Author: Rebecca Reisner

Nancy Dillard Lyon’s Murder

A Husband Tries to Mess with Texas
“Writer’s Block,” (Forensic Files)

When Richard Lyon first began sneaking poison into his wife’s beverages, he probably hoped she would die quickly and doctors would attribute the tragedy to natural causes, end of story.

Nancy Dillard Lyon

But he was ready for a criminal investigation into Nancy Dillard Lyon’s death just the same.

Dallas drama. He prepared documents designed to make it look as though a) Nancy committed suicide, b) her brother murdered her to hide family secrets, or c) an ex-colleague had her killed to stop her from testifying in an embezzlement case.

The architect thought he had all the angles covered.

Fortunately, the state of Texas and Nancy’s family weren’t so easily fooled. They succeeded in getting Richard Lyon removed from the Dallas Country Club and deposited into the W. F. Ramsey Unit on a prison farm in Rosharon.

Here’s a recap of “Writer’s Block,” the Forensic Files episode about the case, plus additional information from internet research.

Richard Lyon was born on April 22, 1957 to a middle class family of five children in Connecticut. His father sold insurance. He attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, then headed to the Harvard School of Design for a graduate degree in landscaping and architecture.

Ivy League sweethearts. There, he met Nancy Dillard, whose parents were wealthy and influential enough for her father’s nickname to be Big Daddy. He had made a fortune in commercial real estate in Texas. But the money hadn’t spoiled Nancy. She was hard-working and practical.

In a Texas Monthly story, Gayle Golden wrote about Nancy and Richard’s early years:

“At Harvard, they had teamed up on all their projects, working through the night until collapsing together in the single bed they shared. According to friends, Nancy had the ideas, Richard the speedy execution.”

The two purposely tweaked their handwriting so it looked similar enough that he could get away with handing in papers she’d written for him.

Richard Lyon at the trial

They married in 1982 and moved into a duplex in University Park, an affluent section of Dallas.

Folks, it’s Camelot. Forensic Files portrayed Nancy as a sweet and generous soul, an assessment corroborated by Golden, a newspaper reporter who lived in the other half of the duplex owned by the Lyons.

Nancy worked her way up to a partnership at Trammell Crow, a real estate development firm. Richard did well for himself as a project manager at a landscape architectural firm.

By 1990, they had two small daughters and lots of friends, swam at the country club, and joined in vacations underwritten by Nancy’s parents, William W. Dillard Sr. and Sue Stubbs Dillard.

Nancy and Richard continued to enjoy working together, Gayle Golden recounted:

“On their own they transformed the once-scrawny back yard into a little paradise, planting trees and wisteria, driving bricks into sand to make a patio, hanging chimes and a hammock.”

They constructed a dollhouse “shingle by shingle” for their daughter Allison.

Neighbor Gayle Golden’s Texas Monthly story

Homewrecker. But, as every Forensic Files watcher knows, idyllic-looking existences tend to give way. Richard began an affair with a coworker named  Tami Ayn Gaisford around 1989. Nancy found out, but instead of getting mad, she got depressed.

Then she got hopeful. She thought the affair might just blow over. Richard left her on at least one occasion but returned and put on the loving husband act, all the while intending to escape from the marriage.

But the mild-mannered 5-foot-7-inch Richard needed a way that wouldn’t mean losing custody of his kids or the affluence and prestige that Nancy Dillard Lyon’s family brought to his life.

And there was something to gain from Nancy’s death: a $500,000 life insurance payout.

Toxic husband. Richard first sprang into action by sprinkling a powdered poison into a soda he bought for Nancy at the movies. The drink tasted terrible and made her sick later that evening. She survived that attempt.

It wasn’t clear what type of poison he used on that occasion.

On a subsequent try, he gave her vitamin capsules laced with the poison barium carbonate. Still, she lived.

At some point, he switched to arsenic, which he probably put in her food and a bottle of wine left anonymously on their porch.

It worked.

Nice playacting. A grim-looking Richard showed up on Golden’s doorstep in January 1991 to ask if she and her husband would look after his daughters while he took Nancy to the emergency room. She had nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

“Do you think you can make it downstairs?” Gayle Golden overheard Richard say to Nancy in a sweet voice. “I’ll carry you.”

Nancy Dillard Lyon, seen here with First Lady Barbara Bush, came from an influential family

During her six-day stay at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, Nancy’s violent illness continued and she begged the medical staff to save her life.

Doctors frantically did tests to find the cause of her illness. She died before they had a chance, on January 14, 1991, at the age of 37.

Forensic tests. Nancy’s father was none-too-pleased that his son-in-law made the decision to terminate her life support without consulting him or his wife. It would come up in court later.

Meanwhile, a laboratory found lethal amounts of arsenic in Nancy’s hair, liver, and kidneys. The strands of hair served as a map of doses of arsenic that coincided with Richard’s interactions with his wife.

Aware that the No. 1 suspect is always the husband, Richard was armed and ready with the aforementioned forged documents designed to look as though Nancy wrote them.

He produced diary entries detailing childhood sexual abuse Nancy’s brother had allegedly perpetrated against her. Perhaps that would prove that either her brother killed her or that Nancy was so distraught over the bad memories she took her own life.

Find a Patsy. The grieving husband also showed authorities an anonymous letter Nancy had received; it threatened violence if she went ahead and testified against a former colleague named David Bagwell who allegedly embezzled $720,000 from Trammell Crow.

Nancy had told doctors about the mystery wine; maybe it was from Bagwell and contained arsenic.

Testifying on his own behalf at the trial, Richard Lyon tried to implicate Bagwell. Nancy had called him a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” he alleged.

And in case that didn’t work, Richard could rely on a receipt for arsenic trioxide, barium carbonate, and two other deadly substances — signed by Nancy — as evidence that she deliberately poisoned herself.

Jerri Sims led the prosecution for the state

Paper Lyon. At the trial, prosecutor Jerri Sims called on a handwriting expert who could see the small differences between Richard’s and Nancy’s handwriting. He determined the diary entries about Nancy’s brother were forgeries created by Richard.

Chemical Engineering Co., where Richard claimed the arsenic came from, said that the receipts it issued to customers looked nothing like the one Richard presented; it was fabricated evidence.

And the anonymous threatening letter on behalf of her former coworker was a big nothing. No one could trace it to anyone involved in the embezzlement case.

Tami Ayn Gaisford, Richard’s girlfriend, testified that Richard had told her that Nancy died from a rare fatal blood disease — more proof that he was a liar.

