Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (140 page)

Truman and Harper called on Alvin Dewey, a tall, handsome man in his 40s, who was handling the massacre case for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. Besieged by reporters, he was not impressed with Truman, who showed up in an overly large sheepskin coat that dragged the ground, a long, fairly narrow red scarf that cascaded to his ankles, a pill box hat in magenta, and a pair of Indian moccasins.

When Dewey asked for his press card, Truman told him he didn’t have one, but that he’d go back to his hotel and show him his passport.

Truman was dismissed, but he didn’t give up so easily. He showed up again and again over the course of the next few days, and amazingly, he impressed Dewey with the intensity of his determination. By then, Dewey had adjusted to his voice.

Actually, it was Harper who initially won Dewey over for Truman. “I made a smart move in taking her with me to Kansas,” Truman said. “She’s a gifted woman, courageous, and with a warmth that instantly kindles most people, however suspicious and sour.”

After Maria Dewey met the odd couple and invited them to dinner, Truman finally won Dewey over.

Marie and Truman soon discovered that they each had roots in New Orleans, and both of them appreciated such dishes as okra-studded gumbo more than the usual steak-and-potatoes diet usually associated with Western Kansas.

After their first dinner together, Harper and Truman were invited frequently into the Dewey home. Truman thrilled them with stories of his encounters with and indiscreet gossip about such iconic women as Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, and Marilyn Monroe.

Harold Nye, an agent for the Kansas Board of Intelligence, remembered when Dewey introduced him to Truman in his hotel room. “He was wearing a new pink
négligée
, silk with lace, and he’s strutting across the floor with his hands on his hips, telling us all about how he’s going to write this book. Later, my straight-as-an-arrow wife accepted his invitation to go with him to Kansas City. He took us first to a lesbian bar, then to a gay male club, and, finally, to the Jewel Box to watch female impersonators.”

In a follow-up story, a reporter for
Time
magazine appraised Truman’s situation: “A diminutive, eccentric, and lisping presence in Midwest territory, whose citizens at first scarcely knew what to make of him, Capote commanded the attention and ultimately the respect of everyone he approached, including the killers.”

Truman began to pick up fascinating details about the case. From the local insurance office, he learned that on the morning of the massacre of his family, Herbert Clutter had taken out a $40,000 insurance policy with a double indemnity provision should he die of other than natural causes.

It was on December 30, 1959, while dining with the Deweys, that a phone call came in for Alvin. He was informed that two prime suspects in the Clutter murders, both of them men, had been arrested in Las Vegas and would be transported under heavy guard back to the Finney County Courthouse in Garden City. Their names were Richard (“Dick”) Hickock and Perry Edward Smith.

Dick Hickock and Perry Smith were two ex-convicts on parole from the Kansas State Penitentiary. While in prison, they met Floyd Wells, who had once worked at the Clutter farm. He falsely informed Hickock and Smith that Clutter kept large amounts of cash stashed at his home, since he didn’t trust banks. “The old shit is very, very rich,” Wells claimed. “He’s a sitting duck for a robbery. They don’t even lock their doors at night.”

Hickock lured Smith into the deal after they got out of prison. “It’s a cinch, the perfect score,” Hickock said. “We’ll kill them, high-tail it to Mexico, and live high off the hog, happily ever after.”

When the murderers were arraigned at the courthouse, Truman saw for the first time the two men who would play such a key role, not only in his personal life, but in his finances. In fact, he’d eventually make millions of dollars off the murders they committed—six million, to be exact.

Born in Kansas City in 1931, Hickock was about twenty-eight years old when Truman first trained “my hawk eye on him.” He had blonde hair and stood less than six feet tall. A serious automobile accident in 1950 had left his face disfigured. Truman had a colorful way of describing his face as “halved like an apple, then put together a fraction off center.”

A native of Kansas City, Hickock had been married twice and had fathered three sons. A former athlete in high school, he turned to petty crimes, including cashing bad checks. These crimes led him to prison, where he first met Smith and where they hatched a scheme to rob and murder.

A native of the now abandoned town of Huntington, Nevada, Smith was the son of rodeo performers “Tex & Flo.” He was of mixed Irish and Cherokee ancestry, and had raven black hair. He stood only one inch taller than Truman. He had nearly died in a motorcycle accident, which had left him permanently disabled, suffering leg pain.

