In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [38]
Inevitable, and appropriate. For Dewey, himself a former sheriff of Finney County (from 1947 to 1955) and, prior to that, a Special Agent of the F.B.I. (between 1940 and 1945 he had served in New Orleans, in San Antonio, in Denver, in Miami, and in San Francisco), was professionally qualified to cope with even as intricate an affair as the apparently motiveless, all but clueless Clutter murders. Moreover, his attitude toward the crime made it, as he later said, "a personal proposition." He went on to say that he and his wife "were real fond of Herb and Bonnie," and saw them every Sunday at church, visited a lot back and forth," adding, "But even if I hadn't known the family, and liked them so well, I wouldn't feel any different. Because I've seen some bad things, I sure as hell have. But nothing so vicious as this. However long it takes, it maybe the rest of my life, I'm going to know what happened in that house: the why and the who." Toward the end, a total of eighteen men were assigned to the case full time, among them three of the K.B.I.'s ablest investigators - Special Agents Harold Nye, Roy Church, and Clarence Duntz. With the arrival in Garden City of this trio, Dewey was satisfied that "a strong team" had been assembled. "Somebody better watch out," he said. The sheriff's office is on the third floor of the Finney County courthouse, an ordinary stone-and-cement building standing in the center of an otherwise attractive tree-filled square. Nowadays, Garden City, which was once a rather raucous frontier town, is quite subdued. On the whole, the sheriff doesn't do much business, and his office, three sparsely furnished rooms, is ordinarily a quiet place popular with courthouse idlers; Mrs. Edna Richardton, his hospitable secretary, usually has a pot of coffee going and plenty of time to "chew the fat." Or did, until, as she complained, Clutter thing came along," bringing with it "all these out-of-towners, all this newspaper fuss." The case, then commending headlines as far east as Chicago, as far west as Denver, had indeed lured to Garden City a considerable press corps. On Monday, at midday, Dewey held a press conference in the sheriff's office. "I'll talk facts but not theories," he informed the assembled journalists. "Now, the big fact here, the thing to remember, is we're not dealing with one murder but four. And we' don't know which of the four was the main target. The primary victim. It could have been Nancy or Kenyon, or either of their parents. Some people say, Well, it must have been Mr. Clutter. Because his throat was cut; he was the most abused. But that's theory, not fact. It would help if we knew in what order the family died, but the coroner can't tell us that; he only knows the murders happened sometime between eleven p.m. Saturday and two a.m. Sunday." Then, responding to questions, he said no, neither of the women had been "sexually molested," and no, as far as was presently known, nothing had been stolen from the house, and yes, he did think it a "queer coincidence" that Mr. Clutter should have taken out a forty-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy, with double indemnity, within eight hours of his death. However, Dewey was "pretty darn sure" that no connection existed between this purchase and the crime; how could there be one, when the only persons who benefited financially were Mr. Clutter's two surviving children, the elder daughters, Mrs. Donald Jarchow and Miss Beverly Clutter? And yes, he told the reporters, he did have an opinion on whether the murders were the work of one man or two, but he preferred not to disclose it. Actually, at this time, on this subject, Dewey was undecided. He still entertained a pair of opinions - or, to use his word, "concepts" - and, in reconstructing the crime, had developed both a "single-killer concept" and a "double-killer concept." In the former, the murderer was thought to be a friend of the family, or, at any rate, a man with more than casual knowledge of the house and its inhabitants - someone who knew that the doors were seldom locked, that Mr. Clutter slept