Never-Before-Seen Documents Reveal a Different Story than was Told by Capote
Part 5 excerpted from “And Every Word Is True” — A Sequel to Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”
Continued from Part IV — Search & Seizure
Discovery
While an engrossing and superbly told story, parts of In Cold Blood have long been laid bare as exaggerated, contrived, wrong, or plainly fabricated. Of course, the author can be forgiven his immodest swaggering about the book’s being “immaculately factual” since he did produce a sensational form of narrative nonfiction journalism comprising the best elements of fiction: setting, plot, and character.
To Capote’s credit, his artful use of the phrase “non-fiction novel” in describing his new genre goes a long way toward reconciling these problems with the facts. Yet, truer facts remain.
Had Capote not pressed his repeated assertion about the book’s accuracy, much of the negative criticism might have stayed at a lower volume. Indeed, the title of this book is taken from an actual quote Truman gave to Newsweek reporter Karen Gunderson, who interviewed Capote at his home on Long Island for the 1966 documentary With Love from Truman.
In the interview, the author emphatically states about his book that, “It’s a completely factual account and every word is true.” Claiming such a lofty standard, however, demands being held to account for it. And held accountable he was.
In Cold Blood had taken the literary world by storm in 1966, making Truman Capote the most famous writer in America. As noted critic Irving Malin observed, “…some consider In Cold Blood a ‘lightweight’ effort; others praise it as a ‘grave and reverend book.’” Malin’s superb anthology includes ten notable reviewers who contrasted the book’s “public ambiguities and American life in general,” in good company with other prominent writers appraising the Capote oeuvre in relation to his new masterwork.
In Cold Blood had been on bookstore shelves only a month when Phillip K. Tompkins, writing for Esquire magazine, rebutted Capote’s daring claim of accuracy in a scholarly critique titled “In Cold Fact.” Tompkins, after reading Capote’s book, had set off on a nine-day trip to Kansas to determine the veracity of the author’s declaration that, “One doesn’t spend almost six years on a book, the point of which is factual accuracy, and then give way to minor distortions.”
But the unveiling of minor distortions, along with several major errors in fact, form the hallmarks of Tompkins’s incisive work.
There is one assertion Dr. Tompkins makes, however, that does bear reconsideration, as confirmed by documents now available to which he did not have access at the time: the intimate correspondence between Perry Smith and the Meiers.
As Tompkins relates: ”During our telephone conversation, Mrs. [Josephine] Meier repeatedly told me that she never heard Perry cry; that on the day in question she was in her bedroom, not the kitchen; that she did not turn on the radio to drown out the sound of crying; that she did not hold Perry’s hand; that she did not hear Perry say, ‘I’m embraced by shame.’ And finally — that she had never told such things to Capote. Mrs. Meier told me repeatedly and firmly, in her gentle way, that these things were not true.”
The notion of the undersheriff’s wife being friendly, even overtly caring for one of the Clutter murderers would have been viewed, at best, as indecorous for the time and place. So “Josie” Meier may have told the young journalist, many years later, what she had to in order to deflect any perceived improprieties by friends and, politically, for her husband’s career as former Finney County sheriff and, at the time, an officer of the Garden City Police Department.
Despite the undersheriff’s early cautions to his wife, however, it appears that both Meiers came to better know and care for Perry Smith in the years leading up to his execution — in correspondence, holiday cards, and at least two personal visits to him on Death Row at Kansas State Penitentiary (a 750-mile round trip they undertook by car).
Prior to his execution, Perry handed a leather satchel to Josie Meier containing his personal journals, some family photos, a few handwritten pages of poetry, and what meager possessions he had remaining, saying, “Here. Take all this stuff. I won’t need it.”
Truman Capote has been quoted as saying that as much as 80% of his research for the book was never used. Even so, it’s very likely that neither he nor Harper Lee were aware of the facts that appear here.
