A Colorful Cast of Characters Makes Literary History — #1
Part 6 excerpted from “And Every Word Is True” — A Sequel to Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”
November 15, 2019 marks the 60th anniversary of the 1959 Clutter family murders in western Kansas, and in a nine-part series of excerpts appearing exclusively on Medium, author Gary McAvoy presents compelling new details of a murder investigation that continues to fascinate readers of Capote’s masterwork, adding new perspectives to the classic tale of an iconic American crime.
Continued from Part V — Discovery
Lineup: Cops & Killers
KBI Special Agent Harold Nye
From an early age, Harold Ray Nye had set his sights on a life in law enforcement. In December 1943 he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps. At the end of World War II, Harold married his childhood sweetheart, Joyce Fechner, and soon after began his life in police work as a night marshal in his hometown of Oakley, Kansas. A year later he joined the Garden City Police Department, serving from 1948 to 1951, during which time his son Ronald Ray was born.
Nye embarked on his career in much the same way all rookies begin, as a beat patrolman at a salary of $220 per month. He was ambitious to learn everything he could about police work, and soon took up classes under the aegis of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, assimilating a broad range of criminology studies including witness and suspect interrogation, collection and preservation of physical evidence, fingerprint analysis and classification, polygraph techniques, and other “modern” mid-twentieth century investigative systems. Nye also became proficient in crime scene and investigative photography as well as advanced photo processing, later establishing Garden City PD’s first forensic photo lab. Only seven months on the job, Nye was promoted to detective. He was 23 years old at the time.
One hundred seventy miles due east of Garden City lies Hutchinson, then the fourth largest city in Kansas with a population of around 35,000, three times that of Garden City. Hutchinson was thriving, with a growing community’s need for more law enforcement.
In 1951, Harold Nye moved his young family to the heart of the heartland to join the larger and more advanced Hutchinson Police Department, again starting as a rookie patrolman — but this time, to his delight, on a black-and-white Harley-Davidson 74 motorcycle — and now possessing an arsenal of formidable skills acquired from many of the best FBI agents at the time. (Nye kept close relations with the FBI for the rest of his life, working directly with Director J. Edgar Hoover on several occasions.)
Nye served as captain of detectives and assistant chief of police at Hutchinson until he was recruited for the KBI by Director Lou Richter, who appointed Nye a Special Agent on July 1, 1955. At 29 years old, Harold Nye was the youngest agent on the team, but every bit the archetypal lawman. A by-the-book professional with a photographic memory, Nye was already a highly-praised investigator, able to piece together disparate elements of a case to establish means, motive, and opportunity, the three bedrock essentials to winning criminal prosecutions.
In the years following Richter’s retirement, succeeding director Logan Sanford found Nye to be one of his most capable and trusted agents, and put him in charge of the Investigations Division. Within months of closing the Clutter case, Nye was promoted to assistant director in January 1961 and was ultimately appointed director of the KBI by Attorney General Kent Frizzell when Logan Sanford retired in September 1969.
In a book commemorating the KBI’s official 50th anniversary, Logan Sanford, while praising all the agents who worked under him, singled out Nye saying that he “…had men ‘work 70-hour weeks as a routine thing, once they started on something they live with it and work it. Harold Nye went five days and nights without ever lying down while on the Clutter case.’ That, to Director Sanford, was the reason the KBI had been successful.”
Even in his earliest years at the bureau, he was widely respected as an ordered, practical, and loyal public servant. He was also a meticulous investigator, verging on the obsessive in his quest for facts and answers, renowned for relentlessly chasing down leads and ferreting out clues to solve cases. Questions pleading for answers swirled through his mind day and night until each found its resolution, if it ever did. Rarely did he let up until “CLOSED” was stamped on the jacket of a case file. Even then, nagging details that didn’t set right might gnaw at him for long periods, even years, as in the case of the Clutter murders.
Law enforcement agencies in the 1950s did not have the benefit of computer technology, not to mention cell phones and other modern devices that make fighting crime considerably different today. It wouldn’t be until 1967 that the Federal Bureau of Investigation would launch the National Crime Information Center, a centralized database of wanted persons, stolen weapons, vehicles, art works, and other valuable items. Large-scale computerization of law enforcement agencies did not emerge until the 1970s. In thousands of cities and small towns across America, detectives relied exclusively on telephones and police radios, teletype machines and typewriters, film cameras and fingerprints, and mostly, shoe leather and steno pads.
Early on in his thirty-year career, Harold Nye developed a methodical practice of journaling. Brief, incisive notes capturing whatever he felt he might need to reference at some future time were diligently recorded in his ever-present notebooks, always the slim, blue-lined steno pads that newspaper reporters used, spiral-bound at the top. These fit easily into Nye’s coat pocket, ready to be plucked out to record the profusion of details he observed in his daily life and in every investigation he worked on.
