A Colorful Cast of Characters Makes Literary History — #2
Part 7 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 VI — Lineup: Cops & Killers
Lineup: The Snitch & the Journalist
William Floyd Wells, Jr.
Local police and the KBI had accrued a slender body of evidence from the crime scene that, on its own, would have done little to offer up clues as to who was responsible for killing the Clutters. If it weren’t for the sharp observations and photographic evidence taken by Officer Rich Rohleder, however, the KBI wouldn’t have even had that.
But without the nearly untold story of one William Floyd Wells, Jr., an inmate in the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing, the fact is that the Clutter crimes would most likely have remained unsolved. The clues were that negligible, the evidence that scant. Without Wells there would have been nothing tying Smith and Hickock to the crimes except two prints from very popular boots. Assuming both men could have led otherwise clean lives, they could have easily gotten away with murder, since the overwhelming majority of U.S. homicides in the 1960 era, some ninety percent, were never solved.
Only Wells did report it. And his story is a curious one.
For such a pivotal character in the scheme of things, “Floyd” Wells was given remarkably short shrift in Capote’s book. What little background information is available on the man is thinly disbursed and difficult to confirm, especially now, nearly fifty years after his death. But what details have been found are, much like Wells himself, puzzling and contradictory.
It’s doubtful that Capote or Lee ever interviewed him, for despite two pages in the book describing Wells in some detail (much of it incorrect), no interview or background notes on him at all were found in the Capote Papers at the New York Public Library, nor in the Capote archives at the Library of Congress. The only time all three — Capote, Lee, and Wells — were even known to be in the presence of each other was in the packed courtroom during the trial.
Moreover, if there is any merit to a conspiracy in the larger story, that was not the book Capote wanted to write anyway, so there would have been little motivation to pursue it. One reliable source told me that Alvin Dewey actually prohibited anyone from visiting Floyd Wells in prison — even Truman Capote. Although I could find nothing conclusive to support this, neither could I find anything to disprove it. But since Capote already had Wells’s statement to the KBI (grateful to “Foxy” Alvin Dewey for having provided it), why bite the hand that fed him?
Any detail of Wells that did make it into the book had appeared earlier in newspapers covering the trial and in (flawed, even perjured) testimony at the trial itself. What is revealed here is largely from a mash of military records, Harold Nye’s notes, KBI documents, and vintage newspaper archives.
A native of Oswego, Kansas, born in 1927, Floyd Wells dropped out of high school without completing his second year, and at age eighteen enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving from 1946 until he was honorably discharged two years later at the rank of private first class.
In the summer of 1948, post-war America was flush with economic opportunity and virtually no unemployment. Having few skills and no formal training, Wells at the time was working at W. J. Small’s alfalfa mill in Holcomb, Kansas. With the approaching alfalfa harvest, a large spread just outside of town with the picturesque name of River Valley Farm was hiring, and in June, Wells found a job working as a ranch hand for Herbert Clutter, one of the most prominent farmers in the region.
Wells worked for the Clutters from June 1948 to January 1949, and despite his claims ten years later that the family favored his work and the pleasure of his company (and he theirs), he left Clutter’s employ after just seven months on the job. No records have been found for his performance or reasons why he left, and longtime Clutter employees, including ranch manager Gerald Van Vleet, had only a vague memory of him when questioned by authorities during the investigation.
Given his claimed mutual affection with the Clutters, and Herb Clutter’s supposed extraordinary financial generosity to him, it’s more than a little strange that Wells’s tenure was so brief, especially for such a plum job many at the time would have fought to keep. Leaving of his own accord seems implausible; Clutter ran a year-round planting and harvesting operation, so there was constant work to be had and no reason for a motivated ranch hand to simply wander off like a stray heifer. After his departure, Wells apparently drifted from one garage to the next as a mechanic and “body and fender man.”
Some ten years later, Wells, with no apparent job prospects at hand, hatched a scheme to start his own lawn mower rental business, which on its own would have been a laudable ambition if it weren’t for one obvious problem: to get his venture started, he needed lawn mowers. Having no startup capital, Floyd embraced the wisdom of Sutton’s Law — an axiom attributed to the famous American bank robber Willie Sutton, who, when asked by a reporter why he robbed banks, answered plainly: “Because that’s where the money is.”
So, Wells broke into an appliance store and, finding the equipment he needed to establish his legitimate venture, pilfered his new inventory. But he got caught in the act.
