Inside the Brutal Murders That Inspired a Foundational Work in the True Crime Genre

“Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of Holcomb,” wrote Truman Capote in his seminal nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood.

That all changed on November 15, 1959, when the gruesome, unsolved murder of a family of four brought the writerly attention of Capote and Harper Lee (a lifelong friend who wrote her own articles on the case, in addition to contributing to Capote’s research) to Holcomb, a small ranching town in western Kansas.

“In the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises—on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles,” Capote wrote in his book’s opening pages. “At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them—four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives.”

The first four lives lost were those of the victims: prosperous farmer Herbert Clutter; his wife, Bonnie; and their two teenage children, Nancy and Kenyon. The last two were the Clutters’ killers.

The Garden City Telegram, a local newspaper, reported that the family had all been bound and gagged, their hands tied behind their backs before they were shot in the head. Family friends who were dropping their daughter off to attend church with the Clutters discovered the bodies strewn across the house.

“This is the goriest crime I have ever seen in Kansas,” Logan Sanford, the director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, told the Telegram. For six weeks, the crime would go unsolved and the killers uncaught. Western Kansas was left in a state of fear.

Capote came up with the idea for In Cold Blood after reading a short, simple article buried deep in the New York Times, which announced: “Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain.” This brutal crime on the Kansas prairies provided a perfect opportunity to write what he called a “nonfiction novel,” a work of factual reporting and tireless research that uses literary techniques, characters and a narrative structure to elucidate the deeper truth and background of a story. Though the author billed In Cold Blood as a true account based on interviews with the Cutters’ murderers and others connected to the case, he later garnered criticism for fictionalizing aspects of the killings.

As the police investigation revealed and Capote’s book—first serialized in the New Yorker in 1965 and then published as a novel in 1966—later detailed, the cold-blooded killers were Perry Edward Smith and Richard Eugene Hickock, recently paroled criminals who’d met while serving time for burglary at the Kansas State Penitentiary. Fellow prisoner Floyd Wells, a former farmhand for the Clutters, told Hickock that the family kept a large amount of cash in a safe in their house. In a small, remote town where neighbors kept their doors unlocked, the job, as Hickock later described it to Capote, seemed like a “cinch.”

On the night of November 14, Hickock and Smith drove 400 miles across Kansas to the Clutter house, where the family lay sleeping. In the early hours of November 15, the pair entered through the unlocked door. After herding the family into the bathroom, the two men discovered that there was no safe. The promised fortune had been a farmhand’s tall tale. That’s when the would-be thieves’ blood began to run cold. A “cinch” of a robbery descended into shambles as they bound, gagged and killed the Clutters in their own home.

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“No witnesses” was the two men’s mantra during their lengthy drive across Kansas, Capote reported in In Cold Blood. Hickock and Smith indeed left no witnesses and took the few spoils they could find: a portable radio, a pair of binoculars and less than $50 in cash.

The two men lasted a little over six weeks on the run. Las Vegas police arrested them on December 30, and they went to trial on March 22, 1960.

Herbert’s younger brother, Arthur Clutter, represented his family in the courthouse. “I just want to get a good look at [Smith and Hickock],” he told the press. “I just want to see what kind of animals they are. The way I feel, I could tear them apart.”

The jury found Hickock and Smith guilty of four counts of murder in the first degree. The men were sentenced to hang. The fifth and six deaths stemming from the bloody events on the morning of November 15, 1959, arrived nearly six years later, on April 14, 1965, when the state of Kansas executed Hickock and Smith for their crimes.

Holcomb, that small, neighborly town on the prairie, was forever changed. As Capote wrote, “Afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy recreating them over and again—those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.”

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.