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 is much to see—simply an aimless congregation of

buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the

Santa Fe Railroad, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the

south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced “Ar-

kan-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 oldstucco

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 café—Hartman’s Café, 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 thecommunity

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 western

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

Americans—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 ofthe 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 re-

creating 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.

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 Vic

Irsik, usually roused him. But today he lingered, let Vic

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 congratulations, “Just

beautiful, honey—a real Southern belle.” Whereupon Nancy

had behaved like one; curtsying in her hoop-skirted

costume, she had asked if she might drive into GardenCity.

The State Theatre was having a special, eleven-thirty,

Friday-the-thirteenth “Spook Show,” and all her friends

were going. In other circumstances Mr. Clutter would have

refused. His laws were laws, and one of them was: Nancy —

and Kenyon, too—must be home by ten on week nights,

by twelve on Saturdays. But weakened by the genial events

of the evening, he had consented. And Nancy had not

returned home until almost two. He had heard her come in,

and had called to her, for though he was not a man ever

really to raise his voice, he had some plain things to say to

her, statements that concerned less the lateness of the hour

than the youngster who had driven her home—a school

basketball hero, Bobby Rupp.

Mr. Clutter liked Bobby, and considered him, for a boy his

age, which was seventeen, most dependable and

gentlemanly; however, in the three years she had been

permitted “dates,” Nancy, popular and pretty as she was,

had never gone out with anyone else, and while Mr. Clutter

understood that it was the present national adolescent

custom to form couples, to “go steady” and wear

“engagement rings,” he disapproved, particularly since he

had not long ago, by accident, surprised his daughter and

the Rupp boy kissing. He had then suggested that Nancy

discontinue “seeing so much of Bobby,” advising her that a

slow retreat now would hurt less than an abrupt severance

later—for, as he reminded her, it was a parting that must

eventually take place. The Rupp family were Roman

Catholics, the Clutters, Methodist—a fact that should initself

be sufficient to terminate whatever fancies she and

this boy might have of some day marrying. Nancy had been

reasonable—at any rate, she had not argued—and now,

before saying good night, Mr. Clutter secured from her a

promise to begin a gradual breaking off with Bobby.

Still, the incident had lamentably put off his retiring time,

which was ordinarily eleven o’clock. As a consequence, it

was well after seven when he awakened on Saturday,

November 14, 1959. His wife always slept as late as

possible. However, while Mr. Clutter was shaving,

showering, and outfitting himself in whipcord trousers, a

cattleman’s leather jacket, and soft stirrup boots, he had no

fear of disturbing her; they did not share the same

bedroom. For several years he had slept alone in the

master bedroom, on the ground floor of the house—a two-

story, fourteen-room frame-and-brick structure. Though Mrs.

Clutter stored her clothes in the closets of this room, and

kept her few cosmetics and her myriad medicines in the

blue-tile-and-glass-brick bathroom adjoining it, she had

taken for serious occupancy Eveanna’s former bedroom,

which, like Nancy’s and Kenyon’s rooms, was on the

second floor.

The house—for the most part designed by Mr. Clutter, who

thereby proved himself a sensible and sedate, if not notably

decorative, architect—had been built in 1948 for forty

thousand dollars. (The resale value was now sixty thousand

dollars.) Situated at the end of a long, lanelike drivewayshaded by rows of Chinese elms, the handsome white

house, standing on an ample lawn of groomed Bermuda

grass, impressed Holcomb; it was a place people pointed

out. As for the interior, there were spongy displays of liver-

colored carpet intermittently abolishing the glare of

varnished, resounding floors; an immense modernistic

living-room couch covered in nubby fabric interwoven with

glittery strands of silver metal; a breakfast alcove featuring

a banquette upholstered in blue-and-white plastic. This sort

of furnishing was what Mr. and Mrs. Clutter liked, as did the

majority of their acquaintances, whose homes, by and

large, were similarly furnished.