As one of Nye’s notebooks reveals, for example, it was a Sunday evening at 7:00 p.m. on November 15, 1959, when he received a call from Director Logan Sanford at the KBI’s Topeka headquarters, dispatching him straightaway to Holcomb, a small village on the western edge of Garden City, Kansas, sixty miles east of the Colorado border. It was an uncommon murder scene, and Sanford wanted Nye’s personal involvement in the investigation. It took Nye six hours to drive across the state from Topeka, arriving in Holcomb at 1:00 a.m. And what began on that high Kansas plain would occupy Harold Nye’s thoughts for the rest of his life.
From the onset of the investigation, Nye’s assiduous reliance on facts and figures, on his respect for structure and policy and process, is amply revealed in the cache of documents he left behind.
Apart from his personal notebooks, the Clutter case-related documents Nye retained include file copies of arrest records; summary reports he prepared, signed, and submitted; interview reports; crime scene photographs he himself processed in the KBI photo lab; fingerprint cards of Hickock and Smith; photos of Nye in Mexico with the secret police he met with on his evidence recovery mission; general correspondence related to the case and Nye’s role in it; and the sundry ephemera that finds its way into the chronicle of a lawman’s life.
His investigative work on the Clutter case, which ultimately earned him a promotion to Assistant KBI Director, is intimately detailed in those two steno notebooks and numerous reports, little of which has been made public before now.
While Alvin Dewey coordinated the investigation from a borrowed desk at the Sheriff’s office in Garden City, Harold Nye handled the brunt of investigative field work, often alone or with his KBI partner Agent Roy Church. Nye’s notes reveal interviews with scores of townspeople and the families of both the victims and killers; details of his flight to Mexico to track down and retrieve items stolen by Smith and Hickock from the Clutter home; and his interrogation of Dick Hickock in Las Vegas, where Nye and Church skillfully extracted a confession.
Much of this appears in Capote’s book, admirably reflecting Nye’s own notes and reports (though Truman’s access to this information can only be attributed to Alvin Dewey). Among those documents, however, are several surprising details probably unknown to Capote, among them:
• On November 11, three days before the murders, a hunter reported an unusual sighting: while stalking pheasants around the old Holcomb bridge, just a half-mile from the Cutter house, he observed three people sitting in the front seat of a vehicle matching the make and model of Hickock’s car, an older Chevy Fleetline. Returning ninety minutes later to his own car parked nearby, the hunter noticed that both the car and its occupants were still sitting there.
• The night marshal in Cimarron, a town just twenty-five miles from the scene of the crime in Holcomb, reported three suspicious men entering the Western Cafe at around 3:00 a.m., an hour after the murders. Though it wasn’t realized at the time, descriptions of two of the men bore uncanny resemblances to Smith and Hickock.
• Though Mr. and Mrs. Clutter did not sleep together and, as noted, had likely not had intimate relations for years (a consequence of Bonnie’s mental and physical infirmities), the coroner’s report shows that spermatozoa had been found on the back of Mrs. Clutter’s light peach-colored nightgown — the one she was wearing when she was murdered (among the linens her fastidious housekeeper, Mrs. Helm, laundered twice weekly).
These three pieces of compelling information alone, as reported by Harold Nye, appear not to have been more thoroughly investigated, and may have contributed to Nye’s later frustrations that left him with an unresolved conscience.
A s his son Ron learned all too well growing up under this particular lawman’s roof, the one thing Harold Nye could not abide was a lie. When he first read In Cold Blood, what he found angered him so much that he threw the book across the room, calling it “a fiction.” (Contrary to persistent media reports that Nye never read the entire book, it appears he did; his personal notes reveal numerous page references through to the last chapter.)
It was no secret that Harold Nye did not care much for Truman Capote. In an interview published in 1997, Harold Nye pointedly told writer George Plimpton that “I did not get a very good impression from that little son of a bitch…and that impression never changed.” But when warranted, Nye could be open and cordial despite his personal feelings toward the author.
As for being homophobic, Nye was hardly alone on that score, in Kansas or anywhere else in mid-20th-century America. During the 1950s, communists weren’t the only targets of McCarthyism’s “Red Scare.” Homosexuals were considered “subversives” as well. Thousands of gay men and women were either dismissed without due process or quit from government jobs under pressure of blackmail and exposure. The zeal of this “Lavender Scare” actually became official government policy in 1953, when President Dwight Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450 allowing any federal employee or contractor to be fired just for being homosexual (alcoholics and neurotics need not apply, either).
This gave rise to widespread and even “acceptable” persecution by law enforcement officials across the country, but especially in Bible Belt states, of which Kansas, though on the fringes geographically, adopted the rigors of membership enthusiastically.
