FILE NO. 0182
Content warning: this dossier describes the shotgun killings of a Kansas farm family of four, two of them teenagers, who were bound and gagged before they died; a double execution by hanging; and the unsolved killings of a young Florida family, including two small children and a mother who had been raped. It contains no body, scene or victim images.
The Clutter Family Killings: Holcomb, Kansas, and In Cold Blood
Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter were killed in their farmhouse near Holcomb, Kansas, on November 15, 1959. Richard Hickock and Perry Smith were convicted in 1960 and hanged in 1965. Truman Capote made the case famous. This is what the court record shows.
Legal status: Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith were convicted in the District Court of Finney County, Kansas, on March 29, 1960, of four counts of first degree murder in the deaths of Herbert W. Clutter, Bonnie Mae Clutter, Nancy Mae Clutter and Kenyon Neal Clutter. The jury fixed the punishment at death and each was sentenced to be hanged. Their convictions were upheld on appeal and in state and federal habeas proceedings. Both men were hanged at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing on April 14, 1965. They were later named by Florida investigators as suspects in the unsolved December 1959 killings of the Walker family in Osprey, Florida, but were never charged with those killings.
On the morning of Sunday, November 15, 1959, two teenage girls walked into a farmhouse outside Holcomb, Kansas, a town of fewer than 300 people, and found their friend Nancy Clutter dead in her bed. Her mother was dead in another bedroom. Her father and her younger brother were dead in the basement. All four had been bound and gagged, and all four had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range. Nothing obvious had been taken, the telephone lines had been cut, and the county sheriff told a reporter that it looked like the work of a psychopath.
Six weeks later two paroled Kansas convicts were arrested in Las Vegas. They had driven roughly 400 miles across the state to rob a safe that a former farmhand had described to one of them in a prison cell. The safe did not exist. They left with a small amount of cash, a portable radio and a pair of binoculars. Both confessed, both were convicted, and both were hanged after five years of appeals.
The case would probably be remembered today only in western Kansas if Truman Capote had not read about it in The New York Times. His book, In Cold Blood, made the Clutters, their killers and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation agents who caught them into some of the most familiar figures in American crime writing. Because nearly every later account is shaped by it, this dossier relies on the court record wherever it can and says so where later accounts differ.
Quick facts
- Victims: Herbert W. “Herb” Clutter, 48; Bonnie Mae Clutter, 45; Nancy Mae Clutter, 16; Kenyon Neal Clutter, 15 (the 1961 Kansas Supreme Court opinion gives his age as 14).
- Date and place: about 1 a.m., November 15, 1959, near Holcomb, Finney County, Kansas.
- Convicted: Richard Eugene Hickock, 28 at his first court appearance, and Perry Edward Smith, 31, of four counts each of first degree murder.
- Verdict: March 29, 1960; death on every count.
- Executed: April 14, 1965, by hanging, at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing.
- Taken: about $40 to $50, a radio and binoculars.
- The book: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966).
The Clutter family of Holcomb
Herbert W. Clutter was born at Ingalls, Kansas, on May 24, 1911. After Kansas State University he came to Finney County as its county agricultural agent in 1934, and in 1939 he left that job to build his own livestock and farming operation, and by 1959 the Clutter farm and ranch covered almost 1,000 acres in what The New York Times called “one of the richest wheat areas.”
He was also one of the best known farm leaders in Kansas. He helped form the Kansas Association of Wheat Growers and became its first president, and he later served as president of the National Association of Wheat Growers. President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him to the Federal Farm Credit Board. The Times reported that he served from December 1953 until April 1957.
The family farmhouse stood at the end of a long lane lined with Chinese elms. The Clutters were active members of the First Methodist Church in Garden City, where Nancy taught a Sunday school class.
Bonnie Mae Clutter was 45. Nancy Mae Clutter, 16, and Kenyon Neal Clutter, 15, still lived at home. The couple’s two older daughters had left home: Beverly was a student at the University of Kansas, and the other was married and living in Mount Carroll, Illinois. Nancy had a horse named Babe, a steady boyfriend and a best friend, Susan Kidwell, who would be one of the two girls to find her.
On the evening of Saturday, November 14, 1959, the last known contact with the family came at about 9:30 p.m., when Herb Clutter telephoned his business partner, Gerald Van Vleet, who lived nearby. They talked about the farm and the ranch.
