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By Ronald R. Nye
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In 1886 my great-great-grandfather, Henry Nye, loaded his family’s worldly possessions into a covered wagon, bid farewell to friends and family, and left their home in Chillicothe, Iowa, for the fertile plains of western Kansas, homesteading a farm near Oakley, about 50 miles north of Garden City. Their son, my great-grandfather Charley William Nye, was just 19 years old at the time, and like so many other persevering, self-reliant German immigrants who settled in the grassland prairies of the Midwest, he, and his sons after him, became farmers as well.
My father, Harold Nye, was also raised on the farm. But he never saw himself taking over the family business. Since childhood, his dreams were associated with police work. Generations of stern northern European upbringing had instilled in his DNA an unyielding sense of law and order, of right and wrong. As a career law enforcement officer, he took that ethic to work every day, and brought it back home every night. And that’s how I was raised, to respect the rule of law, a characteristic that has served me well throughout my life.
As far back as I can remember, Dad kept a more or less continuous diary, writing in hundreds of spiral-bound steno pads. His entries, which he frequently recorded at night, included his thoughts about pretty much everything: to-do lists for household chores and repair jobs, vacations, job-related tasks and observations from when he was a detective, and continuing with the practice when he became director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) and beyond into retirement. Dad kept these journals in a locked closet. None of us were ever allowed to go in there, because he said not to. (It was the same with his service revolver. Visitors to our home were often shocked seeing Dad’s holstered weapon slung over the back of a living room chair. Asked if he weren’t concerned that my sister or I might handle it: “No,” he told them matter-of-factly, “because I told them not to.”)
When KBI Director Logan Sanford retired in 1969 it surprised no one that the attorney general, Kent Frizzell, chose Harold Nye as his replacement. Politically, however, Dad’s rigorous adherence to the rule of law didn't earn him many friends, and he stayed in the job for just a few years. He would never have sacrificed his principles for political gain; his only objective was faithfully serving the people of the state his great-grandfather helped settle nearly a century before, and he did so with honor and distinction from 1947 until his own retirement in 1975.
After Dad’s death in 2003, my mother—as so many widows do when their husbands pass—had to deal with some 50 years of Dad’s “stuff.” And my dad was a legendary keeper of stuff, including well over a dozen large boxes filled with copies of documents from cases he had worked on throughout his career, as untold numbers of investigators do in case they are ever called to testify on former cases. Mom had wanted to get rid of them for years, but Dad insisted on keeping them in the event he ever got to write his memoir of police work. So, she had a huge dumpster delivered for disposing of odds and ends in the garage and attic—and also called a shredding company, who indifferently fed so many years of my dad’s life into their efficient machines—and that was that.
Except for one box.
Truman Capote had an aloof but cordial relationship with my father, and during the time he was working on In Cold Blood, Truman—and I use the name familiarly here because he told me to, having visited our home when I was a boy—would often write letters to Dad, amiable letters chatting him up on various aspects of the case and the trial, trying to draw out details from him about the investigation—details which rarely satisfied Truman’s expectations (though he did have better luck with Alvin Dewey). He also sent Dad first editions of two of his books, both of them signed with warm inscriptions. That last box, one I salvaged from the trash my mother had set out, contained those books and letters, along with two note-filled steno pads my father maintained during the Clutter murder investigation. I was grateful beyond words that they had survived a tragic fate with the shredders, for I had little else by which to remember my father.
Frankly, I would just as well have preferred to keep my dad’s memorabilia than sell it, but my family’s mounting medical expenses came first, and I believed there was likely some value in that box. I called Christie’s, the esteemed auction house in New York, but this was outside their area of interest, so they referred me to the Seattle dealer Vintage Memorabilia.
Over the next few days the owner of that company, Gary McAvoy, and I had many long talks about my father and the Clutter case, and I knew I’d found the right home for my dad’s legacy. Gary has an authentic reverence for history and takes seriously his role as provisional custodian for the objects left in his care. I have no doubt he’s invested far more time and effort preparing my items for auction than he was likely to get out of the deal. But his keen interest in Capote’s legacy and, frankly, empathy for my personal situation, inspired him to produce a first-class presentation that was viewed by thousands of people online and covered by media all over the world in the summer of 2012.
But then, inexplicably and at no small effort or expense, the State of Kansas filed a lawsuit against us in a no-holds-barred grab for my dad’s personal notebooks regarding the Clutter murder case, punishing his reputation with lies and insinuations in the process. Rather than submit to their abusive and threatening behavior, I did what my dad taught by example all my life: I fought for what was right. And with the grateful support of Gary and his company—and a first-rate legal team—we chose the high road. After years of litigation, the District Court of Kansas ultimately affirmed our First Amendment rights to publish Dad’s papers and notebooks—retaining possession of everything in the process—so that we could continue this work of which I am certain my father would have approved.
Over his long career in law enforcement Dad had many more interesting cases than this one, and he was always bewildered by the attention the Clutter case received. It was, after all, thought to be just a small-time robbery gone terribly wrong....
Ronald Nye
Oklahoma City