It has been well established that Alvin Dewey, the KBI agent coordinating the investigation, provided Capote with ample confidential details of the crimes, including those with highly sensitive elements, the kind that gave the book such human intimacies as passages from Nancy Clutter’s private diary, containing her last entry written an hour before a shotgun blast ended her life. Apart from this ongoing and widely acknowledged ethical breach lasting years, given what follows, one is left to wonder if Dewey hadn’t actually been the guiding hand behind the story that ultimately appeared in print; the story the KBI itself has eagerly promoted for decades.
When I began helping our legal team build our defense in 2012, I dug into the task wholly exasperated at the time and effort it would take away from my business and my life. Reading and digesting all that “closed-case” documentation might have been a true crime devotee’s idea of a good time, but it wasn’t mine. The lawyers, however, urged a thorough index of everything, and doing that required a submersion into material that, over time, both challenged and intrigued the lay historian in me.
Peeling back the layers, each scenario laid out here made little sense on its own. But, as with many mysteries having too many threads, when woven together properly a different tapestry began to emerge. And it wasn’t just me seeing new patterns. Others of note to whom I turned for periodic sanity checks — criminologists, legal experts, journalists, law enforcement officials, psychologists, crime writers — all professed astonishment when presented with new and materially relevant facts to a story that had been pretty well known. Or so they thought.
Custody
As we were now on our way down the long and combative path to litigation — and the Nye archives would remain in our possession until the Court ruled otherwise — I laid out the stacks of documents on my desk, contemplating the strategy we might take. I had given this material only token attention thus far since there was no compelling need to read every page word for word just for a simple auction. After all, at the time these appeared to be only supplemental artifacts, bit players in a supporting role to the headlining letters and first edition books inscribed by Truman Capote to Harold Nye.
But then there were the gruesome crime scene photographs, harsh and sobering reminders of the great cost involved, tempering my anticipation. The photos called to mind a question that has lingered in the minds of many readers of In Cold Blood, myself included: given the pitiful spoils for which the Clutters’ lives were exchanged — reportedly less than fifty dollars — why were the murders so extravagantly brutal? The official explanation did nothing to make that question less relevant.
For my part, I couldn’t imagine there might be new details among the auction items in my possession that would materially change Capote’s story or the KBI’s hand in the investigation.
I began with Harold Nye’s two steno pads, a worthy challenge alone since Nye’s handwriting was meant only for his own reference and later interpretation. Apart from what could more easily be read, a profusion of cryptic scribbles, references, and abbreviations will forever be unknown to anyone but Nye himself, and he’s no longer alive.
I dedicated the next few weeks to reading every page, jotting down notes when a particular detail caught my attention. The deeper I got into Nye’s chronicle of events, the more profoundly I was struck by the history spread before me — a contemporaneous, first-person account by a sharp young investigator at the top of his game, laying out the bones of what would ultimately become, from the viewpoint of another, an American literary classic in master storytelling.
Nye’s notes from his interrogation of Hickock in Las Vegas, for example, reflect a calculated precision, illustrating the art of capable, old-style sleuthing techniques. For several hours (and pages) Nye and his partner, Roy Church, allowed Hickock to spin his factitious cover story, replete with false alibis — until they pounced on him, stating the real reason for his detention:
“When jumped about Clutter case — Dick said
Now now — wait a minute — you [can’t] tie me
up with a murder -
Mention old man & woman
Finish 5:45”
One early discovery in Nye’s notebooks revealed a pivotal discrepancy in timing during the investigation, a key fact first gleaned by The Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Helliker, with whom I’d shared the Nye materials early on. As recounted in his February 2013 article, “Capote Classic ‘In Cold Blood’ Tainted by Long-Lost Files,” Helliker was first to note a previously unacknowledged gap between the time Floyd Wells revealed to the KBI who the murder suspects were, and when the KBI actually acted on that information.
Readers of Capote’s book, and even viewers of the 1967 film, may recall the dramatic scene in which Harold Nye visits the Hickock farm alone and, talking with Dick’s parents, spies the presumed murder weapon.
According to In Cold Blood and to the official version of events given by the KBI, this scene took place the day Wells spoke up about the crime. Inconvenient as they might be, however, the facts tell a different story. The KBI did not act on the same day they received Floyd Wells’s information, but five days later. Alvin Dewey simply did not believe Wells’s story, dismissing it as nothing more than contrived prison talk, so he gave the lead no pressing importance.
