In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences

decided the town ought to be called after him. Soon as it was, what did he do? Sold out. Moved to California. Not us. I was born here, my children was born here. And! Here! We! Are!” One of her children is Mrs. Myrtle Clare, who happens to be the local postmistress. “Only, don’t go thinking that’s how I got this position with the government. Myrt didn’t even want me to have it. But it’s a job you bid for. Goes to whoever puts in the lowest bid. And I always do—so low a caterpillar could peek over it. Ha-ha! That sure does rile the boys. Lots of boys would like to be mail messenger, yessir. But I don’t know how much they’d like it when the snow’s high as old Mr. Primo Camera, and the wind’s blowing blue-hard, and those sacks come sailing— Ugh! Wham!”

In Mother Truitt’s profession, Sunday is a workday like any other. On November 15, while she was waiting for the west bound ten-thirty-two, she was astonished to see two ambulances cross the railroad tracks and turn toward the Clutter property. The incident provoked her into doing what she had never done before—abandon her duties. Let the mail fall where it may, this was news. that Myrt must hear at once.

The people of Holcomb speak of their post office as “the Fed Building,” which seems rather too substantial a title to confer on a drafty and dusty shed. The ceiling leaks, the floor boards wobble, the mailboxes won’t shut, the light bulbs are broken, the clock has stopped. “Yes, it’s a disgrace,” agrees the caustic, some-what original, and entirely imposing lady who presides over this “But the stamps work, don’t they? Anyhow, what do I care? Back here in my part is real cozy. I’ve got my rocker, and a nice wood stove, and a coffee pot, and plenty to read.”

Mrs. Clare is a famous figure in Finney County. Her celebrity derives not from her present occupation but a previous one—dance-hall hostess, an incarnation not indicated by her appearance. She is a gaunt, trouser-wearing, woolen-shirted, cowboy-booted, ginger-colored, gingery-tempered woman of unrevealed (“That’s for me to know, and you to guess”) but promptly revealed opinions, most of which are announced in a voice rooster-crow altitude and penetration. Until 1955 she and her late husband operated the Holcomb Dance Pavilion, an enterprise that owing to its uniqueness in the area, attracted from a hundred around a fast-drinking, fancy-stepping clientele, whose behavior, in turn, attracted the interest of the sheriff now and then. “We had some tough times, all right,” says Mrs. Clare, reminiscing. “Some of those bowlegged country boys, you give ‘em a little hooch and they’re like redskins—want to scalp everything in sight. Course, we only sold setups, never the hard stuff itself. Wouldn’t have, even if it was legal. My husband, Homer Clare, he didn’t hold with it; neither did I. One day Homer Clare—he passed on seven months and twelve days ago today, after a five-hour operation out in Oregon—he said to me, ‘Myrt, we’ve lived all our lives in hell, now we’re going to die in heaven.’ The next day we closed the dance hall. I’ve never regretted it. Oh, along at first I missed being a night owl—the tunes, the jollity. But now that Homer’s gone, I’m just glad to do my work here at the Federal Building. Sit a spell. Drink a cup of coffee.”

In fact, on that Sunday morning Mrs. Clare had just poured herself a cup of coffee from a freshly brewed pot when Mother Truitt returned. “Myrt!” she said, but could say no more until she had caught her breath. “Myrt, there’s two ambulances gone to the Clutters’. “Her daughter said, “Where’s the ten-thirty-two?” “Ambulances. Gone to the Clutters’—“

“Well, what about it? It’s only Bonnie. Having one of her spells. Where’s the ten-thirty-two?”

Mother Truitt subsided; as usual, Myrt knew the answer, was enjoying the last word. Then a thought occurred to her. “But Myrt, if it’s only Bonnie, why would there be two ambulances? “A sensible question, as Mrs. Clare, an admirer of logic, though a curious interpreter of it, was driven to admit. She said she would telephone Mrs. Helm. “Mabel will know,” she said.

The conversation with Mrs. Helm lasted several minutes, and was most distressing to Mother Truitt, who could hear nothing of it except the noncommittal monosyllabic responses of her daughter. Worse, when the daughter hung up, she did not quench the old woman’s curiosity; instead, she placidly drank her coffee, went to her desk, and began to postmark a pile of letters.

“Myrt,” Mother Truitt said. “For heaven’s sake. What did Mabel say?”

