The Nicest Boy in Wolcott, KS
The story of Lowell Andrews' last thanksgiving
Born on September 21st of 1940, Lowell Lee Andrews’ hometown newspaper once described him as “the nicest boy in Wolcott, Kansas”.
Founded in the mid nineteenth century, Wolcott was named for the railroad official who lobbied for an extension of the Missouri Pacific Railroad into the area.
This allowed it to become closely linked with nearby Kansas City, and ever since, it’s been considered a sleepy attachment to the city’s bustling urban sprawl.
It’s here that young Lowell Andrews grew up, and back in the fifties, Wolcott was still a small, mostly rural portion of Wyandotte County.
It was surrounded by farmland and orchards, and despite the construction of a nearby highway, the town was reluctant to urbanize in the same way other suburbs had.
It was a quiet, quaint and wholesome little town, where young Lowell’s intellect and musical talents were allowed to flourish.
He was a passionate reader, played bassoon in the college band, and by the late fall of 1958, an eighteen-year-old Lowell had enrolled at a local college to study biology.
But despite outward appearances, Lowell did not enjoy his life in Wolcott, and was firmly convinced his future lay elsewhere.
During late November of 1958, Lowell and his older sister had both returned home to spend Thanksgiving weekend with their parents.
Twenty-year-old Jennie was enrolled at the University of Kansas, where she was studying to become a teacher; and on the evening of Friday, November 28th, she lay on the couch watching TV with her parents, after a dinner of leftover turkey.
Lowell, on the other hand, chose not to join them; and instead sat upstairs in his bedroom, reading the final novel of seminal Russian author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, entitled ‘The Brothers Karamazov’.
Set in 19th-century Russia, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ is a passionate philosophical novel that discusses questions of God, free will, and morality.
It has also been described as a theological drama dealing with problems of faith, doubt, and reason in the context of a modernizing Russia, with a plot that revolves around the subject of patricide.
After reaching the novel’s conclusion, Lowell is believed to have closed it, placed it down onto the desk in front of him, and remained in silent thought for a prolonged period of time.
Lowell then walked to the bathroom, lathered up his face, and shaved using his father’s safety razor.
He did so with precision and care, ensuring there were no errant whiskers or accidental cuts; then once completed, Lowell walked back to his bedroom, and put on the black, two-piece suit his parents had purchased for him following his college acceptance.
Lowell stopped for a moment to inspect himself in a hallway mirror, ensuring his hair and attire were nothing short of immaculate.
Then, after opening a closet in his bedroom, Lowell retrieved a twenty-two caliber, semiautomatic rifle, and began walking downstairs.
There, in the Andrews family’s living room, his parents and older sister had their eyes fixed on the TV screen.
They heard Lowell’s footsteps in the doorway, but didn’t turn to look.
Since they were watching a movie, and in order to replicate the magic of the movie theater, the Andrews family had turned out their living room’s lights.
When Lowell flicked them on, they vocally protested, but as his mother, father and sister turned to look at him, looks of terror filled their eyes.
Lowell hadn’t turned on the lights to ruin their movie experience, he’d turned them on in order to better aim his rifle.
The first of Lowell’s bullets punched through the skull of his older sister, killing her instantly.
Sprawled out on the couch, and in direct view of Lowell as he walked into the living room, she presented the easiest and most obvious target.
Lowell’s parents, on the other hand, died much, much harder.
Lowell put three quick bullets into his fifty-year-old father, William, then did the same to his forty-two-year-old mother, Opal Andrews, as she tried to shield her husband's body.
Lowell took a moment to calm himself before beginning the next phase of his plan, and approached a living room window before hearing movement coming from behind him.
He returned to find that, somehow, his mother had survived her injuries; and after staggering to her feet, she lunged at him.
In little more than a second, Lowell Andrews put three more bullets into the woman that’d nursed him at her teat.
She fell to the floor, took her final breaths, then passed away.
Lowell stared at her lifeless body for a moment, regarding his murdered mother with a chilling lack of emotion.
Seconds later, he heard more movement behind him.
Lowell turned, only to see his bleeding father crawling towards the kitchen telephone.
He took aim, sending multiple twenty-two caliber bullets into his father until his ammunition ran dry. He then took out a Ruger .22 caliber pistol from a hip holster, and emptied all of its bullets into his father’s back.
It was a brutally cold-hearted execution, but Lowell wasn’t done there.
When his pistol quit firing, he ejected the empty clip, loaded a fresh one, then began shooting into his father’s lifeless body, almost at random.
A homicide detective later said that – it was as if Lowell had wanted to observe the damage his shots inflicted to different parts of his father’s body. A sickening experiment performed on the man who raised him.
Lowell fired a total of six shots at his mother, but seventeen at his father.
Then when all was said and done, he began staging the scene, to make it appear as if a household burglary had somehow gone horribly, horribly wrong.
He opened a window in the family living room, then stacked garden furniture outside it, intent on giving the impression that someone had climbed through the window while the family were dozing.
Police were meant to assume that an outnumbered home invader had panicked upon waking the family, and in the ensuing chaos, had murdered them one by one.
