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A longtime colleague and business partner of Herbert Clutter, Kenneth Lyon’s final duty to his friend was to administer his estate after his death. While In Cold Blood makes no mention of him (nor was there any particular reason to, at the time), it was Lyon who opened the Clutter home for Capote and Lee to explore freely—favored access requested by Capote’s lawyer, Clifford Hope, which, despite the KBI’s having declared the farm off-limits, supplied firsthand details of the home so meticulously characterized in the book.
Lyon, a fellow farmer in western Kansas, owned 480 acres of his own irrigated land in northwest Finney County near Garden City. In the late 1940s and early ‘50s he was also manager of and a partner in Clutter’s River Valley Farm, which at the time comprised over three thousand acres. In the months preceding the murders, presumably for reasons of debt, Lyon had urged Clutter to sell off some of his holdings. Gerald Van Vleet, River Valley’s manager at the time of the murders, confirmed that Clutter had in fact sold 1080 acres earlier that spring.
Herb Clutter, as chairman of the board of the Garden City Co-Op in 1953, had named Ken Lyon as manager of that company, displacing the current manager to whom Clutter was opposed. Lyon, chairman of the Garden City School Board for several years, also served with Herb Clutter on the Federal Farm Credit Board. Both were prominent men of power and influence in their local, state, and national farming communities.
Having such stature goes a long way toward building one’s career, and in 1959 Ken Lyon moved up from vice president to president of the Federal Intermediate Credit Bank in Wichita, one of twelve government-sponsored banks owned by its member-farmers, charged with providing loans to farms, ranches, and other agricultural industry organizations.
Left with few accounts of Lyon’s life apart from the frequent accolades he earned in the press, and two interviews with Alvin Dewey, it’s impossible to know now whether he was aware of a possible dalliance between his wife and Herb Clutter. In one of those interviews, however, Lyon told Dewey he had “never known Mr. Clutter to...have an association with another woman nor had he ever heard rumors to this effect.”[68] Given the tight-knit community (and small town gossips few communities lack) it’s hard to imagine Mr. Lyon would not have caught wind of it. (And practically speaking, if he had, would this have been the right time to disclose such knowledge?)
