Washington. Smith stayed with an Army friend for a time in the Tacoma area, where he was employed as a car painter. With one of his first paychecks, Smith bought a motorcycle. While riding, he lost control of the bike due to adverse weather conditions. Smith nearly died in the accident and spent six months in a Bellingham hospital. Because of the severe injuries, his legs were permanently disabled and he suffered chronic leg pains for the rest of his life. To help control the pain, Smith consumed an excessive amount of aspirin. The murders and life on death row Perry Smith and Richard Hickock first met in the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas. Smith was eventually paroled, and the pair later resumed their acquaintance upon Hickock's release in November 1959. Hickock allegedly wrote to Smith, imploring him to violate his parole by returning to Kansas to assist Hickock with a robbery he had been planning. Smith claimed that his return was initially motivated not by meeting with Hickock, but by the chance to reunite with another former inmate, Willie-Jay, with whom he had developed an especially close bond while in prison; Smith soon discovered, however, that he had arrived in the Kansas City area just a few hours after Willie-Jay had left for the east coast. Smith met with Hickock, and almost immediately the two set to work out Hickock's plan. Driving west to Holcomb, they entered the Clutter home through an unlocked door late in the evening of November 14, 1959, whereupon they bound, gagged, and then murdered the four family members present: Herbert Clutter and his wife Bonnie, and their children, Nancy, 16, and Kenyon, 15. Hickock later testified that he had gotten the idea to rob the Clutters after being told by former cellmate Floyd Wells, who had worked as a farmhand for the Clutters, that there was a safe in the family's house containing $10,000. When they invaded the house, however, they discovered that there was no such safe. After six weeks at large, mostly spent idly roaming the country, Smith and Hickock were captured in Las Vegas, Nevada, on December 30, 1959, following an extensive manhunt which extended into Mexico. Smith admitted to cutting the throat of the father, Herbert Clutter, as well as shooting both Herbert and Kenyon Clutter in the head with a shotgun at close range. Records show a dispute