Clutter Family Murders: In Cold Blood, Trial, and Executions

The Clutter family murders were the November 15, 1959, killings of Herbert Clutter, his wife Bonnie Mae, and their two youngest children, Nancy and Kenyon, in their farmhouse near Holcomb, Kansas. Two ex-convicts, Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Smith, broke in expecting to find a safe full of cash, left with about fifty dollars, a pair of binoculars, and a transistor radio, and were caught six weeks later. Both were hanged in 1965. The case became one of the most famous crimes in American history after Truman Capote turned it into his 1966 book In Cold Blood.

Who the Clutters Were

Herbert Wesley Clutter, 48, owned River Valley Farm, a prosperous wheat operation in Finney County. He was a college graduate and one of the most respected people in the area. His wife Bonnie, 45, suffered from recurring depression that kept her largely at home.¹

The couple had four children. The two eldest, Beverly and Eveanna, were already married and living away by that November. Nancy, 16, taught Sunday school at the First Methodist Church in Garden City, baked pies, rode her horse Babe, and had a boyfriend named Bobby. Kenyon, 15, was quiet and spent his time tinkering with a vintage truck.¹

What Happened on the Night of November 15, 1959

Hickock and Smith drove to the farmhouse armed with a twelve-gauge shotgun, an eight-inch hunting knife, nylon rope, adhesive tape, and rubber gloves. They entered through an unlocked west door and woke Herbert Clutter in his downstairs bedroom. When no safe turned up, they interrogated him and searched the house, then separated the family.²

Herbert was tied on a mattress carton in the basement furnace room. Kenyon was bound to a couch in the adjoining recreation room. Upstairs, Bonnie and Nancy were each tied to their beds. All four had their mouths sealed with adhesive tape.³

Herbert was killed first. His throat was cut, and he was shot in the head. Kenyon was next, killed by a shotgun blast at close range. The killers then went upstairs and shot Nancy and Bonnie in their beds. After each shot they picked up the ejected shell casing.² For all that, they left with roughly forty to fifty dollars from Herbert’s billfold, four silver dollars, a pair of binoculars, and a Zenith portable radio.³

Afterward they buried the four spent shotgun cartridges along with unused rope and tape near a county line road north of Garden City. Hickock cleaned blood off the shotgun using water drained from the car’s radiator, and they burned blood-stained clothing and gloves at a roadside park.²

Why the Clutters Were Targeted

Richard Hickock, born in eastern Kansas, had drifted through jobs as a railroad worker, auto mechanic, and ambulance driver. A 1950 car accident left his face noticeably asymmetrical. In March 1958 he was sentenced to five years at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing for a burglary involving a stolen rifle.¹

Perry Smith had a rougher start. Born to a Native American mother and a Caucasian rodeo-circuit father, he served in the Korean War from 1948 to 1952. A postwar motorcycle accident left him with chronic pain and a heavy reliance on aspirin. His record included reckless driving, burglary, jail escape, and vagrancy, and he was sentenced to five to ten years at Lansing in 1956.¹

The two met as cellmates at Lansing, but the man who set the crime in motion was another inmate, Floyd Wells. Wells had worked as a ranch hand at River Valley Farm for about a year in the late 1940s. He told Hickock that Herbert Clutter was wealthy and kept a safe in his home office holding as much as $10,000. The information was outdated and wrong; the safe Wells remembered was in an older house on the property, not the family’s current residence. Hickock latched onto it anyway.⁴ He told Wells he intended to find Smith after release, drive to the Clutter home, rob the safe, and kill everyone in the house so there would be no witnesses.¹

Hickock’s motivations were financial. He wanted money for a high-end lifestyle. Smith dreamed of buying a boat to search for sunken treasure in Mexico. Smith later said he had tried to call Hickock’s bluff and prove he was a “phony,” while Hickock was determined to prove he was not a coward.¹

How the Killers Were Caught

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation assigned the case to Alvin Dewey Jr., who had personally known Herbert Clutter.⁵ The break came from Wells himself. Sitting in Lansing, he heard news of the murders on the prison radio and recognized the crime Hickock had described. For weeks he stayed quiet, afraid of retaliation from other inmates and afraid of being charged as an accessory. Eventually he confided in another prisoner, who helped him reach the deputy warden. On December 10, 1959, Wells gave KBI Agent Wayne Owens a formal statement naming Hickock and Smith and describing the family and the farm layout.⁴ Wells reportedly had his eye on a $1,000 reward offered by a newspaper.⁶

Investigators circulated mug shots and issued an all-points bulletin. On December 30, 1959, at about 5:25 p.m., Las Vegas police officers Ocie Pigford and Francis Macauley spotted the two men in a 1956 Chevrolet stolen in Iowa, parked near the Victory Hotel on Main Street. They were arrested without incident. Smith had just retrieved a box from the Las Vegas post office containing the boots he had worn during the murders.⁶

On January 6, 1960, KBI officers returned the pair to Garden City. Investigators recovered Hickock’s hunting knife, the twelve-gauge shotgun, the transistor radio and binoculars (which had been sold to an officer in Mexico City), and the buried cartridges, rope, and tape.² Crime scene photography had also revealed a bloody footprint matching Smith that was invisible to the naked eye, along with a tire track from the killers’ vehicle.³

Smith eventually admitted killing all four members of the family. He said he confessed so that Hickock’s elderly parents would not go to their graves believing their son was the actual killer.¹

The Trial and the Verdict

The trial began on March 22, 1960, in the District Court of Finney County. Hickock was represented by Harrison Smith, and Perry Smith by A.M. Fleming. Kansas Attorney General William M. Ferguson led the prosecution with Assistant Attorney General Robert E. Hoffman and Special Counsel Duane E. West. The defendants had specifically asked to be tried together.²

