Truman Capote and the Legacy of "In Cold Blood"

By Ralph F. Voss

Ralph F. Voss was a high school junior in Plainville, Kansas in mid-November of 1959 when four members of the Herbert Clutter family were murdered in Holcomb, Kansas, by “four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives,” an unimaginable horror in a quiet farm community during the Eisenhower years. No one in Kansas or elsewhere could then have foreseen the emergence of Capote’s book–which has never gone out of print, has twice been made into a major motion picture, remains required reading in criminology, American Studies, sociology, and English classes, and has been the source of two recent biographical films.

Voss examines Capote and In Cold Blood from many perspectives, not only as the crowning achievement of Capote’s career, but also as a story in itself, focusing on Capote’s artfully composed text, his extravagant claims for it as reportage, and its larger status in American popular culture.

Voss argues that Capote’s publication of In Cold Blood in 1966 forever transcended his reputation as a first-rate stylist but second-rate writer of  “Southern gothic” fiction; that In Cold Blood actually is a gothic novel, a sophisticated culmination of Capote’s artistic development and interest in lurid regionalism, but one that nonetheless eclipsed him both personally and artistically. He also explores Capote’s famous claim that he created a genre called the “non-fiction novel,” and its status as a foundational work of “true crime” writing as practiced by authors ranging from Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer to James Ellroy, Joe McGinniss, and John Berendt.

Voss also examines Capote’s artful manipulation of the story’s facts and circumstances: his masking of crucial homoerotic elements to enhance its marketability; his need for the killers to remain alive long enough to get the story, and then his need for them to die so that he could complete it; and Capote’s style, his shaping of the narrative, and his selection of details–why it served him to include this and not that, and the effects of such choices—all despite confident declarations that “every word is true.”

Though it’s been nearly 50 years since the Clutter murders and far more gruesome crimes have been documented, In Cold Blood continues to resonate deeply in popular culture. Beyond questions of artistic selection and claims of truth, beyond questions about capital punishment and Capote’s own post-publication dissolution, In Cold Blood’s ongoing relevance stems, argues Voss, from its unmatched role as a touchstone for enduring issues of truth, exploitation, victimization, and the power of narrative.

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Oct 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9780817385880

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Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood

Ralph F. Voss

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2011

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Adobe Caslon Pro

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Cover image: Truman Capote studies members of the press on the Finney County Courthouse grounds on January 6, 1960, as all await the arrival of Kansas Bureau of Investigation agents and their prisoners, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. Photo courtesy of the Hutchinson News, Hutchinson, Kansas.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Voss, Ralph F.

    Truman Capote and the legacy of In cold blood / Ralph F. Voss.

       p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8173-1756-0 (cloth : alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0-8173-8588-0 (electronic)

1. Murder—Kansas—Case studies. 2. Capote, Truman, 1924–1984. I. Title. HV6533.K3V67 2011

    364.152′30978144—dc23

                                                                                                                    2011019757

For Glenda

and for my three sons

John, Walker, and Collin

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Legacy of Capote’s Celebrity

2. The Gothic Muse Triumphant

3. A Legacy of Style

4. The Myth of the Nonfiction Novel

5. The Gay Subtext of In Cold Blood

6. Capote’s Argument against Capital Punishment

7. The Legacy of Creative Influence

8. The Legacy in Kansas

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. The Clutter family at Christmas during the mid-1950s