No apologies need be made here for anyone’s view of others. But two rather amusing accounts will surely help set the stage for why Harold cast Truman in the light he did, and Truman did nothing to diminish the power of that wattage. On the contrary, he clearly enjoyed cranking it up.
The first episode has some confusion and controversy attached to it, which will be cleared up here for the record. George Plimpton, in his wondrous book Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career, ostensibly quotes Harold Nye in an interview (some 35 years after the events):
Al Dewey invited me to come up and meet this gentleman who would come to town to write a book. So the four of us, KBI agents, went up to his room that evening after we had dinner. And here he [Truman] is in kind of a new pink negligee, silk with lace, and he’s strutting across the floor with his hands on his hips telling us all about how he’s going to write this book….
However, Ron Nye — who, like his father, has a remarkable memory — specifically recalls Harold telling him a slightly different version of the story about that particular night:
One day Dad and I were talking about Truman and the Clutter case, which was unusual for my father, since he rarely ever spoke about his work. He said that Truman and his friend Nelle were staying in a motel close by the Clutter farm. Dad was at the Clutter farm with two other agents, Clarence Duntz and Roy Church, when he received a radio call from Dewey that Truman would like to speak with them.
When they had finished their work for the day, all three went to the motel, thinking perhaps that Capote might have something to share about the investigation. When Truman opened the room door to greet them, though, he was wearing a pink negligee. He laughed and laughed at the look on the agent’s faces when he opened the door. Then Truman started asking a lot of questions about the investigation, but of course no one said anything about the case. Realizing there was nothing to be gained, they thanked Capote for his time and drove on home.
By the time George Plimpton interviewed Harold Nye, with the crimes then decades past, it’s probable Nye mistakenly recalled Dewey being in the scene, when in fact Dewey was simply passing on Capote’s request that they meet him at the motel.
It’s entirely possible that Plimpton was either unable to reach Nye for confirmation, or that he simply decided to use his original interview notes without subsequent validation. In any case, it is evident that Plimpton simply got it wrong.
The second episode was a more audacious stunt, in which Truman took Harold and his wife Joyce out for a memorable night on the town in 1965.
The town in question was Kansas City, Missouri, and it may surprise many to learn that as early as the 1920s, Kansas City was home to a remarkably large number of gay bars, nightclubs, and saucy cabarets discreetly nestled between the east and west coasts, all largely controlled by the Mafia. In spite of the Midwest’s reputation for entrenched religious fervor, Kansas City’s “homophile” community of the 1960s is today considered the central catalyst for the evolution of America’s gay liberation movement.
Capote knew of these establishments better than most (straight) locals at the time, since — like many gay men and women who lived where such discreet locales prevailed — he understood the code for finding and gaining access to such largely invisible rendezvous. It had been later reported that he also knew George Cauden, the show director for the legendary Jewel Box Lounge, “a willowy 29-year-old…who went by the stage name Mr. Tommy Temple.”
In what was surely a prime example of understated branding, the Jewel Box billed itself far and wide as “Kansas City’s Most Unusual Show,” spotlighting a lineup of drag queens who sang popular tunes and performed comedy sketches for both straight and gay audiences. Even top celebrities of the era, names such as Rock Hudson, Eartha Kitt, Liberace, and Pearl Bailey, were spotted there when passing through town.
On previous occasions when visiting Kansas City, Nye often brought his wife, Joyce, with him, staying at the historic Muehlebach Hotel, and he did so for this trip as well. It’s not clear whether their respective visits to Kansas City were planned or coincidental, but one evening Capote insisted the Nyes join him for “drinks on the town.”
The three met in the lobby of the Muehlebach and from there took a taxi to Midtown. Finding his desired destination, Truman introduced his guests to a lesbian bar, where he slipped the doorman a hundred-dollar bill to get in. Nye recalled there were about a hundred people in the bar, mostly female couples, eating and dancing and “doing their thing.” Joyce Nye, unaccustomed to such liberal gatherings, was horrified, but she dared not say anything to their host, not yet anyway.
From there Truman took them to a male gay bar (likely the Colony Club) where they took a table and ordered drinks. Within minutes three “young bucks” approached Capote and engaged him in conversation while “playing with his ears.” By this time Joyce, getting more nervous by the minute, quietly urged Harold to make excuses so they could get out of there.
But Truman insisted they make one more stop — at the Jewel Box cabaret, where thirty female impersonators performed, much to the amazement of Harold, who, three decades later, told George Plimpton in an interview, “I mean they looked as good as any beautiful babes in New York. But at the end of these little skits they revealed that they were males….”
