“Can I help in the kitchen?” she asked Dolores Hope.
“This way,” Dolores replied happily. As the two women took twice-baked potatoes from the oven and put condiments in bowls to go with roast duck, the main course, Dolores found herself liking Nelle right away. “After you talked to her for three minutes, you felt like you’d known her for years. She was ‘just folks’—interested in others, kind, and humorous.”18
Dolores announced that dinner was ready and the adults seated themselves in the dining room. The Hopes’ four children—Christine, Nancy, Quentin, and Holly—sat at a miniature version of the grown-ups’ table.
Looking around the scene, Truman realized it was a breakthrough in eliminating the town’s suspicions about them, and he also knew Nelle deserved the thanks: “She was extremely helpful in the beginning when we weren’t making much headway with the towns people, by making friends with the wives of the people I wanted to meet,” he said later. “She is a gifted woman, courageous, and with a warmth that instantly kindles most people, however suspicious or dour.”19
One of the Hopes’ daughters, Holly, later author of Garden City: Dreams in a Kansas Town, said Christmas dinner that night brought together six people who became lifetime friends because they met on an intellectual level. “My experience in a small town is that there are always some people who have been involved in the arts and they like to keep up, but they might not have much opportunity. So when someone like Lee and Capote come through, it’s a big deal. You just have to tap into it.”20
By the end of the evening, Marie Dewey had invited Truman and Nelle to dinner at their house for red beans and rice—a real Southern dinner. It was music to their ears.
“Truman didn’t fit in and nobody was talking to him,” said KBI detective Harold Nye, who by now was logging thousands of miles chasing down leads. “But Nelle got out there and laid some foundations with people. She worked her way around and finally got some contacts with the locals and was able to bring Truman in.”21
They had penetrated Garden City, just as Nelle promised Truman they would.
* * *
Nelle and Truman arrived at the Deweys’ the following Wednesday night about 6:30 P.M. Marie had planned quite a spread: a shrimp-and-avocado salad, red beans and rice cooked with bacon, corn bread, country-fried steak, and a bottle of a sweet white wine. Al introduced the guests to the rest of the family: Alvin III, 12; Paul, 9; and Courthouse Pete, a fat, one-eyed, 14-pound striped cat.
For about an hour, the adults sat in the living room getting better acquainted. About 8:00 P.M. dinner in the kitchen was ready. As everyone pulled up to the table, the phone rang again for the sixth or seventh time since Nelle and Truman had arrived. Marie said it rang at all hours ever since the murders—always a call for Al about some aspect of the case. He got up to answer while they waited to begin eating. From his office down the hall, they could hear him talking louder and louder. When he returned a few minutes later, his voice crackled with excitement.
“Well, if you can keep a secret, this is it: our agent out in Las Vegas said they just nabbed those two guys … Smith and Hickock.”
Marie started to cry. “Oh, honey … honey, I can’t believe it.”22
For Nelle and Truman, the news squared with what they had figured out on their own. A rumor had been circulating among the reporters at the Finney County Courthouse about a prisoner, Floyd Wells, in Lansing State Penitentiary in Kansas, who read in the newspapers about the Clutter murders. Hoping to win a break from the prison authorities and claim the $1,000 reward offered by the Hutchinson News, Wells had told the warden about a former cellmate of his, Richard Hickock, who had planned to hook up with another guy, Perry Smith, and rob the Clutters. Hickock was convinced Clutter must have plenty of cash because Wells, a former farmhand on the Clutter place, had told him that there was a safe in the house.
All of this was supposed to be a secret, but now, in his euphoria, Al Dewey couldn’t resist laying it all out for Nelle and Truman. The call he had just received was from Detective Nye. The Las Vegas Police had taken the two suspects into custody for a minor traffic violation. Mr. Nye had been doing “setups” in several states, alerting the police to be on the lookout for them. As soon as Nye, Dewey, and a third KBI detective, Clarence Duntz, could get to Las Vegas, they would begin interrogating the suspects, who had been leaving a tantalizing trail of bad checks all over the country.