Facing reality. While Golden described Nancy as “infuriatingly optimistic” about saving her marriage when Richard first left her, it came out at the trial that her hopefulness had finally receded: At some point, she had quietly removed her husband as beneficiary of her life insurance policy.

She also shut him off from their joint bank accounts. She didn’t appreciate his using $5,900 of their money to buy a ring for Gaisford.

In 1990, Nancy had hired a divorce attorney, Mary Henrich, in whom she confided her suspicion that Richard was poisoning her — something she felt too embarrassed to tell police, according to court records from Richard Lyon’s unsuccessful 1994 appeal.

Nancy planned to move to Washington, D.C., with her daughters after the divorce, a 1991 AP story reported.

Ants implicated. At the trial, internist Dr. Ali Bagheri noted that Richard was “smiling, joking, and laughing” with hospital staff members during his wife’s emergency room visit.

A detective noted that upon being informed that Nancy had passed away from poisoning, Richard Lyon didn’t ask any questions.

Lyon later admitted to buying some poisons, for killing fire ants in his yard, he said.

But members of the jury brought their healthy sense of skepticism with them for the two-week trial.

Bar exam. They took three hours to find Richard Lyon guilty of first-degree murder.

Judge John Creuzot didn’t buy Lyon’s story

During sentencing, Judge John C. Creuzot said that Lyon used “various and sundry chemicals to kill Nancy. The first two didn’t work, and you finally finished her off with arsenic, a tried-and-true method of producing death.”

Creuzot gave him life in jail and a $10,000 fine. (By the way, in other applications, Creuzot is known for being merciful. He was part of a bipartisan effort to give alcoholic and drug-addicted offenders treatment instead of incarceration.)

Lyon’s sentence began on December 19, 1991 — less than a year after Nancy Dillard Lyon died. I guess Texas courts don’t mess around.

Today, Richard Alan Abood Lyon is prisoner No. 00612188 in the capable hands of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

An upcoming post will look into developments in his case since the conviction.

Until then, cheers. — RR

Update: Read Part 3

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Richard Lyon: Arsenic and Architecture

Nancy Dillard’s Husband Fooled Everyone at First
(“Writer’s Block,” Forensic Files)

If the story of Nancy Dillard Lyon’s death sounds a little familiar, it’s because her husband chose to kill her via poisoning, the same method used by Dr. Anthony Pignataro, the subject of a recent blog post.

A young Nancy Dillard

Pignataro, an egomaniacal plastic surgeon, failed in his efforts. Debbie Pignataro survived the doses of arsenic the doctor slipped into her food and lived to see him imprisoned.

No showboat. Nancy Dillard Lyon wasn’t so lucky. The architect died on January 14, 1991 after her husband, Richard, also an architect, sneaked harmful chemicals — one of them arsenic — into her comestibles over a long stretch of time.

He almost got away with it.

Unlike the narcissistic Pignatoro, Lyon was an outwardly modest man respected in his profession and in his community in Dallas, Texas.

The 34-year-old father of two managed to evade suspicion until after his wife died.

And even then, he supplied his defense attorneys with an armory of hard-to-refute evidence.

Nancy and Richard Lyon wed after grad school

Media binge. But the criminal justice system nailed Lyon, who had an Ivy League degree, just the same. It’s always refreshing to see investigators untangle a plot concocted by someone sure he can outsmart them.

The story became the subject of not only the Forensic Files episode “Writer’s Block” but also an hour-long Dominick Dunne’s Power, Privilege, and Justice entitled “Traces of Evil” and a made-for-TV movie called Death in Small Doses starring Tess Harper, Richard Thomas, and Glynnis O’Connor.

Upcoming posts will offer a recap of “Writer’s Block” along with some other research about the case as well as an epilogue for Richard Lyon, who is 60 years old and still among the living.

Until then, cheers. — RR  

Update: Read Part 2

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Rodger Broadway: Magazine Crew Murderer

A Salesman Ends Eskalene DeBorde’s Life
(“Death by a Salesman,” Forensic Files)

Rodger Broadway’s decision to burglarize a house with an unlocked front door and then kill the surprised homeowner was spontaneous.

Eskalene DeBorde

But the explanation for how the Bronx, New York, native ended up in Mrs. Eskalene DeBorde’s neighborhood in the first place offers a glimpse into an industry rife with malice of forethought.

Paging help. DeBorde, a 66-year-old typist for the University of Kentucky, had no reason to suspect a van would drive into her corner of Knox County, Tennessee, and drop off a group of ex-convicts and other offenders tasked with selling magazine subscriptions door to door.

It was 2001, when anyone desiring a subscription could order one online or fill out a card that fell out of any issue of Good Housekeeping or Cosmopolitan or Sports Illustrated at a newsstand.

Consumers weren’t exactly longing for Reader’s Digest salespeople to show up the way kids hope for Good Humor trucks.

The magazine publishers, however, did have a need. The decline of Publisher’s Clearinghouse and the rise of the Do Not Call List were taking a toll on subscription sales, according to a New York Times investigative report.

Shadow industry. While respectable media organizations like Hearst, Time Inc., and Condé Nast had no hand in creating magazine crews like the one that recruited Broadway, they acquired subscriptions through middlemen who did business with them.

Rodger Broadway

The door-to-door salespeople tend to benefit the least from the transactions, according to organizations that track and study them. Magazine crews seem to function at best as multilevel marketing schemes and at worst as vehicles for fraud, indentured servitude, and physical abuse against the salespeople.

Not that this in any way mitigates the cruelty of Broadway’s actions. But it sheds light on one of many types of businesses that prey upon undereducated people looking for opportunities.

The New York Times exposé of magazine crews dates back to 2007, but The Atlantic wrote about them as recently as 2015. Currently, at least three humanitarian organizations — Polaris, Parent Watch, and the National Consumers League’s Child Labor Coalition — advocate for young people ensnared by magazine crews.

Neighborhood suddenly risky. More information about that will follow, but first, here’s a recap of “Death by a Salesman,” the Forensic Files episode about the Rodger Broadway murder case:

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Eskalene DeBorde lived just a few blocks away from Lynn Noffsinger, her grown daughter who had small children.

DeBorde left her doors unlocked to make it easier for her daughter to drop by with her kids. Crime had never been a problem in the area until August 20, 2001.

That day, one of the salesman who descended upon DeBorde’s Knoxville neighborhood to sell subscriptions was 21-year-old Broadway. He had a conviction for credit card fraud and had served time for “aggravated robbery,” meaning that he either committed the theft with a deadly weapon or caused bodily harm to the victim.