Other than a housekeeper who came in on weekdays, the

Clutters employed no household help, so since his wife’s

illness and the departure of the elder daughters, Mr. Clutter

had of necessity learned to cook; either he or Nancy, but

principally Nancy, prepared the family meals. Mr. Clutter

enjoyed the chore, and was excellent at it—no woman in

Kansas baked a better loaf of salt-rising bread, and his

celebrated coconut cookies were the first item to go at

charity cake sales—but he was not a hearty eater; unlike

his fellow-ranchers, he even preferred Spartan breakfasts.

That morning an apple and a glass of milk were enough for

him; because he touched neither coffee or tea, he was

accustomed to begin the day on a cold stomach. The truth

was he opposed all stimulants, however gentle. He did not

smoke, and of course he did not drink; indeed, he had

never tasted spirits, and was inclined to avoid people who

had—a circumstance that did not shrink his social circle as

much as might be supposed, for the center of that circle

was supplied by the members of Garden City’s First

Methodist Church, a congregation totaling seventeen

hundred, most of whom were as abstemious as Mr. Clutter

could desire. While he was careful to avoid making a

nuisance of his views, to adopt outside his realm an

externally uncensoring manner, he enforced them within his

family and among the employees at River Valley Farm.

“Are you a drinking man?” was the first question he asked a

job applicant, and even though the fellow gave a negative

answer, he still must sign a work contract containing a

clause that declared the agreement instantly void if the

employee should be discovered “harboring alcohol.” A

friend—an old pioneer rancher, Mr. Lynn Russell—had

once told him, “You’ve got no mercy. I swear, Herb, if you

caught a hired man drinking, out he’d go. And you wouldn’t

care if his family was starving.” It was perhaps the only

criticism ever made of Mr. Clutter as an employer.

Otherwise, he was known for his equanimity, his

charitableness, and the fact that he paid good wages and

distributed frequent bonuses; the men who worked for him —

and there were sometimes as many as eighteen—had

small reason to complain.

After drinking the glass of milk and putting on a fleece-lined

cap, Mr. Clutter carried his apple with him when he went

outdoors to examine the morning. It was ideal apple-eating

weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purestsky,

and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the

last of the leaves on the Chinese elms. Autumns reward

western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons

impose: winter’s rough Colorado winds and hip-high,

sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange

land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek

the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks

bristle, blaze. At last, after September, another weather

arrives, an Indian summer that occasionally endures until

Christmas. As Mr. Clutter contemplated this superior

specimen of the season, he was joined by a part-collie

mongrel, and together they ambled off toward the livestock

corral, which was adjacent to one of three barns on the

premises.

One of these barns was a mammothQuonset hut; it

brimmed with grain—Westland sorghum—and one of them

housed a dark, pungent hill of milo grain worth considerable

money—a hundred thousand dollars. That figure alone

represented an almost four-thousand-percent advance over

Mr. Clutter’s entire income in 1934—the year he married

Bonnie Fox and moved with her from their home town of

Rozel, Kansas, to Garden City, where he had found work

as an assistant to the Finney County agricultural agent.

Typically, it took him just seven months to be promoted; that

is, to install himself in the head man’s job. The years during

which he held the post—1935 to 1939—encompassed the

dustiest, the down-and-outest the region had known since

white men settled there, and young Herb Clutter, having, ashe did, a brain expertly racing with the newest in

streamlined agricultural practices, was quite qualified to

serve as middleman between the government and the

despondent farm ranchers; these men could well use the

optimism and the educated instruction of a likable young

fellow who seemed to know his business. All the same, he

was not doing what he wanted to do; the son of a farmer, he

had from the beginning aimed at operating a property of his

own. Facing up to it, he resigned as county agent after four

years and, on land leased with borrowed money, created,

in embryo, River Valley Farm (a name justified by the

Arkansas River’s meandering presence but not, certainly,

by any evidence of valley). It was an endeavor that several

Finney County conservatives watched with show-us

amusement—old-timers who had been fond of baiting the

youthful county agent on the subject of his university notions:

“That’s fine, Herb. You always know what’s best to do on

the other fellow’s land. Plant this. Terrace that. But you

might say a sight different if the place was your own.” They

were mistaken; the upstart’s experiments succeeded—

partly because, in the beginning years, he labored eighteen

hours a day. Setbacks occurred—twice the wheat crop

failed, and one winter he lost several hundred head of

sheep in a blizzard; but after a decade Mr. Clutter’s domain

consisted of over eight hundred acres owned outright and

three thousand more worked on a rental basis—and that,

as his colleagues admitted, was “a pretty good spread.”

