Historic Literary Memorabilia Found in Trash Makes Its Way to Auction

Part 3 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 II — Forensics

Cohorts

Beyond having a direct lineage to one of the founding families of Kansas, Ronald Nye’s name is forever linked to history through his father, Harold Nye, the lead field investigator for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation during one of America’s most famous criminal cases.

Ron was nine years old when the Clutter family was murdered on November 14, 1959. And although he was just a boy, the date of the crime is not something he is likely to forget, for the 14th of November happens to be his birthday. What’s more, he was born in Garden City, Kansas, the same town and hospital that Nancy and Kenyon Clutter were born in, just a few years before Ron. As he tells the story:

It must have been sometime in 1959 when I first became aware of the Clutter murders. I was nine years old then and I remember the moment so well. My mother drove a 1950-something Dodge coupe to take my sister and me to school every day. My sister and I did not get along… not at all. To keep her more than an arm’s length away I would sit in the back seat of that old brown car and wait for my sister to get dropped off first, she was a few years older than I was and her school was closer.

My dad was gone a lot in those days. He never really said much about what he was working on, but one day when he came home he had put something in the back seat of Mom’s car — a very large piece of cardboard with stuff stuck all over it. It had a large black stain from some kind of liquid that had dried on it, like it had been poured on it. There were bits of something in black, some of them small, like little bugs, and some larger, like chips of wood.

If you asked my dad a straight question about something, he gave you a straight answer. You might not understand it, but still, he gave it to you “with the bark on it.” So, the next time he was at home for supper I asked him what was all over that cardboard in the back seat. He said some of it was part of a man’s brain and skull…and the black liquid was his blood. That was enough information, and where that conversation ended.

When I was in my early teens, I heard some friends talking about the movie In Cold Blood. They said that Mr. Clutter had been killed while laying on a mattress box in the basement of his home. It rang a bell with me all those years later. The timing was right, and the description was right. The piece of cardboard in the back of my mom’s car must have been what my friends were talking about. I waited for another opportunity to ask Dad about the cardboard that had been in the back seat of Mom’s car. He simply stated that, yes, it was the one Mr. Clutter had been killed on, destined for the KBI lab in Topeka for tests. Dad had to return to the Clutter farm before being able to check it in to the property room at headquarters, however, so he dropped it off at home for safekeeping.

I also remember another evening when my dad brought a slide projector from the office with a box of transparencies he needed to analyze. We had finished dinner and Dad waited for the dishes to get washed. He told my mother and sister that he was going to look at some autopsy slides on the kitchen wall and asked them to leave the kitchen. They left, and as I got up Dad asked if I wanted to stay and view them with him.

Those slides are as vivid in my mind today as they were that evening. Not because I knew they were the Clutter family, but because this was the first time that Dad let me watch an autopsy of naked females. Believe me there was nothing erotic about what I was watching. The pictures revealed the step-by-step process of layers of flesh being peeled back to locate objects that had stuck in the flesh and bone. I still remember the close-up pictures of the heads with large pieces missing or just barely hanging on.

In the seven years from the Clutter murders in 1959 to his sixteenth birthday in 1965, Ron had not seen much of his father. Promoted to assistant director of the KBI just months after winding up the Clutter investigation, Harold Nye’s caseload — indeed, the KBI’s entire crime fighting caseload throughout the state — was outpacing the meager capabilities of the bureau’s dozen or so field agents.

Fighting crime was what Harold Nye was built for. But the cost to his family life was a bitter trade. His wife, Joyce, never knew when she might see her husband again for dinner; she fretted over the grim and ever-present possibility that he might fall in the line of duty. Joyce Nye struggled with persistent anxiety as long as Harold had the job. Young Ron, who slept at the foot of her bed each night when Harold was away, bore the brunt of safeguarding his mother from her imagined dangers. Since childhood, Joyce had been warned that if she wandered too far from home the gypsies would steal her, thus beginning a life filled with groundless fears.

As a son whose dad, for years, had never come to any of his sporting events at school, Ron had his own melancholy. Lacking other interests at home or school, and with a family life that held more strictures than it did stability, Ron felt stifled.

Rebellious adolescents looking to find their place in life often dream of escaping the confines of family, of metaphorically “running away to join the circus.” At age fifteen Ron harbored similar dreams of independence, but when he chose to act on them, the circus he ran off to join was a literal one — he jumped at the chance to become a “carney” for Royal American Shows, the largest traveling circus troupe in the world.

