I recently reread In Cold Blood for the second time a few months ago, and I don’t care about the factual discrepancies and recreated dialogue, it’s a damn good book. So with the 1959 Clutter family murder on my mind, I wondered if there was a museum dedicated to the crime or the book (of course there is not!!!), although there have been countless retellings of the event from the 1967 film to the two biopics, Capote and Infamous, about Truman Capote’s research in writing the book. Then I wanted to know what was left of River Valley Farm, located in the small community of Holcomb in Kansas, where the killings took place. The town, with a population of a little over 2,000 people, has train tracks as it was once a major stop for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway but not much else. There is the driveway that leads to the surviving Clutter house, as you might recall from this description: “Under a full moon and nearing midnight, the two killers travel the dirt road to the Clutter home. The bright autumn night is partially masked by the Chinese elms that form a canopy over the road.” Then there is the historic two-story brick home itself, which was put up for auction in August 2006 but was taken off the market when nobody came forward with an adequate bid. There are rumors that teenage Nancy Clutter still haunts the building, walking the halls at night. And then there are the graves of Nancy, Bonnie Mae, Herbert and Kenyon Clutter at Valley View Cemetery in nearby Garden City. Although the book was a literary sensation when it was published, the citizens hold a lingering bitterness towards Capote and his book. On the fiftieth anniversary of their deaths, a memorial was dedicated to the Clutters in the local park with a list of the family’s accomplishments and not a single mention of In Cold Blood.
River Valley Farm, Holcomb in Kansas