2. The Clutter house in 2010

3. Richard Hickock’s mug shots

4. Perry Smith’s mug shots

5. Truman Capote, age four

6. Capote on the dust jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms

7. Capote strikes a pose in the lobby of Garden City’s Windsor Hotel

8. Capote signs copies of In Cold Blood at the Finney County Public Library

9. The Clutter driveway in 1959

10. Clutter caskets being loaded into hearses on the day of the funeral

11. Capote’s sketch of the layout of the Clutter farm

12. Capote’s sketch of all of Smith and Hickock’s travels from the beginning to their capture

13. Perry Smith being taken into court

14. Richard Hickock being taken into court

15. Capote in the packed courtroom

16. Capote’s courtroom sketch of Perry Smith

17. Robert Blake, Truman Capote, Scott Wilson, Alvin Dewey, and John Forsythe during filming of In Cold Blood in Kansas

18. The poster for Richard Brooks’s film of In Cold Blood

19. The poster for Capote

20. Nelle Harper Lee in downtown Garden City, circa 1960

21. The Clutter gravestones

22. Herbert W. Clutter

23. Bonnie Clutter

24. Nancy Clutter

25. Kenyon Clutter

26. The Clutter Memorial in Holcomb

27. The Holcomb Community Park dedicated to the Clutter family

Acknowledgments

My debts in writing this book are many, beginning with The University of Alabama, which generously granted me a sabbatical leave during the spring term of 2008 to allow me more time to work on the manuscript, and the following English department graduate research assistants who helped at various stages of my research: Catherine Ball, Amanda Phillips, and Pilar Walker.

Thanks also go to the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, where I examined relevant selections among the Truman Capote Papers; as well as the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., where I studied some of the Truman Capote Papers housed there. I am grateful for the friendly and helpful assistance of the excellent staff at both of these institutions.

I also thank the Truman Capote Literary Trust, Alan U. Schwartz, trustee, for its kind permission to include certain material from the Truman Capote Collection at the New York Public Library and the Truman Capote Papers at the Library of Congress.

For their generous permission to use photographs and their consistent interest in and support for this book, I thank the Finney County Historical Society and Museum, the Finney County Public Library, and the Finney County Sheriff’s Office. I also thank the Hutchinson News and the Monroe County Heritage Museums for permission to use photographs.

Numerous individuals in numerous places offered information, encouragement, and insight in some degree and in some way or another; I endeavor here to name them all while running considerable risk of omission: Katherine Adams, Thomas Fox Averill, Stacey Beth-Mackowiac Ayotte, Kevin Bascue, Bob Beatty, Philip Beidler, Roy Bird, Jennie Chinn, Gerald Clarke, Clark Elliott, Henry Elliott, Sue Elliott, Alan Gribben, Kathy Hanks, Fred Hargis, Clifford R. Hope Jr., Dolores Hope, Nolan Howell, Terri Hurley, Gary Jarmer, Robert Keckeisen, Michael L. Keene, James Kenny, Machelle Klaus, Jean Knaus, Norman McMillan, Connie Groth McPherson, John McPherson, Sandra J. Milburn, William L. Nance, Megan O’Shea, Laurie Oshel, Stacey Parham, Laura L. Phillippi, Bob Rupp, Coleen Rupp, Carolyn Sayler, John Sayler, Elaine Scheuerman, Ray Shearmire, Carl Singleton, Steven Trout, Richard Uhlig, Dan Waterman, Duane West, Orvileta West, and Fred Whiting.

Special thanks go to all my colleagues in the English Department at The University of Alabama, and to members of the Association of College English Teachers of Alabama (ACETA).

I wish to acknowledge the love and support of my six sisters, all of whom live in Kansas, where we grew up: Betty Deutscher, Joyce Elliott, Grace Brown, Shirley Cheatum, Alice Sneath, and Marilyn Rodgers; I wish also to honor the memory of our brother, Bill Voss, whom we lost the same year the four members of the Clutter family died.

My deepest gratitude goes to Glenda Brumbeloe Weathers, whose enthusiasm for this project and research assistance throughout its development have surely been as invaluable to my efforts as Harper Lee’s must have been to Truman Capote’s efforts on In Cold Blood.

Any virtues this work has are shared by those above; any of its faults are mine.

