In Cold Blood (12 page)

Of those present, none had been closer to the Clutter family than Andy Erhart. Gentle, genially dignified, a scholar with work-calloused hands and sunburned neck, he’d been a classmate of Herb’s at Kansas State University. “We were friends for thirty years,” he said some time afterward, and during those decades Erhart had seen his friend evolve from a poorly paid County Agricultural Agent into one of the region’s most widely known and respected farm ranchers: “Everything Herb had, he earned—with the help of God. He was a modest man but a proud man, as he had a right to be. He raised a fine family. He made something of his life.” But that life, and what he’d made of it—how could it happen, Erhart wondered as he watched the bonfire catch. How was it possible that such effort, such plain virtue, could overnight be reduced to this—smoke, thinning as it rose and was received by the big, annihilating sky?

THE KANSAS BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, a state-wide organization with headquarters in Topeka, had a staff of nineteen experienced detectives scattered through the
state, and the services of these men are available whenever a case seems beyond the competence of local authorities. The Bureau’s Garden City representative, and the agent responsible for a sizable portion of western Kansas, is a lean and handsome fourth-generation Kansan of forty-seven named Alvin Adams Dewey. It was inevitable that Earl Robinson, the sheriff of Finney County, should ask Al Dewey to take charge of the Clutter case. Inevitable, and appropriate. For Dewey, himself a former sheriff of Finney County (from 1947 to 1955) and, prior to that, a Special Agent of the F.B.I. (between 1940 and 1945 he had served in New Orleans, in San Antonio, in Denver, in Miami, and in San Francisco), was professionally qualified to cope with even as intricate an affair as the apparently motiveless, all but clueless Clutter murders. Moreover, his attitude toward the crime made it, as he later said, “a personal proposition.” He went on to say that he and his wife “were real fond of Herb and Bonnie,” and “saw them every Sunday at church, visited a lot back and forth,” adding, “But even if I hadn’t known the family, and liked them so well, I wouldn’t feel any different. Because I’ve seen some bad things, I sure as hell have. But nothing so vicious as this. However long it takes, it may be the rest of my life, I’m going to know what happened in that house: the why and the who.”

Toward the end, a total of eighteen men were assigned to the case full time, among them three of the K.B.I.’s ablest investigators—Special Agents Harold Nye, Roy Church, and Clarence Duntz. With the arrival in Garden City of this trio, Dewey was satisfied that “a strong team” had been assembled. “Somebody better watch out,” he said.

The sheriff’s office is on the third floor of the Finney County courthouse, an ordinary stone-and-cement building standing in the center of an otherwise attractive tree-filled square. Nowadays, Garden City, which was once a rather raucous frontier town, is quite subdued. On the whole, the sheriff doesn’t do much business, and his office, three sparsely furnished rooms, is ordinarily a quiet place popular with courthouse idlers; Mrs. Edna Richardson, his hospitable secretary, usually has a pot of coffee going and plenty of time to “chew the fat.” Or did, until, as she complained,
“this Clutter thing came along,” bringing with it “all these out-of-towners, all this
news
paper fuss.” The case, then commanding headlines as far east as Chicago, as far west as Denver, had indeed lured to Garden City a considerable press corps.

On Monday, at midday, Dewey held a press conference in the sheriff’s office. “I’ll talk facts but not theories,” he informed the assembled journalists. “Now, the big fact here, the thing to remember, is we’re not dealing with one murder but four. And we don’t know which of the four was the main target. The primary victim. It could have been Nancy or Kenyon, or either of the parents. Some people say, Well, it must have been Mr. Clutter. Because his throat was cut; he was the most abused. But that’s theory, not fact. It would help if we knew in what order the family died, but the coroner can’t tell us that; he only knows the murders happened sometime between eleven P.M. Saturday and two A.M. Sunday.” Then, responding to questions, he said no, neither of the women had been “sexually molested,” and no, as far as was presently known, nothing had been stolen from the house, and yes, he did think it a “queer coincidence” that Mr. Clutter should have taken out a forty-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy, with double indemnity, within eight hours of his death. However, Dewey was “pretty darn sure” that no connection existed between this purchase and the crime; how could there be one, when the only persons who benefited financially were Mr. Clutter’s two surviving children, the elder daughters, Mrs. Donald Jarchow and Miss Beverly Clutter? And yes, he told the reporters, he did have an opinion on whether the murders were the work of one man or two, but he preferred not to disclose it.

