.
What you did can't be undone, but maybe it can
be understood, and maybe that's enough to keep someone else
from picking up the gun. Perry Smith never mailed that
letter because there's no return address for a soul that
(40:51):
lost its way. But maybe the point of rewired isn't
to find closure. Maybe it's to open things up, to
sit in the mess to admit that crime isn't just evil,
it's human, and humans. We lie, we hide, we bleed
in private, but every so often we write a letter.
(41:11):
Coming up next Act seven, the survivor who never spoke,
We imagine a different clutter child, one who didn't die
that night, but live to carry the weight of the
world's fascination. What happens when your tragedy becomes everyone's favorite story.
You'll find out next. There's a detail in every crime
(41:33):
scene that no one talks about. Not the blood, not
the bodies, not even the silence. It's the flash, that cold,
artificial burst of light, turning horror into documentation. It doesn't
care who died, it doesn't care how they lived. And
that's where we go. Now into the eyes behind the lens,
(41:56):
the one person in the room who's not supposed to
feel any thing, but sees everything. This is the story
of the crime scene photographer who walked into the clutterhouse
and never walked out the same. Let's imagine it's just
before dawn November fifteenth, nineteen fifty nine. A rookie photographer
from the Finny County Sheriff's Office is called in. He's
(42:19):
only been on the job six months, took the gig
to pay off student loans. Thought he'd be shooting DUIs
and petty theft, maybe the occasional bar brawl aftermath. Instead,
he's handed a tripod and told you're documenting a family.
He doesn't know yet that documenting a family means photographing
(42:40):
them dead, sprawled across their home, like someone rearranged furniture
and forgot the rules of mercy. He steps inside the clutterhouse.
The air smells like copper and Sunday pot roast. There's
a coffee cup still sitting in the kitchen, sink half full,
a radio left on Nancy's perfume, hanging faint in the
(43:03):
hallway like she just walked through. Then he sees Kenyon
sprawled out in the basement wreck room, hands bound, face turned,
a teenage boy with a future stolen. Mid sentence, he
lifts the camera, clicks, no do overs, no autofocus, no
fix it in post, just light, blood and permanence, and
(43:28):
something cracks in him right there, because in that moment,
the camera isn't a tool. It's a scalpel. There's a
name for what starts to happen, and people who witness
atrocity from behind a lens perpetration by proxy. You're not
committing the crime, but you're complicit in how it's remembered. Photographers,
(43:50):
especially crime scene texts, carry a strange kind of trauma
they don't get to scream, they don't get to look away,
and they sure as hell don't get to forget. He
would later tell his wife years later, Whiskey in hand,
kids Asleep, that there was something worse than what he saw.
(44:11):
It's that I had to decide what mattered, which angles,
which frame, what to leave out. I became the editor
of someone else's last chapter. Look, I've walked crime scenes,
not as a photographer, but as the first responder. And
let me tell you something. It's not the blood that
gets you. It's the toothbrush still wet, the open closet door,
(44:33):
the shoes lined up by the bed like the dead
were planning to leave the house again. It's the life
around the death that haunts you. And the crime scene
photographer he doesn't just see the aftermath, He curates it.
He decides what evidence gets remembered and what trauma gets
cropped out. What does that do to a man to
(44:56):
witness murder through a lens and then live with the
that your photograph might be the only proof a victim
ever existed. Because here's the truth we don't talk about
in true crime. Sometimes the most horrifying thing in the
room is the one who doesn't get a name, not
(45:16):
the killer, not the victim, but the witness, the one
who saw and kept it to himself. So maybe there
was no rookie photographer in Holcombe. Maybe the photos were
taken by someone older, someone seasoned, someone already numb. But
I like to imagine there was someone new, someone who
(45:37):
saw what we now obsess over in documentaries and books
and podcasts, and had to swallow the horror hole without
the luxury of telling their side, and that side it matters.