Truman Capote and the Legacy of

In Cold Blood

Introduction

The Chinese elms that Herb Clutter planted in 1948 to flank the driveway leading to his newly built and personally designed home near Holcomb, Kansas, have seen better days. Once they flourished in green fullness, as Chinese elms often did in summer defiance of this generally arid region, especially when the trees were close to a stream; and there was always water in the nearby Arkansas River back then. Now dead branches protrude erratically from the sparse green the elms wear in summer, and the riverbed is sand. Cycles of lengthy drought exacerbated by excessive nearby irrigation and dam building upstream in Colorado have joined elm disease in besetting Herb’s trees. Herb built the house in the country, but Holcomb has grown so much recently that the house now has a street address. A swinging gate bars entrance to the driveway, reinforced by a Private Property sign. Donna Mader, present owner of the Clutter place, isn’t unfriendly; it’s just that so many curious strangers from all points of the compass seem to be attracted to this particular elm-lined driveway on the southwest edge of town, and their gawking at all hours proved unsettling, so she put up the gate.¹

The Clutter house is the site of multiple murders over a half century ago, before the world had heard much about mass murders and serial murderers—before the notoriety of Richard Speck, Charles Whitman, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, Aileen Wuornos, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Dean Corll, and a host of others. Tiny Holcomb, with fewer than three hundred people when the Clutters were murdered in their home on the night of November 14, 1959, became a focus of attention that yet endures, despite the intervening years and the rapid growth of the town thanks to cattle feedlots, meat-packing, and energy industries; it endures despite the mind-numbing occurrence of crimes of far greater magnitude in this country, such as the foreign terrorist attack in New York City on September 11, 2001, the domestic terrorist attack in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, numerous school shootings such as Columbine and Virginia Tech, and on and on. There is something about the Clutter case that makes it loom large in cultural memory, and my purpose is to examine various reasons as to why this is so.

This book is about the legacy of another book and its author: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Without Truman Capote and his book, most people wouldn’t know about the murders of four members of the Clutter family. In the long, sad history of multiple murders in the United States, particularly since the Clutter murders, there is, without Capote, nothing truly extraordinary about the Clutter crime, except perhaps for its location and the exemplary outward lives of the victims. The killings did not take place in a bustling metropolis, nor even a suburb, but in a tiny farming community in western Kansas—the epitome of the American rural heartland. And the Clutters were by all accounts wholesome individuals who seemed stereotypes of virtuous Midwestern farm people, the last people you’d ever expect to be murdered, as some local folks later described them.

Nor, without Capote, would there be anything extraordinary about the two murderers, both ex-convicts who had met in the Kansas State Penitentiary; one, Richard Eugene Hickock, a no-account hot check artist from near Kansas City, Kansas; and the other, Perry Edward Smith, also a no-account, a burglar and drifter who could not legitimately claim a home anywhere. The two men were caught through a combination of their own desperate attention-grabbing actions and methodical police work, and they were tried, convicted, and executed by the state of Kansas for the Clutter killings.

What lifts this particular crime out of the ordinary and gives it lasting memory is Capote, an erstwhile writer of Southern gothic fiction and occasional journalistic accounts. His book In Cold Blood, about the Clutter crime and its consequences, is the crowning, most distinguished achievement of his career and a pioneering document in the history of American nonfiction and true crime narration. Now, better than a half century after the Clutter murders and the deaths of Smith and Hickock by state-sanctioned hanging, In Cold Blood remains in print, and because of its ongoing relevance to so many contemporary cultural concerns, it is often required reading not only in many American literature courses and courses in the writing of creative nonfiction but also courses in journalism, criminal justice, sociology, and psychology, where teachers emphasize how well the book is written and how it addresses very real questions about crime and punishment in our culture as well as questions about what constitutes truth in reporting and the value of such reporting.