On the face of it, this recent revelation might not have merited the news it generated — clinching a front-page appearance in The Wall Street Journal’s weekend section and its repurposed syndication on hundreds of websites worldwide — were it not for two notable points.
First, Harold Nye never visited the Hickock farm by himself, an implausible scenario some in law enforcement consider might have been reckless if he had. But it did provide Capote with a riveting scene for the book (and an even more gripping treatment in the film). The official report shows that after obtaining a lawful search warrant, Nye and three other officers descended on the Hickock farm several days later, discovered the shotgun, then took the suspected murder weapon into evidence and tested it for ballistics.
Second, the KBI has for decades held up Capote’s book as the bedrock version of events for its own investigation, even relying on In Cold Blood, flaws and all, as its primary source material for the bureau’s official history published in 1980. A cursory review of their own Clutter case summaries might easily have alerted someone over the years that the bureau was open to exposure when the official facts controverted what had already been widely asserted in one of the most famous books in modern literature — the book purportedly documenting the KBI’s “landmark case.” But to this day, claims persist that In Cold Blood portrays a faithful account of the investigation.
Despite the profusion of Clutter case documents in the Nye materials, there seemed at first glance to be little of value beyond what Capote had written. But then, as mentioned, another collection of documents came into my possession: Richard Hickock’s Death Row letters to reporter Mack Nations. And as those revelations unfolded — with startling events corroborated by Harold Nye’s notes and the KBI’s own reports — it felt like a Kansas twister was carving a path through everything I knew about the In Cold Blood saga.
Many of Hickock’s extraordinary disclosures will be revealed in the pages to come, but as unlikely as it may seem, one event in particular stands out regarding a peculiar meeting described in one of Harold Nye’s reports — a meeting that took place about an hour after the murders, fitting Hickock’s stated timeline [emphasis added for discussion]:
While the family was in the bathroom we continued our search of the house. I looked upstairs, my partner down. We took a portable radio out of the boy’s room upstairs, and put it in the car. We were running short on time, and didn’t look the house over, or tear it up like we should. It was almost two o’clock and our meeting with Roberts was about an hour away. We didn’t want to miss that. Five thousand bucks is a lot of dough…. By this time the family was well convinced that we were just going to rob them. Little did they know what was in store for them.
The relevant part of this passage is Hickock’s intriguing allusion to meeting up with someone named “Roberts” after killing the Clutter family. His additional unexpected disclosure about “five thousand bucks” will be discussed in the next chapter. But for now, what are we to make of this meeting, and the reference to someone named “Roberts”?
The timing here is pivotal, for as it happens, about one hour after the murders — but many hours before the bodies were discovered — a local marshal had observed a gathering of three suspicious men in the nearby town of Cimarron, which could very well have been the meeting with “Roberts” referenced by Hickock.
Dodge City, Kansas, “Queen of the Cowtowns,” was the American Old West personified. This part of the country has a fabled history, calling to mind legendary figures like Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday — and of course its most famous fictional lawman, Marshal Matt Dillon, who, along with his hobbling sidekick Chester and “Miss Kitty,” were characters on the long-running TV-western series Gunsmoke. Real or not, all helped conjure a lasting image of Kansas as the heart of the Wild West, an image that still resonates fondly with anyone who grew up in the late 1950s and ‘60s.
Midway between Dodge City and Holcomb lies another historic town called Cimarron. Once a major transportation hub on the famed Santa Fe Trail, the Cimarron Crossing provided passage for wagon trains and stage coaches bound for major points of commerce in the mid-1800s, risking threats of Indian raids, rustlers, and outlaws along the way.
Within an hour after the Clutter family was murdered — making it between 2:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. that Sunday morning — Cimarron’s Night Marshal Fred Voelker was just about to go off duty when he stopped in at the Western Cafe.
Before doughnut shops became ubiquitous hangouts for cops working the graveyard shift, all-night diners served that noble purpose. Even in the early hours around 2:30 a.m., the Western Cafe in Cimarron was doing a brisk weekend business with locals and others passing through town.