That bit of larceny in June 1959 earned Wells a prison sentence of five to ten years at Lansing, where he was assigned to a two-bunk cell, half of which had just become available the week before, when its previous occupant, Perry Edward Smith, made parole and hightailed it to the West Coast, enjoined from ever showing his face in Kansas again, else hazard the prospect of reincarceration.
The other bunk in Wells’s cell was occupied by a shrewd and talkative young Kansan named Dick Hickock. Hickock, also serving a five- to ten-year stretch for grand larceny, had been at KSP for just over a year, with a month or two remaining before he would be paroled.
In his effusive letters to Mack Nations, Hickock wrote of his dismay finding that he’d been assigned a new cellmate, preferring instead to serve out his remaining time alone now that Smith was gone.
But in those last few weeks Hickock found Wells to be quite the chatty fellow himself. Posing as a first-time offender, Floyd was itching with questions about life behind bars, and Hickock, having served multiple stints for various small-time misdeeds, gave his new companion the big picture of life in the big house.
(I say “posing” as a first-timer because Wells had actually served time before, “’about’ three times” as he testified under cross examination during the trial. He had been jailed for burglary, spent three months in the Army stockade for bad behavior, and was arrested for driving without a license. Why he professed rookie status to Hickock seems odd, though, as readers will find, it may have been a useful ruse.)
After about a week of small talk, Floyd got around to asking Dick what his plans were when he made parole. Hickock recalled the conversation [spelling and grammar are verbatim from his handwritten letters; emphasis added for discussion]:
Wells asked me if I was going straight when I got out. I told him I was sick of doing time, that I had a job waiting for me when I got out…. He told me that if he was getting out the first thing he would do, would be to take a little drive and pull the sweetest score he ever seen. He went on to tell me about how he used to work for a guy in southwestern Kansas by the name of Herb Clutter….
Assuming the reliability of Hickock’s letters — and in multiple versions, including oral statements he gave to the KBI, his detailed narratives were invariably consistent — what we find here is an utterly new and startling claim: that Floyd Wells had intended to rob the Clutters himself. Nearly two years after committing the crimes about which he was writing, Hickock had nothing to gain by implicating Wells. There would be no point in making up such a detail.
But was Wells planning to do the deed himself, as he claimed? Or was this some kind of bait he was setting out for Hickock?
The letters go on, with Wells providing Hickock unusually intimate details about Herb Clutter, his family, the “new home,” and the business dealings of a successful farmer:
…This guy was a big rancher and done a lot of seasonal hiring. Especially at harvest time. He went on to elaborate how he worked for Clutter in 1954, (I think) [ed. it was actually 1948] and had worked for him several months. During this time of his employment, Clutter built a new home, and had installed a wall safe. The safe was in a office in the west room of the house on the first floor.] Being as Clutter did a lot of hiring, buying, selling and traveling on business, he kept large sums of money on hand at all times. He kept five thousand all year and as much as ten thousand at harvest time.
Despite his assertion that he became close to the family, what follows next would seem to be at odds with Wells’s reciprocating the Clutters’ generosity. As Hickock described it [sic]:
During the time Wells is telling me this, I’m thinking to myself, “Another one of these cinches I’ve heard so much about. Probably doesn’t keep his safe locked or some crap like that.” I made up my mind not to go for it, but Well’s next statement made me do a lot of thinking. Wells told me that he knew what he was talking about and the deal is a “cinch.” He said he would set me up on it, if I promised to send him a thousand bucks for doing it.
I got to thinking that this isn’t free information like all the rest I’ve heard. I’ve had a dozen guys tell me of easy scores, but they didn’t want nothing out of them, and that made them a lie. But this is different I thought. I told Wells that I might be interested, and for him to tell me the set up. He said, “Oh no, not unless you promise me to send me a grand … if I don’t get a grand at least out of it, I’ll pull it my self when I get out.” I told him, “If I pull it, I’ll send you a grand.” Wells asked me, “Will you tell anybody else?” I told him, No.”
Now, by demanding a share of the heist in exchange for critical information, Wells is clearly implicated as an accomplice in the scheme. Yet the mere suggestion of Wells’s complicity was roundly dismissed by the KBI, who claimed Wells was simply an “innocent bystander” in the affair.
But Wells’s last question — “Will you tell anybody else?” — sheds a different light on the exchange, given the possibility that he was setting Hickock up with darker intentions in mind.
