If you’re an In Cold Blood reader, you probably feel a little cheated — out of images. The same few pictures of the four members of the Clutter family who were murdered in 1959 in Holcomb, Kansas, have shown up in the media for decades.
Eveanna and Bonnie Clutter. Eveanna and her sister Beverly survive but won’t talk to media
You might also have a pent-up need for more insight into the Clutters. The wholesome farm family and their killers — Perry Smith and Dick Hickock — were the subjects of In Cold Blood, which established the nonfiction novel genre and made Truman Capote the most glamorous writer in the U.S.
Well, now Sundance TV can help you out.
Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders, produced by Joe Berlinger (Paradise Lost), taps into the mother lode of unpublished pictures of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon Clutter as well as Hickock and Smith.
Gratis deal. It also shares rare video footage and audio recordings and new interviews with Kansans who knew the Clutters and discuss their feelings in an unpretentious way.
1. The surviving relatives of Bonnie Clutter who hated In Cold Blood because it portrayed her as emotionally impaired weren’t necessarily just being defensive. The docuseries features people who knew her well and remember her as a great hostess and a lot of fun.
Perry Smith in the army
2. The family of killer Richard Hickock tried to make amends once Dick turned into a petty criminal. They would give a gift of a horse to parties he had wronged.
3. Although she didn’t appear on camera, one of Herb and Bonnie Clutter’s granddaughters gave voice interviews to the documentary makers. It’s surprising because her mother, Eveanna Mosier — Nancy and Kenyon’s older sister — shunned the press and never liked In Cold Blood.
4. As a child, Perry Smith sustained a severe penile injury when a nun hit him with a flashlight. The book made mention of other nun-inflicted abuse at school because Smith was a bed wetter — but it never revealed anything quite as perverse.
Eveanna, Beverly, Nancy, and Kenyon Clutter.
5. Nancy Clutter’s boyfriend Bobby Rupp said that he looked up to her father as a role model despite that the book alleged Herb Clutter pressured Nancy to break up with Bobby because he was Catholic and the Clutters were Methodists.
6. At age 28, Richard Hickock sounded like a weary old man in a recording of his police questioning. Capote portrayed him as ever-charming, sly, and upbeat.
7. The psychiatrist who evaluated Smith and Hickock after their arrest and Smith’s army buddy who testified for him at the trial are still alive and appear on camera.
8.In Cold Blood and the Clutter case garnered so much attention that even David Hickock, the brother of killer Richard Hickock, snagged a writer to pen his biography.
Flo Buckskin was Perry Smith’s mother
9. The filmmakers somehow managed to get hold of two photos of Perry Smith’s parents, Flo Buckskin and Tex Smith, who performed in rodeo shows together before they had four kids and she sank into alcoholism.
10. “Olathe” (as in “Olathe, Kansas”) is pronounced “oh-lay-thuh.”
That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR
A widely distributed picture of the Clutters, minus their surviving elder daughters, Beverly and Eveanna. Clockwise from bottom left: Nancy, Bonnie, Herb, and Kenyon.
The Clutters’ house on River Valley Farm in Holcomb, Kansas. Apparently the heinous crime committed there didn’t put a curse on the structure. It stands today and has had other occupants.
Holcomb, the home of the Clutters, had only 270 residents at the time of the murders in 1959, but 1,000 people showed up for their funeral in Garden City.
The author was born Truman Streckfus Persons, but his birth father had little to do with him. His mother’s second husband adopted him and renamed him Truman Garcia Capote.
Nancy Clutter, second from left, regularly cooked meals for her family and also won prizes for her baked goods.
The last person to see the Clutters alive, Nancy’s boyfriend Bobby Rupp faced suspicion in the community and briefly transferred to a different high school to avoid it.
Bobby Rupp, seen here circa 2005, said that he and his brother drove to the Clutters’ farm after they heard about the murders; In Cold Blood says they walked. He allowed Capote to ask him some questions early on, but didn’t like him and wasn’t interested in his book.
Nancy Clutter, left, with her close friend Susan Kidwell.
The basement of the Clutters’ house, where police found Herb lying on a large piece of cardboard, with his throat cut and a bullet wound.
The New Yorker magazine, which published the serialized version of In Cold Blood in 1965, is still the Holy Grail for aspiring writers.
The Chinses elms that lined the Clutters’ driveway.
Garden City, Kansas, newspaper coverage of the murders.
Truman Capote in middle age. He died of alcohol-related problems in 1984 at age 59 at the home of Johnny Carson’s ex-wife Joanne Carson.
A rare photo of all six Clutters, with Kenyon and Nancy at the lower left and Herb in the middle. Bonnie, Beverly, and Eveanna are in the picture, although it’s not clear who’s who.
Truman Capote and Harper Lee met as children and stayed friends. She based the character Dill after him in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Truman Capote around the time he made a splash with Other Voices, Other Rooms, about a little boy who searches for his father only to find he’s severely handicapped and unable to speak — a metaphor for the absence of his real father.
Richard Hickock grew up in a stable home and was a popular student-athlete. Perry Smith was severely abused and, at times, abandoned as a child. They were both executed by hanging.
Truman Capote lacked parental love as a child, but his wealthy stepfather Joe Capote provided well for him materially and paid for expensive private schooling.
Harper Lee looks on as Truman Capote signs copies of In Cold Blook in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1966. She helped him research the book.
Robert Blake played Perry Smith in a 1967 movie version of In Cold Blood. He went on to success in the 1970s TV series Barretta. Blake was himself tried for murder in 2005 and acquitted.
Click on any image to view this post as a slideshow.
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.
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
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 OtherVoices, 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.
