Another Newspaper Article

Wichita Eagle (newspaper) SUNDAY November 14, 1999 Clutter murders still 'too close to home' for Holcomb residents Miniseries put details of murder in spotlight By Mark Wiebe Knight Ridder News Service HOLCOMB, Kan. --Taped inside Gary Jarmer's tattered first edition of "In Cold Blood" is a black-and-white photo of Jarmer standing next to Nancy Clutter, the youngest daughter of a wealthy and popular Finney County farmer. The teenagers proudly display the 4-H Who's Who Key Awards they won in the fall of 1958 for outstanding leadership. A year later, on Nov. 15, 1959, the bound bodies of Nancy; her father, Herb; her mother, Bonnie; and her younger brother, Kenyon, were discovered in their rural Holcomb, Kan., home. The four had been shot to death at close range. Jarmer would never again see or talk with the girl he had respected and admired, the energetic 16-year-old he had danced with on occasion, who one time told him, "Gary, you're a really good dancer." Like so many others who lived in this rural community 40 years ago, Jarmer felt the raw pain and shock of losing a friend. He and the community felt the fear of wondering why anyone (a neighbor? a stranger?) would want to kill such nice people. He felt the panic that drove many to buy new locks and some to put their loaded shotguns under their beds. For Jarmer, the deaths of the Clutters and feelings of loss were personal. They had not yet become part of the larger-than-life legend that this small Kansas farming community could have easily lived without. That would come later, in 1966, with the publication of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." Only then would the community's story be filtered through the eyes of a celebrated author who came across the Clutter name in a one-column article buried inside The New York Times. After enduring hordes of reporters, after having their pain splashed on the front pages of papers ranging from The Denver Post to The Kansas City Star, many Finney Countians thought their story reached a fitting conclusion on April 14, 1965. That is when the convicted killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, climbed the gallows of the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing. The spotlight, they assumed, would go away, and those who knew the Clutters could choose their own way to grieve and remember, live and forget. Capote's so-called nonfiction novel wouldn't let them. Talk to friends or acquaintances of the Clutters, and many are likely to tell you they have not read the book or seen the film. Too close to home. Who, after all, wants to witness or imagine the violent deaths of people they knew? Who among them needs to hear again that Hickock and Smith went to Holcomb on an erroneous tip about piles of cash inside the Clutter home, and that they planned all along to leave no witnesses? But talk to the guardians of the area's two unofficial tourist destinations -- the old Clutter home and Valley View Cemetery in Garden City, where the Clutters are buried -- and you will discover that Capote's work has a firm purchase on America's collective imagination. Over the years, thousands have visited these two sites, neither of which appears on the historic walking or driving tours included in the Garden City and Holcomb Visitors Guide. "Basically, the only reason why people do come out here is because they've seen the movie or read the book," said Valley View's caretaker, Jim Hahn, standing just yards from the Clutters' headstones. "But 'In Cold Blood' just makes it really, really hard for those who are still alive." A cemetery employee for 24 years, Hahn said the curiosity-seekers were less abundant this year. "That's good," Hahn said, motioning to the headstones. "These people need to rest." Travel a few minutes west to Holcomb, and just about anyone in this town of 1,950 can direct you to the old River Valley Farm, 420 acres that Herb Clutter and his farmhands once tilled and harvested. Leonard and Donna Mader, both natives of the area, have owned the farm since 1990. Apart from a satellite dish perched above a window and the dusty rose aluminum siding around the second floor, the house looks much as it did 40 years ago, complete with neatly tuck-pointed tan bricks, and a large, flat yard of Bermuda grass in front. The property looks nothing like a tourist attraction. But, Donna Mader said, "there's always people calling me, 'Would you show us your home? Would you show us your home?' To me, it's just unreal." Mader said it was not uncommon on a summer weekend for as many as 10 cars to drive down the half-mile, elm-lined gravel drive just to stare at the house. Those numbers increased a few years ago after CBS broadcast a miniseries based on the book. "They're very nice people," she said. "From all over." Rarely do the Maders invite the curious in. But for a brief time they did give $5 tours. "Some of them almost begged to come in and see it, and I said, '...let's just let 'em,'" said Leonard Mader. The Maders stopped the tours after receiving letters they believed came from friends of the Clutters' two surviving daughters. How, Mader said the letter writers wanted to know, could they make money off the tragedy? Drive from the Mader house east to Main Street, turn left, cross the railroad tracks, and you will be staring down the closest thing resembling a downtown in Holcomb. But no one calls it that. There are no retail businesses on Main, just Holcomb Elementary School, the old vacant post office, a house that's for sale, a large field used by the school and the nondescript white building that houses El Rancho Cafe. In Wednesday's lunch at El Rancho, the talk at rancher Bob Jones' table was sports. The eight men, including Jones, said they had not realized the anniversary of the murders was approaching. Jones, 56, who knew Nancy Clutter, said, "I'm not too keen on talking about it." Duane West, the man who helped prosecute Hickock and Smith, is not as reticent. He will reflect on the tragedy of having lost "the productive intellect and capacity" of the victims, with whom West attended church. But he did not see the newsworthiness in the 40th anniversary. So many people, he said, have moved to the area since the killings, several thousand attracted by jobs at two large slaughterhouses built in the 1980s. "I think it's basically a nonevent for the community....We've got a lot who never even heard of the murders. Many probably don't even know who Truman Capote was," West said. Jarmer, grayer and heavier than he appears in the snapshot with Nancy Clutter, stood outside the Finney County Courthouse on Wednesday. It's the same building he twice entered as an 18-year-old farm boy to attend Hickock's and Smith's trial. Holding his copy of "In Cold Blood" , Jarmer recalled the crisp fall morning when he and a friend, just back from pheasant hunting, sat stunned in a pickup truck as the news broke on radio station KIUL. He talked about Nancy and Kenyon. A rueful look came over his face. "They were cut down way, way too early," said Jarmer, who retired as a dean at Garden City Community College in 1998. "I got to live my life, and they didn't." Even though he lived through the events 40 years ago, Jarmer believes Capote's work serves as a valuable document for those who were not there at the time. His 32-year-old son, Mark, a history instructor at the college who studied the murders two years ago to prepare for a course on Kansas literature, agrees. As part of the course, Mark Jarmer took students to the Mader house. He showed them the seven blue, loose-leaf notebooks in the Finney County Sheriff's Department -- notebooks with documents from the case, newspaper clippings and crime scene photos. Jarmer's course and the notebooks, assembled in the last two years, are signs that some in the community are beginning to accept their place in history. So is the Garden City Police Department's glass-enclosed case that displays, among other things, Perry Smith's black leather boot, some of the rope the killers used, a copy of "In Cold Blood" and a Life magazine article about the movie. It's doubtful that the likes of Bob Jones will ever view these artifacts. But the years to come will leave fewer who lived through that crisp November morning, and more who will experience it only through Capote's literary lens or the movies it spawned. Those people will be curious.