After one of the biggest initial printings (reportedly one hundred thousand hardback copies) ever ordered by Random House up to that time,² its price was set in 1966 at $5.95 per copy, and it quickly became a best seller and Book of the Month Club selection, prompting Newsweek to observe: The five-ninety-fives and their corollary begettings have already brought Capote an estimated $2 million. New American Library has paid $500,000 for paperback rights, probably the highest price ever for a work of nonfiction, and Columbia pictures has given Capote another half million, reportedly the largest sum ever for film rights to a book, as well as ‘complete control’ and one-third of the movie’s profits.³ Considering that the average starting, nine-month salary for a Kansas high school English teacher in the 1965–66 school year was $5,000 (your author has intimate knowledge), it is easy to see how much In Cold Blood enriched Capote at the time. Since then, In Cold Blood has been translated into thirty-two languages and, as recently as November of 2005, ranked number sixty on Amazon.com’s list of books sold.⁴

Despite solid success with his earlier fiction, most notably his debut novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), and a handful of short stories, most of them written from the mid- to late 1940s, Capote’s literary reputation would be severely diminished without In Cold Blood, which is undoubtedly the work for which he will always be best remembered. Moreover, this book will show that, in addition to the scholarship about In Cold Blood that has appeared in literary and other academic journals, Capote and his best-known book have been kept before the public in other art forms created by other artists, including various feature films, an opera, a graphic novel, and a conventional novel. Any Internet search engine will reveal countless references to the crime, the book, Capote, and related topics. There can be little doubt that Truman Capote and In Cold Blood have left a significant cultural legacy.

That legacy came at a great price, beginning with the killings of the Clutters themselves but continuing with the increasing artistic and personal tensions that Capote experienced as he found himself drawn more and more into the complexity of the work he had originally conceived to be only an article reporting on the impact of the crime on the small community of Holcomb. At first he didn’t even concern himself with whether or not the killers were caught; he was pursuing a kind of human-interest story that he’d convinced the New Yorker to commission: what effect did this locally shocking crime have on people in the tiny community? His interests lay in artistic questions of a journalistic and sociological nature, not criminal justice. But as he and his good friend, the fellow Alabama author Harper Lee (Nelle to her friends), spent more time in the community, the more they got to know not only the crime investigators but also the citizens of Holcomb and nearby Garden City, the seat of Finney County. Capote and Lee saw the fear and suspicion that gripped a community that had formerly seemed so open, trusting, honest, and God-fearing. And when the killers, Smith and Hickock, were caught and brought back to Finney County within a few weeks after the murders, Capote got to know them, too, and realized his work had far more reach than he ever initially imagined. It was now more than the story of a crime’s impact on the people in a very rural place; it was also the story of the victims and their killers, as well as the law enforcement people who pursued and captured them; it was the story of the process of law and punishment not only in the state of Kansas but in the nation. It was more than an article; it was a book, and Capote was going to have a lot more invested in it than even he knew at the time.

Capote was thirty-five years old when he began the work, and he was quite confident that he was equal to the task of writing it. He believed he could relentlessly study the principals in the story, find out the facts, and then use his novelistic techniques to shape those facts into a narrative he called a journalistic nonfiction novel—a phrase he coined to promote a kind of writing that, despite his later claims, he did not so much invent as build upon and advance. Before In Cold Blood, Capote was already established in New York City’s literary and social circles, having parlayed his Southern muse and flair for eccentricity into attracting considerable attention. He was something of a darling in New York’s café society, a 1950s gay stereotype in his voice and mannerisms but able to cultivate famous, accomplished people of whose acquaintance he was proud—writers, artists, scholars, photographers, and socialites. In 1956 he had managed a merger of his writing and celebrity-acquaintance interests in lengthy pieces for the New Yorker; one a first-person, impressionistic report of a tour of the Gershwin musical Porgy and Bess in Soviet Russia (The Muses Are Heard); and the other a first-person pseudo-interview or portrait of actor Marlon Brando (The Duke in His Domain). Neither piece was conventionally journalistic, and both emanated from Capote himself at the center; yet both fueled Capote’s interest in nonfiction, an interest that would eventually lead him to the Clutter case, which he first read about in a brief straight news item buried in the inner pages of the New York Times on November 16, 1959.