Apparently, that was just one too many boundaries crossed for Joyce Nye. Without saying a word, she stood up from the table, snatched her purse, stormed out of the Jewel Box and hailed a cab. When the taxi pulled up, Joyce opened the door and got in. Truman, who had pursued her out of the club, jumped in beside her to soothe her ruffled feathers. In numerous retellings of the story to her son Ron over the years, Joyce always insisted Truman had taken on “a normal, masculine voice,” apologizing to her profusely for “jerking peoples’ chains” just to get a reaction, and pleading that she not go back to the hotel angry at him:
My mom so disliked Truman that it really doesn’t fit that she was there at all. She had to have been bushwhacked. There must have have been some compelling purpose for the trip in the first place for her to break her own rule and get roped into a night on the town. She would not have gone unless she felt there was an absolutely necessary reason, going so far as to compare the experience as offering herself up for human sacrifice.
When they all returned to the Muehlebach, Harold and Truman got into a thunderous quarrel in the hotel lobby over that evening’s ambush, which only served to create more rancor in a relationship that was never measured in terms of much affection anyway. It was not long after this clash that Harold and his wife were disinvited from what was to be Manhattan’s hottest ticket in town the following year: Truman’s famed Black and White Masquerade Ball.
Whatever Capote’s reasons for behaving the way he did that night — or why the Nyes put up with three progressively more distressing venues that clearly came as a shock to a “small town girl,” as Truman described Joyce — it remains a curious testament to his well-known penchant for recrimination that the author chose Alvin Dewey as the protagonist for his story.
A closer, more objective view of the facts clearly establishes Harold Nye as the one who did the lion’s share of investigative work in the case, not only as vividly depicted in In Cold Blood, but as revealed in the majority of official KBI reports.
In any case, Capote would find that Alvin Dewey made a much more compliant ally as the book’s “hero.”
KBI Special Agent Alvin Dewey
Alvin A. Dewey, Jr. lived in Garden City, just a few miles from the scene of the Clutter crime. A former FBI agent and past sheriff of Finney County, Alvin and his wife Marie knew the Clutter family well.
On November 15, 1959, Dewey was assisting local police with a bombing investigation in Wichita, some 200 miles away, when he got a call at his hotel from Marie, who was at church that Sunday morning, informing him that the entire Clutter family had been shot and killed.
As resident agent, Dewey took on the role of case coordinator. He knew the local law enforcement agencies and, indeed, most of the townspeople who knew the Clutters, so it made practical sense for him to serve as the point of convergence. He was also as close a friend to Herb Clutter as either man could have at the time, both involved with the same Methodist church and various community activities. Had he not been investigating the nightclub bombing in Wichita, Dewey would have been teaching that morning’s Sunday school class himself.
In 1959 Garden City had a modest population of just under 12,000. Home to the seat of Finney County, the Sheriff’s headquarters served as the most sensible base of operations for coordinating the Clutter investigation.
Although his office comprised just three crowded rooms on the third floor of the courthouse building, Sheriff Earl Robinson assigned Dewey a temporary desk for him to liaise the efforts of city police, sheriff, and county personnel, and other KBI investigators, while fielding phone calls from the public and the media and filing reports back to KBI headquarters in Topeka.
But was Dewey really the “hero” of the investigation, as depicted by Capote in his book? Not so much, as it turns out. Now that we’re able to see past the shroud of mythology that has cloaked In Cold Blood for decades — and which has been perpetuated in nearly every book, article, and film about the story since its publication — it’s clear that others had measurably greater influence on the outcome. And yet the Dewey myth continues. As former Finney County deputy sheriff Keith Denchfield recalls, “Harold Nye, Clarence Duntz, and Roy Church did the real investigative work. Dewey was mainly there for public relations. Roy once told me he had given all the notes he made each day to Dewey, who then just handed them over to Truman….”
It was Harold Nye, along with two fellow agents, Roy Church and Clarence Duntz, who quietly and efficiently handled the bulk of investigative field work, acknowledged not only by other principals involved, but as confirmed in official reports. In fact, for his service in the Clutter case Nye was promoted to assistant director of the KBI just a few months later, while Dewey remained a field agent.
As Harper Lee’s biographer Charles Shields quoted Harold Nye shortly before his death in 2003, “Dewey was only supposed to ‘take care of the press, the news media, take our reports in, send them to the office, and be the office boy.’”
Dewey himself later downplayed his modest role quite plainly in the Garden City Telegram, responding to the disgruntled feelings many held about the disproportionate credit he was given in the book.
Frankly, there was much to commend the former FBI agent to the role for the author’s purposes, for despite Agent Dewey’s later denials of any impropriety, Capote would have no better access to the ripest and most sensitive investigative details that made his book such a compelling narrative. A case could be made, then, that In Cold Blood was as much a product of the KBI’s guiding hand as it was Capote’s flowing pen.