Over the next few decades Ron lived a life not unlike most middle-class Americans. He had three children from two marriages, four grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. His career as a rehabilitation counselor fulfilled him, and his hobby of fixing up old cars kept his mind content. The discipline instilled in him by his father (nascent in youth, when little else mattered except girls and sports) ultimately applied itself admirably in college, where Ron graduated magna cum laude. Following graduate school, he was credentialed as a National Certified Counselor and later certified by the American Board of Medical Psychotherapists and Psychodiagnosticians.

Like his father, Ron chose a life of service, but he never sought the kind of spotlight that rivaled his father’s. His more discreet calling came, unbidden, on the morning of April 19, 1995. Working as a licensed professional counselor for HealthSouth Rehab Hospital in Oklahoma City, he was discussing patients with a colleague when, at exactly 9:02 a.m., a Ryder rental truck parked three blocks away, in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, exploded with such violence that — as would be accounted for later — 324 buildings in a sixteen-block radius were damaged or destroyed.

Starting almost immediately following that pivotal event in American history, and for the next several years, Ron and his team counseled and treated nearly every survivor of the bombing, including first responders. He was later nominated by the Oklahoma Counseling Association for the Humanitarian of the Year Award for his work with the survivors and was named Counselor of the Year by HealthSouth Oklahoma City.

As the epicenter of tornadoes in the U.S., people living in Oklahoma are ever vigilant for abrupt weather changes, especially in May, when rotating columns of air touching the earth appear with little warning, often causing massive destruction in their wake.

But in 2005 the entire state was spared from the threat of even one twister. Spring, brief as it usually is there before the hot, humid days of summer press in, had favored Oklahoma City with a picture-perfect day on the 10th of May, and the sun had just settled above the horizon when Ronald Nye pulled up to his mother’s house in Warr Acres, a tidy suburb northwest of the city.

Obviously, his mother was doing a thorough job of cleaning house. An imposing green twenty-yard dumpster, already brimming with household detritus after just a few days on site, hugged the side of the driveway where his mother and sister had parked their cars. Risking a ticket from the ambitious patrols scouting the neighborhood, Ron nosed his Dodge Caravan in behind the dumpster, its tail jutting out into the street, and shut the engine off.

It had been a long day counseling patients at the hospital, and as the early evening’s lingering warmth swirled around him, he closed his eyes and leaned back for a moment. The mellow percussive slap harmonics of Michael Hedges’ acoustic guitar, winding down on the CD player, braced him for the certain chaos waiting inside the home his father died in two years earlier.

Harold Nye passed away in 2003. For his wife, Joyce, the house they had shared for 28 years had grown too big and become too empty with the kids grown and gone. Alone and increasingly apprehensive, her anxiety spells were more frequent, unpredictable, and often tormenting. She looked forward to living closer to her son in Edmond, north of the city, where he could look in on her after work.

His moment of bliss over, Ron switched off the ignition and got out of the van. Behind his mother’s car a row of trash cans had been put out for collection, jutting haphazardly into the street. Figuring his van might be enough ticket for one day, he pulled the bins in closer to the curb.

Peering inside the bins, Ron spied stacks of paper — old photos, fingerprint cards, an assortment of documents — and two spiral-bound reporter’s notebooks, the kind his father had used for years. Notebooks he was never permitted to see as a young boy; notebooks he had completely forgotten about since leaving home to join the circus.

Reaching down, he snatched a thick, worn, chestnut-brown folder with an elastic tie cord enclosing it, shaking off scraps of garbage partly obscuring it.

He set the folder on the hood of his van, exposing two familiar hardcover books his mother had also discarded — and suddenly a memory surfaced: a vision of Truman Capote sitting in his family’s living room in 1960, talking about his famous Hollywood friends, names like Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe.

From beneath the jetsam of household rubbish, Ron pulled out the two books — signed first editions of In Cold Blood and Capote’s Selected Writings — both inscribed and given to his father by Truman many years before, when Ron was eleven years old. Beneath those books was yet another brown clasped folder identical to the first, but this one was stuffed with yellowed newspaper clippings about the Clutter murders.

For years, Harold Nye had saved copies of reports from every investigation he’d ever worked on, an entirely permissible practice under Kansas statute and — more relevant to law enforcement professionals — a sensible policy in the event they might later be called to testify in court.

