Richard Rohleder

Figure 16. Richard Rohleder in 1943

Choosing Dewey as the protagonist put at risk the story’s historical fidelity. Most principal figures—notably Duane West, the county prosecutor who built the case against the killers—have uniformly singled out one individual, Garden City’s assistant chief of police Rich Rohleder, as having the greatest impact on the case from day one.

Born in 1911, Richard G. Rohleder grew up on a farm in Hays, Ellis County, that part of western Kansas settled by European immigrants in the late nineteenth century. His Russian-born mother and father—whose own parents starved to death in Siberian gulags—fled the Russian revolution for a better life in Kansas, drawn by the prospect of homesteading its vast fertile lands. They were among the wave of Volga-German farmers who settled in the Great Plain states, seeding the hard red winter wheat, the grain that would sustain Kansas farmers through drought and pestilence; the basic grain used to make bread and all-purpose flour.

When Rich was seven years old, both his parents died of Spanish flu during the great pandemic of 1918. Along with his two brothers, he was taken in by a foster family, where the boys worked the farmstead while attending school. Though he never made it beyond the sixth grade, Rohleder found lessons of self-reliance and ingenuity working the land, experiences that, lacking more formal education, would come to shape his skillful but underrated career in law enforcement.

In 1943, with no previous training in police work at all, Rohleder joined the Hays Police Department, and after proving his mettle there as deputy sheriff, moved on to the larger Garden City force in 1951. Over the next two decades he advanced from patrolman to detective to assistant chief of police, all the while devising new methods for analyzing and solving crimes, years before the KBI or other such agencies had similar capabilities.

“My dad had a natural, God-given talent for finding things out,” Rohleder's son Dean told me in an interview. “His ability to investigate and solve crimes was amazing. Besides photography, he was a skilled mechanic and gunsmith, managing all firearm maintenance for the police departments he served with.”^[93] Rohleder also taught himself the esoteric art of fingerprint matching, refining his own crime scene kit with print dusters made of ostrich feathers (which, as he discovered, are superior to other material for their innate static charge that attracts dust).

In a Lawrence Journal-World article memorializing Rohleder’s legacy in law enforcement, Patrick Smith, a contemporary reporter who has written extensively on the Clutter case, observed: “Even though Capote gave him little credit, Rohleder's thoroughness and forward thinking left a legacy at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. The KBI now ‘brackets’ crime scene photos—meaning the photographer will take one photo at the proper exposure, then one longer and one shorter...,”^[94] in order to suss out details that might otherwise be missed.

Finney County prosecutor Duane West and others also credit Rohleder with being the only investigator who initially considered robbery a motive for the murders, and he was alone in his (accurate) speculation that the killers could be hundreds of miles away the day after the murders.^[95]

Though relegated to just one meager paragraph in In Cold Blood, it was Rohleder alone who discovered the single most important contribution to solving the Clutter murders. Using his Graflex 4x5 Speed Graphic (recognizable as the typical “press camera” used by news photographers in the early- to mid-twentieth century), Rohleder meticulously documented the crime scene, producing seventeen black-and-white pictures that told the jury all it needed to bring a swift conviction at trial: shocking images of the Clutter family, each viciously gunned down where they lay, bound and gagged; the vast pool of blood drained from Herb Clutter’s lacerated throat, his pajama-clad body lying on top of a cardboard box in the basement; and most significantly, two different boot prints—a distinctive Cat’s Paw brand found in a patch of blood on the cardboard; and another bearing a diamond tread found in the dust on the cement basement floor.

Figure 17. Perry Smith’s bloody boot print

Rohleder’s keen discovery not only informed investigators they were dealing with more than one murderer, it was ultimately the only physical evidence authorities had tying any suspects to the crimes—provided the boots they were wearing at the time could still be found and matched.

After thirty years in law enforcement, Richard Rohleder retired in 1973, and in 1988, while tinkering in his home workshop, suffered a heart attack that ended his long and honorable life.

Jon Craig, an attorney in Garden City who knew Rohleder, said the former cop was proud of his work, but that “He wasn't interested in becoming famous. He was just doing his job.”^[96]