Judge says investigative files for 'In Cold Blood' murders can be published by investigator's son
In 2012, a Kansas judge ruled that records kept by a man who investigated the murder of four family members portrayed in a famous Truman Capote book could not be published, sold or used as the basis for a book.
But Shawnee County District Court Judge Larry Hendricks has since rethought his ruling in a civil case brought by the state attorney general’s office over investigative material concerning the case described in Capote’s book, In Cold Blood.
In a follow-up decision released Monday, Hendricks said free-speech rights implicated by defendant Ronald Nye’s efforts outweigh the government’s interest in keeping the files confidential, the Associated Press reports.
Ronald Nye is the son of Harold Nye, a member of a Kansas Bureau of Investigation squad of special agents assigned to investigate the 1959 murders of Herbert, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter, two parents and their teenage children, the Topeka Capital-Journal explained in an article last year.
Ronald Nye said he pulled the investigative material out of the trash after his mother threw it away following his father’s death in 2003. He argued that the material did not belong to the state because it was comprised of his father’s personal records.
He said his father assembled the material in preparation for writing a memoir he never completed, obtaining investigative records from the KBI with the then-director’s permission, KCTV reported in 2012.
“We would go up to the state capitol, and dad and I would go in and go down into what he called the dungeon,” Ronald Nye said, insisting that his father was a stickler for following the rules and would never have taken material without permission. “We would go in and hunt for a particular box of case files.”
He earlier auctioned a signed copy of Capote’s book and letters sent by the author to his father.
As documented by Capote’s book, an acclaimed true-crime novel that included some re-created dialogue, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith were convicted of the murders and executed in 1965.
See also:
ABAJournal.com: “In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote”
ABAJournal.com: “Tests on degraded DNA can’t link ‘In Cold Blood’ killers to unsolved Florida slayings”