Actually, at this time, on this subject, Dewey was undecided. He still entertained a pair of opinions—or, to use his word, “concepts”—and, in reconstructing the crime, had developed both a “single-killer concept” and a “double-killer concept.” In the former, the murderer was thought to be a friend of the family, or, at any rate, a man with more than casual knowledge of the house and its inhabitants—someone who knew that the doors were seldom locked, that Mr. Clutter slept alone in the master bedroom on the ground floor, that Mrs. Clutter and the children occupied
separate bedrooms on the second floor. This person, so Dewey imagined, approached the house on foot, probably around midnight. The windows were dark, the Clutters asleep, and as for Teddy, the farm’s watchdog—well, Teddy was famously gun-shy. He would have cringed at the sight of the intruder’s weapon, whimpered, and crept away. On entering the house, the killer first disposed of the telephone installations—one in Mr. Clutter’s office, the other in the kitchen—and then, after cutting the wires, he went to Mr. Clutter’s bedroom and awakened him. Mr. Clutter, at the mercy of the gun-bearing visitor, was forced to obey instructions—forced to accompany him to the second floor, where they aroused the rest of the family. Then, with cord and adhesive tape supplied by the killer, Mr. Clutter bound and gagged his wife, bound his daughter (who, inexplicably, had not been gagged), and roped them to their beds. Next, father and son were escorted to the basement, and there Mr. Clutter was made to tape Kenyon and tie him to the playroom couch. Then Mr. Clutter was taken into the furnace room, hit on the head, gagged, and trussed. Now free to do as he pleased, the murderer killed them one by one, each time carefully collecting the discharged shell. When he had finished, he turned out all the lights and left.

It might have happened that way; it was
just
possible. But Dewey had doubts: “If Herb had thought his family was in danger, mortal danger, he would have fought like a tiger. And Herb was no ninny—a strong guy in top condition. Kenyon too—big as his dad, bigger, a big-shouldered boy. It’s hard to see how one man, armed or not, could have handled the two of them.” Moreover, there was reason to suppose that all four had been bound by the same person: in all four instances the same type of knot, a half hitch, was used.

Dewey—and the majority of his colleagues, as well—favored the second hypothesis, which in many essentials followed the first, the important difference being that the killer was not alone but had an accomplice, who helped subdue the family, tape, and tie them. Still, as a theory, this, too, had its faults. Dewey, for example, found it difficult to understand “how two individuals could reach the same degree of rage, the kind of psychopathic rage it
took to commit such a crime.” He went on to explain: “Assuming the murderer was someone known to the family, a member of this community; assuming that he was an ordinary man, ordinary except that he had a quirk, an insane grudge against the Clutters, or one of the Clutters—where did he find a partner, someone crazy enough to help him? It doesn’t add up. It doesn’t make sense. But then, come right down to it, nothing does.”

After the news conference, Dewey retired to his office, a room that the sheriff had temporarily lent him. It contained a desk and two straight chairs. The desk was littered with what Dewey hoped would some day constitute courtroom exhibits: the adhesive tape and the yards of cord removed from the victims and now sealed in plastic sacks (as clues, neither item seemed very promising, for both were common-brand products, obtainable anywhere in the United States), and photographs taken at the scene of the crime by a police photographer—twenty blown-up glossy-print pictures of Mr. Clutter’s shattered skull, his son’s demolished face, Nancy’s bound hands, her mother’s death-dulled, still-staring eyes, and so on. In days to come, Dewey was to spend many hours examining these photographs, hoping that he might “suddenly see something,” that a meaningful detail would declare itself: “Like those puzzles. The ones that ask, ‘How many animals can you find in this picture?’ In a way, that’s what I’m trying to do. Find the hidden animals. I feel they must be there—if only I could see them.” As a matter of fact, one of the photographs, a close-up of Mr. Clutter and the mattress box upon which he lay, had already provided a valuable surprise: footprints, the dusty trackings of shoes with diamond-patterned soles. The prints, not noticeable to the naked eye, registered on film; indeed, the delineating glare of a flashbulb had revealed their presence with superb exactness. These prints, together with another footmark found on the same cardboard cover—the bold and bloody impression of a Cat’s Paw half sole—were the only “serious clues” the investigators could claim. Not that they
were
claiming them; Dewey and his team had decided to keep secret the existence of this evidence.

