Mockingbird (19 page)

Evidently, when it came to interpreting what this farm had to say about its former inhabitants, Nelle and Truman were on their own. They decided to examine the house separately: each would make maps of the floor plan and take notes on the contents of the rooms. In a sense, they would be interviewing the house the way they did people, and then, afterward, they could compare their impressions.

“Apparently [Hope] saw nothing evil in our explorations,” Nelle noted, though he was “alert as a fox.”
31
He and Lyon stepped away for a whispered conversation while Nelle and Truman oriented themselves to the layout of the house.

In a way, they 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 Boulware 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 the house, 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.

Nelle excused herself and walked past Van Vleet, who it seemed was permanently ensconced in his late partner's chair, to examine Herb Clutter's office.

Herb and his wife, Bonnie, forty-five, had been one of the most admired and active couples in Holcomb and Garden City. On the walls of Herb's dark veneer-paneled office were framed certificates and labeled notebooks covering his career. “If something happened in Holcomb, you pretty much knew Herb or Bonnie had something to do with it,” said Merl Wilson, who, with his wife, Argybell, alternated with the Clutters in leading the local 4-H.
32
Herb had been president of the National Association of Wheat Growers and directed the Farm Credit Administration for the district covering Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Colorado. The books in the floor-to-ceiling shelves in his office reflected his singular interests—
Crops in Peace and War
,
Beef Cattle in Kansas
, and
Farmers at the Crossroads.
In Garden City, Clutter had also served on half a dozen committees for the First Methodist Church. In many ways, he was to western Kansas what Nelle's father, A. C. Lee, was to southern Alabama: a pillar of the small-town community determined to preserve its sanctity.

Nelle headed upstairs next, out from under the quietly watchful eyes of Hope, Van Vleet, and Lyon. At the top of the stairs she looked briefly into a small bathroom with pink tile and towel rods before moving on to the bedrooms. Room by room, she began to take inventory in her notes, of everything she saw.

The first bedroom she came to had belonged to Eveanna, who was, by this time, married and living in Mt. Carroll, Illinois. (She was one of the two older daughters who no longer lived at home.) Bonnie Clutter had been sleeping in Eveanna's bedroom, and that was where her body had been discovered. Mrs. Clutter, a pretty wraith of a woman, taught Sunday school and belonged to the Women's Society of Christian Service. She was said to suffer from debilitating bouts of depression that kept her crying in bed for days. One night, she had been found wandering distractedly in Garden City and taken home. (Truman, rummaging downstairs in the basement bathroom, had found vials of prescription tranquilizers labeled “Bonnie Clutter, Wesley Hospital, take four a day.”)
33

Nelle glanced at the old-fashioned dresser of heavy oaklike wood with a big mirror, the throw rugs, and an “atrocious table lamp on the table beside the bed.”
34
It was a stuffy room to be cooped up in. Then she moved on to Beverly's room, but since Beverly was away at Kansas University Medical Center studying nursing, and nothing about the crime involved her room, Nelle only took note of the dark, heavy furniture.

Around the corner was Kenyon Clutter's pale-gray-green bedroom. Solitary and studious, according to classmates, Kenyon had been fifteen when he died. His bedroom was the largest, stretching nearly half the length of the house, suggesting that he was the intended heir of River Valley Farm. On the bookshelf above his bed were titles of boys' books—the complete
Hardy Boys
series—and a handful of young adult bestsellers, including Junior Literary Guild selections. Framed pictures of his two eldest sisters, Eveanna and Beverly, held pride of place on one of the shelves above his desk. “Kenyon Always be Good,” Nelle read in the corner of Eveanna's picture. There were also several completed plastic cars from model kits, three figurines of Kenyon's favorite breeds of dogs, two snapshots of his prize-winning sheep, and four horse figurines. Against the opposite wall stood an antique wind-up Victrola, a symbol of Kenyon's fascination with mechanical things.

