An attempt by the estate of Gene Hackman to stop release of information generated by investigations into the deaths of Hackman and Betsy Arakawa-Hackman has been successful in the short term: on Monday, March 17, a state district judge in Santa Fe granted a restraining order that temporarily blocks public distribution of certain materials that the estate hopes to keep private.

The order prevents the state’s Office of the Medical Investigator (OMI) and the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office from releasing any photographic or video evidence that shows the bodies of Hackman and Arakawa-Hackman; the inside of their home; and any body camera footage that shows their bodies or the body of “any deceased animals at the Hackman residence.” (That language applies to Zinna, one of the couple’s three dogs, who died along with them.) Materials of this nature have been requested by various media outlets using New Mexico’s Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA). The next hearing about the estate’s request will happen on March 31.

Searchlight New Mexico uses IPRA frequently, and we support the public’s right to have access to government information. At the same time, whether the Hackman estate wins or loses, I’m sympathetic to their concerns, in part because of what I’ve watched happen over the years with a story I’ve long been interested in: the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, a crime made famous around the world by Truman Capote’s best-selling 1966 nonfiction book, “In Cold Blood.”

In the case of the Clutters, photos of their bodies — as they were found inside their home after they were killed by ex-cons Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, whose motive was robbery — do exist, and they’ve found their way online and into documentary films. These days, it only takes a moment to locate bloody images of both parents, Herb and Bonnie, along with Nancy and Kenyon, the two high school students who were murdered with them in the early morning hours of Sunday, November 15.

Each photo is horrifying. All four Clutters were killed by a shotgun blast to the head; Herb’s throat was cut before he was shot. The images also appear in two documentaries I’ve seen: “Murder ‘In Cold Blood,’” a 1997 production that’s part of A&E’s tabloid-style “American Justice” series; and “Cold Blooded: the Clutter Family Murders,” a SundanceTV production that appeared in 2017.

Obviously, the Hackman and Clutter stories are markedly different in some ways. One involves death by natural causes, one involves murder. But at the center of both cases are images of deceased people who members of the media and the public have a strong interest in seeing.

Autopsy and funeral home photos

As I learned recently, there are two other sets of Clutter photos that, for now, are not well known and are not available online: shots of the medical examinations done after the murders by Dr. Robert Fenton, a general practitioner who was the Finney County coroner at the time, along with shots of the victims being prepared for burial at the funeral home. (Holcomb is five miles west of Garden City, the Finney County seat. Smith and Hickock were convicted in Garden City in 1960 and condemned to death; they were hanged at the Kansas State Penitentiary, located in Lansing, in 1965.)

Some of these photos turned up in an archive maintained by the late Harold R. Nye, an agent with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) who worked on the case and kept copies of official correspondence, photos and documents. (Nye went on to become KBI director from 1969 to 1971.) This collection was inherited by his son, Ronald R. Nye. In 2012, Ronald Nye and Gary McAvoy — a writer based in Washington State who dealt in collectibles — were preparing to sell much of Nye’s archive in a private auction, and they had to give serious thought to the implications of marketing images that depict such brutal violence.

“After much consideration,” McAvoy later wrote in a book called “And Every Word Is True,” “Ron and I decided to exclude the crime scene photos, most of which were simply too gruesome to release ‘into the wild.’” Instead, they voluntarily sent them to the KBI for safekeeping in their archives. McAvoy retained digital copies.

McAvoy added that he was shocked at how much interest people had in seeing such photos. “Those of the victims, in particular, hold a lurid attraction for many,” he wrote. “In my research, I found a cultish fascination existed in locating those specific images.” To describe this subculture, he used the term “underbelly of the internet.”

A few days after the photos were sent, the Kansas Attorney General hit McAvoy and Nye with a cease and desist order, claiming that Harold Nye’s journals were state property that contained “highly confidential information.” This was the start of a legal fight that Nye and McAvoy won in 2014. The two worked together on McAvoy’s book about “In Cold Blood,” which contains a foreword written by Nye.

The book’s title is derived from something Capote often bragged about. When “In Cold Blood” was published, he told interviewers that he’d achieved perfect factual accuracy in a book that reads like polished fiction. As he put it to the Saturday Review in 1966: “I got this idea of doing a really serious big work — it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: every word of it would be true from beginning to end.”

Capote preferred memory to note-taking or taping because those techniques, he argued, made interview subjects feel self-conscious and nervous. His book contains quotes that go on at great length, so one has to wonder how he reported all that accurately. Capote claimed he was naturally gifted with “the auditory version of a photographic memory,” which he improved through practice drills.