Lowell then drove over to his apartment in the nearby town of Lawrence, Kansas, where he began to establish his alibi.
Having lent a friend his precious typewriter, he arranged to pick it up that evening under the pretense that he had to write an essay. Then, after dropping the typewriter off at his apartment, Lowell visited a local movie theater, where he atteneded a showing of the 1958 movie ‘Mardi Gras’.
He spoke loudly, imparted friendly greetings to other theater goers, and placed himself in the very rear of the theater, so that everyone filing out at its conclusion would see him seated quite prominently at the back of a well-lit theater.
Once the movie was over, Lowell drove to the banks of the Kansas River, where he dismantled the weapons used to murder his family, and tossed the separate parts off the Massachusetts Street Bridge.
He then returned to his apartment, telephoned local law enforcement, and informed them that he strongly suspected his parents’ house had just been burgled.
However, when the police arrived at his apartment, and were forced to pass on the bad news of his family’s murder, they observed that Lowell expressed only the slightest amount of surprise.
Yet, not only did Lowell seem unperturbed at what would normally be considered devastating news, there was barely a hint of emotion about him.
When asked how he knew of the potential break-in at his parents’ home, Lowell began obfuscating. Then once he admitted his 911 call was prompted by (what he called) “a bad feeling”, he was promptly arrested as the case’s primary suspect.
Whilst in police custody, Lowell vehemently protested his innocence.
He claimed he’d had a falling out with his parents prior to Thanksgiving Dinner, and hadn’t been over to their places in weeks.
But the fact that Lowell seemed to have had a mysterious premonition regarding the incident which led to his parents’ and sister’s deaths - was extremely incriminating.
Homicide detectives pressed him for hours, demanding to know why and how Lowell had killed his family.
It took the intervention of the family’s minister, a Pastor Vertio C. Dameron, to finally coerce to confession from who he’d once considered a promising young man.
Dameron reportedly gave the boy a Coke, before asking him:
“You didn't do this terrible thing, did you? If you did, now is the time to purge your soul”.
Lowell might’ve finally admitted to the murder of his mother, father and sister, but the confession was completely devoid of remorse.
Lowell told one police officer, “I’m not sorry, but I’m not glad I did it [either]. I just – don't know why I did it. I didn’t even feel anything as they died”.
At his trial, the defense argued that Pastor Dameron’s testimony of Lowell’s confession should be stricken from the record.
The further explained that Pastor Dameron, quote, “occupied the role of minister of the church of which the defendant was a member”; essentially claiming the relationship had unspoken confidentiality, similar to that which exists between a doctor and patient.
But as Pastor Dameron himself asserted, “there was no course of discipline in the Baptist church by which a member thereof was enjoined to confess his sins to a minister of the church”.
On the advice of his defense team, Lowell pled not guilty by reason of insanity, and was subsequently sent for tests at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, KS.
It was here that a Dr. Joseph Satten established that Andrews was almost certainly schizophrenic, but that he had been completely compos mentis (or ‘of composed mind’) at the time he murdered his family.
Dr. Satten went on to call Andrews’ crime a “sudden murder”, meaning his behavior had been perfectly regular both before and after his family’s slaughter.
This led the doctor to believe the state was well within its right to prosecute Lowell to the full extent of the law.
Which they promptly did.
After taking the stand, Lowell’s pleas of insanity fell on deaf ears, and following his conviction, he was condemned to be executed.
After his request for clemency was denied by the state’s governor, Lowell was asked about his family’s funeral arrangements.
“I don't care what you do with them”, he said.
Then when asked if he had any regrets regarding the murders, he stated “I didn't feel anything about it. The time came, and I was doing what I had to do. That’s all there was to it”.
After further appeals for clemency were disregarded by the US Supreme Court, Lowell Lee Andrews was executed by hanging on November 30th of 1962, aged just twenty-two.
His last meal consisted of two fried chickens with sides of mashed potatoes, green beans and pie à la mode. He gave no last words.
Those in attendance gave eerie accounts of Lowell’s final moments, with one reporter stating he was, and I quote, “outwardly remorseless and disinterested”. Another reporter, this one from the Associated Press, said Lowell was actually “smiling slightly” as he was led to the gallows.
Because Lowell was a hefty six-foot-one, and 250 pounds, it's believed that he had to hang for some time before he was pronounced dead. Other witnesses claim the rope actually broke, but despite their proliferation, such rumors were never confirmed.
Lowell Andrews was one of the last people to be executed in the state of Kansas.
He was subsequently buried next to his parents and sister in the Mt. Salem Cemetery in Excello, Missouri.
The three family members were labeled on a single tombstone. Lowell’s separate tombstone lies parallel, and is engraved with a single word - ‘Son’.
Prior to his execution, Lowell was detained at the Lansing Correctional Facility, the very same place as the murderers of the Clutter family were being held, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith.
Hickock and Smith had been made infamous following the release of Truman Capote's book ‘In Cold Blood’, with the former once being asked what he thought of Lowell Andrews following numerous daily interactions with him.
“He was a funny kid”, Hickock said, “he had no respect for human life. Not even his own”.