His attention piqued by the short article, Capote called William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker who had encouraged his journalistic interests, to enlist support for going to Kansas to investigate and report. Capote then persuaded Harper Lee, who had just finished the manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird, to accompany him to Kansas—a move that would prove wise indeed, for it was her graceful charm and friendliness that tempered the impression the obviously gay 5’3" Capote, with his high voice and flair for attracting attention to himself, was bound to make in a place like western Kansas. Lee helped contact people for interviews and then participated in those interviews. Capote, claiming impressive recall, did not use a tape recorder during the interviews, relying instead on his own fresh recollections of each day’s work to make notes in the evenings back at his rented rooms. Lee also wrote post-interview notes, which she then compared to Capote’s. Capote and Lee succeeded through their tenacity—it became clear that they were staying in Garden City until they got their story—and through the graciousness of some local citizens, such as attorney Clifford Hope and his wife Dolores, who invited them to Christmas dinner in 1959 and more or less launched Capote and Lee as popular social figures among prominent Garden City families.⁵ It wasn’t long after that Christmas dinner that Capote and Lee insinuated themselves into the confidence of Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) agent Alvin Dewey, whose wife, Marie, was a native Southerner who was especially charmed by the reputations and attentions of her fellow Southerners Capote and Lee. This connection to Dewey and the case proved crucial to Capote’s getting key details about the pursuit, capture, and conviction of the killers, because Dewey headed the KBI investigation.

Later, as he worked on his Kansas true crime project, Capote began to spread his own news about it, sharing bits of it in public readings, teasing the curiosity of the potential market with his unerring sense of self-promotion. But the wheels of justice in Kansas turned slowly after the speedy trial and conviction. Capote basically had his story and knew how he wanted to treat it, but he had to wait agonizingly on its ending. It had taken only four months after the crime to capture, try, and convict the killers, but the legal delays attendant to capital punishment added significantly to the stress and duration of Capote’s dilemma while postponing publication. Anticipation of the book grew as time passed. Capote was making a bid for greatness, and he was making no bones about it, but he was also on the horns of a powerful, protracted dilemma: for his book to have its best possible ending, Smith and Hickock, who had become his friends, would have to hang.

Almost forgotten at the heart of the buildup to In Cold Blood are Herbert and Bonnie Clutter and two of their children, Nancy and Kenyon, who of course did not die so that Truman Capote could polish his reputation; but, fairly or not, things sometimes seem to have worked out that way. No, the heart of the crime story didn’t originally have anything at all to do with Truman Capote, and it began with a jailhouse lie.

The Clutters died because Kansas prison inmate Floyd Wells told his cellmate, Richard Hickock, that he had once worked for Clutter, whom Wells described as far wealthier than Clutter actually was. Wells told Hickock that Herb Clutter always kept $10,000 in cash in a safe at their home on the outskirts of town, and Hickock, soon to be paroled, schemed to get that money, which Wells had simply made up to give his story more appeal. Wells never dreamed Hickock would ever try to rob Herb Clutter; he thought his fanciful tale was merely the sort of jailhouse hyperbole in which all prisoners engaged. After Hickock was paroled, he recruited Smith, who was Hickock’s prison cellmate before Wells and who was now also on parole. Hickock’s plan was for Smith to accompany him to the Clutter residence, carrying weapons and picking up rope and tape along the way. The idea was to steal the money and leave no witnesses whose testimony could eventually return Hickock and Smith to prison. As it turned out, there was neither a safe nor much money in the Clutter home, nor had there ever been; but by the time those facts became manifestly clear to Hickock and Smith, the barefoot and pajama-clad Clutters, who had been awakened from slumber, had not only gotten a good look at the intruders but had also cooperated with them, putting up no real resistance.