Two parolees and a story about a safe
Richard Eugene Hickock, known as Dick, grew up on a farm in eastern Kansas. According to a 2004 study of the case by U.S. Probation Officer Sally J. Keglovits, which drew on original Kansas parole and KBI notes, he had been married twice and badly hurt in a car accident in 1950. His record consisted mostly of bad cheques and petty theft until March 15, 1958, when he was sentenced to five years in the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing for the burglary of a home in Johnson County.
Perry Edward Smith had a harder start. Keglovits describes a transient childhood with two alcoholic parents, service in the Army from 1948, including the Korean War, and an honourable discharge in 1952, followed by a motorcycle accident that left him in hospital for half a year with badly damaged legs and chronic pain. In 1956 he was sentenced to five to ten years at Lansing for a burglary in Phillips County, Kansas, and a jail break.
The two men shared a cell at Lansing only briefly. Keglovits puts it at two weeks; the Tenth Circuit says about a month. Smith was paroled on July 6, 1959, on condition that he stay out of Kansas. Hickock got a new cellmate, Floyd Wells, a thief serving three to five years for breaking into an appliance store.
Wells had once worked for Herb Clutter. According to the Kansas Supreme Court, Hickock “got the impression from such cellmate that Clutter was a wealthy wheat farmer, who kept a safe in his home.” The Tenth Circuit added that before his parole Hickock also obtained from Wells the location of the farm and “a detailed diagram of the interior of the house.” Hickock, the state court found, “devised a plan whereby he and a friend would, upon his being discharged from the penitentiary, go to Holcomb, tie the Clutter family up, rob the safe and leave no witnesses to the crime.”
Wells later gave the KBI his own account. In the statement quoted by Keglovits from the original KBI case notes, he said Hickock told him he would get hold of Smith and “go to the Clutters’ and see if there’s still $10,000 in their damned safe.” Wells said Hickock “said he had a plan, and, after the robbery would kill everyone there and leave no witnesses.” Wells said he had not believed him.
Whatever Wells had seen, it was not in the house Hickock went to. Wells told the KBI that he had seen Clutter’s desk and, he believed, a safe in “the old house where the Clutters lived in 1949,” around the time the new house was finished. The new house had no safe. Hickock later told KBI agents that Wells was to receive $2,500 from the robbery; that claim comes only from Hickock, and Wells was never charged.
Hickock was paroled on August 13, 1959, and went to live with his parents. He took a job at a garage in Olathe and wrote to Smith, telling him, in the Kansas Supreme Court’s words, that he had a “score.” Smith, then in Nevada according to the Kansas Supreme Court, broke his parole conditions and came back to Kansas. He called Hickock on November 12, 1959, and the two men did some work on Hickock’s 1949 Chevrolet.
The drive west, November 14, 1959
The account of the night that follows comes from the Kansas Supreme Court’s 1961 opinion, which set out what it called “a highly summarized statement of the evidence adduced by the state,” evidence that the court said was “wholly uncontroverted and undisputed by any other evidence of record.” The court said it was leaving out “many of their gruesome details,” and this dossier does the same.
On the afternoon of Saturday, November 14, the two men left Hickock’s parents’ home at Edgerton, Kansas. They told his parents they were going to Fort Scott to see Smith’s sister, who in fact lived in California. Hickock had put his 12 gauge shotgun, a box of shells, a hunting vest and his hunting knife, with an eight inch blade, in the car. On the way west they stopped and bought nylon rope, two inch adhesive tape, a small pocket knife and some rubber gloves.
The drive was roughly 400 miles. At about midnight they reached Garden City, then drove on to Holcomb and up the lane to the Clutter house. A light was on in the tenant house, and they started to leave; when it went out, they turned around and parked on the west side of the house.
They went in through the unlocked west door, carrying the shotgun and the knife. They got Herb Clutter out of bed in his downstairs bedroom, took him into the room he used as an office, and searched for the safe. When they could not find it, they questioned him about where it was. He told them there was no safe. They took some money from his billfold.
Inside the house
The men then took Herb Clutter upstairs, where his wife, Nancy and Kenyon were asleep. They woke the three, put the whole family in the second floor bathroom, and searched the house for the safe and for more money. They found some money but no safe.
