Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
been saving it: Wyatt Earp was from Pella, the little Iowa town with the windmills. Isn't
that great?
Fifty miles beyond Dodge City is Holcomb, Kansas, which gained a small notoriety as
the scene of the murders described with lavish detail in the Truman Capote book In Cold
Blood. In 1959, two small-time crooks broke into the house of a wealthy Holcomb rancher
named Herb Clutter because they had heard he had a safe full of money. In fact he didn't.
So, chagrined, they tied Clutter's wife and two teenaged children to their beds and took
Clutter down to the basement and killed them all. They slit Clutters throat (Capote de-
scribes his gurglings with a disturbing relish) and shot the others in the head at point-blank
range. Because Clutter had been prominent in state politics, the New York Times ran a
small story about the murders. Capote saw the story, became intrigued and spent five years
interviewing allthemainparticipants-friends, neighbors,relatives, policeinvestigators and
the murderers themselves. The topic, when it came out in 1965, was considered an instant
classic, largely because Capote told everyone it was. In any case, It was sutticiently semin-
al, as we used to say in college, to have made a lasting impact and it occurred to me that I
could profitably reread it and then go to Holcomb and make a lot of trenchant observations
about crime and violence in America.
I was wrong. I quickly realized there was nothing typical about the Clutter murders: they
would be as shocking today as they were then. And there was nothing particularly semin-
al about Capote's book. It was essentially just a grisly and sensational murder story that
pandered, in a deviously respectable way, to the readers baser instincts. All that a trip to
Holcomb would achieve would be to provide me with the morbid thrill of gawping at a
house in which a family had long before been senselessly slaughtered. Still, that's about all
I ask out of life, and it was bound, at the very least, to be more interesting than Historic
Front Street in Dodge City.
In Capote's book, Holcomb was a tranquil, dusty hamlet, full of intensely decent people, a
place whose citizens didn't smoke, drink, lie, swear or miss church, a place in which sex
outsidemarriagewasunforgivableandsexbeforemarriageunthinkable,inwhichteenagers
were home at eleven on a Saturday night, in which Catholics and Methodists didn't mingle
if they could possibly help it, in which doors were never locked, and children of eleven or
twelvewereallowedtodrivecars.ForsomereasonIfoundtheideaofchildrendrivingcars
particularly astonishing. In Capote's book, the nearest town was Garden City, five miles
down the highway. Things had clearly changed. Now Holcomb and Garden City had more
or less grown together, connected by an umbilicus of gas stations and fast-food places.
Holcomb was still dusty, but no longer a hamlet. On the edge of town was a huge high
school, obviously new, and all around were cheap little houses, also new, with barefooted