Next up Act eight, the rewired forensics file. All right,
time to flip the lab lights on and grab the gloves,
(45:59):
because in this app we're tossing out the nineteen fifty
nine playbook. No more hunches, no more bootstraps and cigarettes
crime solving. We're running this case through the forensic filter
of today, digital automated, hyper precise. But here's the twist.
When you put nineteen fifty nine under a twenty twenty
four microscope, the evidence starts talking back. Let's open the
(46:23):
rewired forensics file. Picture it a rural Kansas farmhouse, no
forced entry, four victims, all bound, all shot. Back in
the day, this was solved on confessions and a tip
from an ex con. But if that same crime scene
happened today, oh honey, it wouldn't just be a detective's
(46:44):
gut instinct to guiding the case. It'd be a data tsunami. Because,
let's be real, Perry and Dick would have left a
digital blood trail a mile long, and even if they hadn't,
modern forensics wouldn't need them to talk. The evidence would scream.
Let's start with the crime scene ballistics analysis. Every bullet
(47:05):
fired could be matched to a digital fingerprint. The twelve
gauge and shotgun shells left at the scene wouldn't just
maybe connect to a weapon, They'd be laser mapped, database matched,
and timeline locked. Touch DNA rope fibers on the wrists,
skin cells left behind. Perry tied Nancy up with a
(47:28):
piece of cord. You don't think he left one cell behind.
That rope would be a gold mine today. Luminol plus
blood spatter trajectory, this would be a full scale three
D crime scene reconstruction. Not just he was laying this way.
We're talking velocity, angle force, and shooter location down to
(47:49):
millimeter science. Perry said he shot herb point blank. That
trajectory could be proven or disproven in a lab within
twenty four hours. Digital forensics. Okay, let's be creative. Say
Perry and Dick are millennials instead of baby boomers. You
know Dick is texting someone shady. Perry's Google history is
(48:12):
a Reddit thread come to life. They're watching YouTube clips
of shotgun tutorials and printing maps of the clutter property.
Modern tech wouldn't need a confession. It would hand deliver
motive and intent via screen time and location metadata. Let's
also call out what nineteen fifty nine missed. The mattress
(48:33):
herb clutter was found on, never tested for blood spatter directionality,
the rope filed away, no one thought to check if
it matched local hardware stores. And I'm not judging the
investigators of the time. They worked with what they had.
But here's the bitter truth. Justice in nineteen fifty nine
depended on luck. Today it depends on labs, and even that,
(48:58):
let's be honest, still fails plenty of folks. This is
where my inner sociologist kicks in because forensic tech has
exploded since the nineteen sixties, but not evenly. You think Holcombe,
Kansas has access to a rapid DNA machine. You think
every rural department is running toxicology screens on trace evidence
(49:22):
from dirt floor basements. Please, the tech divide is real.
And sometimes it's not that we can't solve old cases,
it's that no one budgets for the dead. Let's say
Perry and Dick stood trial today, their defense team would
come hard with alternate theories. No fingerprints match conclusively, the
(49:46):
timeline doesn't hold under phone tower pings, the trajectory of
the bullet doesn't align with Perry's confession. Touch DNA is present,
but we can't rule out third party contamination.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
Boom.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
Just like that, the jury's second guessing what we thought
was rock solid. Because science doesn't tell you who pulled
the trigger. It just tells you what happened and lets
lawyers do get out, Which brings me to this uncomfortable idea.
In a case like this, would the forensics help or confuse?
Would it clarify a motive or just turn tragedy into
(50:24):
technical noise? Because here's the real twist. Sometimes forensics doesn't
give us closure, It just gives us clarity about how
murky the truth really is. So what does the rewired
forensics file tell us that in twenty twenty four, the
Clutter murders might have been solved faster, or maybe not
(50:45):
at all. That maybe Perry's confession wouldn't have held up.
That maybe Dick would have argued tech planted the evidence,
and maybe our modern systems would have unraveled under the
weight of their own data. Because when every answer comes
with four more questions, the crime doesn't get solved, it
gets digitized. Up next act nine, the brother nobody knew.