One at a time, the court found, they moved the family. Herb Clutter was tied hand and foot in the basement furnace room, and Kenyon was tied to a couch in the recreation room next to it. Bonnie and Nancy Clutter were tied hand and foot in their beds. Bonnie Clutter, Kenyon and his father were taped. The Times reported the next day that there were no signs of a struggle.
Then, in the words of the Kansas Supreme Court, “desiring to leave no witnesses,” Herb Clutter’s throat was cut, and he was shot in the head. Kenyon was killed next with a shotgun blast at close range. The men went upstairs, where Nancy and her mother, “in that order,” were shot and killed. After each shot, the men picked up the ejected shell.
The court’s summary does not say which man fired the shotgun. Smith first told investigators that each of them had killed two members of the family; he later said that he had killed all four. Keglovits writes that he changed his account so that Hickock’s parents would not think their son was a killer. Neither man testified at trial, so neither account was tested in court.
The men left with Kenyon’s portable transistor radio, a pair of binoculars and the cash. The sources give different amounts for the cash: about $40 and four silver dollars in Keglovits, $43 in a 2015 Salon account, and less than $50 in the Topeka Capital-Journal. They had been in the house, the court found, for approximately one hour.
They drove north from Garden City and turned east on the county line road. A short distance on they stopped. Hickock cleaned the blood from the shotgun with water drained from the car radiator, and Smith dug a hole with the hunting knife and buried the four spent shells and the leftover rope and tape. Further east they burned some of their bloodstained clothing, including the gloves. They reached Olathe at about 11 a.m. on Sunday, November 15. Smith registered at a hotel under an assumed name, and Hickock went home to his parents at Edgerton.
Sunday morning
On Sunday morning two of Nancy’s classmates, Susan Kidwell and Nancy Ewalt, came to the house. When no one answered the door, Nancy Ewalt went inside. “I saw Nancy in bed,” she later testified at the trial. “I thought she was sleeping or something, so I went over to shake her to try to wake her up and I saw blood all over the wall.”
Garden City Police Chief Mitchell Geisler was among the first officers to reach the house, together with Assistant Chief Rohleder, an expert photographer who photographed the scene. The county coroner, Dr. Robert Fenton, said at the time, “I’ve seen some gory things in my time, but nothing as gory as that: what we found in the Clutter house Sunday morning.”
The story that ran in The New York Times the next day, under the headline “Wealthy Farmer, 3 Of Family Slain,” reported that there were no signs of a struggle, that the telephone lines had been cut and that nothing had been stolen, which was nearly true. “This is apparently the case of a psychopathic killer,” Sheriff Robinson told reporters.
The county attorney was Duane West, then 27. Of the night he heard of the arrests, he later said: “It was literally like somebody had lifted a 200-pound sack of grain off my shoulder.”
The investigation
The Kansas Bureau of Investigation took charge of the case. Alvin Dewey led the investigation, with four other KBI investigators under him. Retired Chief Justice Walter G. Thiele later found that “immediately thereafter there was considerable feeling of fear and danger of further crimes of similar nature,” and that the feeling largely dissipated only after the arrests.
According to the Garden City Police Department, Rohleder’s photographs revealed a bloody footprint that was not visible to the naked eye, and a tire track left by the killers’ car. West credited Rohleder above anyone else in the case and said the assistant chief had found two footprints, one dusty and one bloody, and had told officers to look for more than one killer.
The break came from inside the Kansas State Penitentiary.
The informant
Floyd Wells heard about the killings on the radio in his cell. Keglovits writes that he waited about two weeks before arranging to be called to the warden’s office under a false pretext, so that he would not be known as a prison informant, and notes that a well publicized reward was being offered at the time. He told KBI agent Wayne Owens what Hickock had said to him about the Clutters.
Keglovits, quoting what she describes as original KBI case notes, dates Wells’ statement to December 10, 1959. KBI documents released by The Wall Street Journal in 2013, as summarized by the Lawrence Journal World, date the interview to December 4.
That 2013 release also challenged one of the best known episodes in In Cold Blood. Capote wrote that Dewey acted immediately on the tip. According to the Journal’s account of the documents, the agency instead “waited five full days after Mr. Wells’ statement to visit the Hickock farm,” and when the visit came it did not involve a lone agent arriving at night; four lawmen, three KBI agents and a local sheriff’s deputy, “converged midday on the farm.” By then, the two men were already gone.
