Free I Am Scout by Charles J. Shields Page B

(right), one of the Clutter family murderers, receiving a mental fitness examination in March 1960 before his trial. (AP photo)

    Smith’s partner Dick Hickock was talkative and friendly. “Never seen anyone so poised, relaxed, free & easy in the face of four 1st-degree murder charges,” Nelle marveled in her notes. (AP photo)

    Alvin Dewey, a detective on the Clutter case, helped Nelle and Truman gain inside information about the investigation as it unfolded. (Corbis)
    And there were key people who refused to be interviewed under any circumstances; they’d had their fill of reporters describing the gory details of a crime involving a respected family. For example, the first witnesses to find Nancy Clutter’s body had been teenagers Nancy Ewalt and her friend Sue Kidwell, who had run screaming from the Clutters’ house. When Nelle and Truman approached Nancy’s father, Clarence, and asked for a moment of his time, he fixed them with his watery blue eyes, framed in a red, weather-beaten face, and said evenly three times to their questions, “I’m a busy man,” and finally turned away. 12
    After several days of this, Truman began to believe that coming out to Kansas had been a mistake all around. “I cannot get any rapport with these people,” he told Nelle. “I can’t get a handle on them.” Except for two high school English teachers who had read some of his work, no one knew him from the man in the moon. How many more times was he going to be called “Mr. Cappuchi” or “Ka-poat”?
    â€œHang on,” Nelle said. “You will penetrate this place.” 13
    A few days later they got their big break.
    *   *   *
    On Sunday, December 20 , Nelle and Truman were waiting to be picked up in the lobby of the Warren Hotel by Herb Clutter’s former estate attorney, Cliff Hope. Hope was on Dr. McCain’s list of people to get to know, and Truman had been pestering him for several days. Finally, he had agreed to drive the pair out to the Clutter farm. The KBI had placed the farm off-limits, but Hope agreed to intercede with the family’s executor, Kenneth Lyon, explaining that Nelle and Truman were friends of Dr. McCain’s. Mr. Lyon acquiesced, but insisted on being present and drove the 200 miles from Wichita to meet them there. 14
    The farmhouse was at the end of a quarter-mile lane in Holcomb. Hope parked near the side. The yellow brick and white clapboard home with 14 rooms, 3 baths, and 2 wood fireplaces had been built in the late 1940 s, at a time when many homes in the county went without running water. Surrounded by a lawn landscaped with pointed, jade green bushes, the big house had been the crown of Mr. Clutter’s 4 , 000 -acre farm. When Kenneth Lyon unlocked the front door, everyone started up the hedge-lined walk. The heat in the house was off, but the scent of lemon furniture polish hung in the chilly air.
    In a way, Nelle and Truman had come full circle from their childhoods in Monroeville. They were figuratively once again on South Alabama Avenue where they had lived next door to each other and fantasized that a madman lived down the street in the tumbledown house owned by the Boleware family. They had spied on that house, speculated about the goings-on inside, and dared each other to sneak inside that lair. Nelle had used it, with some embellishments, as the home of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. By contrast, this successful Kansas farmer’s house, perched in a breezy, sunny spot, didn’t have creaking hinges, broken shutters, and flickering shadows, or any of the lurid conventions associated with horror. But by exploring it, they were embarking once again on a hunt for something monstrous.
    It took them about an hour to comb the house and the outside. They went room by room, noting the furnishings, their color, the art on the walls, and even the books on the bookshelves. Nelle drew a