“For the KBI,” former assistant director Larry Thomas told a reporter, “we call it our landmark case that put us on the map… It’s the rung on the ladder we all strive for.”
A s coordinator of the Clutter murder investigation, KBI Agent Alvin Dewey knew very well that his friend, Herb Clutter, had been seen dancing and “smooching” with Mildred Lyon. Dewey had taken an official report from a Kansas State Highway Patrol trooper who reported a witness’s account of the event. Dewey personally wrote at least two “Memorandum for the File” reports detailing several individual eyewitness accounts to that effect.
Moreover, Dewey was convinced from the start that Herb Clutter was murdered with premeditation. County prosecutor Duane West, who tried the murder case in 1960, recalled that when Dewey learned Floyd Wells had fingered Smith and Hickock as the killers, he dismissed it: “Dewey said it wasn’t them. [He] was convinced it was somebody local who had a grudge against Herb Clutter.” Yet this possibility was never seriously considered as a motive.
Why did this otherwise respected former FBI agent continue to feed Truman Capote confidential documents and case details that would form the underpinnings of a story that in so many ways differed from facts Dewey knew at the time?
Richard Eugene Hickock
Raised by devoted parents on a farmstead near the village of Edgerton, Kansas, “Dick” Hickock had every benefit of a good middle-class childhood: a hard-working father, Walter, who built the family home with his own hands on forty-four acres of rich farm land; and Eunice, a deeply religious homemaker and doting mother. Walter worked as an auto mechanic and body repairman by day, and after hours would work the land with his family, yielding marketable crops of wheat, corn, hay, and strawberries, while their garden supplied an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables for the family. According to Dick’s younger brother, David, Walter and Eunice taught their sons “… the joy of living off the land, the beauty of nature, and the rewards of working and playing hard.”
All in stark contrast to the kind of life Perry Smith had.
But similar to Perry, two key incidents in Dick Hickock’s youth put his life squarely on a calamitous path. In his book, Dick’s brother David wrote that his brother had stolen a watch from a local drugstore. When discovered by his parents he readily admitted his guilt, made amends with the store, and no charges were filed.
Another more serious episode involved a car accident in 1950. At the time Hickock was on a date with his future wife, Carol, when he lost control of his car on a water-slicked highway. Dick was thrown from the vehicle into a water-filled ditch, in which he nearly drowned.
Once a high-achieving, handsome and popular high school athlete, Dick was transfigured after the accident, both cosmetically and psychologically. His face was badly scarred, leaving his left eye skewed and out of proportion.
Almost overnight Dick’s personality had changed from responsible, outgoing, and optimistic to “…more solemn, morose, and extremely reckless. He believed that he was able to do and say anything without any consequences…. His attitude continued to become more defiant and increasingly restless. His sporadic and irrational words left the rest of us wondering if the concussion he suffered in the accident had resulted in trauma to his brain.”
According to prison tests, Hickock had an IQ of 130, placing him in the second highest range: “Very Superior Intelligence,” one level below Genius. Dick’s car accident on its own, however, would appear unlikely as the sole agent of change, considering his theft of a drugstore wristwatch the year before. So, was the die cast early in his life, or did a head injury contribute to Dick’s maladjusted and ultimately criminal activity?
Dr. James S. Walker, a specialist in severe trauma histories and one of only nine psychologists in the U.S. who are board-certified in both clinical neuropsychology and forensic psychology, reviewed Hickock’s correspondence and known personal history, and offered this observation:
From a nonscientific point of view, Dick Hickock was one who would have been called in his day and place “a man of low character.” Examination of his personality from a modern forensic neuropsychology point of view reveal several characteristics that we now strongly associate with the concept of a “psychopath”: superficial emotions, a glib style, lack of remorse, chronic irresponsibility, and callousness, to name a few. A very intriguing aspect of his case is his history of apparent severe traumatic brain injury. The motor vehicle accident that resulted in his facial disfigurement, with an extended loss of consciousness, is the sort that often results in frontal lobe dysfunction, a syndrome of impulsivity and poor behavior control known to at times result in violent criminality. In Hickock’s case, his head injury can with certainty only be blamed for perhaps disinhibiting personality factors that were already present, as some criminal impulses were already evident prior to the crash.
Dr. W. Mitchell Jones, the court-appointed psychiatrist who evaluated both Hickock and Smith in person, had asked each of them for biographical sketches in writing. In Hickock’s, he confesses to a variety of crimes and misdemeanors, but one paragraph stands out: “There were other things I should have told you, but I’m afraid of my people finding them out. Because I am more ashamed of them (these things I did) than hanging.…”
Dr. Katherine Ramsland, a professor of forensic psychology and distinguished author of several books on the science of crime scene investigation and serial killers (including another Kansas notable, Dennis Rader, the “BTK Killer”), offered another perspective on both men:
Both Smith and Hickock were antisocial small-time offenders. Either might have resorted to killing if they had been seen or cornered, although I think that Hickock (an apparent narcissist), would more easily have killed a number of witnesses or pursuers than Smith would have.