Their arrest was then requested as parole violators.
Mexico, the road and Las Vegas
Several days after the killings, Hickock and Smith left the Kansas City area and drove to Mexico City. There they sold Hickock’s car, and they sold Kenyon’s radio and the binoculars to a traffic policeman. Their plans in Mexico came to nothing. They went to California, then back east to Iowa, where, according to Keglovits, they stole a 1956 Chevrolet, then to Kansas City, and finally to Las Vegas.
At about 5:25 p.m. on December 30, 1959, Las Vegas patrolmen on routine duty, carrying a bulletin and mug shots of the two men, arrested them in the stolen car. They were held as parole violators and signed waivers of extradition to Kansas. Four Kansas officers arrived in Las Vegas on December 31.
The confessions
The Tenth Circuit’s 1964 opinion sets out what happened next, because the voluntariness of the confessions was a main issue on appeal. On January 2, 1960, the Kansas officers questioned the two men separately, after advising each of his rights, including the right to counsel. At the end of a four hour session Hickock denied any knowledge of the Clutter killings. Smith told them nothing.
On January 3 the officers questioned both men again, after again advising them of their rights. Within a short time, the court found, Hickock “told in detail all the facts relating to the robbery and murder of the Clutter family.” Hickock signed a longhand version of the confession. Smith continued to deny any part in the crime, even after he was told that Hickock had confessed and named him.
On January 4 the officers drove the two men back to Kansas in separate cars. During the trip, Smith “admitted his part in the robbery and murders and gave a full account of how the crimes had been accomplished.” The Tenth Circuit found nothing in the record to suggest that either confession was involuntary. The only evidence to the contrary at the 1962 state habeas hearing was Smith’s own testimony: “I felt I was under duress at the time, not under duress of any physical violence but under mental duress.” The commissioner found that the confessions were voluntary.
On the way back, at the two men’s direction, the officers went to a spot near Scott City, where the two said they had buried the shotgun shells, rope and tape. Four empty shells, with rope and tape similar to that used on the victims, were later found there. Officers also recovered the shotgun and the hunting knife at the home of Hickock’s parents in Edgerton, and the radio and binoculars in Mexico City, all through information the two men gave them.
Return to Garden City
News of the arrests and confessions, and of the expected time of arrival, had been published in advance. The cars reached Garden City at about 6 p.m. on January 6, 1960. The county jail was on the upper floors of the Finney County courthouse, and a crowd had gathered on the lawn. Its size depends on the source. Thiele found that about 300 people had gathered that afternoon but that the crowd had dwindled to about 25 citizens and a number of newspaper people by the time the cars arrived. The Tenth Circuit recorded witness estimates of 150 to 500. Duane West, speaking in 2017, recalled more than 1,000. The official findings agree that the crowd was not hostile; witnesses described it to Thiele as “curious, congenial or jovial.”
On January 7, before County Judge M.C. Schrader, Hickock said, “I would like to waive preliminary hearing.” Smith said, “I wish to waive my rights for preliminary hearing.” They were bound over for trial.
Counsel, sanity and the decision not to move the trial
On January 8, 1960, the two men appeared in the District Court of Finney County. Each said he had no lawyer and no money to hire one. The court appointed Harrison Smith to represent Hickock, and A.M. Fleming, who had practised law in western Kansas for decades, to represent Smith. Thiele’s findings give their experience as 22 and 39 years; the Tenth Circuit gives about 24 and about 40. Fleming told the court he did not want the appointment but would serve as well as he could.
On January 29 both defendants asked the court to appoint a commission to examine their sanity. The court appointed three Finney County physicians, none of them a psychiatrist. They examined both men and reported that neither was “insane, an idiot or an imbecile,” and that each could understand his position and help in his defence. The defence had asked for a psychiatrist on the commission; the Kansas Supreme Court later held that the statute did not require one.
The court granted a severance on February 6, but on March 9 the two men agreed to a joint trial. On the defence’s motion, the court had already quashed the jury panel and summoned a new one of 150.
The defence did not ask to move the trial out of Finney County. Thiele later found that counsel and their clients had discussed it. Reasons to stay included sermons against capital punishment in Finney County pulpits and the fact that both lawyers were well known locally. They agreed no change of venue should be sought, and Hickock’s father agreed as well. The Tenth Circuit later wrote that the discussion of a defence was directed “not toward acquittal, but toward the prevention of a sentence of execution.”
