IN COLD BLOOD (PART 2): PERSONS UNKNOWN

IN COLD BLOOD (PART 2): PERSONS UNKNOWN — THE CLUTTER MURDERS, ALVIN DEWEY, AND THE HUNT FOR PERRY SMITH

 The Clutter family is dead. Holcomb, Kansas is in shock. And for 6 weeks, investigators have nothing: no suspects, no motive, no real leads.

In Part 2 of Crimery’s 4-part In Cold Blood series, host Jennifer Novotney follows the story into its most unsettling section: “Persons Unknown.” This is where Truman Capote’s book stops being only about the murders — and starts becoming a study of fear, suspicion, obsession, and the men who did it.

This episode explores the horrifying discovery of the Clutter family murders, the collapse of safety in Holcomb, KBI investigator Alvin Dewey’s desperate search for answers, and the 6-week stretch where the killers remained unknown. Then the story turns: a prison tip changes everything, and the hunt for Perry Smith and Dick Hickock begins.

But this episode goes deeper than the investigation. It also explores why Capote made Perry Smith the emotional center of In Cold Blood — and why that choice still disturbs readers today.

In this episode:

•  The discovery of the Clutter family murders 
•  Why Holcomb, Kansas stopped trusting itself 
•  Alvin Dewey and the weight of a case with no answers 
•  Floyd Wells, the prison tip, and the break that changed everything 
•  Perry Smith’s childhood, trauma, and the controversy around Capote’s sympathy 
•  Dick Hickock, the planner behind the crime 
•  Why “Persons Unknown” is one of the most psychologically unsettling sections of In Cold Blood

If you’re reading along, this episode covers Part 2: “Persons Unknown” and sets up Part 3: “The Answer.”

Host: Jennifer Novotney
Show: Crimery
Website: crimery.show

Buy the "In Cold Blood" here: https://amzn.to/4sCZUj2

KEYWORDS
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote, Clutter family murders, Persons Unknown, Perry Smith, Dick Hickock, Alvin Dewey, Holcomb Kansas murders, Herbert Clutter, Nancy Clutter, Kenyon Clutter, Bonnie Clutter, Floyd Wells, true crime podcast, literary true crime, Jennifer Novotney, Crimery