Hickock continues:
I took the diagrams and studied them. I asked Wells how the safe was anchored in the wall, and if it could be removed and opened else where. He then described how the safe was put in the wall. I asked him if he was sure. He said he worked for Clutter when the house was built, and watched the safe installed.
Like a spawning salmon leaping into the jaws of a patient grizzly, Hickock couldn’t turn back now. His eagerness laid bare, he challenged Wells over and over, trying to find cracks in his story:
For the next two weeks, when ever I thought of it, I asked him to repeat the Clutter deal. His story never changed. I believed him. But before I left for home I told him, “If things don’t go right for me in the free world and I ever decide to knock off this safe, I’ll send you a grand.” He said, “It’s a deal.” And we shook hands on it.
Savoring the prospect of a “sweet score,” Hickock could not have known that most of what he had just heard was a lie, a fact confirmed by Wells’s testimony at the trial, where he denied ever discussing a safe [sic]:
The conversations we had were more lengthy than I have written, because I questioned him a lot as to the safe and each and every other detail he had related to me. His story never varied, and I might add that he was a convincing lier. Wells testified at the trial that he never told me Clutter had a safe, but he emphatically insisted that he did, and would not tell me the whole thing unless I promised to send him one thousand dollars. He had a ulterior motive for telling me what he did, and I wish I knew what it was. It may have been just what happened. Wells may have had a grudge against Herb Clutter and was hoping some physical harm might come to him. But this is just a conjecture on my part, as I have no proof.
As In Cold Blood describes, Wells first heard about the Clutter murders while listening to the radio in his cell, two days after the crime had occurred. Wells made no immediate mention of what he knew about it to anyone, presumably fearing that time-honored prison axiom “snitches get stitches.”
But three weeks later, burning with a desire to share what he knew, he claimed he did mention it to a fellow inmate at KSP.
In fact, at least two others were aware of Wells’s story: inmates of no particular account named John Sabol and Frank Harper, and if they knew, others knew as well. But KBI agent Alvin Dewey and county prosecutor Duane West shrugged off any significance of others having knowledge of Clutter’s supposed cash trove.
Don Kendall, one of the more persevering reporters who covered the Clutter murder trial for the Hutchinson News, filed some of the most detailed stories on the case from Garden City, providing keen insights unobtainable from other sources.
On March 30, 1960, the case went to the jury. That evening’s edition of the Hutchinson News featured several columns by Kendall, each laying out key elements of the proceedings. Among those was a piece headlined “‘Smoke Screens’ Set by Hickock,” in which the reporter relates an absorbing account of testimony regarding knowledge of the plot by other inmates. In it the prosecution team offered conflicting observations on the issue:
KBI Agent Al Dewey — “Wells is the only one we heard about.” He said he hadn’t heard the names, Sabol and Harper.
County Atty. Duane West — “We had heard there were others that have heard of this talk and planning.” But, West added, the plan probably circulated in the prison “like a lot of talk does.”
KBI Agent Harold Nye — Asked if he had heard about Sabol and Harper, Nye replied quickly: “No.” Asked if anyone else was thought to have heard of Hickock’s scheme in the prison, Nye replied: “Oh yeah, there were several in there that knew.”
As to the contention that Wells was in for a cut if Hickock went through with the robbery, Kendall writes:
Consensus among KBI and Finney County officials was that Wells, through “normal” prison boredom and conversation, paved the way for Hickock’s plan by inadvertently mentioning he had once worked for a “rich farmer out west.” This, officials said, doesn’t imply complicity in the crime that Wells will be charged as an accessory. However, this opinion was voiced by the authorities before the trial was over.
So, consider for a moment that if Wells were casting a wide net for the right person to execute a more duplicitous plan, he may have just been trying out his story until that individual emerged. Then he crossed paths with Dick Hickock, a man bragging of sociopathic exploits and with a history of seeking a quick buck, especially one that could be a “cinch” to pull off. An easy score. If Floyd Wells had hoped for this outcome, he couldn’t have chosen a better, if unwitting, fall guy than Dick Hickock.