The Clutters’ compliance ultimately made no difference. Herb Clutter was already bound and gagged when Perry Smith slit his throat and then shot him in the head with Hickock’s 12-gauge shotgun. All of the remaining Clutters, similarly bound and gagged, save Nancy, were also shot in the head. And for this, the killers drove off into the Kansas night with about forty dollars, a portable radio, and a pair of binoculars. They buried the shotgun-shell casings and remaining rope and tape by a desolate farm road, and they drove back to eastern Kansas, their plans for riches dashed but convinced that no one could tie them to what they left behind.

The discovery of the bodies the next day shocked and saddened the community, then plunged it into fear: who would do such a thing? The Clutter farm was about a half mile southwest of town, more than a mile from U.S. Highway 50 that lay on the north edge of the community, causing some to speculate that the killers were local, not drifters off the highway. Yet everyone knew everyone else in town, and no one could imagine why anyone would ever want seriously to harm any of the Clutters. Since Holcomb had no police department, it fell to Finney County Sheriff Earl Robinson to investigate. Sheriff Robinson quickly called for reinforcements from the KBI, and by the time the news of the murders had spread across the state, KBI agents Roy Church, Clarence Duntz, and Harold Nye had joined the local KBI agent, Dewey, who had been appointed by KBI director Logan Sanford to head the investigation. Dewey was already at work with the sheriff, trying to find motives and clues, both of which were hard to come by.

The KBI men reasoned that if the motive was robbery, the murders probably weren’t done by anyone from the Holcomb area, because everyone there knew Herb Clutter didn’t keep cash around (Capote later reported in In Cold Blood that Clutter even paid for haircuts by check).⁶ On the other hand, though the Clutter home was a spacious brick structure, there was nothing about it that would cause strangers who’d ventured off the highway to think that large amounts of cash were inside. Like many western Kansas farmsteads, it had a few ordinary-looking outbuildings: three barns, a machinery shed, a small house for the hired man and his family—who were home that night but neither heard nor saw anything. The aforementioned long driveway lined with Chinese elm trees led from the county road to the house. To the investigating lawmen, it just didn’t seem like the Clutters would be killed by anyone, local or not. Yet they knew that a killer or killers had gone up that driveway the night of November 14, after Nancy’s boyfriend Bobby Rupp had left and after the Clutters had retired for the night.

The KBI investigators speculated that there was more than one killer simply because it was hard to conceive that one person could manage to tie up and gag all the victims, but they did not have evidence suggesting that there were two killers until two different sets of boot prints were discerned in the crime-scene photographs shot by Richard Rohleder, a talented amateur photographer who was also a Garden City policeman. But whose boot prints? And where were the shotgun and its discharged shells? Where was the knife used to cut Herb Clutter’s throat? What was missing from the house? (After a few days, the woman who regularly cleaned house for the Clutters noted only that Kenyon’s portable radio was missing. That the binoculars had also been stolen was not known until later, when the killers confessed.) Robbery remained the most obvious motive, reinforced when the investigators found a watch secreted in one of Nancy Clutter’s shoes, perhaps lodged there after she heard the intruders but before she was bound. In short, there was almost nothing to go on in the investigation and almost nothing to stop the fear and suspicion that engulfed Holcomb, Garden City, Finney County, and eventually, most of the state.

Herb Clutter had been very well known in Kansas, a well-respected farmer and rancher, a self-made man educated at the state’s premier agricultural university who had followed a career as a county agricultural agent (i.e., one who advised farmers and ranchers about modern agribusiness methods) by buying his own place and putting his knowledge into practice, expanding and prospering in a typically unostentatious way. A staunch Kansas Republican, he had been appointed to the Federal Farm Credit Board during the administration of fellow Kansan Dwight Eisenhower. He had been the first president of the Kansas Association of Wheat Growers and a past president of the National Association of Wheat Growers. Currently, he was president of the board of directors of the Garden City Cooperative Equity Exchange and a member of the board of the Consumers Cooperative of Kansas City, Missouri. He had once been featured for his farm management expertise in an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.⁷ He was an active member of the local 4-H (head, heart, hands, and health) club and the First Methodist Church of Garden City. Clutter’s prominence added to the fact that the murders were very big news in the state of Kansas, and one of the state’s major daily newspapers, the Hutchinson News, published over 150 miles to the east of Holcomb, offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the Clutter case.⁸

