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Courtesy of Wendle & Josephine Meier Family
From an early age, Harold Ray Nye had set his sights on a life in law enforcement. In December 1943 he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps. At the end of World War II, Harold married his childhood sweetheart, Joyce Fechner, and soon after began his life in police work as a night marshal in his hometown of Oakley, Kansas. A year later he joined the Garden City Police Department, serving from 1948 to 1951, during which time his son Ronald Ray was born.
Nye embarked on his career in much the same way all rookies begin, as a beat patrolman at a salary of $220 per month. He was ambitious to learn everything he could about police work, and soon took up classes under the aegis of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, assimilating a broad range of criminology studies including witness and suspect interrogation, collection and preservation of physical evidence, fingerprint analysis and classification, polygraph techniques, and other “modern” mid-twentieth century investigative systems. Nye also became proficient in crime scene and investigative photography as well as advanced photo processing, later establishing Garden City PD’s first forensic photo lab. Only seven months on the job, Nye was promoted to detective. He was 23 years old at the time.
One hundred seventy miles due east of Garden City lies Hutchinson, then the fourth largest city in Kansas with a population of around 35,000, three times that of Garden City. Hutchinson was thriving, with a growing community’s need for more law enforcement.
In 1951, Harold Nye moved his young family to the heart of the heartland to join the larger and more advanced Hutchinson Police Department, again starting as a rookie patrolman—but this time, to his delight, on a black-and-white Harley-Davidson 74 motorcycle—and now possessing an arsenal of formidable skills acquired from many of the best FBI agents at the time. (Nye kept close relations with the FBI for the rest of his life, working directly with Director J. Edgar Hoover on several occasions.)
Nye served as captain of detectives and assistant chief of police at Hutchinson until he was recruited for the KBI by Director Lou Richter, who appointed Nye a Special Agent on July 1, 1955. At 29 years old, Harold Nye was the youngest agent on the team, but every bit the archetypal lawman. A by-the-book professional with a photographic memory, Nye was already a highly-praised investigator, able to piece together disparate elements of a case to establish means, motive, and opportunity, the three bedrock essentials to winning criminal prosecutions.
In the years following Richter’s retirement, succeeding director Logan Sanford found Nye to be one of his most capable and trusted agents, and put him in charge of the Investigations Division. Within months of closing the Clutter case, Nye was promoted to assistant director in January 1961 and was ultimately appointed director of the KBI by Attorney General Kent Frizzell when Logan Sanford retired in September 1969.
In a book commemorating the KBI’s official 50th anniversary, Logan Sanford, while praising all the agents who worked under him, singled out Nye saying that he “...had men ‘work 70-hour weeks as a routine thing, once they started on something they live with it and work it. Harold Nye went five days and nights without ever lying down while on the Clutter case.’ That, to Director Sanford, was the reason the KBI had been successful.”[74]
Even in his earliest years at the bureau, he was widely respected as an ordered, practical, and loyal public servant. He was also a meticulous investigator, verging on the obsessive in his quest for facts and answers, renowned for relentlessly chasing down leads and ferreting out clues to solve cases. Questions pleading for answers swirled through his mind day and night until each found its resolution, if it ever did. Rarely did he let up until “CLOSED” was stamped on the jacket of a case file. Even then, nagging details that didn’t set right might gnaw at him for long periods, even years, as in the case of the Clutter murders.
Law enforcement agencies in the 1950s did not have the benefit of computer technology, not to mention cell phones and other modern devices that make fighting crime considerably different today. It wouldn’t be until 1967 that the Federal Bureau of Investigation would launch the National Crime Information Center,[75] a centralized database of wanted persons, stolen weapons, vehicles, art works, and other valuable items. Large-scale computerization of law enforcement agencies did not emerge until the 1970s. In thousands of cities and small towns across America, detectives relied exclusively on telephones and police radios, teletype machines and typewriters, film cameras and fingerprints, and mostly, shoe leather and steno pads.