This theory acquires a bit more heft in light of Wells’s unabashed lies to the KBI under oath, not to mention the KBI’s passive endorsement of them when presented to the jury. Wells was allowed to spin a shockingly contradictory tale of denial, also while under oath, with the KBI failing to inform the Court that the witness was perjuring himself. As Hickock writes:
The prosecution called Wells to the stand, and as he was walking toward the witness stand, I looked at my dad and nodded my head. Up until the time he entered the court room, I had my doubts that he would testify. I didn’t believe that he would take the stand and tell the court and jury what he had told me. If he did, he would be in the same fix I was in. I was curious to see what kind of a story he was going to put down, and still keep his shirt tail clean. He was supposed to get a cut of the dough we were supposed to have found in the “safe” at the Clutter home.
During the trial Hickock grew furious as he listened to Floyd Wells spin lies on the witness stand, telling a factually different story than the one he weaved in their cell at Lansing; one that also conflicted with the statement Wells gave under oath to KBI Agent Wayne Owens. His anger mounting, it was all Hickock could do to remain seated in the courtroom, later telling Capote in an interview that he almost jumped Wells right there during the trial, but he had friends in Oklahoma who could take care of Mr. Wells if need be.
Given this new information, several things are clear:
• Floyd Wells contrived a sufficiently attractive story for the benefit of Dick Hickock, a man obsessed with making a big score, and who bragged that he would leave no witnesses;
• Wells lied under oath to the KBI that Herb Clutter had a safe containing $10,000. There was no safe, and there was no money. The KBI knew this and yet still used Wells testimony as evidence in court;
• Wells could not have drawn the map of the Clutters’ new house, simply because he had never been inside it. By his own admission, supported by press reports at the time, Wells left Clutter’s employ before the home had even been completed — and before the family had moved in. Even in his testimony at trial he was quoted as saying he “had made no maps or drawings for Hickock.”
Presented with Wells’s request for early clemency, Kansas Governor George Docking wasn’t convinced that Wells hadn’t been an actual accomplice to the crimes, since he reportedly expected a thousand-dollar bounty from Hickock in return for laying out the heist. “I’m not sure this man didn’t plant the idea in the first place,” the governor said. Consequently, Docking denied clemency for Wells.
But Wells did win release from prison a mere two months after the March 1960 trial, despite the fact that, according to prison records, the earliest parole he was eligible for was July 1962. Though everyone denied it, including Wells and the KBI, there had to have been a plea deal by the State for his testimony. Wells was immediately transferred from the prison in Lansing to the Kansas State Industrial Reformatory in Hutchinson, where inmates were eligible for parole after serving 10 months — an expedient way to get around the governor’s denial of clemency. Wells didn’t even serve that minimum, however. He was released after just five weeks.
Retired federal probation officer Sally J. Keglovits, an expert on the Clutter case, put it more bluntly. “From my experience, Kansas authorities would be disingenuous claiming there was no quid pro quo involved in the early release of Floyd Wells,” she said in an interview. “Under usual circumstances, an inmate in Kansas in this time period would not become eligible for parole until he had served the minimum sentence — and for Wells that was five years — minus whatever “good time” had accrued. Prisons didn’t face the same pressures they do now, so overcrowding was not a big issue. There was no need to grant an early parole to Wells, but there may have been reasons to reward him.”
Having gained a swift reprieve from his original five- to ten-year sentence, and walking away with a $1,000 reward to boot, the “informer” who was undeniably complicit in the Clutter murders was paid off handsomely, earning both money and his freedom in the bargain.
And then… he disappeared.
As might well be imagined, the pressure was overwhelming to find those responsible for killing the Clutter family and put an end to the “If it can happen there, it can happen here” state of mind that gripped Kansas, the Midwest, and beyond. The attraction of such a singularly notorious crime had drawn journalists from across the country to, as one Wichita Eagle reporter described it, “this rural outpost on the Kansas prairie.” The political burden on local authorities to solve a mass murder that had fostered such fear in a bucolic town unaccustomed to that sort of infamy would have been punishing. By choosing to ignore Wells’s perjury, the KBI was employing a self-serving strategy to expedite the trial at any cost. To conclude otherwise is irrational.
All of which leaves us with some of the more enigmatic questions central to this story:
• Why did Wells so brazenly lie to the KBI in his interview after informing on Hickock and Smith, having much more to lose than gain by doing so? What was the justification for allowing Wells to perjure himself in court, when the KBI was clearly aware he was doing so?
• Who really drew that detailed layout of the Clutter’s new home, even identifying who slept in which bedroom?
• Was Wells planning to pull off the robbery himself, as Hickock claimed? Or was he merely setting out a trail of bread crumbs, one he expected would be impossible for an ambitious schemer like Hickock to ignore?
