Hickock and Smith confessed to the murders of the Clutter family, for which they were hanged in April of 1965. Authorities suspected the pair of murdering the Walkers as well, but could never secure a charge after Hickock and Smith were cleared by the results of a polygraph test. Truman Capote devoted several pages of In Cold Blood to the murder of the Walkers, but ultimately, concluded that Hickock and Smith couldn’t have been the killers, as they had alibis.

Despite what Capote asserted at the time, subsequent investigations have since revealed holes in Hickock and Smith’s alibis, and some experts have asserted that polygraph tests of the era were notoriously unreliable.

Related: 10 Books Like “In Cold Blood”

In December of 2012, the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department requested a court order to exhume the bodies of Hickock and Smith, in order to run DNA tests in an attempt to connect them to the Walker family murders. The bodies were exhumed on December 18, 2012, but it wasn’t until August of 2013 that results were officially announced.

Unfortunately, the results proved inconclusive. Due to the passage of time, only partial samples could be retrieved from the bodies, and these could not be matched to samples taken from the Walker home. Despite this, many still believe that Hickock and Smith are the most likely suspects in the slaying.

With Hickock and Smith long dead and now reburied, though, it’s likely their connection to the Walker murders will remain strictly hypothetical.

In Cold Blood: The Brutal 1959 Murder of the Walker Family

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