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Like other Midwestern states during the Great Depression, Kansas in the 1930s was beset by roving gangs of bank robbers, cattle rustlers, and countless other thieves and outlaws bent on improving their fortunes. The names are legendary—Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, the Fleagle Gang, “Ma” Barker and Alvin Karpis—all manner of criminal infamy passed through Kansas while carrying out their crime sprees across the Midwest.
This burgeoning “public enemy era” gave rise to considerable expansion of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover and his “G-Men,” as well as the formation of many statewide equivalents such as the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, an agency created in 1939 under the leadership of law enforcement veteran Lou Richter, its first director. Richter and his “K-Men,” as the press soon dubbed them, would come to find their talents in great demand.
Established under the jurisdiction of the state attorney general’s office—and thus subject to the AG’s control and direction—the KBI was conceived as a state police organization formed to assist local law enforcement at all levels, and, mainly at the request of those agencies, to do so without interfering or superseding the authority of local officers.
By Kansas law, county sheriffs were the most powerful law enforcement officials statewide, and while the legislation creating the KBI did not invest it with authority over county sheriffs, it did give the agency broader jurisdictional and investigative capabilities to exercise its duties in any area of law enforcement anywhere in the state, even across state borders.
In the KBI’s first year, Lou Richter handpicked a team limited by statute at the time to just ten agents. And with a total annual budget of only $46,000, their work was cut out for them. From day one, requests for assistance poured in from all over Kansas, a state burdened by a colorful variety of miscreants. Bootleggers, cattle rustlers, bank robbers, drug and gambling cartels, corrupt politicians, forgers, organized crime families...Kansas, the American heartland, served as the crossroads for villainy in the Midwest. In short order the KBI was pressed into action beyond its limits.
In the largest group hiring of personnel since its inception, the KBI hired several more special agents in 1955, among them four men who would become central figures in the Clutter murder investigation: Alvin Dewey, Howard Docker, Clarence Duntz, and Harold Nye.
At the time, with the bureau handling roughly a thousand cases in 1955 alone and growing steadily, agents were expected to put in long hours, while being conversant in the skills of others to fill in where needed—in such disciplines as fingerprint analysis, photo lab processing, evidence forensics, firearm ballistics, and, as might be expected, the endless filing of detailed investigative reports, often based on personal notes taken by agents themselves at the scene of the crime or when needed elsewhere.
From what remains of the Clutter murder investigation files today, it is abundantly obvious Harold Nye was one of the bureau’s most prolific notetakers, and proficient in all disciplines required by the call of duty.
For decades, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation has actively promoted In Cold Blood as its official doctrine on the Clutter case. One recent KBI director, furious that Harold Nye’s investigative work “dominated the narrative” in a 1997 A&E television documentary (upstaging Al Dewey’s coordinating role), even issued a stern letter forbidding agency involvement with any Clutter-related project unless a KBI “technical advisor” was present to ensure that it would be “faithfully accurate in the portrayal of the case and the KBI.”[69]
Moreover, both the KBI’s official 50-year history published in 1990,[70] and one former director’s own book,[71] clearly used In Cold Blood as their only source material on the Clutter case (both burdened with factual inaccuracies), ensuring that history is favorably defined from the perspective of the very agency who handed Capote the package it wanted delivered, neatly omitting parts of the story that did not fit the more heroic narrative.
Granted, a bold assertion. But the influence of Kansas authorities protecting their “landmark case” isn’t limited to the KBI. As shown earlier, a secretary for one former director stated that Attorney General Curt Schneider, after his 1974 election, had the KBI’s entire Clutter case file removed from agency custody and transferred to the attorney general’s office “to lock up and ‘protect’ downtown.”[72]
In December 2012—just two months after Kansas initiated its lawsuit against us—Florida law enforcement officials brought the Clutter case back into the headlines when Sarasota County investigators requested the exhumation of Perry Smith’s and Richard Hickock’s bodies, buried forty-seven years earlier, in hopes of connecting the killers’ DNA to that state’s unsolved Walker family murders of December 1959.
In a perfectly-timed act clearly intended to stall our own legal due process, the KBI inexplicably “reopened” the long-solved Clutter case, ostensibly to accommodate Florida’s exhumation request, but which conveniently prevented us from pursuing discovery for nearly a year. The judge later fined and censured the Kansas attorney general personally for his defiance, noting “an investigation into the Clutter murders cannot be reopened when the killers have been captured, tried, convicted and executed.”[73]
While it’s reasonable to assume that current leadership at the KBI did not have a hand in the events of the early 1960s (nor were they very likely aware of the facts unfolding here, at least before demanding a full accounting of them in court), the agency’s aggressiveness in suppressing our release of Harold Nye’s materials cannot be adequately explained, especially when couched in deference to the privacy issues of surviving families and protection of “confidential” investigative documentation of a case long closed.