At their arraignment each man said, “I wish to stand mute,” and the court entered pleas of not guilty.
On March 14 Hickock asked for a continuance, because his father, Walter S. Hickock, was ill and might not be able to testify. The motion was denied. Walter Hickock did testify at the trial.
The trial
The trial opened on March 22, 1960, before Judge Roland H. Tate. Duane West prosecuted, assisted by Logan Green, a lawyer West appointed to help with the case. Forty five prospective jurors were examined. The state used three peremptory challenges and the defence seven, leaving twelve men on the jury, with two alternates.
The state’s case was built on the confessions and the physical evidence. Hickock’s confession and Smith’s statements were admitted without objection, as were the shotgun and the hunting knife from the Hickock home. Experts testified that the four shells found near Scott City had been fired from Hickock’s shotgun, that there was human blood on one defendant’s boots, that a boot had characteristics similar to the bloody print found at the scene, and that the blood on the knife was of the same type as one of the victims’. Photographs of the victims were admitted over defence objection.
Neither defendant testified. The defence rested largely on the testimony of a psychiatrist who had examined them. Under the Kansas rule then in force, he could testify only to whether the men knew right from wrong at the time of the crime. He said Hickock knew right from wrong, and that he had no opinion about Smith.
In closing, according to the same account, Green told the jurors that “some of our most enormous crimes only happen because once upon a time a pack of chicken-hearted jurors refused to do their duty.” West said decades later that the choice to seek death was his: “I am the one who made the decision to ask the jury for the death penalty.”
On March 29, 1960, the jury returned separate verdicts finding each man guilty of first degree murder on all four counts and fixing the punishment for each at death. Accounts of how long the jury was out differ: Keglovits and Great American Trials say 40 minutes, while the Wichita Eagle, citing West, gives one hour and 40 minutes. Their motions for a new trial were overruled, and each was sentenced to be hanged.
Five years of appeals
The two men were taken to death row at Lansing. Their appeal argued that the sanity commission should have included a psychiatrist, that the continuance should have been granted, and that publicity had made a fair trial in Finney County impossible. On July 8, 1961, the Kansas Supreme Court rejected every point, noting that the publicity argument had not been raised at trial, and affirmed the convictions.
The two men then complained to the court about their own lawyers, who were discharged. Russell Shultz, a Wichita lawyer who chaired a Kansas State Bar Association committee investigating the conduct of the trial, brought a habeas corpus petition on their behalf on December 3, 1961.
The court appointed Walter G. Thiele, its retired chief justice, to take evidence. In February 1962 every member of the trial jury was called and questioned. Thiele found that although the jurors knew something about the case and some had known Herb Clutter, none had formed or expressed an opinion about guilt before the trial. He found that counsel had met their clients fifteen or more times, not the four the men claimed, and that the newspaper coverage offered as evidence of prejudice was “a factual recital.”
On July 7, 1962, the Kansas Supreme Court adopted Thiele’s report and denied the writ. Of the decision not to move the trial, it wrote that it did not think it unreasonable for counsel to believe the men could have a fair trial in Finney County, adding, “in fact, we believe they did have a fair trial.” The U.S. Supreme Court denied review of that decision on February 18, 1963. A separate appeal by Smith from the 1961 decision was dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In federal court, Joseph P. Jenkins and Robert H. Bingham, two Kansas City, Kansas, lawyers, were appointed to represent them. Their petitions argued that local prejudice and pressure had left the trial lawyers doing “little or nothing” to protect their clients’ rights. The district court denied the petitions. On July 1, 1964, the Tenth Circuit affirmed. It concluded: “we are of the opinion that the petitioners were not denied the constitutional protection of a fair and impartial trial.” The U.S. Supreme Court denied review on January 18, 1965.
The Tenth Circuit noted that when the trial lawyers took the case both men had confessed and the stolen radio had been recovered. “Neither vigor nor skill can overcome truth,” it said, quoting an earlier decision.
The executions, April 14, 1965
The executions took place just after midnight on April 14, 1965, in a warehouse on the penitentiary grounds that housed the state’s gallows. Hickock was 33 and Smith 36. Salon’s account says that rain was hammering the roof.