Each man was charged with four counts of first-degree murder. The state’s evidence relied heavily on the defendants’ own voluntary statements, and the defense raised no objection to them at trial. The defense called a psychiatrist to testify about their mental state, but neither defendant took the stand. The jury of twelve men deliberated about forty minutes before returning guilty verdicts on all counts for both men and fixing the punishment at death.²

The Kansas Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and death sentences on July 8, 1961, rejecting defense claims about pretrial publicity and about the makeup of the psychiatric commission that had evaluated the defendants.²

The Executions

Hickock and Smith spent nearly five years on death row at Lansing as further legal proceedings played out.⁷³¹

The Clutters were buried at Valley View Cemetery in Garden City.¹

Truman Capote and In Cold Blood

Truman Capote first learned of the case from a brief New York Times article headlined “Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain.” He traveled to Kansas with his childhood friend, novelist Nelle Harper Lee, to research the story. Lee helped with reporting and interviews; Capote’s notebooks show he paid her a $900 salary plus a $250 advance. He also paid $100 each to Smith and Hickock for their cooperation.⁸

Capote spent six years on the project. In Cold Blood was serialized in The New Yorker in 1965 and published as a book in 1966. He marketed it as a “nonfiction novel,” calling it “completely factual” with all quotes “transcribed verbatim.”⁸

Where the Book Departs from Fact

Those claims did not hold up. Before his death in 1984, Capote acknowledged that the book’s final scene, a conversation in a cemetery between a detective and one of Nancy’s friends, was “pure invention.”⁹ His notebooks at the Library of Congress show that many quotes attributed to specific people were drawn from disembodied notes not tied to any speaker, and that he fabricated scenes to enhance the narrative.⁸

Reporting by the Wall Street Journal and analysis of KBI records showed Capote significantly embellished Alvin Dewey’s role. The book portrays Dewey as a “hard-charging” detective who acted immediately on Wells’s tip, but KBI files indicate the bureau waited five days to follow up. Capote also described Dewey visiting the killers’ family farmhouse alone and deceiving their parents by claiming he was investigating a parole violation; KBI documents show four lawmen conducted the search and made no such claim. Capote reportedly lobbied Columbia Pictures to hire Dewey’s wife as a consultant on the film for $10,000, an arrangement that may have shaped how Dewey appeared on the page.¹⁰

The book also contains scenes no one could have witnessed, such as a morning conversation between Nancy and Kenyon on the day they died. New Yorker editor William Shawn flagged several such passages with the query “How know?” during editing. No verification was provided and the passages stayed in. The magazine’s fact-checking largely covered objective details such as dates, distances, and spellings, without attempting to verify dialogue or reconstructed scenes.⁹

The Surviving Daughters’ Objections

Beverly English and Eveanna Mosier, the two older Clutter daughters, have been sharply critical of Capote’s work. Both allege that he violated an agreement to let them review the manuscript before publication, failed to consult reliable sources about their family, and “grossly misrepresented” them for profit. They have said the family never received any money from the book or its film adaptations.¹¹ In 2017 they participated in the SundanceTV documentary Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders, which they described as their first chance to “get the true story out about who Herbert, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter were as people.”¹²

The Walker Family DNA Test

Hickock and Smith are sometimes linked to another unsolved case. In December 2012, their remains were exhumed from Mount Muncie Cemetery at the request of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office in Florida. Investigators wanted to test their DNA against semen evidence from the 1959 murder of the Walker family in Osprey, Florida, in which Cliff and Christine Walker and their two young children, ages three and two, were killed on December 19, 1959, while Hickock and Smith were known to be in the state.¹³

The results, announced in August 2013, were inconclusive. Only partial DNA profiles could be extracted from the remains, and the 1959 Florida evidence was too degraded for a definitive comparison. Investigators said the results could neither exclude nor confirm the two men. The Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office continued to regard them as the most viable suspects, and the Walker case remained unsolved.¹⁴¹⁵

What Became of the Family and the Farm

Beverly English, a retired nurse, and Eveanna Mosier, a retired schoolteacher, both settled in the Newton, Kansas, area. Beverly compiled three binders of family mementos and photographs to preserve a positive record of their parents. Together the sisters accepted an award on their father’s behalf at the Kansas Co-op Hall of Fame in 2003. Memorials to the family include a stained-glass window and altar at the United Methodist Church in Garden City, a shelter at the Kansas State 4-H camp at Rock Springs Ranch, and a park in Holcomb.¹¹¹⁶

River Valley Farm was sold at auction after the murders; the surviving daughters found maintaining it emotionally unbearable. Nancy’s horse Babe sold for $75.¹ The farmhouse remains a private residence and working farm, not open to the public, and current residents ask passersby to respect their privacy.¹⁶

1
U.S. Courts. In Cold Blood Revisited
2
Justia. State v. Hickock and Smith, 188 Kan. 473
3
Garden City Police Department. Clutter Family Murders
4
The New Yorker. In Cold Blood, Part 3 – Answers
5
City of Garden City. Alvin Dewey
6
The Mob Museum. Sixty Years Later, In Cold Blood Murders Still Resonate
7
Lawrence Journal-World. Witness to Execution
8
Library of Congress. The Notebooks Behind Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood
9
Slate. Fact-Checking In Cold Blood
10
The Atlantic. So In Cold Blood Was Kind of a Sham
11
Lawrence Journal-World. Sisters – Family Surviving
12
People. In Cold Blood Clutter Family Speaks Out Documentary
13
CBS News. In Cold Blood Killers DNA Not Linked to Fla. Murders
14
ABC News. DNA Fails to Link In Cold Blood Killers to 53-Year-Old Case
15
Fox 13 News. Commission Works to Close Cold Cases Throughout the State
16
The Clio. Clutter Family Home