“I’m not surprised,” Mrs. Clare said. “When you think how Herb Clutter spent his whole life in a hurry, rushing in here to get his mail with never a minute to say good-morning-and-thank-you-dog, rushing around like a chicken with its head off—joining clubs, running everything, getting jobs maybe other people wanted. And now look—it’s all caught up with him. Well, he won’t be rushing any more.”

“Why, Myrt? Why won’t he?”

Mrs. Clare raised her voice. “BECAUSE HE’S DEAD. And Bonnie, too. And Nancy. And the boy. Somebody shot them.” “Myrt—don’t say things like that. Who shot them?” Without a pause in her postmarking activities, Mrs. Clare replied, “The man in the airplane. The one Herb sued for crashing into his fruit trees. If it wasn’t him, maybe it was you. Or somebody across the street. All the neighbors are rattlesnakes. Varmints looking for a chance to slam the door in your face. It’s the same the whole world over. You know that.”

“I don’t,” said Mother Truitt, who put her hands over her ears. “I don’t know any such thing.”

“Varmints.”

“I’m scared, Myrt.”

“Of what? When your time comes, it comes. And tears won’t save you.” She had observed that her mother had begun to shed a few. “When Homer died, I used up all the fear I had in me, and all the grief, too. If there’s somebody loose around here that wants to cut my throat, I wish him luck. What difference does it make? It’s all the same in eternity. Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity. So blow your nose.”

The grim information, announced from church pulpits, distributed over telephone wires, publicized by Garden City’s radio station, KIUL (“A tragedy, unbelievable and shocking beyond words, struck four members of the Herb Clutter family late Saturday night or early today. Death, brutal and without apparent motive…”), produced in the average recipient a reaction nearer that of Mother Truitt than that of Mrs. Clare: amazement, shading into dismay; a shallow horror sensation that cold springs of personal fear swiftly deepened.

Hartman’s Cafe, which contains four roughly made tables and a lunch counter, could accommodate but a fraction of the frightened gossips, mostly male, who wished to gather there. The owner, Mrs. Bess Hartman, a sparsely fleshed, un-foolish lady with bobbed gray-and-gold hair and bright, authoritative green eyes, is a cousin of Postmistress Clare, whose style of candor Mrs. Hartman can equal, perhaps surpass. “Some people say I’m a tough old bird, but the Clutter business sure took the fly out of me,” she later said to a friend. “Imagine anybody pulling a stunt like that! Time I heard it, when everybody was pouring in here talking all kinds of wild-eyed stuff, my first thought was Bonnie. Course, it was silly, but we didn’t know the facts, and a lot of people thought maybe—on account of her spells. Now we don’t know what to think. It must have been a grudge killing. Done by somebody who knew the house inside out. But who hated the Clutters? I never heard a word against them; they were about as popular as a family can be, and if something like this could happen to them, then who’s safe, I ask you? One old man sitting here that Sunday, he put his finger right on it, the reason nobody can sleep; he said, ‘All we’ve got out here are our friends. There isn’t anything else.’ In a way, that’s the worst part of the crime. What a terrible thing when neighbors can’t look at each other without kind of wondering! Yes, it’s a hard fact to live with, but if they ever do find out who done it, I’m sure it’ll be a bigger surprise than the murders themselves.”

Mrs. Bob Johnson, the wife of the New York Life Insurance agent, is an excellent cook, but the Sunday dinner she had prepared was not eaten—at least, not while it was warm—for just as her husband was plunging a knife into the roast pheasant, he received a telephone call from a friend. “And that,” he recalls, rather ruefully, “was the first I heard of what had happened in Holcomb. I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t afford to. Lord, I had Clutter’s check right here in my pocket. A piece of paper worth eighty thousand dollars. If what I’d heard was true. But I thought, It can’t be, there must be some mistake, things like that don’t happen, you don’t sell a man a big policy one minute and he’s dead the next. Murdered. Meaning double indemnity. I didn’t know what to do. I called the manager of our office in Wichita. Told him how I had the check but hadn’t put it through, and asked what was his advice? Well, it was a delicate situation. It appeared that legally we weren’t obliged to pay. But morally—that was another matter. Naturally, we decided to do the moral thing.”

The two persons who benefited by this honorable attitude—Eveanna Jarchow and her sister Beverly, sole heirs to their father’s estate—were, within a few hours of the awful discovery, on their way to Garden City, Beverly traveling from Winfield, Kansas, where she had been visiting her fiance, and Eveanna from her home in Mount