After a long and rigorous career, reams of musty old paperwork filled some 15 sturdy banker’s boxes Harold had diligently kept stored up in the attic for decades, and which had agitated his wife Joyce to no end, anxiously convinced the KBI would one day come a-knocking. Despite her husband’s assurances that he was in compliance with the law, she remained unsettled by their presence in her home. Joyce Nye did not trust the KBI.

Ron’s reverie was broken by the distant sound of clanging garbage cans, followed by the high-pitched whine of a hydraulic packer blade, compacting the hopper of a garbage truck approaching the house. Seizing the books and the second folder out of the trash, Ron stowed everything in his van and went inside to join his mother and sister in clearing out the house, packing up what was left of her worldly possessions:

Before I got a chance to say anything to Mom about the folders and books I fished out, she just came out with it. “You’re going to be mad at me, I just know it,” she said. “But I got those boxes of your dad’s down from the attic and had them professionally shredded. I called a company and they brought a shredding truck out to the house last week and destroyed all of them while I watched!” She announced this with a certain measure of pride, as if it had been on some years-long checklist she could finally mark off and be done with.

I just never regarded my father’s files in the attic like she did. Mom said many times that she wished they were gone. I told her it was fine that she had them shredded, but that I’d found the two books and Dad’s papers on the Clutter case in the trash. She said she hadn’t discovered them until after the truck left, because they were on the shelf in Dad’s office.

Because I knew this was a sensitive issue for her, I asked if she had any problem with me taking them out of the trash. She said “No, as long as you don’t bring them back into my house!’”

I didn’t bring them back into my mom’s house. Instead, I took them home.

Six years later, in 2009, Ron learned from his son Will that his ex-wife Lecia was fully disabled, suffering from lupus and early onset Alzheimer’s, and living in federal housing, a scaled-down “apartment” the size of a walk-in closet. Despite being divorced from her for thirty years, Ron had never stopped caring for her:

I’d always told Lecia that when I sleep and dream about a girl, that girl is always her. She is literally the girl of my dreams, always has been. But thirty years ago I was young and foolish, so self-absorbed that I couldn’t see myself tied down with a sick wife for the rest of my days — so I left her and filed for divorce. To this day I agonize over that decision more than any other in my life. But at the time Lecia also thought it was the right thing to do, for she could be neither wife nor mother due to her illness. So, we parted amicably.

Decades later, Ron still carried the burden of abandoning his ex-wife. He decided to visit her, looking for any way he might help. When he discovered her living in such shabby, degrading conditions, he couldn’t bear it. He implored her to move in with him so he could take care of her properly, proposing that they spend their remaining days together.

Despite everything, Lecia knew Ron still loved her. She was also aware that her quality of life was diminishing, and that Ron’s offer was the most sensible option she had out of not very many good ones. She accepted Ron’s offer. He moved her into his home that day.

After three years living together, and with the approach of their fourth winter, Ron knew that the insulation in his drafty home was inadequate for Lecia’s comfort. The insulation of his home was inadequate to stave off the constant drafts:

When the wind blows through this old house you can hear all the windows rattle. No amount of caulk would seal them up; they needed replacement, but I didn’t have that kind of money.

Then I remembered those books Truman gave my father, the ones I dug out of the trash. There were also two letters I found tucked inside the pages of one of the books, part of an exchange of correspondence Dad had with Truman while he was in Spain working on In Cold Blood, and I figured they might have some value.

My dad also had a lot of official papers, copies of reports he filed during his investigation of the Clutter murders, and two reporter’s notebooks he kept all his notes in. All of these papers, by the way, dealt only with the Clutter investigation. There was nothing remaining in what I pulled out of the trash — the only surviving materials that didn’t get shredded — that discussed anything but the Clutter case.

So Lecia and I gathered everything I’d salvaged from my mother’s trash bin several years before — the books, the letters, documents, photos, notebooks, clippings — all of it. While I worked up an inventory list, she started making calls to auction houses to see if there was any interest they might have in the material.

After a few calls we finally reached someone at Christie’s in New York who was personally intrigued by what I’d told her — about my father having worked on the famous murder case that sparked In Cold Blood — but she admitted the material wasn’t really the kind of thing Christie’s handled.

She did, however, suggest I call Gary McAvoy, a dealer of historical memorabilia in Seattle.

And that’s when our long journey began.

Motive

Ron and I forged an easy rapport over the next few weeks. We made arrangements to have his father’s notebooks and other documents sent to me in Seattle, and even discussed the possibility of writing a book about Harold Nye’s role in the famous murder case. Although interest in Truman Capote’s work had remained high for well over five decades, not one of the principals had ever written anything more than a few articles about the case.

