String Theory

You’ve seen them on TV, the evidence boards or “crazy walls” police use for making connections between loose bits of information picked up during an investigation, each bit linked to others by string and pushpins, a process loosely known as “string theory” (with apologies to theoretical physicists).

An excess of nagging details and peculiar observations came to light during the many years of researching this book—in official documents and personal letters; public and private archives; historical newspapers and magazines; during interviews and email correspondence—most of which were simply too peripheral or detached from the themes laid out here. Yet they remain notable.

What follows are the loose bits that string theory couldn’t resolve—discoveries that seem to have importance but didn’t fit anywhere else—along with some lingering questions.

During his interrogation Richard Hickock drew a diagram of each room of the house, by memory, six weeks after the fact—a house they were inside for only one hour, after midnight, and which was completely dark except for their flashlights.
The map Floyd Wells supposedly provided Hickock in their prison cell was never recovered. It seems to have not even been considered worth finding by investigators, nor was it mentioned as being among the evidence Smith and Hickock burned at a roadside rest stop after the murders.
Of all the reports the KBI produced, none bothered to consider a murder-for-hire conspiracy, implying only three possible reasons:

There was gross negligence or incompetence;
They decided (or were instructed) not to investigate further, despite an abundance of compelling detail;
There was further investigation, but those records have been expunged from the file.

What might be found in that Clutter file taken from the KBI by Attorney General Curt Schneider “to lock up and protect?” Could it be the same mysteriously inaccessible "Hickock & Smith Correspondence" folder retained by Governor Avery’s office? Might it contain the complete set of Hickock Letters intercepted by prison censors? And if so, what else do they contain?
How to explain the curious and oddly timed disappearance of Mack Nations’s final full manuscript of his book High Road to Hell shortly after he was killed? Who removed it from his desk in an obscure newspaper office in tiny Huerfano, Colorado—and where might it be today?
To his dying day, Capote maintained that his book was immaculately factual—which to his thinking would have been true if the KBI had provided cherry-picked details to the author, reinforcing the story they wanted to be told.

In a 1966 interview with George Plimpton, Capote revealed a now newly-compelling detail he obtained in his interviews with the killers but omitted from In Cold Blood:

They had two other murders planned that aren’t mentioned in the book. Neither of them came off. One “victim”... was a man they never even knew – like the Clutters. He was a banker in a small Kansas town. Dick kept telling Perry that sure, they might have failed with the Clutter score, but this Kansas banker job was absolutely for certain. They were going to kidnap him and ask for ransom, though the plan was, as you might imagine, to murder him right away.^[218]

These jobs, as Truman said, were never carried out. But could this intended banker have been Kenneth Lyon, the spouse of Mr. Clutter’s presumed paramour, Mildred? Having planted the seed that resulted in Herb Clutter’s death, could Floyd Wells have been a willing conspirator, assigned with the demise of both men? Again, who would have gained by such an arrangement?

Wells certainly could have met Lyon since their paths would at some point have crossed in both business and personal settings—on the ranch, where Wells worked, and of which Lyon was a partner at the time; and in the very busy social milieu of the Clutter home, since Wells claimed to have had such a close relationship to the family.

As for the reported presence of spermatozoa on Bonnie Clutter’s nightgown, the coroner’s autopsy report revealed no evidence of intercourse. The nightgown had been sent to the FBI Forensics Lab in Quantico, Virginia, for examination, resulting in a report of findings returned personally by Director J. Edgar Hoover himself, confirming the presence of semen.^[219]

Figure 52. FBI Confirmation of Spermatozoa on Nightgown

Nye Notebook 1-73 – Harold R. Nye Archives

12-3-59

Received wire from

Hoover —

spermatozoa found on

Mrs Clutter night gown

So how did it get there? Hickock, with an acknowledged history of pedophilia, did admit his intention to rape Nancy Clutter, and was only prevented from doing so by Smith. But the two were not together the entire time in the house.

DNA analysis technologies were not available at the time, and though we filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI for any documents related to the Clutter case, the bureau’s official response, surprisingly, advised that such records had been destroyed, and no copies were retained.

Another perplexing discovery was found on closer inspection of one of the crime scene photographs. Several publications are laid out on the coffee table next to Kenyon Clutter’s body on the sofa in the basement—a lurid selection of pulp romance magazines, surprisingly incongruous given the rigid Methodist sexual mores of both the family and the era.

Figure 53. Lurid magazines next to Kenyon Clutter’s body

Thinking this rather unorthodox for a man of Clutter’s rigorous prohibitions, I turned to an expert in Methodist practices of that era, Dr. Ashley B. Dreff, author of Entangled: A History of American Methodism, Politics, and Sexuality.^[220]

“Given Mr. Clutter's position against the use of alcohol and cigarettes,” Dr. Dreff noted, “one could classify him as a socially conservative Methodist. As such, it is quite surprising and out of character that pulp magazines such as this, which advocate sex outside of marriage, would be found in his home, especially out in the open.”^[221]