Lynn Noffsinger

Worst fear comes true. He probably rang or knocked on DeBorde’s door and entered after getting no answer because she was typing upstairs. Accounts vary as to whether he broke into her home office on the second floor or she emerged and confronted him.

Whichever the scenario, Broadway beat and raped the grandmother, stabbed her through the neck, stole her credit cards and keys, poured himself a soda in her kitchen, and fled in her car.

His explanation for the incident was reported in a Knoxville News-Sentinel article:

“She was not scared. She was feisty… I didn’t come to her house to even do none of that. I went blank because she just … made me beyond mad, she made me (expletive) angry.”

Speedy police-work. DeBorde’s daughter discovered the crime scene around dinner time and called 911. Fortunately, she didn’t have to suffer an agonizing wait for justice.

The authorities solved the crime in less than a day.

Neighbors told investigators about the magazine salesmen they’d seen walking around in white shirts and black ties.

Authorities tracked down their supervisor at a Super 8 motel and spotted DeBorde’s 1997 Mazda Protege parked nearby.

Broadway was on a Greyhound bus back to New York to tend to a family emergency, the supervisor told police.

Nailed by the evidence. The supervisor admitted that members of his team had criminal records but said they were rehabilitated.

Sheriff’s deputies in Virginia stopped the bus on Interstate 81 and arrested Broadway.

Once in custody, Broadway couldn’t refute video footage showing him using DeBorde’s card at a gas station on the night of the murder.

There was also the matter of the bloody clothes and flower-shaped diamond engagement ring discovered in his travel bag. And he left fingerprints on her car window and a drinking glass in her kitchen.

Later, a lab matched samples taken from the victim’s rape test kit to Broadway’s DNA.

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Door-to-door danger. To avoid the death penalty, the 6-foot-3-inch 202-pound killer accepted a life sentence without parole plus 50 years.

Broadway’s story pretty much ends there, but the scourge of the magazine crews continued.

Shortly after the DeBorde attack, door-to-door magazine sellers committed two more sexual assaults in Tennessee.

At this point, it’s understandable if you can’t imagine having any sympathy for the plight of the people who sell house to house on magazine crews.

Neither could I until I found all the research showing that they’re often victims, too.

Police interview workers at a gas station where Broadway asked for directions after the murder

Grim rewards. The NY Times story tells of jobseekers in their teens and early 20s enticed to join “mag crews” with the promise of seeing the country, having fun, earning $500 or more a week, and accruing points toward tropical vacations.

But in reality, the better part of the commissions are kicked upstairs. Sellers can end up receiving only $10 to $15 a day, sleeping several to a room in cheap motels, being pressured to meet high sales quotas, and receiving drugs instead of wages.

According to Parent Watch founder Earlene Williams as quoted in The Atlantic story:

“Research shows these people mostly come from very low-income situations, may have had trouble with the law, and are earnestly trying to dig themselves out of a hole. They’re vulnerable because they don’t feel like they’re worth anything and the crew managers instill a culture of fear and manipulation.”

John Simpson, a former mag crew member interviewed for a video accompanying the NY Times article, said his supervisors turned him into an enforcer who would beat up team members for not producing enough sales.

(A lawyer for the National Field Selling Association said on camera that abuse claims are exaggerated.)

One former crew member named Isaac James interviewed for the NY Times video said he would filch jewelry and electronics from homeowners while their backs were turned, then use the proceeds to buy magazine subscriptions himself so he would make his quota.

Modern-day Joads. The crew leaders reportedly have abandoned underperforming members at bus stations without enough money for a ticket home. Polaris reports that 25 percent of the calls it receives about sales crews involve “workers left behind in unfamiliar areas.”

Like Okies in debt to the company store, crew members who wish to return to their faraway homes sometimes can’t because they owe the magazine crew owner money for their food and lodging.

Many of the magazine-selling businesses hire crew members as independent contractors, according the NY Times, which means management has no responsibility to give them benefits. (It also relieves the selling businesses’ owners of liability for any wrongs the members may commit.)

Tennessee’s Northeast Correctional Complex

Parent Watch, which Williams created after her own own child had a bad experience on a magazine crew, offers resources to crew members and their concerned parents. She advises consumers to turn away door-to-door peddlers.

It’s not just a matter of safety. The Atlantic reported that the subscriptions, hawked with well-practiced sales tactics (“I only need 100 more points for a basketball scholarship”), cost up to $150 apiece and sometimes the magazines never show up.

Lawmakers have looked for ways to better monitor magazine crews. Back in 1999, Wisconsin Senator Herbert Kohn introduced legislation to regulate the industry, but it failed.

Next chapter. In 2014, the Broadway case was cited by a Knox County clerk pressing for better enforcement of a $55-a-month peddler license mandate for anyone not affiliated with a religious or nonprofit group, or who doesn’t own a business within Knox County.

Meanwhile, Polaris concentrates on regulations that protect the crew members from exploitation. The nonprofit defines abusive magazine crew practices as a form of human trafficking and advocates for the National Fair Labor Standards Act to cover door-to-door sales. It also pushes for magazine publishers to practice transparency regarding their supply chains.

The organization operates the National Human Trafficking Hotline, which offers help for victims and enables concerned observers to report suspected abuse.

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Today, with digital publishing increasingly rendering Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and other former giants of the print magazine business into shrinking pamphlets, perhaps in the near future, magazine crews will die out.

In a blow to the subscription-sales industry in 2003, a circuit court judge ruled Eskalene DeBorde’s family could continue with its $20 million lawsuit against two companies — American Community Services and the Real Deal — affiliated with the magazine crew despite their claims that their salespeople were independent contractors.

As far as an epilogue for Rodger Erick Broadway, he has apparently already resigned himself to fading away quietly. Internet research reveals no evidence of attempts to void his sentence.

Behind razor wire. In his late 30s by now, Broadway is prisoner No. 00360958 at the Northeast Correctional Complex in Mountain City, along with 1,800 other inmates.

As a resident of NYC, I’m glad to know that Broadway is in a prison cell in Tennessee instead of making appearances in dark alleyways or lonely subway cars in my town.

That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

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5 Forensic Files Killers Who Can’t Hurt You Now

Relax, These Heartless Souls Are Out of Commission

With so much cruelty portrayed on Forensic Files, an update that gives a little peace of mind seems in order for this week.