Hours before the bodies of the Clutter family would be discovered, Night Marshal Voelker entered the cafe and took a booth seat as waitress Eunice Bell set down the first of two cups of coffee.
Another patron, Marvin “Squirt” Kramer, owner of the local beer tavern, had just closed his bar for the night and was sitting at the counter when three men walked in, also taking seats at the counter.
The following report was prepared by County Attorney Duane West with Undersheriff Wendle Meier, both of whom interviewed Voelker two weeks after the Clutter murders. [Note: Kramer is misspelled in the report as “Krimer;” spelling is shown as reported]:
On December 15 Undersheriff Wendell Meier and the writer [West] made a trip to Cimarron, Kansas, to check information received on December 2, from Fred Voelker, Night Marshall at Cimarron, Kansas. This information was in regard to three men who stopped at the Western Cafe in Cimarron sometime between 2 and 3:00 o’clock a.m., Sunday morning, November 15. Marshall Voelker was interviewed and stated that he was in the cafe sitting in a booth on the east side. That 3 subjects, one short, dark-haired, heavy set and two tall light-haired individuals entered the cafe and sat on the 3 stools at the north end of the counter, which is on the west side of the cafe. Mr. Squirt Krimer, a tavern operator in Cimarron, was sitting at the counter and the 3 subjects asked Krimer if they knew where they could get gasoline. Krimer in turn asked Voelker if he could get into the station to get gas. Voelker left the cafe and went across the street to the Standard station. He stated that the three individuals hurried out of the cafe, got into their car and drove east on the highway. He stated that the waitress at the cafe indicated to him through the window that the 3 had failed to get their hamburgers which they had ordered to go. A short time later these individuals came back into Cimarron from the east, making a U-turn in front of the cafe, where they stopped while one of the individuals ran into the cafe for the hamburgers. Voelker jumped the driver about making a U-turn, but the driver stated that he was not from Cimarron and so did not know that there was a law against making a U-turn in the middle of the street. Voelker indicated that the subjects were driving a 1949 or 50 Chevrolet 2-door sedan Fleetline, a dark gray color. He stated he believed the license tag was a 1959 Kansas Wyandotte County 67 or 57, remainder of numerals unknown. A small two-wheel trailer was being pulled by the subject’s automobile.
… We talked with Squirt Krimer and his story was substantially the same as that related to us by Mr. Voelker…. One of the other individuals had a scar on the left side of his face.
Both Krimer and Voelker indicated that the dark, heavy set individual had a bad right leg, which they thought to be artificial. They indicated that they had observed this individual limping and saw some type of harness under his clothing which made them think the man had a artificial leg. Voelker indicated that all three of these men were rough looking and had a dirty, unkept appearance.
At Dodge City, Kansas, we interviewed Mr. Ben Hughes, an employee at the Phillips 66 Station which is on the south side of the highway as you go into Dodge City from the west. Mr. Hughes reported that he was on duty Sunday morning November 15 when 3 individuals drove into the station in 1949 or 50 dark gray Chevrolet 2-door Fleetline sedan. He indicated the car was pulling a United Rental Trailer from Kansas City, Missouri, and that the car was bearing Missouri license plates.
Author’s Note:
In 1969 Marvin “Squirt” Kramer, the tavern owner, eventually went on to become sheriff of Gray County, in which Cimarron is the county seat. As of this writing, Marvin’s son Jim is Gray County Sheriff, as was his brother Bill before him.
In an interview, Sheriff Jim Kramer confirmed to me that his father, “Squirt” Kramer, had indeed spoken with the three men mere hours after the murders [which, of course, no one had known about yet].
“Dad had a good eye for details, and he just knew people,” Sheriff Kramer told me in an interview. “He would talk to anyone as long as they wanted to talk. I do remember Dad saying he felt like it was them.”
That this crucial observation — an official eyewitness placing Perry Smith and Richard Hickock at the Western Cafe — has eluded entry in the official record (not to mention further investigation) simply adds strength to the hypotheses laid out in pages to come.