Wheat, milo seed, certified grass seed—these were the

crops the farm’s prosperity depended upon. Animals werealso important—sheep, and especially cattle. A herd of

several hundred Hereford bore the Clutter brand, though

one would not have suspected it from the scant contents of

the livestock corral, which was reserved for ailing steers, a

few milking cows, Nancy’s cats, and Babe, the family

favorite—an old fat workhorse who never objected to

lumbering about with three and four children astride her

broad back.

Mr. Clutter now fed Babe the core of his apple, calling good

morning to a man raking debris inside the corral—Alfred

Stoecklein, the sole resident employee. The Stoeckleins

and their three children lived in a house not a hundred yards

from the main house; except for them, the Clutters had no

neighbors within half a mile. A long-faced man with long

brown teeth, Stoecklein asked, “Have you some particular

work in mind today? Cause we got a sick-un. The baby. Me

and Missis been up and down with her most the night. I

been thinking to carry her to doctor.” And Mr. Clutter,

expressing sympathy, said by all means to take the

morning off, and if there was any way he or his wife could

help, please let them know. Then, with the dog running

ahead of him, he moved southward toward the fields, lion-

colored now, luminously golden with after-harvest stubble.

The river lay in this direction; near its bank stood a grove of

fruit trees—peach, pear, cherry, and apple. Fifty years ago,

according to native memory, it would have taken a

lumberjack ten minutes to axe all the trees in westernKansas. Even today, only cottonwoods and Chinese elms —perennials with a cactuslike indifference to thirst—are

commonly planted. However, as Mr. Clutter often remarked,

“an inch more of rain and this country would be paradise—

Eden on earth.” The little collection of fruit-bearers growing

by the river was his attempt to contrive, rain or no, a patch

of the paradise, the green, apple-scented Eden, he

envisioned. His wife once said, “My husband cares more

for those trees than he does for his children,” and everyone

in Holcomb recalled the day a small disabled plane

crashed into the peach trees: “Herb was fit to be tied! Why,

the propeller hadn’t stopped turning before he’d slapped a

lawsuit on the pilot.”

Passing through the orchard, Mr. Clutter proceeded along

beside the river, which was shallow here and strewn with

islands—midstream beaches of soft sand, to which, on

Sundays gone by, hot-weather Sabbaths when Bonnie had

still “felt up to things,” picnic baskets had been carted,

family afternoons whiled away waiting for a twitch at the end

of a fishline. Mr. Clutter seldom encountered trespassers

on his property; a mile and a half from the highway, and

arrived at by obscure roads, it was not a place that

strangers came upon by chance. Now, suddenly a whole

party of them appeared, and Teddy, the dog, rushed

forward roaring out a challenge. But it was odd about

Teddy. Though he was a good sentry, alert, ever ready to

raise Cain, his valor had one flaw: let him glimpse a gun, as

he did now—for the intruders were armed—and his headdropped, his tail turned in. No one understood why, for no

one knew his history, other than that he was a vagabond

Kenyon had adopted years ago. The visitors proved to be

five pheasant hunters from Oklahoma. The pheasant

season in Kansas, a famed November event, lures hordes

of sportsmen from adjoining states, and during the past

week plaid-hatted regiments had paraded across the

autumnal expanses, flushing and felling with rounds of

birdshot great coppery flights of the grain-fattened birds. By

custom, the hunters, if they are not invited guests, are

supposed to pay the landowner a fee for letting them

pursue their quarry on his premises, but when the

Oklahomans offered to hire hunting rights, Mr. Clutter was

amused. “I’m not as poor as I look. Go ahead, get all you

can,” he said. Then, touching the brim of his cap, he

headed for home and the day’s work, unaware that it would

be his last.