of these
men are available whenever a case seems beyond the competence of local authorities. The
Bureau’s Garden City representative, and the agent responsible for a sizable portion of western
Kansas, is a lean and handsome fourth-generation Kansan of forty-seven named Alvin Adams
Dewey. It was inevitable that Earl Robinson, the sheriff of Finney County, should ask Al Dewey to
take charge of the Clutter case. Inevitable, and appropriate. For Dewey, himself a former sheriff
of Finney County (from 1947 to 1955) and, prior to that, a Special Agent of the F.B.I. (between
1940 and 1945 he had served in New Orleans, in San Antonio, in Denver, in Miami, and in San
Francisco), was professionally qualified to cope with even as intricate an affair as the apparently
motiveless, all but clueless Clutter murders. Moreover, his attitude toward the crime made it, as
he later said, «a personal proposition.» He went on to say that he and his wife «were real fond of Herb and Bonnie,» and saw them every Sunday at church, visited a lot back and forth,» adding,
«But even if I hadn’t known the family, and liked them so well, I wouldn’t feel any different.
Because I’ve seen some bad things, I sure as hell have. But nothing so vicious as this. However
long it takes, it maybe the rest of my life, I’m going to know what happened in that house: the why
and the who.»
Toward the end, a total of eighteen men were assigned to the case full time, among them three of
the K.B.I.’s ablest investigators — Special Agents Harold Nye, Roy Church, and Clarence Duntz.
With the arrival in Garden City of this trio, Dewey was satisfied that «a strong team» had been
assembled. «Somebody better watch out,» he said.
The sheriff’s office is on the third floor of the Finney County courthouse, an ordinary stone-andcement building standing in the center of an otherwise attractive tree-filled square. Nowadays,
Garden City, which was once a rather raucous frontier town, is quite subdued. On the whole, the
sheriff doesn’t do much business, and his office, three sparsely furnished rooms, is ordinarily a
quiet place popular with courthouse idlers; Mrs. Edna Richardton, his hospitable secretary,
usually has a pot of coffee going and plenty of time to «chew the fat.» Or did, until, as she
complained, Clutter thing came along,» bringing with it «all these out-of-towners, all this
newspaper fuss.» The case, then commending headlines as far east as Chicago, as far west as
Denver, had indeed lured to Garden City a considerable press corps.
On Monday, at midday, Dewey held a press conference in the sheriff’s office. «I’ll talk facts but not
theories,» he informed the assembled journalists. «Now, the big fact here, the thing to remember,
is we’re not dealing with one murder but four. And we’ don’t know which of the four was the main
target. The primary victim. It could have been Nancy or Kenyon, or either of their parents. Some
people say, Well, it must have been Mr. Clutter. Because his throat was cut; he was the most
abused. But that’s theory, not fact. It would help if we knew in what order the family died, but the
coroner can’t tell us that; he only knows the murders happened sometime between eleven p.m.
Saturday and two a.m. Sunday.» Then, responding to questions, he said no, neither of the women
had been «sexually molested,» and no, as far as was presently known, nothing had been stolen
from the house, and yes, he did think it a «queer coincidence» that Mr. Clutter should have taken
out a forty-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy, with double indemnity, within eight hours of his
death. However, Dewey was «pretty darn sure» that no connection existed between this purchase
and the crime; how could there be one, when the only persons who benefited financially were Mr.
Clutter’s two surviving children, the elder daughters, Mrs. Donald Jarchow and Miss Beverly
Clutter? And yes, he told the reporters, he did have an opinion on whether the murders were the
work of one man or two, but he preferred not to disclose it.
