Shamus

Within days of news breaking about the auction, Ron received an unexpected phone call at home, and at a rather peculiar time: after 8:00 p.m. on Saturday night, July 28, 2012. The caller identified himself as Kirk Thompson, director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation—the man holding the same office Ron’s father held until 1971.

The KBI has some 300 employees. That the director personally made the call got our attention. It also made us curious. Why would the chief executive of the KBI, who reports directly to the state’s attorney general—two steps down from the governor—make such a call himself?

Thompson got right to the point. News of our auction had reached him, and he wanted to meet with Ron to discuss the materials being offered. Ron, ever amiable, invited Thompson to meet at his home in Oklahoma City to discuss the matter. Thompson agreed, saying he would drive down the next morning—an eight-hour round trip by car from KBI headquarters in Topeka, on a Sunday. Clearly there was some urgency guiding his mission.

It then occurred to Ron that, as field representative for the State of Oklahoma’s rehabilitation counseling programs, he had already arranged meetings with affiliate agencies in Topeka later that week, so he offered instead to meet Thompson there, if the director wanted to save eight hours of his own time on the road. The two agreed to meet at Ron’s hotel in Topeka on Monday, August 2, 2012.

Our appointment was set for 5:00 p.m. but with my state business done I’d arrived early, waiting in the lobby, when a tall bald man approached me. Thompson introduced himself and we took a table in the lounge, sitting across from each other. He looked pretty fried, confessing he’d been in a budget meeting all day.

Like he did in our phone call, Thompson got right to the point, telling me he was troubled by the pending sale of some of my father’s materials. As background, I walked him through how all this started: rescuing Truman’s books and letters to my dad from the trash, along with his notebooks, photos, and other papers; how I was now the sole caretaker for my ex-wife, whose medical expenses were the reason I put Dad’s materials up for sale; and how Lecia and I organized and boxed them up for shipment to Seattle.

I even described how, as a little kid, Dad would take me with him to KBI headquarters on weekends; this would be some time in the late 1950s. Dad had authorized access to everything, and as he looked through boxes of closed case files in the underground archives he would set some boxes aside, taking them to offices upstairs where secretaries could later copy items he needed to work on a book. He’d always wanted to write a book about his investigations, and for years asked me to help him. But being a teenager then, I didn’t really have interest in any of that.

Several times during the conversation Thompson probed for ways he might preempt our sale and commandeer all the items he had highlighted on the inventory list, which a month earlier had been posted on the website’s auction page. But I had to remind Thompson, several times, that I had already turned over my dad’s entire archive to Vintage Memorabilia in preparation for sale, and that I no longer had any control over the material.

I had learned the art of "purposeful conversation" from one of the best. My dad was a gifted interrogator, and he would often try to break me, getting me to acknowledge whatever adolescent mischief I’d gotten into. My father was a master of the third degree, with a piercing gaze so intimidating that even the most resistant subjects eventually collapsed. I was the only one he could never get to fold, which frustrated him to no end.

And while that skill has come to be useful in my job as a counselor, sitting there with Thompson I sensed I might be in an adversarial position, so my instincts were on full alert. I was not going to let this guy put me in a one-down position.^[24]

Our conversation went on for over an hour, and all that time Thompson was bent over in his chair, his neck leaning forward as he rubbed both hands across his shaven head which, like his face, was getting redder and redder as I spoke. Having worked in a hospital for over 20 years, observing the physiological condition of people I’m interacting with had become second nature to me. And it was obvious this was one stressed and exhausted man. I kept thinking it was a good thing I knew CPR.

At the end of our time together, Thompson pointedly told me that, while Capote’s books and letters didn’t matter to him, he was committed to taking possession of my dad’s investigation records, which he claimed were state property—and that included Dad’s personal notebooks.

Of course, I had a different notion. My father had devoted his entire life in service to Kansas. There was no way I’d let them lay claim to his personal papers.

On my way back to Oklahoma, I called Gary to fill him in and give him a heads up. Thompson would be calling him next.^[25]

By the end of our conversation, Thompson appeared to be agreeable, and pleasantly so, indicating that he would relay this offer back to “the families” and that return of all other materials, excluding the notebooks, would likely resolve the situation. He specifically added that he “didn’t think it would go any further.”

