![]() Clutter had been found sprawled atop a cardboard mattress box, the victim of seemingly passionate savagery (not only had someone shot him in the face with a shotgun at very close range but someone had also cut his throat), and an adjoining, much larger area, which the children, Nancy and Kenyon, had furnished as a playroom, and in which Kenyon, bound to a couch, had been shot to death. They went first to the basement, in separate sections of which two of the killings had occurred: a furnace room, where the pajama-clad Mr. Alfred Stoecklein, a hired man and the only employee who actually lived on the property, was waiting to admit them. The patrolman, guardian of a barricade that the authorities had erected at the entrance to the farm, waved them on, and they drove a half mile more, down the elm-shaded lane leading to the Clutter house, which was locally considered rather a show place-white and spacious and standing on an acre of well tended lawn. Going out there, where we’d always had such a welcome.” On the present occasion, a highway patrolman welcomed them. One of them later remarked, “It just shut you up. Erhart and his partners drove the distance in silence. Holcomb (pop., 270), the village in which the tragedy happened, is seven miles west of Garden City (pop., 11,000). Clutter himself his wife, Bonnie his son, Kenyon, fifteen and a daughter, Nancy, sixteen-had been discovered bound, gagged, and shot in the head, by, as their death certificates declared, “a person or persons unknown.” For, feeling it their duty, a Christian task, these men had volunteered to clean certain of the fourteen rooms in the main house at River Valley Farm: rooms in which, on the morning of the previous day, four members of the Clutter family-Mr. 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 rags and strong detergents. Like Erhart, the superintendent of the Kansas State University Agricultural Experiment Station, all were prominent citizens of Garden City, the county seat of Finney County, Kansas. Dale, a veterinarian Carl Myers, a dairy owner and Everett Ogburn, a businessman. Clutter, and often, on these sporting expeditions, he’d been accompanied by three more of Herb Clutter’s closest friends: Dr. Often, on such days in years past, Andy Erhart had spent long pheasant-hunting afternoons at River Valley Farm, the home of his good friend Mr. Monday, the sixteenth of November, 1959, was still another fine specimen of pheasant weather on the high wheat plains of western Kansas-a day gloriously bright-skied, as glittery as mica.
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