• And what forces are capable of making a five- to ten-year prison sentence vanish, resulting in Wells going free after serving just ten months in two institutions having disparate parole conditions? Did somebody want him unavailable or out of reach?
Following a 1961 arrest in Oklahoma for burglary, larceny, and interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle, Floyd Wells seems to have all but vanished. Nine years later, however, he was reported to have been imprisoned again, this time for an armed robbery conviction in Tishomingo County, Mississippi, for which he was sentenced to thirty years at the maximum-security prison in Parchman.
The oldest prison in Mississippi, Parchman is a sprawling 28-square mile prison farm with an environment “so inhospitable for escape that prisoners working in the fields are not chained to one another, and one overseer supervises each gang. A potential escapee could wander for days without leaving the property.” Situated on flat farmland of the Mississippi Delta, the outer edge of the prison’s vast property had no fencing and virtually no trees.
But despite the odds and obstacles, on the morning of Friday, April 3, 1970, Wells is reported to have attempted a brazen but unhurried escape — on a tractor. He was on duty in the prison mess hall, and with the help of two other inmates stole the tractor and — though their absence wasn’t discovered until two hours after they had taken flight — made it only two miles north of the prison when they found themselves cornered in a wooded area by a posse of armed prison guards and highway patrol officers.
Wielding kitchen knives as their only weapons against a small army with guns, two inmates surrendered without a struggle, but Wells is reported to have refused giving himself up and was shot by prison guards. He died on the way to the hospital. At least that was the official story as told to the press.
Starling Mack Nations
“Who?” you may ask. One of the sidelined principals of this story never even appeared in In Cold Blood. Yet without his fervent efforts and influence, none of the many unresolved questions now posed would have ever surfaced.
During the 1954 Kansas gubernatorial campaign, Lieutenant Governor Fred Hall, in his run for the state’s top job, hired as his political advertising director a seasoned newspaper veteran by the memorable name of Starling Mack Nations, the scion of a small family newspaper published in Kansas since the 1930s.
Nations’ father, Hobart, had owned and published The Greensburg News, where young “Mack,” not even 20 years old yet, earned his chops in the newspaper business before and after school. After Hobart died of tuberculosis in 1933, Starling dropped out of school for a while to work at the paper full-time.
Two months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Nations enlisted in the United States Navy, serving until September 1945, a month after the Japanese surrendered, winding down World War II.
Newly married and with a family on the way, Nations went back into publishing, starting his own first newspaper in 1946, The Chase Index. A year later he bought the Kingman Journal in partnership with some local businessmen, and after a few years sold that newspaper and bought up several others in various small Kansas towns, notably the Kinsley Mercury. It was during his time at the Mercury that Nations met future Kansas governor Fred Hall.
Every newspaper publisher since ink was invented has had to contend with political forces in their community, and Mack Nations had to learn to balance unsparing reporting of candidates and officeholders throughout Kansas and Missouri with the need to generate sufficient ad revenues that kept his newspapers thriving.
That particular fusion of experience was good enough for then-Lieutenant Governor Fred Hall to choose Nations to manage his political advertising. Nations accepted the position and became the new governor’s executive secretary when Hall won the election in November. As executive secretary (otherwise known as chief of staff), Mack Nations was now the gatekeeper to the governor.
It wasn’t a particularly long tenure for either man, however, since at the time Kansas chief executives only enjoyed a two-year term, and Hall would not win reelection in 1956. Mack Nations held his job for even less time, just ten months.
A rather strange event took place in 1962, when Nations was arrested for income tax evasion by the Internal Revenue Service. The claims made by the IRS, years after the alleged tax evasion took place, stemmed from a charge that Nations had received a $10,000 cash bribe — presumably on behalf of Governor Hall — as an inducement to obtain a pardon or parole for Mrs. Annas Brown, a jailed abortionist whose family had made arrangements for the payoff.
As reported in The Wall Street Journal, Mack’s son Michael remains convinced that his father’s arrest was instigated by Kansas officials in efforts to derail his book project with Richard Hickock, while facilitating Capote’s work on In Cold Blood. While a bold claim, there is documentation to support such efforts. Indeed, Alvin Dewey himself informed his friend Truman of the indictment against Nations, and Capote was so delighted by the news he wrote to his publisher, Bennett Cerf, exclaiming his apparent delight in Nations’s arrest.