Stacey Castor, who murdered her husband with anti-freeze, then attempted to frame her own daughter Ashley Wallace
Stacey Castor

1. Stacey Ruth Castor
Prison: Bedford Hills, New York
DOB: 7/14/67
FF episode: Freeze Framed
Crime: Murder, attempted murder
Victims: David Castor, Ashley Wallace
Outlook: Deceased.
Stacey murdered husband David Castor in 2005 by feeding him antifreeze via a soft drink and a turkey baster, then staged his death to look like a suicide. She subsequently attempted to frame her own daughter Ashley Wallace for the crime by forging a confession note, then slipping her a lethal dose of pills to make it look as though she’d committed suicide; fortunately, Ashley got help and survived. Stacey might have killed her previous husband, Michael Wallace, as well, but no charges were filed. She died of a heart attack in a jail cell on June 11, 2016. She would have been eligible for parole at age 87 — but I wouldn’t trust someone like her at any age.

Sharon Zachary

2. Sharon Zachary
Prison: Huron Valley Complex, Michigan
DOB: 08/05/1965
FF episode: Prints Among Thieves
Crime: Murder, robbery
Victim: Robert Rogers
Outlook: In prison for life, no parole.
The caretaker of the very crotchety and cash-rich Robert Rogers, Sharon Zachary was already in the will, but she couldn’t wait. The 5-foot-1-inch-tall Battle Creek, Michigan, native started helping herself to his money early, then used a pipe to beat the 80-year-old multimillionaire to death in hopes of gaining total access early.

Shannon Agofsky

3. Shannon Agofsky
Prison: Terre Haute USP, Indiana
DOB: circa 1971
FF episode: Stick ’em Up
Crime: Robbery, murder
Victims: Dan Short, Luther Plant
Outlook: On death row.
Shannon, 18, and his brother Joseph, 23, abducted bank president Dan Short, forced him to unlock the vault in the State Bank of Noel in Missouri, and stole $71,000 on October 6, 1989. Instead of wearing masks to hide their identities, the thieves bound the 52-year-old banker to a weighted chair and threw it into Oklahoma’s Grand Lake. While serving prison time for Short’s murder, Shannon killed fellow inmate Luther Plant in an exercise cage in 2001 and faces the death penalty. In the meantime, he’s active on Facebook. (Joseph Agofsky was convicted of the robbery but not the murder; he died in jail in 2013.)
Read a full recap and update to the case.

Lynn Turner

4. Lynn Turner
Prison: Metro State Prison, Atlanta
DOB: 7/13/68
FF episode: Cold Hearted
Crime: Murder
Victims: Glenn Turner, Randy Thompson
Outlook: Deceased.
The rather benign-looking mother of two poisoned her 32-year-old common-law husband by sneaking antifreeze into his food, in a bid to collect the firefighter’s $35,000 life insurance payout. After Randy Thompson’s death, it came to light that her previous husband, police officer Glenn Turner, had met his end in a similar way and she had received $150,000 from his insurer. She was convicted of both murders and given life in jail. The prison routine didn’t suit Lynn Turner, and she took her own life via an overdose of propranolol in her cell on August 30, 2010.

Colvin “Butch” Hinton

5. Colvin “Butch” Hinton
Prison: Hays State Prison, Georgia
DOB: 09/18/1960
FF episode: Ring Him Up High
Crime: Sexual assault, murder
Victims: Shannon Melendi, Tammy Singleton
Outlook: In prison for life, no parole. SEE CORRECTION BELOW.*
Authorities should have never released Hinton after he attempted to rape 14-year-old Tammy Singleton in 1982. But the sexual predator won freedom after just two years. He got a gig as an umpire at a softball game, where he met 19-year-old Emory University sophomore Shannon Melendi on March 26, 1994. He abducted, raped, and strangled her, then burned her body. Afterward, he took his unsuspecting wife out to dinner at an Olive Garden and gave her as a gift a ring stolen from Melendi. It took a decade for authorities to figure out what happened and convict Hinton.
*Correction and update: Thanks to reader Chi for the correction notice. This inmate is actually up for a parole review in 2018. Shannon Melendi’s family has started a petition asking for Hinton’s parole request to be denied.
March 2020 update: No parole for Hinton. He’s still in Hays State Prison (thanks to reader Marcus for writing in with the good news).

That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR

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Jim Barton: Bad Lieutenant?

Or Maybe a Railroaded Victim
(“Chief Suspect,” Forensic Files)

This week, it’s back to Forensic Files with one of the more perplexing episodes in the series.

Jim and Vickie Barton as a youngish couple

The evidence used to convict Jim Barton for his alleged role in a home invasion that left his wife dead seemed shaky. And unlike other accused Forensic Files spouse killers, Barton was something of a sympathetic character.

While his alleged crime was highly inadvisable, it didn’t carry much in the way of malice — if he really did it, that is. A jury thought so, and convicted him in 2005.

Eye on the prize. I checked into an epilogue for the 6-foot-5-inch former lawman, but first here’s a recap of the episode, “Chief Suspect,” along with additional information from internet research and insights from YouTube commenters.

Jim Barton was a well-liked lieutenant with the Springboro, Ohio, police department. His wife, Vickie, worked as a nurse supervisor at Sycamore Hospital.

The couple met through their love of riding and lived on a horse farm called Locust Knoll in Franklin Township, outside of Springboro. By all reports, Jim and Vickie had a happy marriage.

By the time he was around 40, Jim allegedly was aiming to win the top job of police chief, but that position would usually go to someone who resided within the city limits.

Horrific scene. On April 11, 1995, he called 911 to report finding his wife on the floor. She was undressed, not breathing, and had three bullet wounds to the head from a .22 caliber.

Someone had ransacked the household’s gun collection but didn’t steal anything.

Vickie Barton taught at Kettering College of Medical Arts in Ohio

The crime shocked the small community, and police geared up for a thorough investigation. But they found no suspects and no helpful evidence.

The case went cold for a few years, until police arrested a local career criminal named Gary Henson over an unrelated burglary. Henson said he knew something about the Vickie Barton homicide.

Suicide adds intrigue. His half-brother, William Phelps, was paid $3,000 by Jim Barton to rob his home in order to scare Vickie so that she’d agree to move away from their rural property and into the city of Springboro, Henson contended.

But Phelps went off the rails and raped and murdered Vickie, said Henson, who also told police that the original plan was for Henson himself to go along on the robbery but that he was in jail then.

Phelps committed suicide just weeks after the murder. (Henson later changed his story, testifying that Phelps had an accomplice, and the accomplice was the one who assaulted and killed Vickie.)