That isn’t how things turned out. Three days after our fairly cordial conversation, Thompson called again. This time his voice had a different timbre to it, clearly more subdued, less confident, even somewhat chastened, I felt, given his more cooperative and optimistic tone just a few days earlier. If I were to speculate, I’d say he had been directed, in no uncertain terms, to procure all materials at any cost.

Thompson now made clear that the attorney general had demanded that all materials be “returned” to them—an odd claim, given that Nye’s personal notebooks were originated by him and had never been seen by anyone else.

First, though, the KBI wanted to send someone out to Seattle to inspect our cache of documents “just to see what we have." I was told “an agent who knew the files intimately” would arrive at my office three days hence, at 9:00 a.m. on Monday.

This was not an appealing prospect, to say the least. It was an intrusive and undiplomatic tactic, and for Kansas to act so brazenly, especially when our discussions had been moving along amicably, made me less inclined to accommodate any of their demands.

This peculiar change in their approach was our first indication that someone wanted these materials pretty desperately. Instead of opening my door to one of his agents, I offered to send Thompson a DVD containing a digital copy of all material, to which he agreed, though I gather with some reluctance.

I’d seen enough political thrillers to know that when the stakes are high enough, the person who possesses incriminating evidence is likely to find himself the victim of some “misfortune." To even the bargain, that person often takes out an “insurance policy.”

While I didn’t feel my life was in danger, I did think it might be prudent to get a copy of these materials into the trusted hands of someone in the media—just in case it was all snatched out of ours without due process.

I didn’t have to wait long for another stroke of synchronicity. Two days after my conversation with Kirk Thompson, I received a call from Kevin Helliker at The Wall Street Journal. A University of Kansas graduate who grew up just a mile from the Hickock farm, Helliker has had a lifelong interest in the Clutter murders. When word of our auction reached him, he asked me if he could see some of the Nye materials.

Helliker had won a Pulitzer Prize for his past work, so I was delighted to share our cache of documents with such a respected journalist. But since Helliker’s beat was largely health and sports, I didn’t hold much hope for his writing an article about our auction or the legal peril surrounding it. But at least whatever Kansas wanted so badly would be in the hands of an independent third party, a senior reporter for a prominent newspaper the State of Kansas would be hard pressed to coerce.

Based on the KBI’s interest in our little auction—and put on guard by the director’s unsettling assertions to Ron about a preemptive strike, as well as his puzzling change of attitude—it was clear we might need some legal advice. I figured our best strategy was to find someone with expertise in taking on public agencies, and—given our proximity to Truman Capote and his work—someone skilled as well in intellectual property law.

Though Seattle is teeming with lawyers, for our particular needs one firm stood out: Hendricks & Lewis. The firm’s partners, O. Yale Lewis, Jr. and his wife Katherine Hendricks, had won major cases against cities, states, and the federal government, as well as litigating complex estate issues for the Jimi Hendrix family, the rock band Nirvana, and Kurt Cobain’s wife, Courtney Love—all successful wins in defense of intellectual property.

Having been a Navy submarine officer, Yale knew, literally and figuratively, how to work in tight spaces—and we were definitely in one of those. He also hails from Alabama, not far from where Truman Capote and Harper Lee grew up, another touch of synergy to the unusual case encircling us.

Yale, a Southern gentleman to the core, listened carefully as I ran down the latent menace descending on Ron and me in those early days. I laid out Harold Nye’s notebooks, the Clutter crime scene photos, and scores of other documents on his conference room table, and while his team stood in awe of the documents spread out before them (all past readers of In Cold Blood), I marveled at the impact historical materials have on those who rarely come in contact with such potent objects.

Legal minds have little tolerance for ambiguity. And the first question everyone raised was: What is in here that Kansas does not want exposed?

One developing theory for why the KBI was so keen on acquiring our documents was the possibility that, odd as it may seem, they may not have had much at all in their own official file dealing with the Clutter case. We had solid grounds on which to base this assumption, including court testimony by KBI personnel who were unable to offer informed responses to simple, relevant questions by our attorneys and even the judge, about what the official case records contained.

Indeed, Logan Sanford, director of the KBI until 1969, once lamented, “Law-enforcement and crime records in Kansas through the years have been seriously inadequate .... In many cases an outgoing police chief or sheriff just destroyed his records or took them with him. We've found many cases in the state where a crime has been committed but where there is no written record.”^[26]