News of that reward eventually reached the ears of Floyd Wells, still an inmate at the Kansas State Penitentiary. Now, hearing about the $1,000 reward, Wells realized that he probably knew who had killed the Clutters. He stepped forward to claim the reward, and the KBI men finally had a lead; moreover, they soon were in pursuit of Hickock and Smith because the killers’ failure to find money in the Clutter home prompted Hickock to write several bad checks in Kansas City before he and Smith fled the state. KBI men spoke with Hickock’s parents, who reported that he had disappeared shortly after November 15, and they did not know his where-abouts. Hickock’s parents were certain that Smith, whom they knew to be an ex-convict and who had appeared with their son at their home just before Hickock’s disappearance, had been a bad influence. KBI agents also spied a shotgun at the Hickock home, and though they were convinced that it was the murder weapon, they did not take the gun at the time. They did, however, authorize a national search for Hickock and Smith, who by then had fled to Mexico, a trip financed by Hickock’s bad checks.

But the bad-check money was soon spent. Hickock, who may have seductively recruited Smith for the Clutter crime by indulging Smith’s fantasies about the two of them diving for sunken treasure off Mexico’s coast, told Smith that they would have to return to the United States, where Hickock believed they could more easily raise money. Possibly because of Smith’s affection for Hickock, possibly because Smith felt he had no other recourse, or possibly because Smith believed the Clutter murders forged an unbreakable bond between him and Hickock, Smith reluctantly agreed to leave Mexico with Hickock. He then packed some of his and Hickock’s belongings and shipped them to himself, care of general delivery in Las Vegas. The shipment included the boots they wore in the Clutter house. Then the two returned by a very circuitous route to the Kansas City area, where Hickock again signed his name to worthless checks. But this time, an alert clerk, who had an intuition that the check he’d just accepted from Hickock was bad, wrote down the number of the stolen license plate of the stolen car the killers drove away from the store. When the check bounced, Hickock’s name, along with the license plate number, came to the KBI agents. Incredibly, the killers managed to drive away from Kansas City again, but this time the license plate number followed them on another circuitous route across many state lines to Las Vegas.

In Las Vegas, Smith and Hickock drove to the post office where Smith retrieved the package of belongings he had shipped from Mexico. They had just picked up Smith’s package when a Las Vegas police officer happened to spot their car and its license plate. The killers were arrested, and the Las Vegas police notified the KBI that the prisoners were in custody. Agents Church, Dewey, Duntz, and Nye went to Las Vegas to interrogate the suspects, at first implying that they were simply talking with them about parole violations. They didn’t yet have solid evidence that could place Hickock and Smith in the Clutter house that night. They needed to sweat the prisoners and hoped one of them would break and confess (this occurred before the 1966 Miranda Supreme Court Decision, and neither prisoner had requested an attorney). The interrogators had some help from the package Smith had retrieved from the post office, for within it they found the boots that had made Smith’s and Hickock’s footprints in the Clutter basement. Along with the boots that matched Richard Rohleder’s actual-size photographs of the footprints, they had Floyd Wells’ testimony. And they knew about the shotgun back at the home of Hickock’s parents near Edgerton, Kansas, and the fact that his parents hadn’t seen him since November 16. It wasn’t much, but it proved to be a good start.

Working methodically, the KBI men made sure Smith and Hickock were separated and could not consult with each other. They gradually demolished the alibi the killers had concocted for the weekend of November 14–16. They waited for an opportune time to mention the Clutter case; then after mentioning it, they said that they had a witness (Wells) whom they did not name at the time. And they