The revelations were more than enough reason for a cold case squad to reopen the investigation in 2003.

Detectives listened to Jim Barton’s 911 tape for any hints pertaining to a robbery-for-hire, and came up with a lot of what it considered red flags.

Tale of the tape. First, the detectives noted that Barton referred to the killers in the plural, evidence that he knew that two people committed the crime, they theorized. But as a YouTube commenter noted:

Susan Adams7 months ago  “They” could be said because you don’t know if the person who committed the crime was man, woman, one person or several. Saying “they” shouldn’t have [raised] red flags.

Detectives also interpreted noise on the tape as the sounds of Barton moving objects around, possibly tampering with evidence.

Gary Henson

But the offending noise, which the episode broadcast, sounded rather nonspecific. It could have been the house’s HVAC system or a breeze through a window.

In an interview for “Scared to Death,” a 20/20 episode about the Barton case, Jim Barton said that he looked around the house in case an assailant was still on the scene. Perhaps that accounted for some of the noise on the 911 tape.

Jumping to conclusions. Also, the theory about the attack as a scare tactic seemed a little far-fetched.

Before voting for conviction, I’d want to hear something along the lines of a secret recording of Barton admitting to the crime. No evidence like that existed. As another commenter wrote:

Sam Rod1 year ago (edited) “hmm, the evidence was terrible in convicting this guy. this was a long reach for the prosecution.“

And on the subject of long reaches, one of the prosecution’s witnesses (presumably Henson) was hypnotized in order to extract information from him, said Barton defense lawyer Jon Paul Rion.

According to the 20/20 episode, in his earliest police interviews, Henson didn’t mention a robbery-for-hire plan; he added that part of the story later.

Henson sounded like a none-too-reliable witness all in all.

A CBS story published on truthinjustice.com reported that Vickie’s friends considered the frighten-into-relocating theory a stretch as well: “It would have challenged her to be more aggressive in protecting their farm,” Vickie’s girlfriend Darlene Bisgaard told CBS.

Here’s the part that really made me lose respect for the methodology of the investigation:

Jim Barton in custody

Hokey experiment. On the 911 tape, Barton said, “I gotta call [unintelligible word that sounded like ‘felp’], man.” Prosecutors asserted the garbled word was “Phelps” — thereby proving that Barton was in cahoots with Henson’s half-brother, William Phelps.

Barton maintained that he said “help” as in “I gotta call for help.”

To prove otherwise, the prosecution brought in Robert Fox, an Ohio State University linguistic and acoustic-phonic expert.

“To eliminate any potential bias,” narrator Peter Thomas explained, the professor was given only two choices: Was the word “help” or “Phelps”?

But why even give him suggestions? They should have simply let him interpret the word in question instead of prejudicing him.

Fox concluded that Barton said “Phelps” despite what seemed like a lack of a final “s” sound on the tape.

Failed second marriage. And there were other weak revelations as well. Barton’s second wife, Mary Ann Lacy, said that he sometimes spent time alone in their darkened basement, which investigators translated into evidence of guilt.

But Barton had married Lacy, who was Vickie’s best friend, only 15 months after the murder, and he may have still had sorrow to process. It didn’t make him guilty of anything. Or as an online commenter put it:

Dan Kirchner1 year ago (edited) “so the 2nd wife dumped him for spending alone time in the basement?? wtf? its called a mancave these days, right?”

Another piece of new evidence the prosecutors seized upon: A waitress named Barb Palmer suddenly remembered that, 10 years earlier, she had seen Jim Barton and William Phelps eating together at a local diner called Mom’s Restaurant.

Unless they left her a $100 tip, how could she recall them after all that time?

DNA taken from the crime scene didn’t match that of Gary Henson or William Phelps (authorities exhumed his body to get a sample).

Credit undeserved. But members of the jury apparently harbored few doubts. They convicted Barton of complicity to commit manslaughter. On April 15, 2005, he received a sentence of 15 to 50 years at the Southeastern Correctional Institution in Lancaster.

“Had it not been for the forensic analysis of Jim’s 911 call, the case might never have been solved,” narrator Peter Thomas concludes. But as another commenter noted:

Babalwa Brook2 years ago  “I love how they are crediting forensics for solving this case when it clearly was the informant who brought up Phelps and the waitress who confirmed that dude knew Phelps smh”

The Forensic Files episode left off in 2006, but more has happened since then.

Barton wins a round. In 2015, the  6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that authorities improperly withheld evidence about a break-in that happened in another rural home in Warren County, where the Bartons lived.

Vickie Barton’s mother, Mary Jane Siebert (right), testified for the defense. She is shown with Elaine Barton, who married Jim in 2003.

The panel of judges also said that the state’s case hinged on  “unsupported, shifting and somewhat fantastical” witness testimony (presumably referring to Henson’s assertions).

In March 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to reinstate Barton’s conviction, meaning Ohio authorities would have to give him a second trial or set him free.

The following month, Jim’s third wife, Elaine Geswein Barton, put up $350,000 in bail, and he exited prison.

In September 2016, Barton avoided a new trial by entering an Alford plea, whereby the accused maintains his innocence while admitting that enough evidence exists to convict him.

Who knows? Of course, maybe Barton really did cause his wife’s death via the Fargo-like plot that Henson related. The time Barton served behind razor wire seems like adequate punishment for a crime of that nature.

From the evidence shown on Forensic Files and detailed in newspaper stories, however, his chance of being guilty seems around 50 percent. As a juror, I’d want to be 99 percent sure before convicting.

That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube

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Menendez Brothers Cheat Sheet

Who’s Who in a Beverly Hills Greek Tragedy
(Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders)

After watching the first episode of The Menendez Murders, I’m suspecting the NBC series won’t be quite as good as last year’s FX true-crime juggernaut, The People vs. OJ Simpson.

Series star Edie Falco

But so what? The Menendez miniseries still means eight nights of Edie Falco as defense lawyer Leslie Abramson. I’d tune in to watch Edie read the Hertz terms & conditions agreement.

Throw in the portrayal of Lyle and Erik Menendez — the telegenic brothers who massacred their parents and soothed their grief with shopping sprees — and it definitely merits one hour every Tuesday (10 p.m. EST on NBC) for the next seven weeks.

The Menendez Murders dramatizes the killing of Jose and Kitty Menendez inside their $5 million Beverly Hills mansion on August 20, 1989. Here’s a cheat sheet on the real-life cast of characters.

