A Kansas court fight over files showing major mistake (or lie) in Truman Capote's novel, In Cold Blood

Richard Hickok, executed in 1965 along with Perry
Smith for the 1959 murders of four members
of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas

Related: Dan Futterman talks about writing Capote
 
The Attorney General of Kansas has secured a temporary restraining order against Gary McAvoy, owner of Vintage Memorabilia in Seattle, and Ron Nye, son of the late Kansas Bureau of Investigation detective, Harold Nye, from releasing documents the elder Nyr took home years ago.
     The attorney general argues that the documents belong to the state of Kansas and that their release would invade the privacy of remaining members of the Clutter family, four of whom were murdered in their home near Holcomb Kansas on November 15, 1959.
     Nye and McAvoy say the KBI just wants to hide unflattering revelations and that it has embarked on an "intimidation and suppression campaign."
     Members of the Clutter family have broken their 50-year policy of silence, to publicly oppose the sale of photos and documents about the case.
     The documents plainly contradict one of the most dramatic parts of Truman Capote's pioneering "nonfiction novel" treatment of the case — the interview which convinced the KBI that a jailhouse snitch who fingered Hickock and Smith as the Clutter killers was right:

     Nineteen days passed before a prison inmate, Floyd Wells, ...a former employee on the Clutter farm, came forward to announce that one of his former cellmates, Mr. Hickock, had told him he intended to rob and kill the Clutters with the help of Mr. Smith, another ex-convict.
     In Mr. Capote's telling, that very evening the KBI dispatched Mr. Nye to the farmhouse of Mr. Hickock's parents. Finding only the parents home, Mr. Nye sits down to coffee with them.
     Making no mention of murder, Mr. Nye pretends to be seeking Mr. Hickock only for parole violation and hot-check writing. That tactic induces Eunice and Walter Hickock inadvertently to disclose all manner of incriminating information about their son, including that he recently bought a 12-gauge shotgun, leaning right there against a wall—the same gauge used to kill the Clutters.
     "Nye shut his notebook and put his pen in his pocket, and both his hands as well, for his hands were shaking from excitement," Mr. Capote wrote. Within a few hours of receiving the Wells tip, in Mr. Capote's telling, the KBI had essentially confirmed it.
     But according to the KBI documents, this isn't how it happened. The documents show that the agency waited five full days after Mr. Wells' statement to visit the Hickock farm, the last known whereabouts of Richard Hickock. When the visit did occur, the documents show, it didn't involve a lone agent venturing in the dark of night to the farm, and being served coffee.
     The documents show that four lawmen—three KBI agents and a local sheriff's deputy—converged midday on the farm. They found only the suspect's mother at home. They made no pretense of pursuing a parole violation. Executing a search, they found the shotgun, took it outside and fired it to collect the empty casing for ballistic purposes. They also confiscated clothing that appeared to be smattered with blood.

Diana Selsor Edwards is a cultural anthropologist and a mental health counselor (LPCC) in Silver City and the niece of Herb Clutter. Here is what she wrote about In Cold Blood:

Twenty-five years after the deaths, I began to face the past, hoping that doing so would help me heal from that trauma and other losses. For the first time, I read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. I was angry and disappointed. The Clutters became cardboard figures, hardly more than a backdrop for Capote's sympathetic depiction of the killers. I felt powerless to correct his version of the truth. In the face of Capote's fame, I would have been as invisible as I was in Kansas in 1959.
     Nonetheless, for me, Uncle Herbert and Aunt Bonnie, Kenyon and Nancy, continue to live, both in memory and in the strengths they engendered in us.