The sources disagree on how the order of execution was chosen. Jerry Collins, a corrections officer at the time, told The Topeka Capital-Journal in 1996 that prison officials decided to toss a coin and hang the winner first, and that Hickock won the toss and said, “Well, I’ll be damned. That’s the first thing I’ve ever won in my life.” Salon’s 2015 account says the men were hanged in alphabetical order. Both put Hickock first.
Hickock walked the 13 steps to the top of the gallows. Asked whether he had anything to say, according to the police department’s account, he called over KBI agent Roy Church, who had played a major part in the arrests, and told him, “You’re sending me to a better place than this,” adding that he bore Church no grudge. The prison chaplain, Rev. Edgar Meissner, read from the 23rd Psalm. The trap was sprung at 12:19 a.m., and Hickock was pronounced dead at 12:41 a.m.
Smith followed. His last statement, as recorded in the police department’s account, was this: “I think it is a hell of a thing that a life has to be taken in this manner. I say this especially because there’s a great deal I could have offered society. I certainly think capital punishment is legally and morally wrong. Any apology for what I have done would be meaningless at this time. I don’t have any animosities toward anyone involved in this matter. I think that is all.” The former prison chaplain, Rev. James Post, prayed for him, though Smith had not wanted anything read over him. “I cheated him a little bit, ” Post said afterward. Smith dropped at 1:07 a.m. according to the Capital-Journal, or 1:02 a.m. according to Salon, and was pronounced dead at 1:19 a.m.
Truman Capote was among the witnesses. Hickock and Smith were the next to last people hanged in Kansas. In June 1965 James Latham and George York were hanged on the same gallows. As of Salon’s 2015 account, Kansas had not executed anyone since.
The two men are buried side by side at Mount Muncie Cemetery near Lansing, in section 34, row 29, according to Keglovits. Capote paid for their headstones. Those original stones were later stolen, turned up on a farm in southeastern Kansas, and are now in storage at the Kansas Museum of History in Topeka.
Truman Capote, Harper Lee and In Cold Blood
Truman Capote, already a celebrated novelist, told The New York Times in 1965 that none of his projects had measured up to his idea of what he called “the non-fiction novel,” a factual story told with the techniques of fiction, until he read a short item in the Times about the killing of a Kansas farmer who had held a farm program post under Eisenhower. As he remembered it, the story ran under the headline “Eisenhower Appointee Slain.” The story the Times archive preserves from November 16, 1959, runs under “Wealthy Farmer, 3 Of Family Slain.” This dossier does not resolve the difference.
He chose Kansas partly because he had never been there. His lifelong friend Harper Lee, whose To Kill a Mockingbird would win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, volunteered to go with him, and she stayed in Holcomb helping with his notes for the first two months. The Wichita Eagle reported in 2009 that Capote reached town within a few weeks of the murders. Duane West told the Eagle in 2017 that Capote and Lee did not arrive until after Hickock and Smith had been captured. The two accounts cannot both be right.
Capote spent about a year and a half in Kansas, talking especially with the two killers, whom he called “the boys.” Authorities allowed him to visit the two men, and he spent most of five more years writing. The New Yorker published the full 135,000 word text in four issues in the autumn of 1965, beginning with “The Last to See Them Alive” in September. Random House published the book on January 17, 1966. Capote told the Times he was receiving about $2 million in magazine, book and film payments, including $500,000 for paperback rights.
The book was a bestseller and has been published in more than 30 languages. The 1967 film, starring Robert Blake as Perry Smith and John Forsythe as Al Dewey, was filmed partly in the Clutter house and in the courtroom where the actual trial was held. The making of the book inspired Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006). In Cold Blood has never gone out of print.
Capote insisted that the book was “immaculately factual.” Some of the people in it disagreed. Duane West said he never read it. “Capote was a tragic little figure as far as I was concerned,” West told the Eagle. West credits Garden City Assistant Police Chief Richard Rohleder as the main hero of the investigation; Capote, the Eagle noted, gave most of the credit to Dewey and to Logan Green. After the Supreme Court’s 1966 Miranda decision, Capote and Dewey both told a U.S. Senate subcommittee examining the ruling that the case could not have been solved under the new rules. “Any lawyer worth his salt would have advised the boys to say nothing,” Capote said. “Had they said nothing, they would not have been brought to trial, much less convicted.”