In a separate but factually equivalent report taken by Harold Nye, who interviewed Voelker the day after the Clutter murders, more specific details were gathered for each individual:
Voelker describes the three subjects as follows:
№1: White male, 21 to 25, 175 to 180 pounds, heavy build, rough-looking, artificial right leg, wearing a dark green jacket…reddish brown high topped shoes.
№2: Possibly Spanish, 21 to 25, 5 ft. 7–5 ft. 9, sandy blonde bushy hair, white shirt with design in it, black shoes, no coat.
№3: White male, 21 to 25, 5 ft 9. Slender build, ducktail haircut, black shoes, white shirt with two inch black check in it, no coat….
The three subjects had moved one of the three’s personal belongings from Kansas City to Garden City, Kansas, and were en route back to Kansas City, Missouri….
The first point of interest here is the reported time frame. It took the killers just eight hours to get to Holcomb from Hickock’s home in Olathe, yet the return trip took eleven hours. It was a 45-minute drive from Holcomb to where they buried the spent shotgun shells and other materials used in the crimes, just north of Garden City, and another 45-minute drive down to Cimarron. That leaves at least ninety minutes otherwise unexplained, which easily accounts for the meeting in Cimarron before Smith and Hickock made it back to Olathe at noon on Monday.
Then we have descriptions of two of the three men in the Western Cafe, who bear striking similarities to Smith and Hickock. As Subject “№1,” Smith could easily have passed for white (his father was Caucasian), and he looked young for thirty-one, his age at the time. His “limping” “bad right leg” reference is the clincher since Perry’s left leg had been mangled in a motorcycle accident. Allowing for eyewitness fallibility, it would be easy to mistake which leg of a person seen limping was “artificial.” And since Smith did wear high-topped black boots, they would likely have had blood smeared on them just an hour after the murders, which could account for the observed “reddish brown” color. Hickock himself commented on how much blood Perry had on him at the murder scene and how much he left on the floor of the car.
Subject “№3” distinctly corresponds to Hickock in age, height, build, his ducktail hair style, and most notably the scar beneath his left eye from an injury suffered in a bad car accident years before.
Which leaves the identity of the third man, Subject “№2,” a mystery. Could this have been “Roberts”?
During the ensuing murder investigation, state Highway Patrol officers were charged with canvassing area hotels and filed reports on what they found. An exhaustive review of these documents revealed surprising entries in the registers of two separate Garden City motels: the Wheatlands Motel and the Warren Hotel. Both had registered guests with the name “D. Roberts.” Both guests checked out the day before the murders.
Further research into the identity of “Roberts” yielded only dead ends. Who “Roberts” was remains unknown.
The suspicious behavior of the three men — rushing out of the cafe to avoid the marshal, leaving behind the food they ordered — is especially noteworthy. And though it may just be coincidence, in his letters Hickock wrote that, after killing the family, “… I was hungry. Boy was I hungry.”
During his interrogation with Harold Nye after being captured in Las Vegas, Hickock did mention that he and Smith stopped at an all-night cafe, adding “but I don’t remember the name.” For someone whose mastery of such granular details so impressed investigators, as well as Capote and Lee, it seems odd that Hickock’s memory would fail him for such a key moment in the chain of events.
The appearance of a 1949 Chevy Fleetline sedan plays prominently throughout this story. Hickock owned a black 2-door model, and ten years in the hot Kansas sun would have oxidized it to a dark gray, as was common then for black cars lacking modern paints with protective polymers. The three unidentified “Subjects” seen in the Western Cafe drove a vehicle that was identical in make, model, color, and condition.
As for the license plates, Kansas passenger car tags in 1959 were yellow, whereas Missouri plates that year were black, so they could hardly be confused, dampening the potential for flawed witness reporting. Given the time, proximity, and nearly identical description of the occupants and their vehicle at the Phillips 66 station in Dodge City, the possibility of that sighting being a different vehicle with different people, towing an identical trailer, is improbable. But how to explain the difference in license plates, unless Roberts had an otherwise identical car? Hickock had no qualms stealing license plates in the past, so they could easily have had another set on hand since they were on the run.