Among the other articles on Dewey’s desk was Nancy Clutter’s diary. He had glanced through it, no more than that, and now he
settled down to an earnest reading of the day-by-day entries, which began on her thirteenth birthday and ended some two months short of her seventeenth; the unsensational confidings of an intelligent child who adored animals, who liked to read, cook, sew, dance, ride horseback—a popular, pretty, virginal girl who thought it “fun to flirt” but was nevertheless “only really and truly in love with Bobby.” Dewey read the final entry first. It consisted of three lines written an hour or two before she died: “Jolene K. came over and I showed her how to make a cherry pie. Practiced with Roxie. Bobby here and we watched TV. Left at eleven.”

Young Rupp, the last person known to have seen the family alive, had already undergone one extensive interrogation, and although he’d told a straightforward story of having passed “just an ordinary evening” with the Clutters, he was scheduled for a second interview, at which time he was to be given a polygraph test. The plain fact was that the police were not quite ready to dismiss him as a suspect. Dewey himself did not believe the boy had “anything to do with it”; still, it was true that at this early stage of the investigation, Bobby was the only person to whom a motive, however feeble, could be attributed. Here and there in the diary, Nancy referred to the situation that was supposed to have created the motive: her father’s insistence that she and Bobby “break off,” stop “seeing so much of each other,” his objection being that the Clutters were Methodist, the Rupps Catholic—a circumstance that in his view completely canceled any hope the young couple might have of one day marrying. But the diary notation that most tantalized Dewey was unrelated to the Clutter-Rupp, Methodist-Catholic impasse. Rather, it concerned a cat, the mysterious demise of Nancy’s favorite pet, Boobs, whom, according to an entry dated two weeks prior to her own death, she’d found “lying in the barn,” the victim, or so she suspected (without saying why), of a poisoner: “Poor Boobs. I buried him in a special place.” On reading this, Dewey felt it could be “very important.” If the cat had been poisoned, might not this act have been a small, malicious prelude to the murders? He determined to find the “special place” where Nancy had buried her pet, even though it meant combing the vast whole of River Valley Farm.

While Dewey was occupying himself with the diary, his principal assistants, the Agents Church, Duntz, and Nye, were crisscrossing the countryside, talking, as Duntz said, “to anyone who could tell us anything”: the faculty of the Holcomb School, where both Nancy and Kenyon had been honor-roll, straight-A students; the employees of River Valley Farm (a staff that in spring and summer sometimes amounted to as many as eighteen men but in the present fallow season consisted of Gerald Van Vleet and three hired men, plus Mrs. Helm); friends of the victims; their neighbors; and, very particularly, their relatives. From far and near, some twenty of the last had arrived to attend the funeral services, which were to take place Wednesday morning.

The youngest of the K.B.I. group, Harold Nye, who was a peppy little man of thirty-four with restless, distrustful eyes and a sharp nose, chin, and mind, had been assigned what he called “the damned delicate business” of interviewing the Clutter kinfolk: “It’s painful for you and it’s painful for them. When it comes to murder, you can’t respect grief. Or privacy. Or personal feelings. You’ve got to ask the questions. And some of them cut deep.” But none of the persons he questioned, and none of the questions he asked (“I was exploring the emotional background. I thought the answer might be another woman—a triangle. Well, consider: Mr. Clutter was a fairly young, very healthy man, but his wife, she was a semi-invalid, she slept in a separate bedroom …”), produced useful information; not even the two surviving daughters could suggest a cause for the crime. In brief, Nye learned only this: “Of all the people in all the world, the Clutters were the least likely to be murdered.”

At the end of the day, when the three agents convened in Dewey’s office, it developed that Duntz and Church had had better luck than Nye—Brother Nye, as the others called him. (Members of the K.B.I. are partial to nicknames; Duntz is known as Old Man—unfairly, since he is not quite fifty, a burly but light-footed man with a broad, tomcat face, and Church, who is sixty or so, pink-skinned and professorial-looking, but “
tough
,” according to his colleagues, and “the fastest draw in Kansas,” is called Curly, because his head is partly hairless.) Both men, in the course of their inquiries, had picked up “promising leads.”