Early on in his thirty-year career, Harold Nye developed a methodical practice of journaling. Brief, incisive notes capturing whatever he felt he might need to reference at some future time were diligently recorded in his ever-present notebooks, always the slim, blue-lined steno pads that newspaper reporters used, spiral-bound at the top. These fit easily into Nye’s coat pocket, ready to be plucked out to record the profusion of details he observed in his daily life and in every investigation he worked on.
As one of Nye’s notebooks reveals, for example, it was a Sunday evening at 7:00 p.m. on November 15, 1959, when he received a call from Director Logan Sanford at the KBI’s Topeka headquarters, dispatching him straightaway to Holcomb, a small village on the western edge of Garden City, Kansas, sixty miles east of the Colorado border. It was an uncommon murder scene, and Sanford wanted Nye’s personal involvement in the investigation. It took Nye six hours to drive across the state from Topeka, arriving in Holcomb at 1:00 a.m. And what began on that high Kansas plain would occupy Harold Nye’s thoughts for the rest of his life.
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Figure 15. Nye's first notes on the Clutter murders
Harold R. Nye Archives
From the onset of the investigation, Nye’s assiduous reliance on facts and figures, on his respect for structure and policy and process, is amply revealed in the cache of documents he left behind.
Apart from his personal notebooks, the Clutter case-related documents Nye retained include file copies of arrest records; summary reports he prepared, signed, and submitted; interview reports; crime scene photographs he himself processed in the KBI photo lab; fingerprint cards of Hickock and Smith; photos of Nye in Mexico with the secret police he met with on his evidence recovery mission; general correspondence related to the case and Nye’s role in it; and the sundry ephemera that finds its way into the chronicle of a lawman’s life.
His investigative work on the Clutter case, which ultimately earned him a promotion to Assistant KBI Director, is intimately detailed in those two steno notebooks and numerous reports, little of which has been made public before now.[76]
While Alvin Dewey coordinated the investigation from a borrowed desk at the Sheriff’s office in Garden City, Harold Nye handled the brunt of investigative field work, often alone or with his KBI partner Agent Roy Church. Nye’s notes reveal interviews with scores of townspeople and the families of both the victims and killers; details of his flight to Mexico to track down and retrieve items stolen by Smith and Hickock from the Clutter home; and his interrogation of Dick Hickock in Las Vegas, where Nye and Church skillfully extracted a confession.
Much of this appears in Capote’s book, admirably reflecting Nye’s own notes and reports (though Truman’s access to this information can only be attributed to Alvin Dewey). Among those documents, however, are several surprising details probably unknown to Capote, among them:[77]
✎ On November 11, three days before the murders, a hunter reported an unusual sighting: while stalking pheasants around the old Holcomb bridge, just a half-mile from the Clutter house, he observed three people sitting in the front seat of a vehicle matching the make and model of Hickock’s car, an older Chevy Fleetline. Returning ninety minutes later to his own car parked nearby, the hunter noticed that both the car and its occupants were still sitting there.
✎ The night marshal in Cimarron, a town just twenty-five miles from the scene of the crime in Holcomb, reported three suspicious men entering the Western Cafe at around 3:00 a.m., an hour after the murders. Though it wasn’t realized at the time, descriptions of two of the men bore uncanny resemblances to Smith and Hickock.
✎ Though Mr. and Mrs. Clutter did not sleep together and, as noted, had likely not had intimate relations for years (a consequence of Bonnie’s mental and physical infirmities), the coroner’s report shows that spermatozoa had been found on the back of Mrs. Clutter’s light peach-colored nightgown—the one she was wearing when she was murdered (among the linens her fastidious housekeeper, Mrs. Helm, laundered twice weekly).
These three pieces of compelling information alone, as reported by Harold Nye, appear not to have been more thoroughly investigated, and may have contributed to Nye’s later frustrations that left him with an unresolved conscience.