The fight over Harold Nye’s notebooks
Harold Nye was one of the lead KBI investigators on the case and later became the bureau’s director. After his death, his son Ronald Nye said he had rescued his father’s notebooks from a wastepaper basket after his mother tried to throw them away. In 2012 material from Nye’s case files appeared on an online auction site. The state went to court against Ronald Nye, other members of the Nye family, and Gary McAvoy, a Seattle literary memorabilia dealer, and his business, Vintage Memorabilia.
On September 27, 2012, the State of Kansas, through Attorney General Derek Schmidt and the KBI, filed a petition in Shawnee County District Court and the same day obtained a temporary restraining order blocking the sale or publication of the material, arguing that it belonged to the state because Nye had been a state employee. Judge Larry Hendricks granted a preliminary injunction on April 23, 2013. On November 26, 2014, he vacated it, concluding that it should never have been granted and that the sale and publication were protected by the First Amendment and the Kansas Constitution. In 2015, rather than produce documents the court had ordered it to turn over, the state moved to dismiss its own case.
Hendricks ordered the state to pay the defendants’ legal fees, $152,585, and on March 29, 2019, the Kansas Court of Appeals affirmed and added fees for the appeal. KCUR reported that the total came to more than $168,000. McAvoy’s own book, And Every Word Is True, draws in part on the notebooks; KCUR reported that it suggests the Clutter killings were contract killings rather than a robbery gone wrong. That theory has not been tested in any court and is not supported by the trial record, which rests on the two men’s confessions to a robbery.
The Walker family of Osprey, Florida
On December 19, 1959, about a month after the Clutter killings, Cliff Walker, 25, his wife, Christine Walker, 24, and their two small children, Jimmie, 3, and a 2 year old daughter, were killed at their home on a ranch in the small community of Osprey, in Sarasota County, Florida. Cliff Walker was shot. Christine Walker was beaten, sexually assaulted and shot. Jimmie was shot, and his sister was shot and drowned in a bathtub.
Hickock and Smith were in Florida that December. According to CBS News’ account of the investigation, they checked out of a Miami Beach motel on December 19, and at some point that day they bought items at a Sarasota department store; witnesses said they spoke with the pair in Tallahassee on December 21. The Walkers had been considering buying a Chevrolet Bel Air, the kind of car the two men were driving. A polygraph test in the early 1960s cleared them, but a polygraph expert said in 1987 that such tests were worthless.
Detective Kimberly McGath of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office took a fresh look at the case in 2007. In December 2012 the KBI exhumed Hickock’s and Smith’s remains from Mount Muncie Cemetery so that their DNA could be compared with a profile developed from semen found on Christine Walker’s underwear. In August 2013 the sheriff’s office announced that the comparison had failed. Only partial profiles could be recovered, and the crime scene samples were degraded. “It wouldn’t exclude them but it also does not provide us with any level of confidence to say there’s a match because there’s not,” said Capt. Jeff Bell. A spokeswoman, Wendy Rose, said that “based on the totality of the evidence, investigators still regard Smith and Hickock as the most viable suspects in the Walker murders.”
That is as far as the record goes. Hickock and Smith never confessed to the Walker killings and were never charged with them. They are suspects in an unsolved case, not its proven killers. “We’re not closing the case,” Bell said. “It remains an unsolved murder.”
Holcomb today
The Clutter house still stands. The Clutters designed and built it, and when it was finished in 1948 at a cost of $40,000 it was a showpiece: a blond brick house among the white stucco and wood siding of the area, with 14 rooms, two and a half bathrooms and an unusually large basement. The surviving Clutter daughters sold it, and its later owners have dealt with trespassers for decades. Portions of the 1967 film were shot there. The house sits at the end of a quarter mile driveway and is private property. Signs at the edge of the grounds say so: “STOP.” “Posted. No Trespassing.”
Holcomb has grown from a few hundred people in the late 1950s to just over 2,000. In 2009 the city dedicated its community park to the Clutters. Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter are buried in Valley View Cemetery in Garden City, and their graves, like the house, still draw visitors.