Leslie Abramson, defense lawyer
Born: 1942
Before the Menendezes entered her life, Abramson successfully defended teenage father-killer Arnel Salvatierra, who got off with no jail time after Abramson portrayed him as an abused child. Likewise, she defended Erik and Lyle Menendez by presenting a tale of paternal cruelty strong enough to result in a mistrial for Erik and Lyle — who shot their father five times and their mother nine. A second trial ended with a guilty verdict and, although Abramson wasn’t allowed to speak during the sentencing, she got to see her clients spared the death penalty. She reportedly received $700,000 for her work on behalf of the Menendezes.
Random Fact: She’s a bittersweet reminder of when it was okay to have a big frizzy perm.

Jose Menendez, father
Age at time of murders: 45
Born: 1944
The Cuban immigrant came to the U.S. at 15 and married at 19. Jose turned an accounting degree from Queens College and an insatiable drive for success into a $500,000-a-year job in the entertainment industry at Carolco Pictures. The domineering Jose eventually amplified his ambitions and transferred them to his sons, but he was very hard on them. Erik’s high school swimming coach recalled that Jose would criticize his son harshly in front of his teammates. Apparently, he took pride in his children’s physical appearance as well and urged Lyle to wear a toupee when an early case of male pattern baldness emerged.
Random Fact: His company produced Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo pictures.

Kitty Menendez, mother
Age at time of murders: 47
Born: 1941
Described in some sources as a socialite, the onetime midwestern elementary school teacher was born Mary Louise Anderson. She met Jose at Southern Illinois University and married him, despite both sets of parents’ disapproval (Hers didn’t like that he was an immigrant; his were put off that she came from a broken home). After having Lyle and Erik, she gave up her career. The series portrays her as suffering from depression. Other sources have reported that she was fragile and unusually emotionally dependent on her husband. Before moving to California, the Menendezes lived in Princeton, New Jersey, where Kitty reportedly had a fulfilling social life. She wasn’t happy about relocating to the West Coast.
Random Fact: Before the Menendezes bought their house on Elm Drive, it had at different times been rented out to Elton John and Prince.

Lyle Menendez, elder son
Age at time of murders: 21
Born: 1968
Pressured by his father to apply to Princeton University, Lyle did attend the Ivy League school for a short time, until cheating on a test got him suspended for a year. At some point during his travails, he impregnated a girlfriend, but Jose stepped in and persuaded her to terminate. Lyle bought a $60,000 Porsche Carrera with his late parents’ funds. He and his brother expected to collect a $5 million life insurance payout on their father, but it turned out that Jose had never taken the required physical exam, voiding the policy.
Random Fact: Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne said that Lyle’s was the only toupee that ever fooled him.

Erik Menendez, younger son
Age at time of murders: 18
Born: 1970
Emotionally more vulnerable than his older brother, Erik exhibited grief — whether real or feigned — that included weeping, throwing himself to the ground on the front lawn of the house, and going fetal the night of the murders. He managed to pull himself together well enough to use his late parents’ money to hire his own personal full-time tennis coach at $50,000 a year (quite a nice salary in 1989).
Random Fact: Lyle at one time expressed interest in going into commercial real estate because he admired Donald Trump’s career.

Judalon Smyth, witness
This irritating mess of a witness was an entrepreneur who owned a tape-duplicating business at the time of the Menendez drama. Smyth told investigators that she overheard Erik Menendez confess to murdering his parents while she was standing outside psychologist Jerome Oziel’s office door. Her story about her personal relationship with the doctor, who was married with two children, changed a number of times, but they both ultimately admitted to an affair. At some point, she switched to the defense side after asserting that Oziel had brainwashed her.
Random Fact: She said she found Oziel revolting at first.

Jerome Oziel, psychologist
Born: Circa 1947
Erik Menendez first sought help from Oziel after he committed two burglaries in 1988. Oziel must have done a great job counseling Erik, because he killed his parents a year later. Erik confessed to the murders to the Beverly Hills shrink, who ended up breaking his patient confidentiality agreement because, he said, he was worried Lyle and Erik might try to shut him up. But he ended up having both Lyle and Erik as patients, only to testify against them later. Oziel now practices in Oregon and specializes in couples counseling.
Random Fact: California took away his psychology license in 1997 amid a number of allegations including compelling a construction worker to do free home-repair work in return for therapy.

That’s all for this post. Next week, the blog will resume Forensic Files recaps. Until then, cheers. — RR

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In Cold Blood Slideshow

Click on any image to view this post as a slideshow.

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In Cold Blood: No Saints in Kansas

A Girl Detective Takes on a Quadruple Homicide

Just a brief post this week since I went a little off the rails with the long-form blogging last time.

I like Truman Capote’s writing and true-crime stories so much that it’s hard to stop elaborating.

The first In Cold Blood post discussed how the flamboyant Capote created a new literary genre, and last week’s explored his alleged efforts to snuff out a competing manuscript.

Never stop. But when the subject is In Cold Blood, there’s always more.

The tale of the brutal collision between the wholesome Clutter family and two dissolute criminals in Holcomb, Kansas, has been fascinating readers since the book hit the best-seller list in 1966.

Now, Soho Press has a new telling of the story coming out in November.

The novel No Saints in Kansas offers the tale through the eyes of the fictional Carly Fleming, a 15-year-old who recently moved to Kansas.

Carly was just beginning a friendship with Nancy “the town darling” Clutter when the teenager was murdered along with three members of her family on November 15, 1959.

Taking the initiative. In the early days of the investigation, detectives (in real life, too) suspected that Bobby Rupp, Nancy’s boyfriend, was the culprit who tied up, robbed, and shot her and her brother, Kenyon, and their parents, Herb and Bonnie.

Carly, who feels protective of Bobby, launches her own investigation in order to clear his name.

And speaking of going off the rails, Carly sneaks onto the murder scene, barges in on a press conference, and does her own ballistics tests.

She ends up grounded and arrested. Nevertheless, she persisted.

Hometown girl. If all this sounds like a novel for a teen audience, it’s because it is. Soho Press is publishing the book as young adult fiction.

Murderers Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. Smith later said that he liked Nancy Clutter and could see she was trying to put him at ease. He shot her anyway.

I enjoyed the telling just the same, especially because author Amy Brashear brings credibility to the characterizations.

Brashear and her family moved to Finney County, Kansas, in 1991, when she was 9.

That’s 33 years after the homicides, but locals hadn’t stopped talking about them, and probably never will.

Lose the halo. The author grew up around people old enough to have known the Clutters personally and still feel the psychic trauma caused by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock’s crime.