From how they present themselves (though not from a professional assessment), Hickock would probably have shown less remorse over taking a life than Smith. Neither demonstrated the collection of traits we usually see in extreme offenders — such as rampage mass murderers and predatory serial killers — so for these two to have committed such a crime, we must also include the circumstances in the calculation. Personality disorders alone would not explain what motivated them, individually or working together.
Setting aside the fact that no one actually treated Hickock as a psychotic patient — a basic precondition for rendering any professional diagnosis — he does appear to fit the textbook definition of a psychopath, and certainly that of a pathological liar.
But liar or not, Hickock’s most intriguing disclosures, in his Death Row letters to Mack Nations, are in part corroborated by Harold Nye’s notes and official KBI reports — reports prepared weeks before the killers had even been identified.
As readers will find in chapters to come, Hickock’s elaborate retelling at least lends itself to a reconsideration of events.
Perry Edward Smith
Readers of In Cold Blood will already know much about Perry Smith who was, in the words of prison chaplain James Post, “the victim of an unfortunate childhood filled with adversity,” which included regular beatings at the hands of orphanage nuns; the gas-poisoning suicides of his brother, Jimmy, and Jimmy’s wife, Jean; the loss of his sister Fern (also known as Joy), who fell to her death from a fire escape; his promiscuous alcoholic mother, Flo, and his abusive-when-not-absent father, Tex — both erstwhile performers on the rodeo circuit when not engaged in routine domestic violence. Hardly a setting for the American dreams of any child. A lost soul who yearned for a life beyond the hand that was dealt him, Smith constantly worked to improve himself (and others), as his personal journals reveal in abundant poetic detail.
I am not sure of how much or how little I have accomplished, I have blundered on my way, snatching as much enjoyment as possible from the stingy fates. Each day must be sufficient unto itself, keeping in view only the direction of the journey’s end.
I cannot realize that I am old, where could the long day have gone? It has been only a short time since I have started on the road with all the world before me and immeasurable time for the journey I was to take, now that the pilgrimage is almost over, and the day is nearly done. How endless the unexplored road appeared to be, and how short the footworn trail seems now.
At age sixteen, Smith signed up for a two-year stint in the Merchant Marine, and in 1948 enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving a three-year tour of duty in the Asiatic–Pacific as a heavy equipment operator with the 3rd Combat Engineer Battalion. His last fifteen months of service were spent at the Bay of Inchon during the Korean War, where he helped bridge the many rivers needed to ensure troop mobility leading up to the Battle of Inchon, where Smith was awarded the prestigious Bronze Star, the Army’s fourth-highest military decoration for valor — an honor given only for heroic or meritorious achievement and services in a combat zone.
Smith’s foreign service ended at sea on October 1, 1951, while crossing the Pacific on a troop ship sailing for home. Young Perry had the distinction of being the first man to set foot off the ship when it docked in Seattle, and was warmly greeted by high-ranking Army officials who had arranged a flight home for him to join his father in Trapper’s Den, Alaska. Under the front-page headline “Alaska Trapper Rotated Home from Battle; Cheered at Dock,” a Fairbanks newspaper reported, “Troops aboard and crowds of welcomers cheered as the stocky, black-haired youth strode down the gangway, grinning.”
Perry spent his final months of unused furlough helping his father trap fur in Alaska, and while there he received his Honorable Discharge from the Army on June 9, 1952. Shortly thereafter he returned to Washington State, where two events occurred that would ultimately impact the lives of many people.
In September 1952 Perry suffered a motorcycle accident that nearly crippled him. The lasting damage was so severe that he walked with a noticeable limp on misshapen legs. The better part of the following year he spent recovering in the Cushman Indian Hospital in Tacoma.
Just four months before his accident, as we have recently learned, Perry fathered a son. It’s not clear who the mother was, nor whether Perry was actually aware of the boy’s later birth. Now in his 60s, Jewell Praying Wolf James — raised in the Pacific Northwest by Perry’s friend Joe James as his own son — is a master totem pole carver and prominent environmental activist for the Lummi tribe, the indigenous people of Washington’s northern coast on the waters of the Puget Sound.
Another thematic story point which Capote misconstrued about Perry was his heritage: he did not have a drop of Cherokee blood in him. Perry’s mother, Florence Julia Buckskin, was in fact not a full-blooded Cherokee at all, but born of mixed Western Shoshone–Northern Paiute ancestry; his father, John “Tex” Smith, was Caucasian with Northern European streaks of Irish and Dutch.
