Episode 9: Parallel Lines

A relentless spotlight has shone on Holcomb since the Clutter murders. Many have profited financially from their tragedy and deep wounds have not been able to heal. Herb Clutter’s surviving daughters feel that their family was misrepresented in the novel. Many of those involved have never spoken about the incident. Bobby Rupp, Nancy’s boyfriend at the time of her death, is one of many Holcomb residents who have never read the book.

Driving and walking around Garden City, so much seems unchanged since the fifties. J.M. and I chanced upon an old diner, which has been preserved in its entirety, complete with its original menu board advertising Ice Cream soda for 19 cents. I thought of Susan Kidwell, one of Nancy Clutter’s best friends, fixating on a man sweeping leaves as she left the Philips Funeral Home in Garden City after viewing the bodies inside, trying not to faint. Her friend Judy told me that Susan lives in New York now. Still disturbed by the murders, she did not return to Holcomb for the anniversary memorial.  

In Wichita, south central Kansas, I was searching for a copy of LIFE magazine published in 1966. It contains an article about Capote and In Cold Blood – there are pictures of him posing outside the Holcomb post office, in others Dick and Perry look distrustfully into Richard Avedon’s lens. I wandered into an antique shop owned by a man called Grant Hewitt. He had a huge magazine archive, and although he didn’t have that issue, he found one that I wasn’t aware of, from 1967. Capote is on the cover flanked by Robert Blake and Scott Wilson who starred as Perry and Dick respectively in the 1967 film In Cold Blood, directed by Richard Brooks. It was shot in Holcomb, inside River Valley farm where the Clutters' lived, only 6 years after the murders. Brooks re-enacted the actual events as accurately as possible.

Blake had previously played a young Mexican boy selling lottery tickets in John Houston’s film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. By strange coincidence, Perry had watched this film eight times. It appealed to his daydream nature. He had hundreds of maps: he was obsessed with finding buried treasure; Capote described him as an “incessant conceiver of voyages.” In 2001, Blake was accused of shooting his wife dead, but acquitted by a jury of his peers.

Capote has been criticised for paying excessive attention to the killers' psyches in the wake of their abhorrent crime.  But the power of In Cold Blood is that there is no black and white, no easy conclusions for the killers or victims.  The novels' pathos extends beyond the murdered to the murderers themselves. If there is a lack of compassion shown for any character in the book I believe it is for Bonnie Clutter, the murdered mother, who struggled with depression. Perry and Capote were united by their early experiences of maternal abandonment – one of the many reasons Capote identified so strongly with Perry and perhaps why he goes to such pains to reveal the conflicting sides of his personality. No such sympathy is extended to Bonnie: her plight is almost dismissed.  I wonder if her story touched too closely on Capote’s painful memories of his absent mother, that he could not empathize with a woman who failed to provide emotionally for her own children. 

Tara Darby is a photographer based in Hackney, London. She is a regular contributor to Another, Dazed & Confused and many other international publications. She is currently working on a short film and exhibition

JM Lapham is a musician based in Austin, Texas. He has recorded albums with the band, The Earlies, for Names/679, and collaborated with Micah P. Hinson on The Late Cord for 4AD. He is currently finishing an album for an as yet untitled new project