As I came to discover, Harold Nye did have a story to tell, one he’d wanted to write after he retired from the KBI. There were things about the Clutter case that had nagged him for years, pieces of a puzzle that didn’t quite fit together, especially for a man trained to recognize which tabs interlocked with their corresponding blanks, making the puzzle whole. Sadly, his goal to write a book laying out only what he knew never materialized.

But for now, any thoughts of helping Harold achieve that dream posthumously had to wait.

With the approach of another frigid Oklahoma winter, Ron more than ever wanted to install double-paned windows throughout the house to protect Lecia from drafts. Understanding it might take a while to find a buyer for his father’s historical cache, and with Lecia’s medical expenses mounting, we determined that an auction would be the quickest way to get top value in the shortest time.

Over the next few weeks, I prepared an online catalog of the items being auctioned and posted it on my company’s website. A few friends and colleagues helped test it and by all accounts it presented well.

Ron and I spent much time considering how to display the original crime scene photographs, the very photos taken by Officer Rich Rohleder in 1959 which were used to convict Hickock and Smith. Each bore the signature of “Harold R. Nye” penned on the back, for it was Nye himself who had developed them in the KBI photo lab.

Few people have seen all photos from the Clutter murders. Those of the victims, in particular, hold a lurid attraction for many. In my research, I found a cultish fascination existed in locating those specific images. Exposing this underbelly of the internet did little to mitigate my reluctance in displaying them at all. As a compromise, I reduced each photo to the size of a postage stamp, expunging any detectable detail but sufficient as a practical disclosure to potential buyers that they did exist and were part of the auction.

That these photographs were being offered at all troubled me, not just on a personal level but for the reputation of my business. Again, I sought the opinion of friends and colleagues. A majority believed the crime scene images were essential to the auction process, that they intensified the historical significance while attesting to the brutal consequences of the crime. After all, went the rationale, it wasn’t as if we never saw grisly images like that on TV or in movies. Precedent had long been settled on that score. In November 2017, in fact, SundanceTV aired filmmaker Joe Berlinger’s four-part documentary series, Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders, featuring many of the same more controversial images.

A minority, however, felt that exhibiting the photos might be indelicate and surely impolitic in some circles, despite the minuscule size of the images. My instincts squared with the minority view. But I am, at the end of the day, in the business of representing my clients’ best interests, and this particular client not only needed but deserved the best return we could achieve at auction. We kept the images discreet.

Ready to launch the event, then, tempting fate on Friday, July 13, 2012, we issued an arresting press release announcing a sealed bid auction ending on August 31:

…The sealed bid auction, comprising the extensive personal investigative archives of Special Agent Harold Nye, the youngest of four Kansas Bureau of Investigation detectives assigned to the case — features never-before-seen letters sent from Truman Capote to Agent Nye discussing intimate details of the case years before the book was published. In one letter Capote laments, “…I assume the Kansas Supreme Court will have set a new execution date for Perry and Dick. And now I suppose they will go into the federal courts, and the whole thing will drag on into eternity! No, I’m not bloodthirsty either, but I do wish the damn thing would end. So that I can finish the book before I’m too old and feeble to hold a pen.”

Also highlighted in the auction are hundreds of pages of investigative notebooks and documents, transcripts of interviews with and confessions of the murderers, original crime scene photographs long shielded from the public (and which have been obscured in the online catalog out of respect to the surviving family), fingerprint sheets, mug shots, and rare first editions of Capote’s books, including In Cold Blood signed by the principal KBI detectives as well as the cast and crew of the 1967 film of the same name starring Robert Blake and Scott Wilson as the killers….

A full, detailed inventory accompanied the online catalog, listing the contents of each of several document packets, along with scanned images of various items that might elicit dramatic appeal for bidders. Having decided to keep the entire lot together for sale to just one buyer, we expected a minimum bid in the low 5-figures, an amount that, to use an apt metaphor, would separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of potential bidders. But it’s safe to say, interest in the auction exceeded our expectations.

Within days, the release sparked excitement in newspapers and websites around the world. Thousands of visitors watched the online presentation. Email messages and phone calls poured in daily inquiring about the items, people asking if they could just buy one thing or another, media outlets asking for further details, teachers requesting class materials for their students…. Clearly interest was building; more interest, in fact, than we were prepared for.

But before the auction hammer could fall, a hammer of a different sort came down on us.

Continue with Part IV — Search & Seizure. 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.