Owing to the unusual demands of his job, Harold’s wife Joyce rarely knew what time her husband would be coming home, or if he would come home at all on any given night. The family was most likely to see him on weekends when he would typically drive up in his state car, unannounced, hauling in a week’s worth of laundry with him. Whether day or night, Joyce would dutifully start the washing machine in case Harold got called out on some kind of emergency, which was more likely to happen than not. If the family had already eaten when Harold arrived, she would always have dinner waiting for him. After eating and watching a little television, Nye fell asleep quickly.
But even getting a good night’s sleep couldn’t explain the peculiar behavior his colleagues detected on the job. Nye’s ability to fall asleep was legendary. He could be discovered in the arms of Morpheus anywhere and at any time. Co-workers often found him dozing peacefully, head down on his desk, while activity buzzed all around him. Though not diagnosed until some years later, it was the puzzling disorder known as narcolepsy that accounted for Harold’s spontaneous napping, earning him the endearing nickname given by fellow officers: “Nappy” Nye.
His family, however, had long been aware of Harold’s tendency to drop off with little warning, and much of the time it was a relief, for it spared his children the endless lectures and discipline expected of them while he was awake.
Unless, of course, they were in the car while Harold was driving, as his son Ron vividly recalls:
Whenever the family traveled with Dad, we all took turns watching him. My sister and I sat in the back seat, and our job was to watch for his head to bob. Sitting in front, from the corner of her eyes Mom was alert to his lids starting to droop—even just a long blink might trigger her, and then she was on him like a tick on a hound dog: “Harold!” she’d hoot. And Dad would always protest “I was just resting my eyes,” which gave Mom her opening. ”I’ve been watching you for the last mile,” she’d say, “and your eyes have been closed practically the whole way!” None of us ever felt we could rest while he was driving, which made every trip feel like it might be our last.
I wanted to spend as much time with Dad as I could. So, a lot of that time had to be in the car—going to KBI headquarters in Topeka, visiting police departments and courthouses in other Kansas towns, running household errands for Mom. But there were rules, always rules, especially in the car.
Upping the fear factor, most rides were always against the clock. So Dad would back out of the driveway at exactly 8:45 a.m., and say the goal was to hit the Oakley city limits in under five hours or whatever. The highway was two lanes that wound this way and that, up hill and down dale. My mom and sister would often get motion sickness, but it never bothered me. Dad would tear up the road, the car leaning side to side on shocks that should have been replaced years ago, intent on making the self-imposed deadline just to see if he could. Any one of his three police-band radios would erupt in coded chatter throughout the ride, while two whip antennas crowning his state car lashed in the wind, just adding to the whole clown car adventure.
Harold Nye’s attraction to law enforcement aligned with a natural inclination to serve his community. Of the many stories Ron shared with me about his family, the following stands out:
As early as six or seven years old, I remember Dad having a large wooden photo album that he made to keep pictures from his career in police work. The album had photos of Dad wearing his various police uniforms and the state cars he had driven. He loved his uniforms. My favorite was him in his uniform riding the police motorcycle. I remember looking into his face as he told of times past and could see that he was calling up good memories.
Dad would tell me a little about each picture in the book. With minimum encouragement, he would relate the most interesting stories, always filled with the kinds of details that painted a clear picture in my young mind.
One of my favorite photos was of Dad in a Boy Scout uniform with about a dozen young boys standing around him, all in jeans but each with a scout shirt and tie. The first thing I noticed was that none of the boys were white; all the faces were either black or Indian or Hispanic. Dad told me that when he learned there was no Boy Scout troop in the area where these boys lived, he decided to take it upon himself to start one. He petitioned the regional Boy Scout director and was approved to start a troop. He taught himself several languages—Spanish, German, even American Sign Language—because many of these boys spoke no English.
Over the years Dad would drag that album out from time to time, just to paste in more pictures and look over his earlier work, savoring his personal history. As he turned the pages, he always stopped at that photo of the Boy Scout troop he’d started, his eyes tearing up as he ran his finger across the picture.
