The Garden City Telegram
Email this story | Add Your Comment
| Read (0) Comments
Unforgettable tragedy
Published 11/12/2009 in Local News
Clutter murders: Memories still vivid for former editor, reporter.
By KATHY HANKS
The Hutchinson News
Bill Brown knew to wait for Nancy and Kenyon Clutter. They never missed Sunday school.
Click to Purchase Photo Reprints!
Clutter family slaying
Click to Purchase Photo Reprints!
Telegram photo This was the scene outside the Clutter house the morning the bodies were discovered. Conducting their grim work were Finney Count Sheriff Earl Robinson, right, and two ambulance drivers.
Click to Purchase Photo Reprints!
Photo courtesy Nolan Powell Bob Greer, publisher and editor of the weekly Protection Press newspaper, reads a surprise anniversary edition of the paper with a four page supplement in honor of him. Greer was a reporter for The Telegram at the time of the Clutter murders.
Click to Purchase Photo Reprints!
Telegram photo Bill Brown, former editor/publisher of The Telegram who took the initial photos at the Clutter house shortly after the family members’ bodies were discovered, is shown at his desk in 1960.
He was their teacher at Garden City's First Methodist Church on Sunday morning 50 years ago. Brown recalled, recently, how he delayed the starting of class for them on that infamous morning.
Teaching the youth was Brown's Sunday job. But, he was also editor of The Garden City Telegram. He remembers that Nancy had something special to do that day in class, so he waited.
However, the two teens never arrived. Instead, the Finney County coroner, Dr. Bob Fenton, who also taught Sunday school at the church, came to Brown's classroom and asked him to grab a camera and go with him to Holcomb, a small town just seven miles west of Garden City.
"On the way over, he told me he had been summoned by the sheriff to go to the Clutters," Brown said.
Neither man knew why.
Today, 50 years later, memories aren't as clear as they once were. While shock dulls, Brown's recollection of that Sunday morning is still vivid in his mind.
The newspapers described it as a hideous tragedy for the small western Kansas community. But it also took on a personal meaning for Brown. He not only had the gruesome news to report -- four members of the prominent Herb Clutter family had been murdered -- but the unbelievable death of two teens he taught every week at church to comprehend.
"They were the nicest people you would ever meet. Nancy was a freckled-face girl you would like immediately. Pretty in a way, but not striking; she was wholesome," Brown said.
"Having gone in the house and knowing the kids, I will never erase it from my mind," he said.
While it's nothing he dwells on, the retired journalist and Kansas State University professor now living in Kansas City, Mo., said it was a period in his life that is still intense when recalled.
On that Sunday morning driving up the Chinese elm tree-lined road to Herb Clutter's modern farmhouse, Brown quickly switched from Sunday school teacher into his journalist mode. His photographer was out of town for the weekend, so taking the photos became his job.
He recalled walking into the house and seeing nothing unusual on the main level. Then Fenton and Brown went upstairs where they found Nancy and Mrs. Clutter bound and shot at close range in their beds.
When the two went downstairs to the basement, they were met by Finney County Sheriff Earl Robinson and Richard Rohleder, a detective with the Garden City Police Department.
Brown recalled Rohleder "Had a ball cap on backwards and was searching for foot prints. At the same time he whistled nervously with a mouth full of chewing tobacco."
In Brown's estimation, Rohleder became the hero of the investigation, solving the case with his discovery of the bloody boot print -- the evidence necessary to eventually convict the killers Perry Edward Smith and Richard Eugene Hickok.
Brown's photographs of the bodies being taken by stretcher from a side door of the home were distributed nationally on the wire services. Both The Hutchinson News and the Associated Press flew chartered planes to Garden City to pick up photographs to relay across the country.
Today, headlines of the murder of four people might not send deep shock waves across the country. But 50 years ago, Brown said, it was unusual enough to warrant calls from big city tabloids, nationally and internationally.
Brown recalled an east coast journalist calling The Telegram that Sunday night.
"I asked why the interest?" Brown said. "He said, 'I think it shatters the image of you people in Kansas.' I think he thought this was a hotbed of innocence and safety with little crime. These things might happen in crowded east, but not out here."
Brown never made it home that Sunday, returning instead to the Telegram office, where the newsroom phones were ringing with calls from across the country. He was being bombarded with offers to buy his photos of the crime scene.
"Heck no," Brown told the callers.
For Brown, a murder of such magnitude put a huge stress on his small news staff.¬
Brown had just hired Bob Greer, a journalist from Nebraska, who had come on board as the sports editor but had a desire to cover all breaking news.
While Greer didn't personally know the Clutters, he recalled Nancy's name on the softball roster that summer. Everyone played softball in a league back then, he said.
"I remember thinking Clutter was an odd name," he said.
Greer, who today publishes the Protection Press, recalled covering the scene in Holcomb on the day of the Clutter family funeral.
Everyone was in Garden City for the massive service. Holcomb looked like a ghost town. School was closed, everything was locked up, and there was no activity.
At the time, Greer was driving a vehicle with Nebraska tags. Everyone was under a degree of suspicion, and Greer began to sense that included him.
"For two or three years, the murder dominated our coverage," Greer said.
Just a little more than a month later, Hickock and Smith were arrested in Las Vegas.
Greer remembers the eerie night standing on the Finney County Courthouse lawn in the crowd of on-lookers that included Truman Capote and his friend, author Harper Lee, waiting for the suspects to arrive back in town.
Capote, a writer for the 'New Yorker," at the time and author of other literary works, had arrived in town after reading a brief about the murder in The New York Times. Capote later wrote the book "In Cold Blood."
This time, Hickock and Smith traveled to town in shackles.
"It was really spooky," he said, noting the officials worried there might be violence. I never saw people being guarded like that, with 20 to 25 patrolmen.
Greer went on to help with the coverage of the murder trial. That included a rare interview with Smith and Hickock.
"Bill didn't want to cover the murder trial because he was biased," Greer said.
Before Smith and Hickock, who were sentenced to death, left for the state penitentiary, Finney County Sheriff Grover Craig asked Greer if he wanted to talk to them.
While it wasn't an interview, he spent about 15 minutes with the two men. Hickock wasn't much of a talker, but Greer recalled Smith laughing and joking.
"Smith was a human being, the other guy wasn't much up to par," Greer said. "It was the most discouraging cost of six lives. A massive tragedy happened in a little place you could throw a rock and hit from Garden City."
In the end, Nancy and Kenyon's Sunday school teacher was a witness at the execution of their murderers.
"People talk about closure," Brown said. "I don't buy that at all. There is no closure. You learn to live with it. But it's never erased. Things will prompt that memory."
You can download a PDF of the Nov 16, 1959 Garden City Telegram front page.
Found 0 comment(s)!
Twitter Updates
