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CAMPUS AND AREA
University Daily Kansan, November 12, 1984
Page 8
Echoes of gunshots haunt Holcomb
Town remembers Clutter murders
By ANTONE GONSALVES United Press International
HOLCOMB — A quarter of a century has passed, but the four shotgun blasts of a quadruple murder in New York have raised a farm community trying to forget
Early in the morning of Sunday, Nov 15, 1959, the blast of a shotgun echoed four times through an isolated farmhouse in southwest Kansas, ending the lives of four members of a prominent Holcomb family and condaining their two killers to death.
HERBERT CLUTTER, 18, his wife Bonnie, 45, their daughter Nance, 16, and son Kenyon, 15, died that morning, their heads blown apart by a shotgun blast fired at point-blank range.
"They were well thought of," a 70-year-old Holcomb farmer says today of the Clutters. "I thought whoever done it were damn fools."
One of their killers later said, "It was like picking off targets in a shooting gallery."
The killer, Perry Edward Smith, and his accomplice, Richard Eugene Hickock, were hanged about five years later for the murders, described at the time as the "most heinous crime" in Kansas history.
The tragic ending to the Clutter's lives sparked the late Truman beetleworm, an fictional novel. The cold blood, and a successful motion picture.
BOTH BROUGHT A morbid notoriety to Holcomb that residents today are unable to shake.
Bob Rupp, Nancy Clutter's boyfriend and the last to see the Clutters alive, and Wendle Meir, undersherif at the time of the killings and one of the first at the murder scene, are two of many who refuse to discuss the
"We want to forget the whole thing." Meir said.
Up until about a decade ago, Holocomb remained a dusty farm community on the Kansas plains with a post office, a restaurant, a small market, unpaved roads and about 350 residents.
about three years ago northwest of town.
Today, Holcomb is home to about 1,200 workers, many of them blue-collar workers at the world's largest beef-packing plant, which opened
What hasn't changed is the wind-swept countryside where Hickock and Smith executed their victims. Weather-beaten elms line the dirt road leading to the large farmhouse where the Clutters, a church-going family, once lived.
The half-brick, half-wooden house used to be white, but has been repainted to tan. It is surrounded by
to see them because it was "too painful."
After the trial, the town slowly began to forget.
began to go.
"People went on about their business," Kidwell said. "People just had their own lives to live."
Duane West, Finney County attorney from 1987 to 1961, prosecuted Hickoe and Smith, demanding that they be prosecuted for the premeditated killings.
'Those two guys were scum and they needed to be executed. I would have gone up and pulled the lever on those guys.'
Duane West
former Finney County attorney
flat, cultivated farmland, with the closest home about a half mile away.
A RUSTED SWIM SET sits in the front yard of rancher-farmer Bob Byrd's home. Byd, who has owned a ranch for over 50 years, says to people curious about his home.
Wilma Kidwell, whose daughter Susan was Nancy Cutter's closest friend, is now 77. She gives interviews, hoping to shield her daughter from the potential fate of a friend she were the first to see Nancy Cutter lying on her bed in a blood of child.
The elder Kidwell will only say that her daughter is now 37, married and works as a commercial artist in New York.
"We don't talk about it," Kidwell says of the murders. "Even at the time, she'd just go to her room. She didn't want to discuss it." she says of her daughter "They were just gone, that's all."
Kidwell, who later moved from Holcomb to Garden City, about 7 miles east, recalled Capote's first visit to Holcomb.
"It was strange. I'll have to admit that," she said. "He was very short, of course, and had a fur coat on, fur hat and he was sort of swallowed up in it. (With his high pitched voice, he was certainly not an ordinary person."
WHEN THE KILLERS WERE caught several months later in Las Vegas, Nev., and send back to Garden City for trial, Kidwell did not attempt
The murderous scheme was devised by Hickock in the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing after another inmate and former worker for Floyd Welsh Jr. Floyd Welsh Jr. told Hickock that Heckler clapped $10,000 in a house safe.
THE THOUGHT OF possessing that much money sparked dreams of a carefret life in Mexico, but when the killers arrived at the Clutter home they found no safe and no money. The wealthy Mr. Clutter, for tax purposes, used personal checks for most purchases.
Unable to find more than from $40 to $50 in cash, the killers bound the Clutters' hands and feet and gagged all of them but Nancy.
Except for the throat cutting, the same procedure was used on the other victims — first Kenyon, then Larkin and another last. The killers had no motive.
Smith later confessed that he started with Clutter, cutting his throat and then firing the shotgun as he clocked a flashlight at the target.
"THOSE TWO GUYS were scum and they needed to be executed," said West, a passionate advocate of the death penalty. "I would have gone up and pulled the lever on those guys."
West, 53, has read only excerpts of Capote's book. Yet the former prosecutor, who now has a private law practice and is a Garden City commissioner, has strong opinions
about the work that is required reading in many high schools and is often called a classic in journalism.
"I don't think there was anything of redeeming social value whatsoever in Mr. Capote's book," West said. "His supposed new type of reportage — was a bunch of garbage as far as I am concerned."
"I had no use for that man either," said Clarence Ewalt, who called police after his daughter, Nancy, and Susan Kidwell found Nancy Clutter.
"Why should he make millions of dollars?" Ewalt said bitterly.
dollars?" Ewalt said bitterly.
Kidwell is kinder toward Capote,
who later became her friend.
"To me, he was very nice and very polite and I respected his work," she said. "I never felt that he was trying to use us in way. I didn't feel that and I didn't resent him writing that book. Many people did."
But Kidwell also said the book had a number of inaccuracies.
CAPOTE, A PIONEER OF the "new journalism" style in which factual events are related in narrative, died just months before the 25th anniversary of his infamous visit to Holcomb. His death Aug. 25 was an unusual disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication.
The Clutters are buried in the northwest corner of Valley View Cemetery, which is located on a hilltop overlooking Garden City.
A large, rectangular granite tombstone marks the graves of Herb and Bounte Clutter. The graves of Ninney are marked by smaller, similar stones.
Harrison Smith, who is now 70 and lives in Garden City, defended Hickock in a trial the prosecution entered after authorities already had obtained confessions from both defendants.
"BY THE TIME WE (he and Arthur Fleming, Smith's attorney) got into the picture, it was a pretty cut-and-dried affair as far as their innocence or guilt was concerned." Smith said. "The best we could hope for was that they'd get life in prison as opposed to the end of a rope."
But even try to avoid the hangman's nose for their cheers proved fruited. Hickock and Smith were both killed in 1965, at the Kansas State Pentenitary
Admissions head resigns; plans career in education
Linda Thompson has resigned after four years as director of admissions.
She plans to get married Saturday and move to Bakersfield, Calif., where her fiance lives.
"Officially, Friday was my last day," Thompson said yesterday, "but I still have some things to do like clean out my desk."
Thompson said she intended to pursue a career in higher education on the West Coast.
As director of admissions, Thompson was responsible for managing the admissions office and personnel.
and facilities and host students here on visits." she said.
Thompson also participated in visits to high schools and community colleges, trying to recruit students for the University of Kansas.
"Our goal has always been not to persuade students, but to make them enough aware of what KU has to offer and what its strengths are perceived to be in and out of the state."
The person who takes her place will continue to market KU in new areas of the country, she said.
"Our goal has been to make students aware of the programs, faculty and students that reflect our identity of opportunities available."
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