As his son Ron learned all too well growing up under this particular lawman’s roof, the one thing Harold Nye could not abide was a lie. When he first read In Cold Blood, what he found angered him so much that he threw the book across the room, calling it “a fiction.” (Contrary to persistent media reports that Nye never read the entire book, it appears he did; his personal notes reveal numerous page references through to the last chapter.)
It was no secret that Harold Nye did not care much for Truman Capote. In an interview published in 1997, Harold Nye pointedly told writer George Plimpton that “I did not get a very good impression from that little son of a bitch...and that impression never changed.”[78] But when warranted, Nye could be open and cordial despite his personal feelings toward the author.
As for being homophobic, Nye was hardly alone on that score, in Kansas or anywhere else in mid-20th-century America. During the 1950s, communists weren’t the only targets of McCarthyism’s “Red Scare.” Homosexuals were considered “subversives” as well. Thousands of gay men and women were either dismissed without due process or quit from government jobs under pressure of blackmail and exposure. The zeal of this “Lavender Scare” actually became official government policy in 1953, when President Dwight Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450 allowing any federal employee or contractor to be fired just for being homosexual (alcoholics and neurotics need not apply, either).
This gave rise to widespread and even “acceptable” persecution by law enforcement officials across the country, but especially in Bible Belt states, of which Kansas, though on the fringes geographically, adopted the rigors of membership enthusiastically.
No apologies need be made here for anyone’s view of others. But two rather amusing accounts will surely help set the stage for why Harold cast Truman in the light he did, and Truman did nothing to diminish the power of that wattage. On the contrary, he clearly enjoyed cranking it up.
The first episode has some confusion and controversy attached to it, which will be cleared up here for the record. George Plimpton, in his wondrous book Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career, ostensibly quotes Harold Nye in an interview (some 35 years after the events):
Al Dewey invited me to come up and meet this gentleman who would come to town to write a book. So the four of us, KBI agents, went up to his room that evening after we had dinner. And here he [Truman] is in kind of a new pink negligee, silk with lace, and he's strutting across the floor with his hands on his hips telling us all about how he's going to write this book....[79]
However, Ron Nye—who, like his father, has a remarkable memory—specifically recalls Harold telling him a slightly different version of the story about that particular night:
One day Dad and I were talking about Truman and the Clutter case, which was unusual for my father, since he rarely ever spoke about his work. He said that Truman and his friend Nelle were staying in a motel close by the Clutter farm. Dad was at the Clutter farm with two other agents, Clarence Duntz and Roy Church, when he received a radio call from Dewey that Truman would like to speak with them.
When they had finished their work for the day, all three went to the motel, thinking perhaps that Capote might have something to share about the investigation. When Truman opened the room door to greet them, though, he was wearing a pink negligee. He laughed and laughed at the look on the agent’s faces when he opened the door. Then Truman started asking a lot of questions about the investigation, but of course no one said anything about the case. Realizing there was nothing to be gained, they thanked Capote for his time and drove on home.[80]
By the time George Plimpton interviewed Harold Nye, with the crimes then decades past, it’s probable Nye mistakenly recalled Dewey being in the scene, when in fact Dewey was simply passing on Capote’s request that they meet him at the motel.
This view is reinforced by Dewey’s wife, Marie, who was quoted as saying (not without a touch of derision):
“That was ridiculous,” she told The Topeka Capital-Journal. “Alvin never called on Capote in his hotel room.... I don't know what's gotten into Harold Nye. To me it was just hilarious.”[81]
It’s entirely possible that Plimpton was either unable to reach Nye for confirmation, or that he simply decided to use his original interview notes without subsequent validation. In any case, it is evident that Plimpton simply got it wrong.
The second episode was a more audacious stunt, in which Truman took Harold and his wife Joyce out for a memorable night on the town in 1965.
The town in question was Kansas City, Missouri, and it may surprise many to learn that as early as the 1920s, Kansas City was home to a remarkably large number of gay bars, nightclubs, and saucy cabarets discreetly nestled between the east and west coasts, all largely controlled by the Mafia. In spite of the Midwest’s reputation for entrenched religious fervor, Kansas City’s “homophile” community of the 1960s is today considered the central catalyst for the evolution of America’s gay liberation movement.