(51:09):
If you've been listening closely, and I know you have,
then you probably already clocked the name tex Smith, Perry's
older brother. He wasn't a focus of the original investigation.
He wasn't questioned publicly, he wasn't mentioned in Capote's literary dissection,
but he existed. He lived in the margins of Perry's file,
(51:32):
in the hush of family shame. In that place we
bury our most complicated siblings. So in this act we're
going to do something radical. We're going to shine a
light on the relative who lived in the shadow. Because
in every notorious crime, there's always a ripple effect. And
if Perry Smith was the stone that hit the water,
(51:55):
Texts was the ripple that never broke the surface. Let's
imagine Texts grew up just like Perry, same father, same beatings,
same howling silences. But where Perry turned inward, Text turned
rigid and structured. Maybe he joined the military early. Maybe
he became a factory foreman or a long haul trucker,
(52:18):
something that kept him moving and far from home. But
that doesn't mean the past didn't ride shotgun. He watched
Perry spiral from a distance, watched the headlines roll In four,
murdered in Kansas, two men on the run, names revealed,
and when he saw his last name under those mugshots,
(52:39):
something inside him detonated. This is where psychology gets interesting.
There's a specific trauma that siblings of killers endure. It's
called vicarious moral injury, the guilt of association. You didn't
pull the trigger, you didn't know, but you feel complicit anyway.
(53:00):
Text might have had nightmares where he was back in
the house, hearing the belts, the boots, the fights. Might
have wondered did I miss something? Could I have stopped him?
Was there ever a version of me that became him?
And worse, do people think I am him? Because the
truth is, we don't give families of killers a script.
(53:23):
We give them shame, isolation, and an unspoken job disappear quietly.
Let's pretend Perry didn't die in nineteen sixty five. Let's
pretend he got a stay of execution, life in prison,
forty years behind bars, and let's pretend text showed up
at the prison every few years, sat across from his brother,
(53:48):
asked the hard questions, why them? Did you ever feel sorry?
Were we born this way? Or made this way? That's
the story we never got. Because Perry did and leave
a will. He didn't leave peace. He left Texas a
brother with a different path, but the same blood. Let
me step out of the narration and speak straight from
(54:10):
the badge for a second. We always talk about the
purp and the victim because those are the columns on
the police report. But there's no checkbox for sibling of suspect,
no room on the form for brother who never came
forward because he didn't want to torch his own life
with someone else's sins. We don't train for that, and
(54:32):
frankly we should, because the brother nobody knew might be
the last person who could have told us who Perry
Smith really was. Now, let me offer you a theory.
What if TeX's wrote a letter to the warden after
Perry died, not for sympathy, not for attention, but to
purge I remember him when he was seven. He used
(54:54):
to sing to our baby sister, Our father broke his
jaw once and never said sorry. Not because it justifies anything,
but because it complicates everything.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (55:13):
And in true crime, complication is truth. So maybe texts
never spoke. Maybe he burned every letter Parry sent. Maybe
he changed his name, dyed his hair, left the state,
and let history have its one dimensional villain. But maybe
there was a night he pulled off on the side
(55:34):
of a desert road, stared out at nothing and whispered
I knew him and I didn't, Because sometimes that's all
that's left. We've nearly reached the end, but before we
close the file, we have one final stop. Not in
the courtroom, not in the lab, not even in the family.
(55:56):
We're going inside the absence that hollow space crime leaves behind,
the one that reshapes people, towns and time. Up next
Act ten, the shadow that stayed hold tight because some
things don't follow you they become you if you've made
(56:16):
it this far. First of all, I respect your stamina
and your slightly twisted curiosity. Welcome to the club. We've
walked through confessions, crime scenes, courtrooms and hypotheticals. We've dragged
nineteen fifty nine kicking and screaming into twenty twenty four,
one forensic detail and psychological meltdown at a time. But
(56:39):
now we sit with the shadow, because every crime leaves one,
not a ghost, not a boogeyman, but something quieter, a
change in temperature, a crease in time, a shift in
the way the world used to feel. Polcom didn't burn
to the ground after the Clutter's people still went to church,
(57:02):
kids still played in the wheat fields. The towns still
hosted bake sales and PTA meetings and high school dances.