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

On the morning of November 15th, 1959, Nancy Ewalt and her father pulled up the long dirt lane to the Clutter house. It was a Sunday. Nancy and her friend were supposed to ride to church together, the way they always did. But no one answered the door. The cars were in the driveway. The house was quiet. And something was wrong. They drove to the home of Susan Kidwell, Nancy Clutter's best friend. The Kidwells hadn't seen the family either. Together, they went back to the Clutter house. The girls went inside. Susan walked to Nancy's room, and then the screaming started. Within the hour, the full scope of the horror was clear. Herb Clutter, bound and shot in the basement. His throat was cut. Kenyon on a couch in the playroom, a pillow tucked behind his head, shot in the face. Nancy in her bed, her wrists tied behind her, a single shotgun blast to the head. Bonnie in her room upstairs, gagged with adhesive tape, shot in the side of the head. Each killed at close range. The telephone lines had been cut. A pair of binoculars and Kenyon's transistor radio were missing. Nothing else. And then Holcomb, Kansas, the town that never locked its doors, locked every single one of them. I'm Jennifer Novotny, and this is Primary. In episode one, we walked through the first section of the book, The Last to See Them Alive, where Capote built the world of the Clutter family, immersed us in Holcomb, and used parallel narration to bring the killers and their victims into a collision course. We talked about how Capote constructed the clutters as literary characters, Nancy's cherry pie, Kenyan's Hope Chest, Bonnie's isolation, Herb's unshakable decency, and how he withheld the murders at the end of the section, cutting away at the very moment the killers reached the door. If you listened to that episode and felt a pit in your stomach when we got to the end, that was Capote's design. He wanted you to feel the dread. He wanted you to carry that dread into part two. Today we enter Persons Unknown. And this is where the book transforms. Because Capote is no longer just telling you what happened, he's now asking you to understand the people who did it and to sit with the uncomfortable reality that understanding is not the same as forgiving. The title itself is significant. Persons unknown is a legal term. It's what investigators write on a case file when they have no suspects. And for six weeks after the clutter murders, that's exactly where the investigation stood. No names, no motive, no leads. Just four bodies and a town that was coming apart. This section does three things at once. It shows you a town in shock, an investigation going nowhere, and two killers on the run whose inner lives are far more complicated than the word killer suggests. This is in cold blood. Capote opens Persons Unknown with something deeply unsettling. The discovery of the bodies, told from the perspective of the people who find them. Nancy Ewald and Susan Kidwell, two of Nancy Clutter's closest friends, arrive at the house that Sunday morning expecting a normal ride to church. When no one answers, they enter the house. Susan walks down the hallway to Nancy's room. She finds her friend in bed, her wrists tied behind her, a shotgun wound to the head. The girls run screaming from the house. Clarence Ewalt, Nancy's father, enters to call an ambulance. The phone lines are cut. He has to drive to a neighbor's house just to make the call. By the time the sheriff arrives, the scene is already becoming the worst thing anyone in this community has ever witnessed. What follows is one of the most quietly devastating sequences of the book. The sheriff and then KBI investigators move through the house room by room, discovering each body. And Capote gives you these discoveries in the order they happen. So you experience the horror the way the investigators did. One body at a time, each worse than the last. Nancy upstairs, Bonnie in her room, hands tied in front of her, so that she looked as though she were praying. And then the basement, Kenyon on a couch, a pillow tucked behind his head, and finally Herb on a mattress box on the cold concrete floor, his throat cut, and a shotgun blast to the side of his head. Larry Hendricks, a local English teacher who lived near the clutters, accompanied the sheriff into the house. He had the presence of mind to take notes, realizing he might be called to testify. His detailed observations became part of the investigative record. It is a small detail, but it's worth noting. A writer was one of the first people to see the crime scene. And another writer, Capote, would turn those observations into literature. Pay attention to a detail that haunts investigator Alvin Dewey long after this morning. The contradictions at the crime scene. The clutters were bound, gagged, and executed, but someone also tucked Nancy into her bed. Someone placed a pillow under Kenyon's head. Someone put a mattress box under herb on the cold basement floor. Whoever did this took the time to make the victims comfortable before killing them. Dewey cannot make sense of this. How does a person commit an act of pure violence? And an act of tenderness in the same night, in the same house, to the same people? That question will follow him through the entire investigation. It's the puzzle at the center of the case, and it's one of the central questions of the book. Because it suggests that whoever did this was not simply a monster. Monsters don't tuck people into bed. Whatever this person was, they were something more complicated and more disturbing than the word monster can contain. In the days and weeks following the