Actually, at this time, on this subject, Dewey was undecided. He still entertained a pair of opinions

or, to use his word, «concepts» — and, in reconstructing the crime, had developed both a «singlekiller concept» and a «double-killer concept.» In the former, the murderer was thought to be a
friend of the family, or, at any rate, a man with more than casual knowledge of the house and its
inhabitants — someone who knew that the doors were seldom locked, that Mr. Clutter slept alone
in the master bedroom on the ground floor, that Mrs. Clutter and the children occupied
separate bedrooms on the second floor. This person, so Dewey imagined, approached the house
on foot, probably around midnight. The windows were dark, the Clutters asleep, and as for Teddy,
the farm’s watchdog — well, Teddy was famously gun-shy. He would have cringed at the sight of
the intruder’s weapon, whimpered, and crept away. On entering the house, the killer first disposed
of the telephone installations — one in Mr. Clutter’s office, the other in the kitchen — and then, after
cutting the wires, he went to Mr. Clutter’s bedroom and awakened him. Mr. Clutter, at the mercy
of the gun-bearing visitor, was forced to obey instructions — forced to accompany him to the
second floor, where they aroused the rest of the family. Then, with cord and adhesive tape
supplied by the killer, Mr. Clutter bound and gagged his wife, bound his daughter (who,
inexplicably, had not been gagged), and roped them to their beds. Next, father and son were
escorted to the basement, and there Mr. Clutter was made to tape Kenyon and tie him to the
playroom couch. Then Mr. Clutter was taken into the furnace room, hit on the head, gagged, and
trussed. Now free to do as he pleased, the murderer killed them one by one, each time carefully
collecting the discharged shell. When he had finished, he turned out all the lights and left.
It might have happened that way; if was just possible. But Dewey had doubts: «If Herb had
thought his family was in danger, mortal danger, he would have fought like a tiger. And Herb was no ninny — a strong guy in top condition. Kenyon too — big as his dad, bigger, a big-shouldered
boy. It’s hard to see how one man, armed or not, could have handled the two of them.» More
over, there was reason to suppose that all four had been bound by the same person: in all four
instances the same type of knot, a half hitch, was used.
Dewey — and the majority of his colleagues, as well — favored the second hypothesis, which in
many essentials followed the first, the important difference being that the killer was not alone but
had an accomplice, who helped subdue the family, tape, and tie them. Still, as a theory, this, too,
had its faults. Dewey, for example, found it difficult to understand «how two individuals could
reach the same degree of rage, the kind of psychopathic rage it took to commit such a crime.» He
went on to explain: «Assuming murderer was someone known to the family, a member of this
community; assuming that he was an ordinary man, ordinary except that he had a quirk, an
insane grudge against the Clutters, or of the Clutters — where did he find a partner, someone
crazy enough to help him? It doesn’t add up. It doesn’t make sense. But then, come right down to
it, nothing does.»
After the news conference, Dewey retired to his office, a room the sheriff had temporarily lent
him. It contained a desk and straight chairs. The desk was littered with what Dewey would some
day constitute courtroom exhibits: the adhesive tape and the yards of cord removed from the
victims and sealed in plastic sacks (as clues, neither item seemed very promising, for both were
common-brand products, obtainable here in the United States), and photographs taken at the
scene of the crime by a police photographer — twenty blown-up glossy-print pictures of Mr.
Clutter’s shattered skull, his son’s demolished face, Nancy’s bound hands, her mother’s deathdulled, staring eyes, and so on. In days to come, Dewey was to spend hours examining these
photographs, hoping that he might suddenly see something,» that a meaningful detail would
declare itself. «Like those puzzles. The ones that ask, ‘How many animals can you find in this
picture?’ In a way, that’s what I’m trying to do. Find the hidden animals. I feel they must be there if only I could see them. » As a matter of fact, one of the photographs, a close-up of Mr. Clutter
and the mattress box upon which he lay, already provided a valuable surprise: footprints, the
dusty trackings of shoes with diamond-patterned soles. The prints, not noticeable to the naked
eye, registered on film; indeed, the delineating glare of a flashbulb had revealed their presence
with superb exactness. These prints, together with another footmark found on the same
cardboard cover — the bold and bloody impression of a Cat’s Paw half sole — were the only
«serious clues» the investigators could claim. Not that they were claiming them; Dewey and his
team had decided to keep secret the existence of this evidence. Among the other articles on
Dewey’s desk was Nancy Clutter’s diary. He had glanced through it, no more than that, and now
he settled down to an earnest reading of the day-by-day entries, which began on her thirteenth
birthday and ended some two months short of her seventeenth; the unsensational confidings of
an intelligent child who adored animals, who liked to read, cook, sew, dance, ride horseback — a
popular, pretty, virginal girl who thought it «fun to flirt» but was nevertheless «only really and truly
in love with Bobby.» Dewey read the final entry first. It consisted of three lines written an hour or
two before she died: «Jolene K. came over and I showed her how to make a cherry pie. Practiced
with Roxie. Bobby here and