Nations pleaded innocent and was ultimately acquitted of the charges, but the ordeal took an enormous toll on his life, his family, and his reputation. He returned to the newspaper business as a legislative reporter in Topeka for the Wichita Eagle.
In 1961, while on assignment for the Eagle, Mack Nations interviewed several Death Row prisoners at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, where he met Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, both with executions pending while the Kansas Supreme Court was hearing their appeals.
Truman Capote was well into the work of writing In Cold Blood by this time, and although he spent a good deal of time with both killers, it’s clear the author had a more nuanced interest in Perry Smith, in whose life Capote found, as author Ralph Voss astutely described, “many parallels to his own: childhood abandonment, the need to be loved and appreciated, a flair for and interest in language and the arts…. This affection for Smith undoubtedly affected Capote’s treatment of In Cold Blood.”
Hickock was single-mindedly focused on mounting an appeal to his conviction, a task on which, according to prison records, he’d spent a good deal of time preparing. But to take it further he knew he needed money to hire an attorney. The opportunity presented by Mack Nations provided the logical, if not the only, avenue for such funds. And if he begrudged Capote’s focus on Smith, it also gave him a chance to tell his own side of the story. So Hickock proposed that he and Nations collaborate on Hickock’s “side of the story.” Nations agreed and both signed a contract for the project, the genesis of the Hickock letters destined for a book that would eventually be titled High Road to Hell.
Nations and Hickock were able to meet in prison and corresponded regularly over the next several months, during which time Hickock produced at least 200 handwritten pages of remarkably detailed storytelling. Some of it was in response to specific questions Nations had posed, but most of it was a rambling opus memorializing hideous details of the Clutter crimes, the killers’ cross-country capers after the murders, their adventures in Mexico, and rants on a variety of perceived offenses during their flight from justice, including such things as Floyd Wells’s testimony on the stand, whether Smith intended to kill Hickock, or whether Hickock himself should have killed Smith.
Many scenes Hickock described to Nations are consistent with corroborated accounts, while some appear to be embellishment of known facts. Still others (we might assume) were simply imagined by Hickock to garnish the book the reporter wanted to write. Regardless, what grips the reader is the elaborate added material Hickock infuses into a narrative we thought we already knew. And to what we do know, he instills a fascinating level of vivid detail, typical of those with eidetic memory (which Hickock clearly did possess).
The constant requests by reporters to interview Smith and Hickock — the brass ring of front-page sensationalism following the Clutter murders — became such a concern to prison officials that the state’s director of penal institutions, Colonel Guy Rexroad, issued a directive prohibiting reporters from further access to prison inmates, including personal visits and correspondence by mail.
Though by this time Nations had acquired sufficient material for his book, the prohibition meant that Hickock could no longer track or influence the progress of the book, nor could Nations reach Hickock for any follow-up.
The prohibition also barred (or should have barred) Truman Capote from having similar access to Smith and Hickock. But when Capote discovered he had a competitor in Mack Nations — news delivered by the obliging hand of Alvin Dewey — his lawyers, from the Garden City law firm Hope, Haag, Saffels & Hope, took an unusual and very high level action to persuade prison officials to make special accommodations allowing Capote, “a writer of very high stature,” not “of the ‘pulp magazine’ variety…” to interview Hickock and Smith in person.
Capote had chosen no ordinary Kansas law firm. Its managing partner, Clifford Hope Sr., was a former U.S. Congressman, and his son, Clifford Jr., had been, by no small coincidence, Herbert Clutter’s attorney. Indeed, the younger Hope and his wife Dolores, who was city editor at the Garden City Telegram, became lifelong friends to Capote and even entertained him and Harper Lee at their home on numerous occasions, making introductions to fellow Garden Citians that much easier.
Another of the firm’s partners, Dale E. Saffels, wrote a fulsome letter to Col. Rexroad making the case for exempting Capote from the new prison rule barring journalists. At the time Saffels was also minority leader in the Kansas House of Representatives and a powerful figure in state politics.
After five long-winded paragraphs dedicated solely to validating his client’s need for unfettered access to Smith and Hickock, Saffels concludes with a baffling non sequitur. In his sixth and final paragraph, Saffels writes: “Col. Rexroad, I am, of course, very much interested in the situation at Hutchinson reformatory and sincerely hope that at the completion of the investigation there that it will be determined that many of the accusations and much of the publicity which has occurred are not based on fact. / Yours very truly, Dale E. Saffels.”
