In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
I. The Last To See Them Alive
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that
other Kansans call «out there.» Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside,
with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than
Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the
men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed
toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white
cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler
reaches them.
Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there’s much to see — simply an aimless
congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Rail-road, a
haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced «Arkan-sas») River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands
and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved,
turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco
structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign — dance — but the dancing has ceased and the
advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building with an irrelevant sign,
this one in flaking gold on a dirty window — Holcomb bank. The bank closed in 1933, and its
former counting rooms have been converted into apartments. It is one of the town’s two
«apartment houses,» the second being a ramshackle mansion known, because a good part of the
local school’s faculty lives there, as the Teacherage. But the majority of Holcomb’s homes are
one-story frame affairs, with front porches.
Down by the depot, the postmistress, a gaunt woman who wears a rawhide jacket and denims
and cowboy boots, presides over a falling-apart post office. The depot itself, with its peeling
sulphur-colored paint, is equally melancholy; the Chief, the Super-Chief, the El Capitan go by
every day, but these celebrated expresses never pause there. No passenger trains do — only an
occasional freight. Up on the highway, there are two filling stations, one of which doubles as a
meagerly supplied grocery store, while the other does extra duty as a cafe — Hartman’s Cafe,
where Mrs. Hartman, the proprietress, dispenses sandwiches, coffee, soft drinks, and 3.2 beer.
(Holcomb, like all the rest of Kansas, is «dry.»)
And that, really, is all. Unless you include, as one must, the Holcomb School, a good-looking
establishment, which reveals a circumstance that the appearance of the community otherwise
camouflages: that the parents who send their children to this modern and ably staffed
«consolidated» school — the grades go from kindergarten through senior high, and a fleet of buses
transport the students, of which there are usually around three hundred and sixty, from as far as
sixteen miles away — are, in general, a prosperous people. Farm ranchers, most of them, they are
outdoor folk of very varied stock — German, Irish, Norwegian, Mexican, Japanese. They raise
cattle and sheep, grow wheat, milo, grass seed, and sugar beets. Farming is always a chancy
business, but in west-era Kansas its practitioners consider themselves «born gamblers,» for they
must contend with an extremely shallow precipitation (the annual average is eighteen inches) and
anguishing irrigation
problems. However, the last seven years have been years of droughtless beneficence. The farm
ranchers in Finney County, of which Holcomb is a part, have done well; money has been made
not from farming alone but also from the exploitation of plentiful natural-gas resources, and its
acquisition is reflected in the new school, the comfortable interiors of the farmhouses, the steep
and swollen grain elevators.
Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few American — in fact, few Kansans — had ever
heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the
yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings,
had never stopped there. The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy,
were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside ordinary life — to work, to hunt, to
watch television, to attend school socials, choir practice, meetings of the 4-H Club. But then, 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. At the time not a
soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them — four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives.
But 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.
The master of River Valley Farm, Herbert William Clutter, was forty-eight years old, and as result
of a recent medical examination for an insurance policy, knew himself to be in first-rate condition.
Though he wore rimless glasses and was of but average height, standing just under five feet ten,
Mr. Clutter cut a man’s-man figure. His shoulders were broad, his hair had held its dark color, his
square-jawed, confident face retained a healthy-hued youthfulness, and his teeth, unstained and
strong enough to shatter walnuts, were still intact. He weighed a hundred and fifty-four — the same
as he had the day he graduated from Kansas State University, where he had majored in
agriculture. He was not as rich as the richest man in Holcomb — Mr. Taylor Jones, a neighboring
rancher. He was, however, the community’s most widely known citizen, prominent both there and
in Garden City, the close-by county seat, where he hardheaded the building committee for the
newly completed First Methodist Church, an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar edifice. He was
currently chairman of the Kansas Conference of Farm Organizations, and his name was
everywhere respectfully recognized among Midwestern agriculturists, as it was in certain
Washington offices, where he had been a member of the Federal Farm Credit Board during the
Eisenhower administration.
Always certain of what he wanted from the world, Mr. Clutter had in large measure obtained it. On
his left hand, on what remained of a finger once mangled by a piece of farm machinery, he wore
a plain gold band, which was the symbol, a quarter-century old, of his marriage to the person he
had wished to marry — the sister of a college classmate, a timid, pious, delicate girl named Bonnie
Fox, who was three years younger than he. She had given him four children — a trio of daughters,
then a son. The eldest daughter, Eve Anna, married and the mother of a boy ten months old,
lived in northern Illinois but visited Holcomb frequently. Indeed, she and her family were expected
within the fortnight, former parents planned a sizable Thanksgiving reunion of the Clutter clan
(which had its beginnings in Germany; the first immigrant Clutter — or Klotter, as the name was
then spelled — arrived here in 1880); fifty-odd kinfolk had been asked, several of whom would be
traveling from places as far away as Palatka, Florida. Nor did Beverly, the child next in age to Eve
Anna, any longer reside at River Valley Farm; she was in Kansas Qty, Kansas, studying to be a
nurse. Beverly was engaged to a young biology student, of whom her father very much approved;
invitations to the wedding, scheduled for Christmas week, were already printed. Which left, still
living at home, the boy, Kenyon, who at fifteen was taller than Mr. Clutter, and one sister, a year
older — the town darling, Nancy. In regard to his family, Mr. Clutter had just one serious cause for
disquiet — his wife’s health. She was «nervous,» she suffered «little spells» — such were the
sheltering expressions used by those close to her. Not that the truth concerning «poor Bonnie’s
afflictions» was in the least a secret; everyone knew she had been an on-and-off psychiatric
patient the last half-dozen years. Yet even upon this shadowed terrain sunlight had very lately
sparkled. The past Wednesday, returning from two weeks of treatment at the Wesley Medical
Center in Wichita, her customary place of retirement, Mrs. Clutter had brought scarcely credible
tidings to tell her husband; with joy she informed him that the source of her misery, so medical
opinion had at last decreed, was not in her head but in her spine — it was physical, a matter of
misplaced vertebrae. Of course, she must undergo an operation, and afterward — well, she would
be her «old self» again. Was it possible — the tension, the withdrawals, the pillow-muted sobbing
behind locked doors, all due to an out-of-order backbone? If so, then Mr. Clutter could, when
addressing his Thanksgiving table, recite a blessing of unmarred gratitude.
Ordinarily, Mr. Clutter’s mornings began at six-thirty; clanging milk pails and the whispery chatter
of the boys who brought them, two sons of a hired man named Vie Irsik, usually roused him. But
today he lingered, let Vie Irsik’s sons come and leave, for the previous evening, a Friday the
thirteenth, had been a tiring one, though in part exhilarating. Bonnie had resurrected her «old
self»; as if serving up a preview of the normality, the regained vigor, soon to be, she had rouged
her lips, fussed with her hair, and, wearing a new dress, accompanied him to the Holcomb
School, where they applauded a student production of Tom Sawyer, in which Nancy played
Becky Thatcher. He had enjoyed it, seeing Bonnie out in public, nervous but nonetheless smiling,
talking to people, and they both had been proud of Nancy; she had done so well, remembering all
her lines, and looking, as he had said to her in the course of backstage