murders, Capote turns his attention to Holcomb and Garden City. And what he documents is not just grief. It's the death of a community's identity. Before November 15th, Holcomb was a place where people didn't lock their doors. After November 15th, they locked them. They armed themselves, they watched their neighbors with suspicion. Because in those early weeks, no one knew whether the killer was a stranger or someone they already knew. The investigation had no leads, no suspects, no motive. For all anyone could tell, the person who murdered the clutters might be sitting next to them at Hartman's cafe. Capote captures this shift with devastating precision. He records the gossip, the rumors, the accusations that begin to circulate. Bobby Rupp, Nancy's boyfriend, and the last person to see the family alive, is briefly considered a suspect. A cruel additional indignity on top of a devastating loss. Families begin to leave town. Some pack up and move out of state entirely, unable to live in a place where this kind of thing could happen. The social fabric, the neighborliness that Capote so carefully established in part one unravels. At Hartman's Cafe, which had been the gathering place for the community, the murders become a kind of forbidden topic, and an obsessive one simultaneously. People cannot stop talking about it, but every conversation leads to suspicion. Was it someone local? Did someone have a grudge against her? The idea that the killers might be strangers, random, motiveless, coming from nowhere, is almost worse than the alternative, because it means there is no way to protect yourself. If it can happen to the clutters, it can happen to anyone. Beverly Clutter, the second eldest daughter, comes home for her father's funeral and gets married just days later in a quiet ceremony. Think about that. A funeral and a wedding in the same week. Grief and hope pressed up against each other. Life insists on continuing even when everything else feels like it should stop. What Capodia is showing you here is that the crime did not end when the shotgun blast stopped echoing. The crime continued. It continued in the fear that replaced trust, in the suspicion that replaced neighborliness, in the locked doors and loaded guns that replaced the open, unlocked world the clutters had lived in. The four people killed that night were not the only victims. The community itself was a victim. And unlike the clutters, the community had to go on living with what had been done to it. At the beginning of the section, Capote writes, Today this quartet of old hunting companions had once again gathered to make the familiar journey, but in an unfamiliar spirit and armed with odd, non-sportive equipment, mops and pails, scrubbing brushes, and a hamper heaped with old rags and strong detergents. They were wearing their oldest clothes, for feeling it their duty, a Christian task, these men had volunteered to clean certain of the 14 rooms in the main house at River Valley Farm. Rooms in which four members of the Clutter family had been murdered by, as their death certificates declared, a person or persons unknown. Marie Dewey, the investigator's wife, has a dream in which Bonnie Clutter appears to her and tells her there is nothing worse than being murdered. It's a small, almost throwaway detail, but Capote includes it because it shows how deeply the murders have penetrated the psyche of this community. The crime has invaded people's sleep. It's followed them home and into their beds. Alvin Dewey was a KBI agent, a fourth generation Kansan, 47 years old, and a personal friend of the Clutter family. He had known Herb and Bonnie. He had attended the same church. This case was never just professional for him. It was personal from the first hour. Dewey is assigned as the lead investigator, working alongside KBI agents Harold Nye, Roy Church, and Clarence Dunce. And for six weeks they have nothing. No motive, no forced entry. The killers came in through an unlocked door, almost no physical evidence. The killers retrieved every spent shotgun shell, just a single bloody footprint, and some cord used to bind the victims. Dewey checks over 700 pieces of information. He personally conducts more than 200 interviews. Every lead dead ends. Men at Hartman's cafe start openly criticizing him for the lack of progress. His wife Marie worries about him. He has a recurring nightmare where he spots the killers in a cafe, chases them through a plate glass window, and they escape. He can't stop visiting the clutter house, walking through the empty rooms, standing in Herb's office. At one point, he thinks he sees a face in Bonnie's window. Police respond and find a vagrant named Jonathan Adrian squatting in the house with a shotgun and a hunting knife. For one electric moment, everyone thinks the case is solved. It's not. Adrian has nothing to do with the murders. He's just another lost person who wandered into the wrong place. And then, six weeks in, the phone rings. At the Kansas State Penitentiary, an inmate named Floyd Wells has been listening to the radio. He hears a report about the Clutter's murders and goes cold. Because Floyd Wells used to work for Herb Clutter. He was a farmhand on River Valley Farm, and in prison he had told his cellmate Dick Hickcock about the Clutter family. About how Herb was wealthy, about the house, about a safe he believed was in the home office. It was prison talk, the kind of big score fantasizing that inmates do to pass the time. Wells never thought Hickok would actually do anything with it, but now four people are dead. And Floyd Wells knows exactly who did it. He waits for weeks before coming forward. Snitching in person