Even into adulthood, he was a chronic bed wetter, which had led to severe punishment all his life, as he was transferred from orphanage to orphanage. In a Salvation Army orphanage, one caretaker was so furious at him that he attempted to drown the boy. In one Catholic orphanage, a sadistic nun rubbed a burning ointment on his small penis and stood by to watch him scream in pain. Another nun forced him into a tub of ice water and kept adding more ice until he caught pneumonia.

Joining the Army in 1948, he served in Korea, where his fights with locals and fellow soldiers led to stints in the stockade. After his discharge from the Army, a string of petty crimes eventually landed him in jail.

As young adults, two of his siblings had committed suicide. A sister had jumped from her room in a San Francisco hotel, and a brother had shot his girlfriend after accusing her of adultery before committing suicide.

Truman carefully observed Smith in the courtroom, especially his “sad, droopy eyes. They just drew you into his tortured soul. He had a changeling’s face. He could look at you with savagery one minute, then with almost adoration the next.”

In the courtroom, Truman was no mere newspaper reporter, but went for precise details with the eye of a novelist. Observing the short, stumpy Smith, he described him as a “chunky, misshapen child-man with dwarfish legs. His tiny feet would have neatly fitted into a delicate lady’s dancing slippers; when he stood up, he was not taller than a twelve-year-old child.”

The arrest of Hickock and Smith greatly altered Truman’s perception of his project. Before the telephone call came in from Las Vegas, Truman had more or less wrapped up his short story for
The New Yorker
. Now, he saw it as a larger tale, perhaps a non-fiction book.

On March 29, 1960, the jury in Garden City deliberated for only forty minutes before voting guilty. Judge Roland Tate pronounced the sentence that they should be executed. On the way out of the courtroom, Truman overheard Smith say to Hickock, “No chicken-hearted jurors, they!”

The execution was scheduled for May 13, 1960, when they were to be hanged at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing. But there would be appeals and endless delays before the sentence was carried out.

In Lansing, Truman was granted unusual access to both men, with whom he was to develop intense personal relationships. At first, the warden was reluctant to let him in, but Truman bribed a highly placed official with $10,000.

Charles McAtee, former Director of Penal Institutions in Kansas, said, “Truman was a homosexual, and the warden at the prison thought the last thing in the world that he needed was to put up with a known homosexual visiting two guys on Death Row. He had enough problems with homosexuality inside the prison.”

Harold Nye, the KBI agent who, with his wife, had been escorted by Truman to Kansas City for a tour of that city’s gay night life, made the charge that Truman fell in love with Smith. “He spent hours and hours in Smith’s cell. He bribed the guards for privacy. They were both homosexuals, and they had repeated sex in Smith’s cell. That’s what happened.”

As Smith—to an increasing degree—came to trust Truman, he confided very personal details. “I had assumed that Dick was ‘the man.’ But at the Clutter home, he chickened out before the actual shooting. I had to kill all four of them.”

Smith said that he had to talk Hickock out of raping the Clutter’s daughter, Nancy. “Dick has had a long history of raping young girls around the age of fourteen. He suggested that he could rape Nancy, and that I could rape Kenyon before we shot them.”

“I told him I wouldn’t,” Smith said. “Sex was the last thing on my mind.”

This confession matched what Hickock had claimed when the police had apprehended both of them in Las Vegas. “Perry did it!” Hickock had shouted at the police. “He killed all four of them!” After screaming that accusation, Hickock had fainted.

As Truman became more closely acquainted with Smith, he discovered that they had many similarities. Both of them had grown up in communities which had scorned them, and both of them had “booze hound” mothers and “fathers who fell in love with long distance.” Foster homes and orphanages had led to shared self-assessments as “lost souls.”

On their second afternoon together, Smith said, “I see that you brought your mistress
[a reference to Harper Lee]
to Kansas. I had taken you to be a homosexual.”

“Harper is my friend, and I am a homosexual,” Truman responded.

Smith then asked, “I guess you want to kiss me. Go ahead. The guard isn’t looking.”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Truman said, later confessing this incident to his gay friends. “I even masturbated him that afternoon.”