For years, farm families locked their doors and watched for car lights on country roads at night. “You were always wondering who would be in the car,” said Dave Webb of the Kansas Heritage Center in Dodge City. Kathleen Holt of Cimarron, who was 12 in 1959, said: “I remember how vulnerable we felt at the randomness of it.” Sensitivity is also why the state gallows stays in storage in Topeka. “It’s still extremely sensitive, particularly out around Holcomb and Garden City,” the Kansas Museum of History curator Blair Tarr told Salon in 2015. “Members of the Clutter family are still around.”
Timeline
- November 14, 1959: Hickock and Smith drive west from the Kansas City area toward Holcomb.
- November 15, 1959: Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter are killed in their home at about 1 a.m.
- December 19, 1959: Cliff and Christine Walker and their two small children are killed near Osprey, Florida.
- December 30, 1959: Hickock and Smith are arrested in Las Vegas.
- March 22 to 29, 1960: Joint trial in Finney County; both are convicted and sentenced to death.
- July 8, 1961: The Kansas Supreme Court affirms the convictions.
- July 7, 1962: The Kansas Supreme Court denies habeas corpus.
- July 1, 1964: The Tenth Circuit affirms the denial of federal habeas corpus.
- January 18, 1965: The U.S. Supreme Court denies certiorari.
- April 14, 1965: Hickock and Smith are hanged at the Kansas State Penitentiary.
- January 17, 1966: Random House publishes In Cold Blood.
- December 2012: The KBI exhumes both men for DNA testing in the Walker case.
- March 29, 2019: The Kansas Court of Appeals affirms the fee award against the state in the Nye notebooks case.
FAQ
Were Hickock and Smith convicted?
Yes. A Finney County jury convicted both men of four counts of first degree murder on March 29, 1960, and fixed the punishment at death. State and federal courts upheld the convictions, and both men were hanged on April 14, 1965.
Did they kill the Walker family?
That has never been established. They were suspects, but they were never charged, they never confessed, and the DNA tests reported in 2013 were inconclusive. The Walker murders remain unsolved.
Is In Cold Blood accurate?
Not entirely. Capote called it a nonfiction novel. Records released in 2013 and the prosecutor’s own account differ from the book on several points, including who did the key investigative work.
Citations & Sources
Sources
- Supreme Court of Kansas: State v. Hickock & Smith, 188 Kan. 473 (1961)
- Supreme Court of Kansas: Hickock & Smith v. Hand, 190 Kan. 224 (1962)
- U.S. Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit: Hickock v. Crouse, 334 F.2d 95 (1964)
- U.S. Supreme Court: Hickock v. Crouse, 379 U.S. 982 (1965)
- Kansas Court of Appeals: State ex rel. Schmidt v. Nye (2019)
- The New York Times: Wealthy Farmer, 3 Of Family Slain
- The New York Times: A Book in a New Form Earns $2 Million for Truman Capote
- The New Yorker: In Cold Blood, I: The Last to See Them Alive
- Federal Probation: In Cold Blood Revisited: A Look Back at an American Crime
- Garden City Police Department: Clutter Family Murders
- Garden City Co-op: Herbert W Clutter, Bonnie Clutter, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter
- Kansas Department of Corrections: Lansing Correctional Facility history
- Wichita Eagle: Killings of Holcomb family in ’59 still haunt
- Wichita Eagle: ‘In Cold Blood’ prosecutor never read the book
- Topeka Capital-Journal, via The Mirror: Hanging of ‘In Cold Blood’ killers marks 50th anniversary
- Lawrence Journal World: Documents cast doubt on accuracy of ‘In Cold Blood’
- KCUR: Decades After ‘In Cold Blood,’ Kansas Tried To Prevent Publication Of Investigator’s Notes
- Kansas Public Radio: Ownership of Notorious Murder Case Files Disputed in Kansas Lawsuit
- CBS News: “In Cold Blood” killers’ DNA not linked to Fla. murders
- ABC News: DNA Fails to Link ‘In Cold Blood’ Killers to 53 Year Old Unsolved Florida Case
- Your Observer: DNA inconclusive in 1959 murders
- Salon: Killing the “In Cold Blood” killers
- Realtor.com: The Untold Story Behind the Infamous ‘In Cold Blood’ Murder House
- Encyclopedia.com, Great American Trials: Richard Hickock and Perry Smith Trial: 1960
Image credits
- Photo: Lorie Shaull, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.
- Photo: Ammodramus, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 (public domain dedication).
- Photo: Americasroof, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.
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