can get you killed. But eventually, the weight of what he knows is too much. He contacts the warden. The information is passed to the KBI, and Alvin Dewey, who has been drowning in Dead and Leeds for a month and a half, gets two names. Richard Hickok and Perry Smith. Everything changes. KBI agent Harold Nye fans out across the country. Cox's parents in Olatha, Perry's sister in San Francisco, Perry's father in Alaska. The net begins to close. But the killers don't know this yet. They're still on the road, still running, still unaware that their names are now on a list. While Dewey has been grinding through dead ends in Kansas, Capote has been following Perry and Dick on the road. And this is where Persons Unknown takes its most audacious turn because Capote does not simply track the killer's movements. He takes you inside their minds. After the murders, Perry and Dick drive back east through the Kansas night. They stop along the way. Dick cleans the blood off the shotgun with water drained from the car radiator. Perry digs a hole with the hunting knife and buries the spent shotgun cartridges and the unused rope and tape. They burn their bloodstained clothing at a roadside park. By the time they reach Olatha the next morning, there's almost no physical evidence connecting them to the crime. And then almost immediately, they fall back into the rhythm of petty crime as if nothing has happened. Dick begins writing bad checks all over Kansas City, at department stores, gas stations, anywhere that will take them. They use the money to eat, to buy gas, to keep moving. They head to Mexico, crossing the border with a stolen car and almost no cash. In Mexico, they live on the margins. They befriend a wealthy German tourist named Otto and go deep sea fishing off Alcapuco. Perry catches a giant sailfish and is photographed with it, grinning, looking for all the world like a man on the vacation of his life. It's one of the most jarring images in the book. A man who murdered four people weeks ago, beaming beside a trophy fish in the Mexican sun. But the money runs out. It always runs out. They're forced to leave Mexico, hitchhiking back toward the United States. Along the way, they pick up a ride from a man traveling alone. And Capote reveals that Perry and Dick seriously consider killing him, clubbing him over the head, and taking his car. The only thing that stops them is that the driver picks up another hitchhiker and the moment passes. The driver never knows how close he came. Capote does not present any of this as monstrous in tone. He presents it as human. And this is what makes the section of the book so uncomfortable and so important. Perry and Dick eat hamburgers, argue about money, bicker over petty annoyances, sleep in barns, pick up soda bottles from the roadside for spare change. They're in every outward way to ordinary drifters. The murders sit underneath their daily lives like a fault line that no one sees. Perry Smith is the character Capote is most drawn to, and it shows. He gets more pages, more inner life, more sympathy than anyone else in the book, including the clutters. And whether that imbalance is a deliberate choice or a personal bias, is something worth thinking about as you read. In Persons Unknown, Capote reveals Perry's backstory in full. And it's one of the most harrowing childhoods in American literature. He was born in 1928 in Nevada, one of four children. His parents, Tex John Smith and Florence Flo Buckskin, were rodeo performers. His father, an Irish cowboy, his mother, a Native American bronch rider. For a few years, the family traveled the rodeo circuit together, and those early memories are among the only happy ones Perry has. Then his parents' marriage fell apart. His mother took the children to San Francisco. She became an alcoholic. Perry was placed in a Catholic orphanage where nuns beat him for wetting the bed. He was later moved to a Salvation Army children's shelter where a nurse nearly drowned him in ice water as punishment for the same thing. He never got past the third grade. His mother eventually died, choking on her own vomit while drunk. His sister Fern killed herself by jumping from a hotel window. His brother Jimmy shot himself the day after his wife committed suicide. Of Perry's four-person family, only his sister Barbara survived. And she wanted as little to do with him as possible. Perry's father eventually took him back, and the two of them drifted around the country in a homemade trailer. Alaska, the lower 48, wherever Tex thought he could make a living. They tried to build a hunting lodge in the Alaskan wilderness. It failed. They nearly starved. They had a final falling out over the last biscuit in the house, and Perry left for good. He joined the Merchant Marine at 16, then the Army, where he served in Korea and earned a bronze star for bravery. That decoration mattered enormously to Perry. It was proof, the only official proof he had, that he was capable of something honorable. He kept it among his belongings, along with everything else he could not bring himself to throw away. After his discharge, a motorcycle accident left his legs permanently damaged and him in chronic pain for the rest of his life. He walked with a limp. He was addicted to aspirin. His body, which had already been small, was now grotesquely disproportionate. A powerful, muscular torso set on top of stunted, scarred legs that looked like they belonged to a much smaller person. He drifted into petty crime, ended up in the Kansas State Penitentiary, and there he met two people who would define the rest of his short life. The first was Willie J, an assistant prison chaplain's clerk, who saw something