Portal:United States Merchant Marine/Selected biography/5

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Perry Edward Smith (October 27, 1928 – April 14, 1965) was one of two ex-convicts who murdered four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, United States on November 15, 1959. The crime was made famous by Truman Capote in his 1966 non-fiction novel In Cold Blood.

Perry Smith was born in Huntington, Nevada. The family moved to Juneau, Alaska the following year, where the elder Smith brewed bootleg whisky for a living. Smith's father abused his wife and four children; in 1935, his wife left him, taking the children with her, and moved to San Francisco.^[1] Smith initially lived with his alcoholic mother, who died before he reached adulthood. He afterward lived in a Catholic orphanage, where nuns allegedly abused him physically and emotionally for his life-long problem of chronic bed wetting. He then lived in a Salvation Army orphanage, where one of the caretakers allegedly tried to drown him. In his teens, Smith lived an itinerant existence with his father and briefly joined a street gang. He also spent time in a number of detention homes, until he was returned to his father.

At 16, Smith joined the United States Merchant Marine. He joined the Army in 1948, where he served in the Korean War.