“There’s a lot of desert between here and Las Vegas,” Dewey said, tapping a map with his finger. “On the way back, I don’t care if we only make sixteen miles a day. We’ll just drive around and around until we’ve made them talk. One or the other, whichever’s the weaker, we’ll kill him with kindness. We’ve already got them separated … it shouldn’t be long before we get them hating each other.”
“Can I go with you?” Truman asked.
“Not this time, pardner.”
Years later, Dewey insisted, “Capote got the official word on developments at the press conferences along with everyone else. Some people thought then, and probably still do, that he got next to me and got in on every move of the law. That was not so. He was on his own to get the material for his story or book.… That’s the way things were when the good news finally came on December 30.”23
Marie backed him up: “Alvin refused to talk about the case. We just visited, that’s all. Our friendship developed in that way, but the investigation wasn’t talked about.”24
But Nelle’s notes about everything that was said and done that night in the Deweys’ home tell a different story.
* * *
Hundreds of Garden City and Holcomb residents prepared to brave the blustery weather, cold enough to snow, on Tuesday, January 5, the day scheduled for the arrival of the suspects from Las Vegas.
KBI chief Logan Sanford had said the suspects were due “late Tuesday afternoon,” so Nelle and Truman showed up at the courthouse around 3:00 P.M. to wait for word from Sheriff Earl Robinson’s office. The hallway was filled with bored newsmen smoking and waiting. Nelle found a Coors beer ashtray to crush out her cigarette butts, and settled in. A little after four, the radio dispatcher announced that the press conference would be delayed until 5:00 P.M. A highway patrol captain appeared, chomping on a cigar, and gave instructions to the press to keep the sidewalk clear. Nelle and Truman assumed a big crowd must be gathering, and went outside to see it.
An hour dragged by and it got dark. By 6:00 P.M. the crowd was four or five deep—teenagers, businessmen late for supper, and just curious townspeople. Newsmen stamped their freezing feet and blew on their hands. Nelle noticed Truman’s ears were turning scarlet. Then suddenly someone shouted, “They’re coming!”
At the curb, two dark mud-splashed sedans rolled to a halt. Al Dewey got out of the back seat of the first car. Quickly a handful of other men exited both cars, as if on cue. The figures strode quickly up the sidewalk toward the courthouse. It had grown so dark that the photographers’ flashbulbs acted like strobe lights and caught them in midstep.
There were no jeers, no catcalls from the crowd. Everyone seemed strangely struck dumb. Detective Dewey had the arm of Perry Smith, who was a head shorter and wearing dungarees and a black leather jacket. Richard Hickock came next, also accompanied by a detective, but Nelle couldn’t see him because a broad-backed policeman suddenly stepped in front of her. When the platoon of suspects and detectives sprinted up the courthouse steps, Nelle, Truman, and the reporters surged after them.
A press conference was held while the suspects were placed in their cells upstairs. Dewey sat behind a microphone to answer questions, but his remarks gave away nothing important—only that no one would be allowed to talk to the suspects. After half an hour, the television newsmen turned off their lights, and the press conference sputtered to an end.
Outside the courthouse, the crowd had dispersed, leaving pop bottles and candy wrappers in the grass. Truman was disgusted. He had expected the return of the killers to be dramatic. Why h
ad everyone just stood there gawking? And that press conference! The whole thing, he complained to Nelle on the walk back to the Warren Hotel, was “a debacle.”25
* * *
Despite Al Dewey’s announcement to the press that no one would be allowed to interview the suspects or listen to their tape-recorded confessions, all it took was a pair of $50 checks made out separately to Perry Smith and Richard Hickock for Nelle and Truman to talk to them on Monday, January 11, with the suspects’ lawyers present.