in Perry that no one else did, or at least who told Perry what Perry desperately wanted to hear. Willie J. treated him as intelligent, sensitive, special. He wrote letters analyzing Perry's family dynamics with the vocabulary of a pop psychologist. For Perry, who had never been told he was worth anything, Willie J. was a lifeline. In fact, Perry's original reason for returning to Kansas was not to meet up with Dick, but to reconnect with Willie J. He arrived a few hours too late. Willie J had already left the area, and so Perry, with no one else to turn to, fell in. With Dick instead. The second person he met in prison was Dick Hickok. And where Willie J saw Perry's potential, Dick saw something else. A man he believed was capable of killing without hesitation. Perry had told Dick a story about beating a man to death with a bicycle chain. A story that turned out to be completely fabricated. But Dick believed it, and that lie became the foundation of their entire criminal partnership. Kirpodi writes, For almost a year, father and son lived together in the house near Reno. And Perry went to school. I finished the third grade, Perry recalled, which was the finish. I never went back because that summer dad built a primitive sort of trailer, what he called a house car. It had two bunks and a little cooking galley. The stove was good. You could cook anything on it, baked our own bread. I used to put up preserves, pickled apples, crab apple jelly. Anyway, for the next six years we shifted around the country. What Capote is doing here is something deeply uncomfortable. He is making you feel for the man who killed the clutters. He's not excusing Perry. He's not saying the murders were justified, but he's showing you in grandular detail the life that produced this person. And he's asking you to hold two truths at once. That Perry Smith did something unforgivable, and that Perry Smith was shaped by forces that would break most people. This is one of the most controversial aspects of the entire book. Some readers feel Capote goes too far that by giving Perry this much backstory, this much inner life, this much sympathy, he diminishes the clutters. The victims get one section. The killer gets the rest of the book. That imbalance is worth sitting with. Perry carries two large boxes of personal belongings everywhere he goes old letters, notebooks, souvenirs, a dictionary he loves, scraps of poetry. He sees himself as an intellectual and an artist, a man of extraordinary potential who was denied every opportunity. He keeps a private diary filled with vocabulary words, quotes, and ideas for speeches he will never give. The words are often big and obscure, the kind of words a self-educated person collects to prove that he belongs in rooms he was never invited into. He dreams of treasure hunting, of singing in nightclubs, of being recognized for his talent. He still wets the bed. He still sucks his thumb in his sleep. He has a recurring dream about a giant yellow parrot, as tall as a man, golden like a sunflower, that swoops down to rescue him whenever he's being beaten or humiliated. The parrot blinds his tormentors with its beak, feeds upon their eyes, and then gently lifts Perry up and carries him away to paradise. That dream tells you more about Perry Smith than any psychological evaluation could. He's a man who, deep inside, is still a child waiting to be saved. He has been waiting his entire life. The parrot never comes. And eventually the rage that built up in all those years of waiting, in orphanages, in his mother's apartment, in his father's trailer, in prison, found its way out in the worst possible way. On the worst possible night, against the worst possible people. He is, in Capote's rendering, both a killer and a broken child. And the book never lets you forget either one. One more thing about Perry that Capote wants you to notice, when he and Dick are on the road, Perry is the one reading the newspaper accounts of the murders. He's the one who's nervous, haunted, looking over his shoulder. He has a premonition, a hunch, that they will be caught, and he keeps mentioning a connection named Floyd, who could link them to the crime. Dick waves this off. Dick orders another hamburger. The difference between them in these moments is the difference between a man who knows what he has done and a man who just doesn't care. If Perry is the character Capote spends the most time with, Dick is the one he keeps at arm's length. And the contrast tells you something. Dick was born in 1931 in Kansas City, Kansas, to decent hardworking parents, Walter and Eunice Hickok. He was a high school football star who dreamed of a college scholarship his family couldn't afford. A car accident in 1950 left his face permanently disfigured. After that, two failed marriages, three sons he did not raise, bad checks, petty theft, prison. Here's the thing about Dick. He didn't come from deprivation. He came from love. His parents did everything right, and it wasn't enough. There's no orphanage in Dick's story, no dead siblings, no ice water torture. Whatever's wrong with Dick Hickok did not come from the outside. Dick planned the robbery. He said it would be a cinch, the perfect score. He insisted they leave no witnesses. He recruited Perry because he believed Perry would pull the trigger. And on the night of the murders, Capote writes that Perry stopped Dick from sexually assaulting Nancy Clutter. Dick's response, deal me out, baby, I'm a normal. That line says everything. Dick's entire identity rests on the idea that he is an ordinary guy who caught bad breaks. He sleeps soundly every night. He shows no remorse. When he reads the newspaper