I found the novel engaging also because it seems to confirm something that I’ve always suspected: that Nancy Clutter wasn’t quite the perfect human being that Capote portrayed.

(“You’ve idolized that poor dead woman beyond all human recognition,” as Ruth and Augustus Goetz wrote in The Heiress.)

That and other story elements made No Saints in Kansas a nice read.

Nice holiday gift. I caught a couple of examples of anachronistic language in No Saints in Kansas. The first known use of “face-plant” was in 1982, according to Webster‘s, and I suspect people didn’t say “sounds like a plan” back in the 1950s.

But it’s not the author’s fault that this reader makes her living by pointing out errors; I’m an editor by day.

Author Amy Brashear

I’d recommend the book for any preteen or young teen reader who likes detective stories and true crime.

It’s a good introduction to a U.S. tragedy that Truman Capote made sure will never become arcane.

That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR

 

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In Cold Blood: Alternative Facts

The Story Capote Didn’t Want Us to Buy

The last post mentioned a new development related to Truman Capote’s 1966 best seller, In Cold Blood.

The four murder victims

A report surfaced a few years ago that at the same time Capote was researching his book, another writer was working on a telling from a different perspective.

Dark horse. Capote’s version of a quadruple slaying that took place in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959, relied heavily on interviews with one of the two killers: Perry Smith, whom Capote portrayed as a sensitive drifter marred by abuse and hardship.

The other writer, an uncelebrated newspaperman named Mack Nations, was helping to edit an account called High Road to Hell penned by Smith’s partner in crime: Richard Hickock, a tall Kansan whom Capote portrayed as a personable but remorseless conman, killer, and would-be rapist.

Media coverage about the existence of High Road to Hell dates back to 2009. What’s new is that the son of the late Wichita Eagle reporter is spearheading a campaign to draw attention to it.

Michael Nations, who works as a probation officer, has posted a seven-part video series on YouTube to present some facts about his father’s work.

Smeared. The video series, titled Footprints Found Inside ‘In Cold Blood,’ is a simple effort, just the younger Nations talking to a video camera in front of his garage and later in an easy chair inside his house.

“Many negative and demeaning things were written and published about my father years after his death on December 24, 1968,” Michael Nations says on camera. “I believe it only fitting that what I have presented on his behalf as both a reporter and writer will be credited to him.”

I watched all seven parts. While not absorbing, the series hits a few high notes, particularly in outlining Capote’s attempts to undermine the competing manuscript.

A list of the interesting points from the video series will follow, but first a bit about Smith and Hickock’s crime and In Cold Blood for readers unfamiliar with the events:

Safe house. On November 15, 1959, Richard Hickock, 28, and Perry Smith, 31, slipped through an unlocked door into Herb and Bonnie Clutter’s house and cut the phone lines.

The ex-cons thought that the Clutters, who owned River Valley Farm in Holcomb, Kansas, had a safe containing $10,000 in cash in their house.

Back in 1959, that seemed like the score of a lifetime, or at least enough to finance a jobless existence for a few years.

Hickock acquired his belief about a money-filled metal box when he shared a jail cell with Floyd Wells, a onetime employee of River Valley Farm.

Wells had been inside the Clutters’ house and described its layout in detail to Hickock.

Terrified family. Although Wells got the floor plan correct, he was wrong about the safe. It didn’t exist and, in fact, friends of Herb Clutter later recalled his using checks to pay for nearly everything, even a purchase of $1.50, according to In Cold Blood.

Unfortunately, Hickock had no doubts about a safe. He recruited Smith, another prison friend, for a robbery plan.

Hickock, Smith

After sneaking into the Clutters’ house, the two woke up the family members by shining flashlights in their faces.

They tied up the couple and their two youngest children, Nancy and Kenyon. (The Clutters’ adult daughters, Eveanna and Beverly, didn’t live at home.)

Sex criminal. Hickock, who had a history of targeting underaged girls, admitted that he knew from Floyd Wells’ account that Nancy would be a teenager by then.

He allegedly acknowledged that he intended to rape Nancy, 16, but that Smith had stopped him.

After Hickock and Smith found no safe in the location Wells had specified, they searched throughout the five-bedroom three-bathroom house. Herb Clutter assured them there was no safe.

No church that day. They gave up and stole what little cash family members had in the house, less than $50, plus 15-year-old Kenyon’s transistor radio. They executed each of the Clutters with a gunshot to the head at close range.

Smith and Hickock then fled Holcomb, eventually hiding out in Mexico.

Meanwhile, two of Nancy’s friends entered the house and discovered the bodies; they were planning to go to church with the Clutters and were concerned when no one answered the door.

News of the murders shocked and terrified Holcomb. All the Clutters, but especially Herb and Nancy, were popular in the community.

On the day before she died, Nancy taught a little girl how to make a cherry pie and helped another local girl with a violin solo.

Herb oversaw construction of the First Methodist Church in Garden City, served on the Federal Farm Credit Board, and was the first president of the National Wheat Growers Association.

Michael Nations

Chance encounter. Although their murders weren’t huge news on a national level, the Clutters were affluent enough to merit a short mention in the New York Times.

If not for Truman Capote’s coming across the item by chance, few people outside of Western Kansas would know about the Clutters or Smith or Hickock today.

Capote, a glamorous, already successful 5-foot-3-inch-tall novelist, called up William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, and announced he was heading to Kansas to start working on a story about the crime.

Complex character. For Capote, it turned into a six-year odyssey that included forging a close relationship with lead Kansas Bureau of Investigation detective Alvin Dewey and his well-read wife, Marie, followed by an intimate friendship formed with Perry Smith and some acquaintanceship with Hickock.

The 2004 movie Capote with Philip Seymour Hoffman portrays the writer as a compassionate advocate for Perry Smith on one hand, and on the other, an inveigler impatient for Smith and Hickock’s executions to happen so he could finally slap an ending on In Cold Blood and get it published.

Capote began serializing the story in The New Yorker in 1965, and the book came out in January 1966 to great acclaim. It was translated into 30 languages.

Cut to the video. But back to Michael Nations and his 2017 video series: He asserts that High Road to Hell was suppressed and his father wrongly treated.

Who wanted to thwart Hickock and Nation’s effort? First, there was Capote, of course. He’d invested too much of his time in researching the story to let some enterprising local get in his way.

Also, according to Nations, the Kansas prison and law-enforcement officers who worked with Capote wanted Capote’s story to be the definitive account of their work. Capote portrayed Alvin Dewey as the hard-charging yet humble hero of the investigation and prosecution of the two killers.

