The Clutter Family Murders

On November 15, 1959, the Clutter family — Herbert, a prosperous wheat farmer; his wife Bonnie; and their teenage children Nancy and Kenyon — were found bound, gagged, and shot to death in their farmhouse near Holcomb, Kansas. The crime shocked the small community and the nation, not only for its brutality but for its apparent randomness: the Clutters were a respected, well-liked family with no apparent enemies. No motive was immediately apparent, and nothing of significant value was taken.

The killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, were two ex-convicts who had heard in prison that Herbert Clutter kept a safe in his house containing large sums of cash. They drove to Holcomb specifically to rob the family. When they found no safe and almost no cash, they killed the entire family to eliminate witnesses. The total amount stolen was less than fifty dollars. The case was solved six weeks later when a fellow inmate who had told Hickock about the Clutters informed the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.

Hickock and Smith were arrested in Las Vegas in December 1959 and confessed. Both were convicted and sentenced to death. They were executed by hanging on April 14, 1965, at Kansas State Penitentiary. In their years on death row both men were extensively interviewed by author Truman Capote and his childhood friend Harper Lee, who had traveled to Kansas to research the case for what would become Capote's landmark 1966 book "In Cold Blood."

"In Cold Blood" transformed American literary journalism and the true crime genre, presenting the murders, investigation, and executions in novelistic detail with a moral complexity that forced readers to confront both the horror of the crimes and the humanity of the killers. The book became one of the most celebrated works of American nonfiction of the twentieth century and directly shaped the modern true crime tradition. The Clutter farmhouse still stands near Holcomb, Kansas.