What Saffels makes reference to was a deep and embarrassing investigation by the KBI into “irregularities” at the Kansas State Industrial Reformatory, including prolific use of narcotics, reports of homosexuality and mistreatment of prisoners, and theft of state property. Rexroad was in no position to suffer the implied consequences of non-compliance given Saffels’s threat.
As Capote’s biographer, Gerald Clarke, reported in his book Capote: “…Finally, in desperation, he [Capote] bribed his way in…paying a powerful political figure to pull the right strings. ‘If I hadn’t got what I wanted, I would have had to abandon everything. I had to have access to those two boys. So I went for broke and asked for an interview with this behind-the-scenes figure, who was a man of great distinction and renown in that state. “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars if you can arrange this…”’.”
Thirteen days later Saffels received Rexroad’s response, but the wait was worth it: “…Although it is believed that the rule prohibiting interviews between inmates and reporters is a necessary one, I believe that in fairness to Mr. Capote and other writers who have been preparing materials on this case, consideration should be given to waving [sic] the rule in this instance. It is requested that either you or Mr. Capote notify this office of the date the interview is desired.”
On November 3, just two days after Rexroad granted Saffels’s request, Attorney General William Ferguson declared that, “Kansas State Industrial Reformatory is well managed and efficiently operated,” citing “only minor irregularities in operation of the Hutchinson institution,” thus ending the investigation.
Incensed that Capote would now have direct communications with Hickock, potentially undermining his own work, Mack Nations (who was not extended the same courtesy) fired off a letter to the warden threatening Hickock with forfeiture of his half of any royalties generated by the book should he allow Capote to interview him.
Any worries Capote might have had about Nations, however, faded after reading, as he put it, “that extraordinarily vulgar magazine containing the preposterous Hickcock Nations contribution,” [sic] which was sent to him in Switzerland by Alvin Dewey and his wife Marie. In the same letter thanking them, Capote also expressed his desire to see the original manuscript.
Capote did, in fact, try to buy the manuscript from Nations in a phone call made to the reporter’s Wichita Eagle office. Nations was unequivocal in his response: “Hell, no!” he said, according to Shirley Wise, a reporter for the Eagle and Nations’s girlfriend at the time. Ms. Wise also reported that Nations believed “there was something fishy about the Clutter case. But he wouldn’t say what.”
Mack Nations never found a book publisher for High Road to Hell, the full account of Richard Hickock’s version of the story. The only ink it earned appeared as a condensed excerpt in the December 1961 issue of Male, an obscure men’s pulp adventure magazine — the one referred to by Capote as “extraordinarily vulgar.”
As with most prisons at the time, correspondence to and from inmates was censored, and Hickock’s unrestrained letters to Mack Nations ultimately found their way to Warden Tracy Hand, who then passed the letters on to Kansas Assistant Attorney General Robert Hoffman. Hoffman, who personally argued for the State against appeals by the killers, was deeply concerned that the U.S. Supreme Court might reverse Smith’s and Hickock’s convictions on some technicality. With Hickock’s letters in hand he now possessed an elaborate unsolicited confession which he believed would be useful in the event of a retrial argument.
That the attorney general intended to rely on certain of Hickock’s letters in arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court bears the presumption that all the letters were credible. One can’t simply cherry pick which elements to believe and which to cast aside if one is depending on their wholesale veracity in a court of law. By the AG’s own actions, then, the letters were deemed to have had legitimate standing.
Accordingly, Hoffman prepared a certified copy of the letters for the AG’s files and, as discovered in unpublished documents, made a set of “personal” copies for himself, which (presumably attesting to their value) he attentively encased in a leather-bound folder. Copies of that set were graciously sent to me by Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Helliker (who obtained them from one of his sources), and which provided years of spirited discussion as each of us worked on our respective projects.
Why did Hoffman go to the extraordinary step of making a personal copy of the letters, which he then took home for safekeeping? Did he have doubts that the attorney general’s certified copy on file might not be sufficient? Or, in a state well known for its secrecy, did he suspect the letters might one day go missing?
On Christmas Eve 1968 Starling Mack Nations was killed while driving home in rural Colorado when his car struck a concrete barrier. The only copy of the full bound manuscript of his book, High Road to Hell, containing content not seen by anyone else but last observed sitting on his office desk, mysteriously disappeared that night and has never been found.
Continued at Part VIII — Privileged Communications. 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.