Down the hall was the smaller bedroom belonging to Kenyon's sixteen-year-old sister, Nancy. Dark-eyed, creamy-complexioned, smart in school, active in school clubs, and the recent star of her school play, Nancy was any parent's ideal of a middle-class teenager. On the day before her death, she taught a neighbor girl how to bake cherry pie “her special way.”
35
The walls of her bedroom were pink, and the ceiling painted light blue. She had created a vanity for herself by adding a skirt to an old table. On a cork bulletin board were photos of classmates and clippings from the school newspaper. Near the window was a print of Jesus Christ; and above the bed where Nancy's body had been found were pictures of three kittens. In an overstuffed chair sat a button-eyed teddy bear that Nancy's steady, Bobby Rupp, had won for her at a county fair. Missing, though, and in the hands of the KBI as evidence, was a diary that Nancy had kept for three years with daily entries. “Damnation. We've got to see them,” Nelle wrote in notes when she found out about the diary's existence.
36

She returned downstairs where Lyon, Van Vleet, and Hope were making small talk. Truman was outside drawing a map of the property.

Having seen Herb Clutter's office already, Nelle walked around the living room. A light green sectional sofa matched the walls; the carpet was pink. Mounted above a console record player was another print of Jesus Christ. Christian books and magazines such as
A Man Called Peter
and
Guideposts
lay on shelves within reach of Herb's favorite easy chair—“modern religious crap,” in Nelle's opinion.
37
Off the living room by an adjoining hallway was a large bathroom with pink tiles on the walls, white and chocolate-colored ones alternating on the floor, and a door to the master bedroom, where Herb slept alone. The walls of Herb's bedroom were light blue, the bed large enough for two; above it was a print of Jesus Christ, this time gazing down on biblical Jerusalem. (By now Nelle was beginning to see humor in the pronounced household themes; later she asked Truman if there was a print of Jesus by the washer and dryer she might have missed.)
38

Going back out into the hallway, Nelle turned left toward the dining room, which was the same banal green as the living room. The dining table and chairs were blond and matched a breakfront. Continuing on through the dining room, she came to the white-and-blue kitchen Herb had designed with an eye toward good organization. The cabinets, featuring a built-in dishwasher and stove—unusual for the times—were all at a convenient height, and in a few places the kickboards turned down to provide steps for the children to reach things. There was an ingenious swinging door by the baseboard for sweeping refuse from the floor and sending it down a chute to a garbage can in the basement. One side of the kitchen was devoted to a breakfast nook with a table that would have been large enough to accommodate all six members of the family for a big farm-style breakfast.

Around the corner from the kitchen was a utility room. On the morning the murders were discovered, two boys doing chores on the farm had placed fresh milk inside the utility room at dawn and gone out again, unaware of why the Clutters weren't up and about.

That was all there was to see on the main and upper floors. Nelle went down into the basement.

At the bottom of the stairs was a third bathroom—very up-to-date, Nelle thought, and done in blue and white tile. The center room in the basement was the playroom, scene of church parties for the United Methodist Youth Fellowship. “They were typical 1950s church youth parties, probably on Sunday night, with refreshments, chatting and Ping-Pong. No dancing or music as I remember,” said one of Eveanna's friends, Ted Hall. “Drinking, smoking and profanity was not a part of that crowd and most parents trusted their daughters with young men that they knew. Usually with good reason.”
39
Kenyon's body had been found on the sofa, and Nelle made a dark blotch on her basement map to indicate that. She reached for the bookshelf and flipped through Nancy's 4-H notebook. The girl had written that her father had helped her decorate the basement by drilling holes over the fireplace for an eight-pointed star clock. In a corner of the playroom was a small vending machine that Kenyon had taken apart out of curiosity.

One room over, at the farthest end of the basement, was the furnace where Herb's body had been found lying on a cardboard mattress box. Nelle stood near a red stain on the wall and drew another gout of blood on her map to indicate the location of Herb Clutter's murder. She made no remark about the hellishness of the place, only listed what she saw: low ceiling, unfinished walls, cement floor, three water heaters. Then she went back upstairs to wait for Truman.

