He was gagged with adhesive tape and bound hand and foot, like the mother – the same intricate process of the cord leading from the hands to the feet, and finally tied to an arm of the couch. Somehow he haunts me the most, Kenyon does. I think it’s because he was the most recognizable, the one that looked the most like himself – even though he’d been shot in the face, directly, head-on. He was wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans, and he was barefoot – as though he’d dressed in a hurry, just put on the first thing that came to hand. His head was propped by a couple of pillows, like they’d been stuffed under him to make an easier target.
“Then the sheriff said, ‘Where’s this go to?’ Meaning another door there in the basement. Sheriff led the way, but inside you couldn’t see your hand until Mr. Ewalt found the light switch. It was a furnace room, and very warm. Around here, people just install a gas furnace and pump the gas smack out of the ground. Doesn’t cost them a nickel – that’s why all the houses are over-heated. Well, I took one look at Mr. Clutter, and it was hard to look again. I knew plain shooting couldn’t account for that much blood. And I wasn’t wrong. He’d been shot, all right, the same as Kenyon -with the gun held right in front of his face. But probably he was dead before he was shot. Or, anyway, dying. Because his throat had been cut, too. He was wearing striped pajamas – nothing else. His mouth was taped; the tape had been wound plumb around his head.
His ankles were tied together, but not his hands – or, rather, he’d managed, God knows how, maybe in rage or pain, to break the cord binding his hands. He was sprawled in front of the furnace. On a big cardboard box that looked as though it had been laid there specially. A mattress box. Sheriff said, ‘Look here, Wendle.’ What he was pointing at was a blood-stained footprint. On the mattress box. A half-sole footprint with circles – two holes in the center like a pair of eyes. Then one of us – Mr. Ewalt? I don’t recall – pointed out something else. A thing I can’t get out of my mind. There was a steam pipe overhead, and knotted to it, dangling from it, was a piece of cord – the kind of cord the killer had used. Obviously, at some point Mr. Clutter had been tied there, strung up by his hands, and then cut down. But why? To torture him? I don’t guess we’ll never know. Ever know who did it, or why, or what went on in that house that night.
“After a bit, the house began to fill up. Ambulances arrived, and the coroner, and the Methodist minister, a police photographer, state troopers, fellows from the radio and the newspaper. Oh, a bunch. Most of them had been called out of church, and acted as though they were still there. Very quiet. Whispery. It was like nobody could believe it. A state trooper asked me did I have any official business there, and said if not, then I’d better leave. Outside, on the lawn, I saw the undersheriff talking to a man – Alfred Stoecklein, the hired man. Seems Stoecklein lived not a hundred yards from the Clutter house, with nothing between his place and theirs except a barn. But he was saying as to how he hadn’t heard a sound – said, ‘I didn’t know a thing about it till five minutes ago, when one of my kids come running in and told us the sheriff was here.
The Missis and me, we didn’t sleep two hours last night, was up and down the whole time, on account of we got a sick baby. But the only thing we heard, about ten-thirty, quarter to eleven, I heard a car drive away, and I made the remark to Missis, “There goes Bob Rupp.” ‘ I started walking home, and on the way, about halfway down the lane, I saw Kenyon’s old collie and that dog was scared. Stood there with its tail between its legs, didn’t bark or move. And seeing the dog – somehow that made me feel again. I’d been too dazed, too numb, to feel the full viciousness of it. The suffering. The horror. They were dead. A whole family. Gentle, kindly people, people I knew – murdered. You had to believe it, because it was really true.”
Eight non-stop passenger trains hurry through Holcomb every twenty-four hours. Of these, two pick up and deposit mail – an operation that, as the person in charge of it fervently explains, has its tricky side. “Yessir, you’ve got to keep on your toes. Them trains come through here, sometimes they’re going a hundred miles an hour. The breeze alone, why, it’s enough to knock you down. And when those mail sacks come flying out – sakes alive! It’s like playing tackle on a football team: Wham! Wham! WHAM! Not that I’m complaining, mind you. It’s honest work, government work, and it keeps me young.” Holcomb’s mail messenger, Mrs. Sadie Truitt – or Mother Truitt, as the townspeople call her – does seem younger than her years, which amount to seventy-five.
A stocky, weathered widow who wears babushka bandannas and cowboy boots (“Most comfortable things you can put on your feet, soft as a loon feather”), Mother Truitt is the oldest native-born Holcombite. “Time was wasn’t anybody here wasn’t my kin. Them days, we called this place Sherlock. Then along came this stranger. By the name Holcomb. A hog raiser, he was. Made money, and 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,