That Capote identified Perry as Cherokee may have two possible explanations. First, people more easily recognize the three largest American tribal nations — Navajo, Cherokee, and Sioux — based largely (some would say tragically) on their storied roles in Western films.
Second, Perry’s sister, Dorothy Marchant (interviewed by Capote and given the pseudonym “Barbara Johnson” in In Cold Blood), could have wanted to save face for her family’s Shoshone–Paiute relations, sparing them association with the sins of her brother. The latter seems the more logical explanation.
As for the Clutter crimes, Perry seems to have just been along for the ride, literally. As In Cold Blood describes it, the only reason Smith was in Kansas at all was a hoped-for reunion with his “real and only friend,” the prison chaplain’s clerk “Willie-Jay,” a pseudonym created by Capote for a young man whose real name was John McRell.
McRell was a deeply religious soul who had spent most of his life in various penal institutions for such crimes as burglary and robbery. Prison records indicate that by age 30, around the time he met Perry Smith, McRell had already served five separate sentences in three penal institutions, and would continue this pattern well into his 80s, apparently drawn to a life of service behind bars until his death in January 2017 at age 87.
Though lacking much formal education, McRell was intelligent and acutely insightful, with a caring and positive influence on fellow inmates. Perry Smith, whose tragic childhood and lack of encouraging role models left him cautious and mistrustful of most people, found in his friend the type of man he truly wanted to be. In Perry’s mind, McRell was the only person who really understood him.
Capote brilliantly laid the framework for Smith’s emotional foundation when, like ships passing in the night, Perry and Willie-Jay missed reuniting within mere hours of each other, both having transited through the same Kansas City bus terminal, both now heading in different directions. That frustration, leaving Perry feeling angry and disappointed, combined with the predicament Hickock had handed him in “the perfect score,” created the highly-charged “brain explosion” scene, when on impulse he thrust a hunting knife into Mr. Clutter’s throat. Though some controversy exists as to whether Smith’s actions were spontaneous or premeditated, sufficient evidence would accept a coalition of both theories.
But here reality strikes again, for according to official prison records McRell was not even released from Kansas State Penitentiary until November 19 — four days after the murders took place. As Perry made clear in interviews and to his friend James Post, the prison chaplain, he had desperately wanted to reunite with McRell — his mentor, the manifestation of his conscientious ideals — but he would never see or speak with his friend again.
It also seems obvious that, in spite of Dick’s arrogant bragging about leaving no witnesses, Perry had no such inclination, much less foreknowledge that Herb Clutter may have been the only target, with the lives of other family members taken as collateral damage.
Among other things, Perry was intent on buying black stockings to mask their faces, clearly presuming their robbery victims would be left alive to identify the intruders should their faces be seen. Evidently uncommon articles to come by at the time, Perry knew there was one place black stockings could easily be found — where there were nuns. En route to Holcomb, they stopped at St. Mary’s Catholic hospital in Olathe. But that presented a new challenge.
When Perry was six years old, his mother — fed up with her husband and the rodeo circuit — took her children and moved to San Francisco where, not long after, she abandoned Perry to a California orphanage. It was there he suffered abominable episodes of abuse by Catholic nuns, “black widows” he called them, who beat him repeatedly with a flashlight for wetting his bed. Were it not for his fear of nuns (among his many omens of bad luck), Perry would have gone in and handled the task himself.
Instead he sent Dick, who only pretended to undertake the assignment and returned to the car empty-handed. If masking their identity was of so little importance to Hickock, it may argue that, at the onset at least, he had no intention of letting any of the Clutters live.
Jack Curtis, the Clutter family’s longtime photographer, also took photos of Smith and Hickock after they were apprehended, and sometime later spent several hours interviewing Perry in his cell. In 1968, in a poignant and insightful article for the Los Angeles Times, Curtis wrote of that experience during which Perry revealed many things — including a clear admission that he alone killed all four Clutters.
“You know,” [Perry] said, “about that Clutter thing…” His body stiffened, and he leaned forward…. His hands, between his spread knees, were opened wide, palms up. His big brown eyes swept again from side to side; his voice caught and dropped almost to a whisper.
“I killed all four of them with these hands!” he said. His eyes searched mine, a feeling for some hint of understanding. I have no idea what he saw there. Unprepared for such a startling confession, I just sat there. It was the first time I knew for sure that he had done all the dirty work. I don’t remember what I said, but my eyes must have shown something he wanted to see. There was a long pause.
The hands dropped and his body wilted. “I’ve cried my eyes out at night, but it doesn’t do any good!”