It had taken about an hour for Nelle and Truman to go through the house and walk around the property. They thanked Hope and Lyon for making the house available to them—especially in light of how far Mr. Lyon had driven—and bid taciturn Mr. Van Vleet goodbye. They had two more interviews scheduled that day: a second one with Mrs. Ashida, and one with Mrs. Clarence Katz, whose daughter Jolene was the girl Nancy taught to bake a pie on the last day of her life. Afterward, they returned to the Warren Hotel to go over their notes.

The inside of the house had been an eye-opener. For some time, Nelle had been wondering about the peculiar mix of behaviors in the Clutter family: Herb's hail-fellow-well-met conduct evident everywhere, Bonnie Clutter's debilitating emotional problems, Nancy's perkiness, and Kenyon's reputation as a loner. The interior of the big house provided a clue to the emotional atmosphere of River Valley Farm: it was cold and repressive. A small brass door knocker identified the occupant behind each bedroom door. It was as if the rooms were private offices belonging to individuals instead of one home embracing a family. Truman marveled at the implication: “quite impersonal,” he jotted down.
40
But it suited Herb Clutter's need for control. Said a neighbor, Herb never did anything that didn't benefit Herb Clutter. He was a driven man—“spare, quick, and dynamic in appearance”—wrote a
New York Times
reporter sent to interview him in 1954 as a paradigm of the modern farmer.
41
The only way he'd permit a natural gas company to drill on his land, for instance, was if he received a one-eighth share of the profits. He used some of the gas money to pump underground water for the farm. Since his royalty receipts paid to run the water pump, he was getting both gas and water for nothing. His home operated along the same lines: tight, efficient, and well managed.

The two surviving Clutter daughters, Eveanna and Beverly, were the embodiments of women who grew up in such an environment. Arriving at the farm the day after the murders, they informed KBI investigators that they would like them to leave because there were things in the house they wanted. Detective Harold Nye, thinking about the shock they must have suffered, permitted them to enter certain rooms only. Once inside, they argued over furniture, knickknacks, kitchen utensils—everything in sight—like magpies. “I mean, good Lord,” said Nye, “here we had the murder of the entire family, and we're working this thing up and they were in the house fighting over the merchandise that was there.”
42
Once, he stopped to listen when they had fallen silent. They were taking a break to play the piano and sing.

Four days after the murders, neither young woman showed much emotion during the funeral. Nelle overheard a mourner speculate later whether they were under sedation.
43
(By contrast, Bobby Rupp, Nancy's steady, who had sneaked into the funeral home to hold his girlfriend's hand one last time, wept whenever he heard the song “Teen Angel” on the radio for months.)
44
After the service, Eveanna promptly went to the high school to collect Kenyon's and Nancy's belongings, completely cool and collected, said Nancy's English teacher, Mrs. Polly Stringer. Mrs. Stringer, fighting back tears because Eveanna looked so much like Nancy, was hoping Eveanna would let her keep the ribbon Nancy had worn in her hair the night she starred in the school play. But no, Nancy's sisters had to have that, too.
45
Hearing this, Nelle dubbed Eveanna “Miss Iceberg of 1959.”
46

The whole community was aghast when Beverly went ahead with her wedding the week after the murders. Invited guests who attended the ceremony at the First Methodist Church in Garden City were there out of a sense of loyalty to the family, but most had also been among the one thousand mourners at the four Clutters' memorial service. On the spot where just a few days earlier the caskets of her parents and brother and sister had been placed on biers, Beverly took her vows. The leftover funeral meats could truly have furnished the wedding feast. The sisters departed shortly thereafter with a vanload of furniture and clothing. In addition, they were each forty thousand dollars richer because Herb Clutter, by an eerie coincidence, had taken out a double-indemnity insurance policy on the day of his death.