Al scooted a couple of extra chairs into his office. Perry Smith came in first. Seeing that Nelle was standing, he waited for her to be seated. He acted as solemn as a “small deacon in his preciseness of posture,” she wrote in her notes, “feet together, back straight, hands together: could almost see a celluloid collar and black narrow tie, so prim he was.”26 Truman was ready with handwritten questions: “What is your feeling about marriage?” “Have you ever wished to be married?” “Would you say that you had a father complex—a combination of love and dislike and longing and fear?”27
Gently, Smith waved aside the questions after he heard the first few. His attorney hadn’t briefed him about this meeting. “What’s the purpose of your story?” he wanted to know. Nelle was taken aback by his superior tone. Its purpose, they assured him, was to give him a chance to tell his side of the story. Nelle smiled at Smith several times, but his large dark eyes kept flicking away from hers.28 He clearly felt “cornered and suspicious,” Truman realized. To everything they asked over the next 20 minutes, Smith countered with “I decline,” “I do not care to,” or “I will think it over.” Some kind of cat-and-mouse game was under way. After he returned to his cell, Nelle commented in her notes, “Rough going.”29
Richard Hickock, on the other hand, breezed in, ready for a good bull session. He plunked down in a chair before Nelle was seated. “Never seen anyone so poised, relaxed, free & easy in the face of four 1st-degree murder charges,” Nelle marveled. “Can’t decide whether H. thinks he’s gonna get away with it; or has not realized the depth and futility of the trouble he’s in. Speaks of the future as if he’ll walk out tomorrow.”30
She and Truman expressed admiration for Hickock’s tattoos, which worked like a charm in unlocking his friendliness. Soon he was talking about his favorite reading matter (motors or engineering; his vision of the good life (well-done steaks, mixed drinks, dance music, and Camel cigarettes—he bummed five smokes from Nelle’s pack); how often he liked to eat (three times a day, but in jail it was only two); how he’d like to get a good job in an auto shop and pay off the bad checks he’d written and live in the country. It was practically more than Nelle and Truman could absorb. Truman said Hickock was “like someone you meet on a train, immensely garrulous, who starts up a conversation and is only too obliged to tell you everything.”31 Nelle tried to get questions in edgewise, to which Hickock would reply, “Yes, ma’am,” and then commence spinning another yarn.
He would have extended his stay, except that Al had something he wanted to share with Nelle and Truman, so Hickock was taken back to his cell.
* * *
After Hickock had gone, Dewey reassured Nelle and Truman, telling them not to worry if Smith wanted to play it cagey. Reaching into the Clutter case file in his office, he produced for them the pièce de résistance: the transcripts of Smith’s interrogations. Like dialogue from a play, the pages of transcribed conversation between Smith and the two KBI detectives, Dewey and Duntz, contained everything said in the 9′-×-10′ interrogation room during the three and a half hours that Smith was questioned in Las Vegas. The transcript couldn’t leave the courthouse, and was too much for Nelle to copy, so she targeted key passages. As she worked, Dewey added visual descriptions that weren’t evident on the tape. Thus:
Al: Perry, you have been lying to us, you haven’t been telling the truth. We know where you were on that weekend—you were out at Holcomb, Kansas, seven miles west of Garden City, murdering the Clutter family.
(Perry white; swallowed a couple of times. Long pause.)
Perry: I don’t know anybody named Clutter, I don’t know where Garden City or Holcomb is—
Al: You’d better get straightened out on this deal and tell us the truth—
Perry: I don’t know what you’re talking about … I don’t know what you’re talking about.
(Al & Duntz rise to go.)
Al: We’re talking to you sometime tomorrow. You’d better think this over tonight. Do you know what today is? Nancy Clutter’s birthday. She would have been seventeen.32
When Nelle had finished copying as much as she could, Dewey let her and Truman see another piece of evidence: Nancy Clutter’s diary containing three years’ worth of entries. Since the age of 14, Nancy had recorded, in three or four sentences every night, the day’s events and her thoughts about family, friends, pets, and, later, her teenage love affair with Bobby Rupp. Different colored ink identified the years. Nelle and Truman riffled through the pages. The final entry was made approximately an hour before her death. Nelle copied it down.33
* * *
Loaded with notes from interviews, transcribed interrogations, newspaper clippings, some photos Truman had snapped, sketches of the Clutter farmhouse, and anything Dewey had given them copies of, Nelle and Truman boarded the luxury Santa Fe Super Chief on January 16 in Garden City. It was snowing hard, and they settled in for the 40-hour ride to Dearborn Station, in Chicago. Over the course of approximately one month, they had gathered enough for a solid magazine article for The New Yorker. They would have to return for the trial in March. If the suspects were sentenced to death, should their execution be part of the story? It was a grisly thought. Before his ideas escaped him, Truman wrote some notes on a Santa Fe cocktail napkin.