Capote knew of these establishments better than most (straight) locals at the time, since—like many gay men and women who lived where such discreet locales prevailed—he understood the code for finding and gaining access to such largely invisible rendezvous. It had been later reported that he also knew George Cauden, the show director for the legendary Jewel Box Lounge, “a willowy 29-year-old...who went by the stage name Mr. Tommy Temple.”[82]
In what was surely a prime example of understated branding, the Jewel Box billed itself far and wide as “Kansas City’s Most Unusual Show,” spotlighting a lineup of drag queens who sang popular tunes and performed comedy sketches for both straight and gay audiences. Even top celebrities of the era, names such as Rock Hudson, Eartha Kitt, Liberace, and Pearl Bailey, were spotted there when passing through town.
On previous occasions when visiting Kansas City, Nye often brought his wife, Joyce, with him, staying at the historic Muehlebach Hotel, and he did so for this trip as well. It’s not clear whether their respective visits to Kansas City were planned or coincidental, but one evening Capote insisted the Nyes join him for “drinks on the town.”
The three met in the lobby of the Muehlebach and from there took a taxi to Midtown. Finding his desired destination, Truman introduced his guests to a lesbian bar, where he slipped the doorman a hundred-dollar bill to get in. Nye recalled there were about a hundred people in the bar, mostly female couples, eating and dancing and “doing their thing.”[83] Joyce Nye, unaccustomed to such liberal gatherings, was horrified, but she dared not say anything to their host, not yet anyway.
From there Truman took them to a male gay bar (likely the Colony Club [84]) where they took a table and ordered drinks. Within minutes three “young bucks” approached Capote and engaged him in conversation while “playing with his ears.” By this time Joyce, getting more nervous by the minute, quietly urged Harold to make excuses so they could get out of there.
But Truman insisted they make one more stop—at the Jewel Box cabaret, where thirty female impersonators performed, much to the amazement of Harold, who, three decades later, told George Plimpton in an interview, “I mean they looked as good as any beautiful babes in New York. But at the end of these little skits they revealed that they were males....” [85]
Apparently, that was just one too many boundaries crossed for Joyce Nye. Without saying a word, she stood up from the table, snatched her purse, stormed out of the Jewel Box and hailed a cab. When the taxi pulled up, Joyce opened the door and got in. Truman, who had pursued her out of the club, jumped in beside her to soothe her ruffled feathers. In numerous retellings of the story to her son Ron over the years, Joyce always insisted Truman had taken on “a normal, masculine voice,” apologizing to her profusely for “jerking peoples’ chains” just to get a reaction, and pleading that she not go back to the hotel angry at him:
My mom so disliked Truman that it really doesn't fit that she was there at all. She had to have been bushwhacked. There must have have been some compelling purpose for the trip in the first place for her to break her own rule and get roped into a night on the town. She would not have gone unless she felt there was an absolutely necessary reason, going so far as to compare the experience as offering herself up for human sacrifice.[86]
When they all returned to the Muehlebach, Harold and Truman got into a thunderous quarrel in the hotel lobby over that evening’s ambush, which only served to create more rancor in a relationship that was never measured in terms of much affection anyway. It was not long after this clash that Harold and his wife were disinvited from what was to be Manhattan’s hottest ticket in town the following year: Truman’s famed Black and White Masquerade Ball.
Whatever Capote’s reasons for behaving the way he did that night—or why the Nyes put up with three progressively more distressing venues that clearly came as a shock to a “small town girl,” as Truman described Joyce—it remains a curious testament to his well-known penchant for recrimination that the author chose Alvin Dewey as the protagonist for his story.
A closer, more objective view of the facts clearly establishes Harold Nye as the one who did the lion’s share of investigative work in the case, not only as vividly depicted in In Cold Blood, but as revealed in the majority of official KBI reports.
In any case, Capote would find that Alvin Dewey made a much more compliant ally as the book’s “hero.”