This admission was also reaffirmed during Smith and Hickock’s final parole board clemency hearing on April 6, 1965, one week before they would be executed, where Smith related their actions in chilling detail, as depicted here in a portion of the board’s hearing summary [sic]:
It was then that Smith claims he loaded the shot gun and while Hickcock held the flashlight on Mr. Clutter, who was clutching his injured throat, that Smith shot him in the head, then went into the adjoining room and shot the son. Then, Smith said, Hickock went around and picked up the ejected shell cases, went upstairs and started outside. He called to him and they went to the second floor where Hickcock flashed the light in the face each woman (Mother and daughter) and he, Smith, shot each in the head while they pleaded for mercy, after which they picked up the shell cases and left the house with some items of personal property.
Although In Cold Blood describes Perry apologizing for his actions just before climbing the thirteen steps to his waiting noose, three journalists who witnessed the execution — Bill Brown, editor of the Garden City Telegram; Tony Jewell, a radio reporter for KIUL; and Art Wilson, a Garden City news director reporting for KAKE-TV Wichita — have flatly denied hearing Smith apologize, all having taken verbatim notes at the scene.
Charles McAtee, director of Kansas prisons, was also present at the execution. McAtee — a former Marine, FBI agent, and federal prosecutor — corresponded regularly with both Smith and Hickock over several years, developing an unusually compassionate view of both men in the exchange, especially Perry.
“Smith was an introspective man who tried to find peace through painting, reading and writing. [He] created biblical images in watercolors on [prison] bed sheets, [and] memorized a book, “Thoreau on Man and Nature.”
McAtee recalled Perry’s last words to him. “Mr. McAtee, I would like to apologize to someone, but to whom? To them? To the relatives? To their friends and neighbors? To you? To the State of Kansas? But you know you can’t undo what we did with an apology.”
Perry’s own handwritten journals do reveal a measure of remorse not voiced while he was alive, written in the typical pedantic fashion he favored, and where in parts he seems to be having a one-way conversation with Capote:
“Now that my final hours are in the making,” Smith writes, “I can’t help but feel that this whole fatal disastrous catastrophe appears to me to be an ‘unwanted horrible nightmare.’ I find it almost impossible to convince myself that I have committed this atrocity. But it has happened and cannot be undone…. I am powerless to make amends. The trouble with me, Truman, is that I have the right aim in life but the wrong ammunition.”
Jack Curtis was so moved by his observations of Smith that he closed his article on a distinctly melancholic note.
“It seems to me,” he wrote, “that there is a real lesson to be learned from Perry. All he had within him was dreams. He was molded, in his weaknesses, by outside forces. He killed the Clutters as an instrument of Dick Hickock…. His thirst for big words, it seems to me, represented his desire for an education. He was smarter than he knew. He was no hypocrite. His life was an open book for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. It has seemed to me ever since then that each of us has within us the power to control our own destinies. If we don’t exercise that power, someone else will — with results that can be fatal. The pity was that Perry didn’t understand that any better than most of us.”
In a fascinating two-part article for The New York Times Magazine in 1978 — successively titled “The Private World of Truman Capote” and “The Descent from the Heights,” — acclaimed author Anne Taylor Fleming laid out a cornucopia of insights into Capote’s colorful life. Fleming’s narrative includes a passage from the diary of Sandy Campbell, a close friend of Capote’s who was also the fact-checker for The New Yorker magazine’s publication of In Cold Blood months before the book came out in hardcover. In it, Campbell recounts a moving postscript of Truman’s journey with Perry Smith, an affecting act not known by many people.
“When Perry was dead and taken away,” Campbell wrote, “the warden came up to Truman and gave him an envelope. ‘Mr. Smith wanted you to have this,’ he said.
“It contained all the money Truman had sent Perry over the five years. Truman burst into tears.”
Who really killed the Clutters?
Who committed the actual killings is a question that still lingers in the minds of many, since responsibility was never resolved in Capote’s book.
In his confession, Hickock alleged that Smith shot all four of the Clutters. In Perry’s initial statement to investigators on the road trip from Las Vegas to Garden City, he claimed to have killed only the father and son, while Hickock killed the mother and daughter. Despite Perry’s later changing his statement to confess that he shot all four, allegedly to save Dick’s family further pain, Agent Alvin Dewey maintained his belief that each killed two. Prosecutor Duane West also believed each killed two, as did Bill Brown, editor of the Garden City Telegram, who knew the case intimately from start to finish. Capote, who had spent more time with both men than anyone else and had exchanged hundreds of letters with them over the years, was convinced that Perry himself had pulled the trigger all four times.
According to Perry himself, in his journals and elsewhere, he claims to have pulled the trigger on the entire family, one by one.
Continue at Part VII — Lineup: The Snitch & the Journalist. Follow me on Medium (Gary McAvoy) where you’ll find additional book excerpts as they are published, along with other articles.
From And Every Word Is True by Gary McAvoy (Literati Editions, 2019). Copyright © 2019 by Gary McAvoy. All rights reserved.