Truman Capote circa 1966

A 2017 Wall Street Journal story by Kevin Helliker reports that Dewey let Capote know about the existence of the Hickock script, and it was only then that Capote began visiting death row to interview Smith and Hickock.

Subtle bribery? Michael Nations reads from a letter to Dewey in which Capote calls Nations’ work “preposterous.”

In the same letter, Capote mentions that the Deweys will be welcome to use a Colorado vacation home he plans to buy.

Capote also allegedly refers to Nations as a “bastard reporter” and an income tax cheater and suggests that his own work will offer the Deweys immortality.

Also during the video series, Nations holds up an ancient dog-eared paperback copy of In Cold Blood and says that each crease represents a fact contradicted by letters Hickock wrote to Mack Nations in 1961.

Callous criminal. Nations is probably right about at least some mistakes within In Cold Blood. Other researchers throughout the years have written about errors and possible fabrications in Capote’s work.

While Nations contends In Cold Blood contained falsehoods regarding Hickock’s story, he doesn’t dispute Capote’s portrayal of Hickock as amoral and heartless.

Hickock said in his letters to Nations that he considered people dying to be no big deal (“there are plenty of people to take their place”), he felt cheated that he didn’t get to shoot the Clutters (Smith did that himself, with Hickock’s complicity), and he liked the media coverage and felt proud of his unique criminal achievement.

Among Michael Nations’ other statements, assertions, and opinions presented in the video series:

  • Mack Nations sold an article about his work on the case to a magazine called Male in 1961.
  • There still exist 200 letters Hickock wrote to Mack Nations. The Kansas Historical Society in Topeka has them now.
  • Capote never liked Richard Hickock because the ex-con gave interviews to Mack Nations before speaking with Capote.
  • At some point, authorities banned all reporters except for Capote from interviewing the killers.
  • Michael wrote his own, unpublished exposé, In My Father’s Shoes, in which he transcribed Hickock’s letters to Mack Nations. He asserts that Capote stole some of the content from the letters.
  • Floyd Wells told Hickock he saw a safe in the Clutters’ home and witnessed Herb Clutter retrieving cash from it to pay workers. But at the trial, Wells testified only that he “thought” there was a safe.

False revelation. While those contentions sound believable, Michael Nations’ biggest bombshell is hard to swallow: that Hickock and Smith committed the Clutter robbery on a contract basis for a man named Roberts and they either received or expected to receive $1,000 or more from Roberts in return for their efforts.

Hickock may have told this particular tale to Mack Nations, but that doesn’t make it believable.

As the Wall Street Journal article by Kevin Helliker argues:

“The reasons to discount Hickock’s claim go beyond his lack of credibility as a pathological liar. If he and Smith were paid to kill the Clutters, why didn’t they use that information to try negotiating their way off death row? Why were they dirt poor before and after the crime?”

Nancy Clutter, left

Widening market. After viewing Michael Nations’ video series, I’m still confused as to whether or not he possesses a copy of his father and Hickock’s High Road to Hell manuscript. He mentions that his dad sent a copy to Kansas investigators at their request but never got it back.

Capote may have very well pressed authorities to suppress Nations’ account.

He probably didn’t need to, though.

The public fascination was and is strong enough that a competing book would likely have only stoked greater interest in the Clutter case — and ultimately led critics to conclude that Capote’s book was the greater literary achievement.

That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR

In Cold Blood: Murders That Live On

New Variations on Truman Capote’s Storytelling

This week’s post starts a little sabbatical from Forensic Files to concentrate on some new developments related to the classic true-crime book In Cold Blood.

One of many editions

Truman Capote’s story of the slaughter of four members of a well-liked Kansas farming family in 1959 established a new literary genre: the nonfiction novel.

Cradle to gallows. Capote interviewed people connected with the Clutters, who were terrorized and shot during a home invasion — way before someone invented that term — waged by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, a couple of young ex-cons.

By interspersing that intelligence with information from interviews with investigators and Perry Smith, Capote created a 343-page narrative that included in-depth backstories of the characters, a moment-by-moment narrative of the murders, and coverage of the police work, convictions, and eventual executions of the killers.

Of the two truants, Smith by far had the more sympathetic story, or at least Capote portrayed it that way. The son of a Native American mother and white father who once had a happy marriage and worked together as rodeo performers, Smith suffered from a series of long-running tragedies.

Unexpected bromance. His mother sank into severe acoholism, her four kids lived in an orphanage for a time, and two of them committed suicide. An accident left Smith with mangled legs and constant pain.

Smith and Capote developed a bond during the time he was researching his book.

A Young Truman Capote

Capote, too, came from an unstable household damaged by alcoholism, but he found a way out and turned himself into a member of the glittering literati of his day.

He had early success with his novels Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in 1948 when he was 23, and The Grass Harp three years later. His novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, later the basis for the Audrey Hepburn movie of the same name, came out in 1958.

But In Cold Blood was his blockbuster. It has sold 100 million copies, according to Study.com.

There are at least three movies based on the story.

Wholesome, meet dissolute. My favorite, the 2005 release Capote with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener, portrays the author’s efforts to make a literary conquest out of the quadruple homicide that rocked the Kansas town.

I’ve seen the film about the same number of times I’ve read the book In Cold Blood, at least four. The story of the unlikely face-off between the high-functioning 4-H-meeting-attending Clutter family and the two margin-dwelling assailants makes for an unusual American tableau.

The means of storytelling was a precursor to books such as Sebastian Junger’s 1997 best seller, The Perfect Storm, which featured a reconstructed story of a commercial fishing boat that disappeared.

Fortunately, Capote’s book probably will never vanish from the public consciousness, and two new developments related to the story have recently emerged.

First, information about a manuscript that told the story of the Clutter homicides through the eyes of Dick Hickock has leaked out. A seven-part sparsely viewed story about the manuscripts exists on YouTube. I will give it a watch and report back.

Smith (top) and Hickock

Fresh retelling. And coming up in November, Soho Press is publishing No Saints in Kansas, a novel told from the perspective of a fictional friend to the real-life Nancy Clutter, the dynamic 16-year-old at the center of In Cold Blood.

The author, Amy Brashear, grew up near Holcomb.

No Saints in Kansas is written for a teenage audience, but I’m going to give it a read myself and report back on it just the same. It might make a nice holiday gift for a nascent true-crime fan in the family.

That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — R.R.

Update: Read part 2.