accounts of the murders, he's not haunted. He's checking to see if the police have any leads. Without Dick, there's no crime. He's the architect. Perry pulled the trigger, but Dick drew up the plans. And the question the book leaves you with is, which one scares you more? One of the most fascinating threads in Persons Unknown is the relationship between Perry and Dick. Because it's not a friendship. It's not a partnership of equals. It's something stranger and more volatile than either of those things. Perry initially latched onto Dick in prison because Dick seemed to be everything Perry was not. Confident, decisive, masculine, and practical. Perry had invented a story about killing a man with a bicycle chain just to impress Dick. To make Dick think he was dangerous enough to be worth knowing. The lie worked. Dick began to see Perry as a natural killer. Someone who could do the things Dick could plan, but couldn't bring himself to do it. In reality, Perry was none of those things. He was a damaged, lonely man clinging to the first person who seemed to want him around. And Dick was using him. Their relationship is built on mutual deception. Perry pretending to be harder than he is, Dick pretending to respect him more than he does. What holds them together is not trust or affection. It's need. Perry needs someone who makes him feel like he belongs. Dick needs someone he believes will pull the trigger when the time comes. Each provides the other with something essential. Each resents the other for it. In Mexico, after the murders, the cracks in this dynamic begin to show. Dick mocks Perry's treasure hunting fantasies, the dream of diving for sunken Spanish gold, that Perry has carried around for years. Perry, hurt and humiliated, begins to see through Dick's bluster and recognizes him for what he is. A petty con man, a check forger, a predator who targets young girls. The admiration Perry once felt curdles into something closer to contempt. And yet they stay together. They keep driving, keep running, keep sharing cheap hotel rooms and diner meals. Not because of loyalty, but because neither one has anyone else on Earth. Dick's family does not know what he's done. Perry's only surviving sister wants nothing to do with him. Willie J is gone. They are, as Dick himself later says, two of the most alone people who ever lived. And their aloneness binds them to each other like a chain. Capode captures this dynamic with surgical precision. And it sets up everything that will happen in the interrogation scenes in part three. When the pressure comes, this partnership will not hold. It will crack along exactly the fault lines Capote has shown you here. Because it was never real. It was two broken men leaning against each other in the dark, each one hoping the other would not fall first. Here's what I want you to take away from persons unknown. In part one, you fell in love with a family. In part two, Capote asks you to do something much harder. Know the men who killed them. Not forgive them or excuse them. Just know them. And he never gives you Perry's account of the murders. Not yet. You learn everything about Perry in this section, except the one thing you most want to know. What happened inside that house? Capote is holding it back the same way he held back the murders at the end of part one. And the longer you wait, the more you learn about Perry as a person, the harder it's going to hit when the truth finally comes. By the time you finish Persons Unknown, you know Perry Smith almost as well as you knew Nancy Clutter. You know his childhood, his dreams, and you know his pain. And some part of you feels something for this man that you don't want to feel. That discomfort is not an accident, it's the entire point. Before I let you go, I want to leave you with a little question to sit with. By the end of Persons Unknown, you know Perry Smith's childhood in detail. You know about the orphanage. You know about his mother and his dead siblings. You know about his dreams and his boxes of keepsakes and his chronic pain. And if Capote has done his job, and he has, some part of you feels something for this man that you don't want to feel. So here's the question: Does knowing Perry's story change what he did? Does understanding where someone comes from change your judgment of where they ended up? Capote doesn't answer this question. He simply builds the conditions under which you have to ask it. And that, more than any single scene or character, is what makes this book endure. In our next episode, we enter part three, Answer. The manhunt reaches its end. Dick and Perry are arrested in Las Vegas on December 30th, 1959, six weeks after the murders. They're brought back to Garden City in handcuffs. And in a series of interrogation scenes that rank among the most gripping passages in the book, the truth of what happened inside the clutter house finally comes out. Part three is where Capote finally gives you the scene he withheld in part one. The murders themselves, told in Perry's own words, it's the hardest section of the book to get through. But it's also the moment when everything Capote has built, the empathy, dread, the people you now know on both sides, pays off. Or depending on how you feel about Perry by that point, it might collapse under its own weight. If you're reading along, finish part two and read through part three before the next episode. Pay attention to how Perry tells the story of the murders. Notice what he includes and what he leaves out. How this account differs from Dick's. That discrepancy is one of the most important things in the entire book. Thank you for joining me. I'm Jennifer Novotny, and this is Crimary.