But something fundamental changed, a psychic fracture. Because once you
know that a quiet farmhouse on the edge of town
can hold that much horror, you never look at porches
the same way. Again, let's talk about the people. We
(57:26):
forget the ones who didn't die but stopped living. Nancy's
best friend who had to testify in court and then
go back to geometry class like she didn't just relive
her trauma under oath. The surviving clutter relatives left to
grapple with headlines that called their loved ones characters in
(57:47):
a literary masterpiece. The investigators, the neighbors, the undertaker who
had to prepare four bodies for one funeral, even the judge,
the bailiff, the woman who did the laundry for the
jail and saw pair Mary Smith's socks. That's the thing
about murder. It doesn't just kill people. It reconfigures them
(58:07):
from a sociological lens. A murder like this doesn't just
happen to a family. It happens to a system. And
when the system is small, like rural Kansas in the
nineteen fifties, the aftershock lasts generations. The town learned something
that year. It never unlearned that violence doesn't care about respectability, religion,
(58:30):
or a good harvest. It walks in, unannounced, uncaring, and unearned.
And then it leaves. But the shadow doesn't. It sinks
into the soil, It seasons the gossip. It rewrites the
rules for what normal means. Even decades later, as a
(58:50):
former cop, I used to think closure came from cuffs,
from the slam of the cell door from the wrap
up report and the case fileting that final stamp closed.
But now I know better. The file might close, but
the people never do. That's what true crime doesn't always
(59:12):
tell you that healing isn't a verdict. It's a daily ritual,
and some days you don't heal, You just carry. The
Clutter family never asked to be remembered like this, but
they are not just because they died, but because they
lived quietly and died loudly. And in between those two truths,
(59:36):
a shadow grew and stayed. So what did we just do?
We took a story that's been dissected in courtrooms, immortalized
in literature, and tucked away in high school syllabi and
flipped it inside out. We rewired it not to rewrite history,
but to re examine its angles through the eyes of
(59:59):
a cop, scholar, and someone who knows that justice doesn't
always end in handcuffs and closure doesn't come with a verdict.
This episode wasn't about the guilt we already knew. It
was about the guilt that lingers, the systems that allowed it,
the silence that covered it, and the shadows that grew
(01:00:23):
from it. We looked at Perry Smith not just as
a killer, but as a product of violence, of poverty,
of trauma, unspoken and untreated. We explored the town, the trial,
the people left behind, and the brother who never made
it into the spotlight. And we asked the kind of
(01:00:44):
questions that don't have tidy answers, because real justice rarely does.
For me, this case hits like a scar under the surface,
because as a former cop, I know how routine can
dull your humanity, how policies often fail the people they
were meant to protect, and how the official version of
(01:01:04):
events doesn't always reflect what really happened. And as someone
who's studied people, who's obsessed with the why behind the what,
I know that a bullet might end a life, but
it doesn't end a story. It's the ripples that matter,
the way grief reshapes a town, the way trauma skips generations,
(01:01:26):
the way a farmhouse in Kansas can still echo through
true crime podcasts sixty five years later. That's why I
do this, to dig deeper, to challenge the script, to
rewire what justice means and who gets to define it.
If your mind's racing, if your heart's a little heavy,
if you've got questions I haven't answered yet. Good because
(01:01:50):
we're not done. This Friday, join me and Brian for
our co hosted finale of the Clutter family case file
on The Guilty Files Revisited. Will break down what we've
uncovered and what we've reimagined. We'll argue a little, probably
laugh inappropriately, and maybe even change each other's minds. You
don't want to miss it. That was The Guilty Files
(01:02:13):
True Crime Rewired. I'm Danny. You're investigator of the uncomfortable,
you're sociologist of the sinister, and your guide through the
places most people don't want to go until next time.
Stay curious, stay sharp, and remember justice might be blind,
but on this show we always keep one eye open.
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