Nelle, of course, had plenty of other things to think about. As soon as she returned to New York, she would have to go over the galleys of To Kill a Mockingbird—a painstaking but nevertheless thrilling task for a first-time novelist.
As she watched Truman in the seat opposite hers, musing out the window of the train about The New Yorker article, it probably seemed incredible that her novel would be in bookstores in a few months. Then she would have the right to call herself a writer, too, though not in his league by any means. All she hoped for was a “quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers.”34
The Super Chief was delayed for six hours along the route, and when they arrived in Chicago, they had already missed their New York Central connection. They stayed in the city overnight and departed again the next day, arriving in New York on Wednesday, January 20.
“Returned yesterday—after nearly 2 months in Kansas: an extraordinary experience, in many ways the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me,” Truman wrote to his friend, the photographer Cecil Beaton. “But I will let you read about it—it may amount to a small book.”35
That small book, In Cold Blood, would become one of the most highly regarded works of nonfiction ever published.
* * *
Two months later, Nelle and Truman were back in Kansas for the trial, scheduled to begin the third week of March. By coincidence, the Clutters’ farm was going up for auction the same week.
They left behind a late snowy season in New York. A wet, warm spring had come to western Kansas. Nelle and Truman drove out to the Clutter farm on Sunday, March 21, to witness the sale. Bumper-to-bumper traffic met them at the entrance to the lane up to the farmhouse. The sunny weather in the low 70s had brought out more than 4,000 people for the largest farm auction in western Kansas history. There were cars and trucks from Colorado, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, and practically every county in Kansas west of Newton and Wichita. Auctioneer John Collins, his white shirt shining in the sun, sold everything of value to a swarm of men in coats and Stetsons—tools, tractors, and farm implements.
On Tuesday, jury selection began. For the first time since the courthouse was erected in 1929, the varnished church-type pews were pushed to the sides and rear to leave
room at the front for a special press table and 13 chairs. The newsmen sitting there, pleased to see Nelle back, had taken to calling her “Little Nelle.”36
Just before ten o’clock, district judge Roland Tate entered. Overhead, the telltale metallic clunk of the jail door announced that the defendants were coming down.
The effects of sitting in jail for two months told on them. “Perry Smith is much heavier,” Nelle noted; Richard Hickock, “fatter, greener, and more gruesome.”37 Outwardly, they seemed bored, covering perhaps for being stared at by the 44 prospective jurors who had assembled in the courtroom to be sworn in and questioned. District court clerk Mae Purdy called the prospective jurors’ names in a droning voice. Only four were women.
By day’s end, the jury was composed entirely of men, including the reserve of alternates. Half were farmers. Smith, an amateur artist, had passed the time sketching on a legal pad. Hickock chomped relentlessly on a wad of gum, his chin resting on his hand now and then. The two men had implicated each other in their confessions, but there seemed to be no break in their relationship. Nelle saw Hickock glance at Smith just once, “the briefest exchange of glances, and the old eye rolled coldly. This was when the lawyers huddled the last time and made their preemptory challenges on papers. Smith and Hickock were left alone at the table. Perry looked at him—gave Hickock one of his melting glances—really melting in its intensity—Hickcock felt eyes upon him, looked around and smiled the shadow of a smile.”38
The turnout for the actual trial exceeded the courtroom’s capacity of 160 persons. At the press table, Associated Press reporter Elon Torrence noticed that Truman, dressed in a blue sports jacket, khaki trousers, white shirt, and a bow tie, spent most of his time listening, while Nelle, bringing to bear her law school training, “took notes and did most of the work during the trial.”39
There were no surprises. “How cheap!” exclaimed special prosecutor Logan Green in his closing argument to the jury. “The loot was only about $80, or $20 a life.” Harrison Smith and Arthur Fleming, attorneys for the accused, did not contest the state’s evidence but pleaded for life imprisonment. Harrison Smith argued capital punishment is “a miserable failure.” The jury deliberated less than two hours.
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