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According to In Cold Blood, Harold Nye also left open the possibility for motives other than robbery: “Nobody would kill four people for fifty bucks... Sure, maybe the killer did take the money—but just to try and mislead us, make us think robbery was the reason.”[176]
Remarkably, Capote quoted Nye voicing suspicions which were later confirmed by Richard Hickock in his letters: “Besides, we had to make it look like a robbery.”
Another on Nye’s short list of possible motives turned out to have been prescient: “I thought the answer might be another woman—a triangle. Well, consider: Mr. Clutter was a fairly young, very healthy man, but his wife, she was a semi-invalid, she slept in a separate bedroom....”[177]
During the investigation, and even some forty years after it, Harold Nye was steadfast in maintaining there was more to the Clutter case than had been described in In Cold Blood, one reason for his now well-known gesture of throwing the book across the room angrily, calling it “a fiction,” and, when the film was released in 1967, marching out of the movie theater after the first fifteen minutes.
Ron Nye is convinced his father knew a great deal more, the reason Harold had desperately wanted his son to help him lay out the truth in his own book, which never came to pass.
As author Ralph Voss confirmed, “Nye was deeply troubled about the case, both during the investigation and after it was resolved. He and other agents worked eighteen to twenty hours each day, and he did not believe Capote dealt with him and others honestly in getting the story. Nor did he believe Capote was honest in telling the story once he got it.”[178]
Nye was also distressed by Dewey’s failure to abide by the bureau’s investigative standards and practices, having done so with impunity in the glare of publicity for the KBI following the murders. But at the time he was just a fellow agent, and not one to blow the whistle on a colleague. By the time he later became assistant director, it was pointless to take any meaningful action.