If one were to pose a plausible theory in light of this report — predicated on the credibility of Hickock’s exhaustive letters to Mack Nations — after killing the Clutters, Hickock had prearranged a meeting with someone named Roberts to collect an agreed upon payment, presumably for the task of eliminating Herbert Clutter.
All of which opens up a Pandora’s Box of yet more questions: Who hired him, and why? How did Wells fit into the scheme? Did Smith know anything about the plan? How do we account for any money Hickock claims to have received, since they appear to have had minimal funds for their trip to Mexico? Did the killers get paid at all? Why did they murder the entire family? What was the trailer used for?
And perhaps strangest of all: Why did neither Hickock nor Smith mention any of this in their confessions, or in their defense at trial? If Mr. Clutter was the sole intended target, could murdering the entire family have upset the scheme of the contracting conspirator? One who may have threatened the lives of Hickock’s and Smith’s families should they ever breathe a word of truth? Are answers even possible after so many decades, with nearly all principal figures now long-dead?
From mid-November to the end of January is a miserable time to be a pheasant in Kansas.
Native to Mongolia, ring-necked pheasants were introduced in Kansas in 1906, and today as many as 150,000 hunters in just two months can bag up to three-quarters of a million birds in a bounteous season. Western Kansas in particular boasts some of the best brood rearing habitats in the country, so pheasant hunters are a common sight in the winter. The Kansas Game Commission carefully regulates each season in order to maintain healthy bird populations, so the length of permitted upland hunting and bag limits can vary. In 1959 just twenty days were allowed for hunting, starting on November 7.
On November 11, three days before Hickock and Smith invaded the Clutter home, two hunters were driving by the old Holcomb Bridge, just a half-mile from River Valley Farm, when they caught sight of a pheasant flying across the road. Stopping their car to chase the bird, they noticed an old faded Chevy Fleetline with a black license plate parked north of the bridge. The hunters reported seeing “three rough-looking individuals” all sitting in the front seat of the vehicle, so they waited, allowing them to go after the pheasant first. Several minutes passed, and as there was no movement from the occupants of the Fleetline, the hunters left their car to flush the pheasant themselves. Ninety minutes later they returned to their vehicle, and the three individuals were still sitting in the Chevy.
MEMORANDUM FOR THE FILE
Garden City, Kansas
November 20, 1959Andy [redacted] Garden City, contacted Captain [redacted] of the Garden City PD, on 11/18/59 and advised that on 11/11/59 he was hunting pheasants with a friend south of Holcomb, Kansas; that around 4:15 p.m. on this date a pheasant flew across the road north of the river bridge and that they observed an old beatup Fleetline Chevrolet parked just north of the Holcomb bridge; that this car was a faded color and had a black license plate and that it contained three rough-looking individuals, and that the three were sitting in the front seat of the car and that the individual in the middle was either a man or woman but appeared to have long hair. Mr. [redacted] stated that he thought these individuals were hunting and that they waited for him to get out of the car and go after the pheasant but after waiting a few minutes Mr. [redacted] and his friend got out of their car and went to try to flush up the pheasant. He stated that they were gone for approximately an hour and thirty minutes and when they got back this car and its occupants were still there.
A. A. DEWEY
There are surprising similarities to the reported sighting of these men and the “three rough-looking individuals” at the Western Cafe. If, as in Nye’s report, they were supposedly moving one of their number from Kansas City, Missouri, to Garden City, Kansas, taking time out to hunt pheasant would seem a strange diversion, one especially dubious when not taking advantage of a prime opportunity as a pheasant flew right in front of their car.
In his 2010 memoir, In the Shadow of My Brother’s Cold Blood, Hickock’s brother David writes poignantly about the family’s annual tradition of hunting pheasant in western Kansas, noting “… the last pheasant hunting adventure took place exactly one week before November 15, 1959.” In Cold Blood also describes this hunting trip — to Grinnell, Kansas, a small town ninety miles north of Garden City, where the shotgun David purchased as a gift for his brother Dick was first used.
The second and last time it was used was one week later, inside the Clutter home.
Continued at Part VI — Lineup. 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.
