| |
KBI agent Alvin A. Dewey, Jr. lived in Garden City, just a few miles from the scene of the Clutter crime. A former FBI agent and past sheriff of Finney County, Alvin and his wife Marie knew the Clutter family well.
On November 15, 1959, Dewey was assisting local police with a bombing investigation in Wichita, some 200 miles away, when he got a call at his hotel from Marie, who was at church that Sunday morning, informing him that the entire Clutter family had been shot and killed.
As resident agent, Dewey took on the role of case coordinator. He knew the local law enforcement agencies and, indeed, most of the townspeople who knew the Clutters, so it made practical sense for him to serve as the point of convergence. He was also as close a friend to Herb Clutter as either man could have at the time, both involved with the same Methodist church and various community activities. Had he not been investigating the nightclub bombing in Wichita, Dewey would have been teaching that morning’s Sunday school class himself.
In 1959 Garden City had a modest population of just under 12,000. Home to the seat of Finney County, the Sheriff’s headquarters served as the most sensible base of operations for coordinating the Clutter investigation.
Although his office comprised just three crowded rooms on the third floor of the courthouse building, Sheriff Earl Robinson assigned Dewey a temporary desk for him to liaise the efforts of city police, sheriff, and county personnel, and other KBI investigators, while fielding phone calls from the public and the media and filing reports back to KBI headquarters in Topeka.
But was Dewey really the “hero” of the investigation, as depicted by Capote in his book? Not so much, as it turns out. Now that we’re able to see past the shroud of mythology that has cloaked In Cold Blood for decades—and which has been perpetuated in nearly every book, article, and film about the story since its publication—it’s clear that others had measurably greater influence on the outcome. And yet the Dewey myth continues. As former Finney County deputy sheriff Keith Denchfield recalls, “Harold Nye, Clarence Duntz, and Roy Church did the real investigative work. Dewey was mainly there for public relations. Roy once told me he had given all the notes he made each day to Dewey, who then just handed them over to Truman....”[87]
It was Harold Nye, along with two fellow agents, Roy Church and Clarence Duntz, who quietly and efficiently handled the bulk of investigative field work, acknowledged not only by other principals involved, but as confirmed in official reports. In fact, for his service in the Clutter case Nye was promoted to assistant director of the KBI just a few months later, while Dewey remained a field agent.
As Harper Lee’s biographer Charles Shields quoted Harold Nye shortly before his death in 2003, “Dewey was only supposed to ‘take care of the press, the news media, take our reports in, send them to the office, and be the office boy.’”[88]
Dewey himself later downplayed his modest role quite plainly in the Garden City Telegram, responding to the disgruntled feelings many held about the disproportionate credit he was given in the book.[89]
Frankly, there was much to commend the former FBI agent to the role for the author’s purposes, for despite Agent Dewey’s later denials of any impropriety, Capote would have no better access to the ripest and most sensitive investigative details that made his book such a compelling narrative. A case could be made, then, that In Cold Blood was as much a product of the KBI’s guiding hand as it was Capote’s flowing pen.
“For the KBI,” former assistant director Larry Thomas told a reporter, “we call it our landmark case that put us on the map... It’s the rung on the ladder we all strive for.” [90]
As coordinator of the Clutter murder investigation, KBI Agent Alvin Dewey knew very well that his friend, Herb Clutter, had been seen dancing and “smooching” with Mildred Lyon. Dewey had taken an official report from a Kansas State Highway Patrol trooper who reported a witness’s account of the event.[91] Dewey personally wrote at least two “Memorandum for the File” reports detailing several individual eyewitness accounts to that effect.
Moreover, Dewey was convinced from the start that Herb Clutter was murdered with premeditation. County prosecutor Duane West, who tried the murder case in 1960, recalled that when Dewey learned Floyd Wells had fingered Smith and Hickock as the killers, he dismissed it: “Dewey said it wasn't them. [He] was convinced it was somebody local who had a grudge against Herb Clutter.”[92] Yet this possibility was never seriously considered as a motive.
Beyond not even being considered, reports supporting the possibility appear to have been deliberately concealed. Alvin Dewey never disclosed critical evidence alluding to his initial suspicions, which begs the question: Why not? Despite his considering the possibility in his investigation, Harold Nye appears not to have known about the Clutter affair, at least according to his detailed notes and official reports, but there is a very good reason for that: the interview memoranda recorded by Agent Dewey alone were found in the Finney County records, in the office where he coordinated the investigation, but never appeared in any official KBI report, not even the final investigation summary found in Nye’s file archive (among numerous report revisions). One can only surmise, since there were multiple credible reports, that Dewey was protecting his friend, Herb Clutter, from any posthumous exposure to scandal. While that may be questionable on the basis of personal loyalty, it is hardly official protocol during a murder investigation.
Moreover, why did this otherwise respected former FBI agent continue to feed Truman Capote confidential documents and case details that would form the underpinnings of a story that in so many ways differed from facts Dewey knew at the time?
