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One of the most intriguing paragraphs in In Cold Blood— especially when viewed now, with new perspective—alludes to an unnamed former employee of Clutter’s whose identity Truman Capote would later come to find was actually Floyd Wells. Capote writes [emphasis added]:
“Of the many stories circulating, the most nearly accurate was contributed by a prominent car dealer (who refused to disclose its source): ‘Seems there was a man who worked for Herb way back yonder around ’47 or ’48. Ordinary ranch hand. Seems he went to prison, state prison, and while he was there he got to thinking what a rich man Herb was. So about a month ago, when they let him loose, the first thing he did was come on out here to rob and kill those people.’”[189]
It reads as a passing but nonetheless prescient anecdote. Capote was too smart a writer to drop in such a big clue to foreshadow the revelation to come, and he never underestimated his audience. So why employ such a leading statement at all if it weren’t true?
Though Capote chose not to identify this “prominent car dealer” in the book, his notes give a clue as to who it was—Preston A. Burtis, owner of Burtis Motors, the Ford dealership in Garden City that he bought from Lester McCoy. Burtis not only sold cars to Herb Clutter over the years, he had loaned a vehicle to Capote while he and Harper Lee were going about their research in town. (In his papers, Capote made a note to include “Mr. P. A. Burtis, for car”[190] in the book’s acknowledgments, though few acknowledgments, including this one, actually made it into the published work.)
If we are to presume, then, that such a prophetic statement was accurately provided before Wells had been identified, then we must also assume that someone knew details about the murders that even the authorities were not yet aware of. This single verifiable fact alone is simply breathtaking, leaving little room for ambiguity.
Decades later, in an interview given a few years before he died, Preston Burtis reasserted his position. Burtis recalled meeting Capote, Lee, and celebrity fashion photographer Richard Avedon at a party he hosted in his home.
"He was an interesting little duck," Burtis says of Capote, "and created quite a tidal wave in town; he was more of a character than we were used to....” "But, oh, those murders rattled everybody," Burtis adds. "They were supposedly killed for their money, and I don't know if Herb had $50."[191] [Emphasis added.]
When Burtis said this in 2001, the crimes had been solved for decades. Yet the person to whom Capote attributed that prophetic “rumor” still had doubts many years later.
That so many people who knew Herbert W. Clutter well would so hastily attribute the murders to someone local, someone with a grudge, ought to have merited deeper investigation. Instead, authorities were politically motivated to put this case behind them posthaste. The swift trial and convictions of Hickock and Smith, from capture to sentencing, all occurred in less than three months, with an execution date set for six weeks later, on May 13, 1960,[192] surprising even local law enforcement veterans at the hastiness of events:
“[Undersheriff] Wendle [Meier] and I both thought it was odd that the KBI was rushing things to get a conviction, but we didn’t know why. Cases like that usually took ten years with appeals before punishment was administered. For whatever reasons, somebody wanted all this to end quickly.”[193]
— Keith Denchfield, former Deputy Sheriff of Finney County, Kansas.
According to Bill Brown, editor of the Garden City Telegram, there was even widespread belief that Arthur Fleming and Harrison Smith, the killers’ defense attorneys, were appointed not to mount a vigorous defense, but to make certain Smith and Hickock were found guilty.[194]