“I would use a tape recorder and have someone read into it while I listened,” he said in a 1967 interview with attorney F. Lee Bailey. “Then, I would go into the next room and repeat into another tape recorder, a half hour later, precisely what they had just said.” 

That would have been quite a superpower, but it failed him often. Many writers have shown over the years that not every word of “In Cold Blood” is true — something McAvoy examines in detail. Others have done the same thing. In 2005, a remarkable series of articles about Capote’s work, written by student journalists in Nebraska, were collected under the title “Cold Blood: A Murder, a Book, a Legacy.” Other sources include historian Ralph Voss’s 2011 book, “Truman Capote and the Legacy of ‘In Cold Blood,’” and a 1966 article that appeared in Esquire called “In Cold Fact.” In the “Cold Blooded” documentary, a relative of surviving members of the Clutter family — two adult daughters who were living elsewhere when the crime occurred — shared a list of more than three dozen mistakes they’d identified in passages about the Clutters.

The errors sometimes involve small details, but not always. Harold Nye’s notebooks show that a pivotal scene in Capote’s book — when Nye visits the farm of Hickock’s parents and recovers a shotgun — was rendered inaccurately. For example, Capote has Nye doing that search alone; in reality, a total of four agents were involved. “In Cold Blood” says the search happened immediately after the KBI received a tip about Hickock and Smith’s possible involvement from Floyd Wells, a prison inmate who knew them. In fact, agents went to the farm five days later.

The author of “In Cold Fact,” a Kansan named Phillip K. Tompkins, spent nine days doing research in Garden City and found that Capote had, for dramatic purposes, distorted his description of important events like the interrogation of Smith and Hickock after they were captured in Las Vegas, Nevada. He also fabricated events and dialogue that involved Finney County undersheriff Wendle Meier and his wife, Josephine, who cooked meals for Hickock and Smith while they were jailed in the county courthouse before being tried. According to Tompkins’s research, Capote even altered Smith’s last words before he was hanged, adding an apology he didn’t actually give.

Strangest of all is the final scene. In it, Alvin Dewey, the KBI’s lead investigator on the case, visits the cemetery where the Clutters are buried, runs into Susan Kidwell — one of two friends of Nancy’s who discovered the crime scene — and shares a haunting conversation with her. It was completely fabricated.

Preservation and handling of violent images

My interest in the Clutter murders dates back to my high school years in Garden City. My family moved there in early 1972 from Jackson, Mississippi, because my father, a pathologist, had taken a new job at the local hospital, St. Catherine. He owned a hardcover copy of “In Cold Blood” that I read as a teenager, and I was amazed by the fact that this had happened in my new hometown.

Over the years, through people I met, I absorbed some of the impact the case had locally. Two friends from high school, Tom and Annette Fenton, were the children of Dr. Fenton and his wife, Elaine. I took part in student theater productions with one of the five daughters of Clifford and Dolores Hope, a couple who helped Capote gain local acceptance when he first hit town in 1959, accompanied by the soon-to-be-famous writer Harper Lee. (Clifford, who was Herb Clutter’s lawyer, also represented Capote on matters related to “In Cold Blood” and is thanked in the acknowledgments.) The parents of one friend attended Capote’s famous Black and White Ball in 1966, held when he was at the height of his fame following the success of the book. That fame increased when a movie version was released in late 1967.

The crime scene photos, kept under lock and key at the county sheriff’s office and at the police department, were part of local adolescent lore. (Along with the KBI, both agencies were deeply involved in the case. Crucial crime scene photos, which contained boot print evidence establishing that there were two killers, were taken by a police officer named Richard Rohleder.) My friends and I knew that people could arrange to see them, but I was always confused about that. Could a random high school kid get permission to go in and look?

I never tried to find out. I had no legitimate reason to see the photos, and I knew that my dad — who performed post-mortems throughout his career — would have been ashamed of me for asking.

I first became aware that the photos had gone into wide circulation several years ago, watching the 1997 documentary and then searching for them online. I found them easily and wondered: How and when did this happen?

As I learned, it’s difficult, perhaps impossible, to answer that question with certainty at this point. But the fact that they did leak out lends credence to the Hackman estate’s worries that, if images were made accessible to the media and the public — even if the authorities are careful about how that process works — they could wind up online and in films someday.

I found two people who have photos taken of the Clutters at the funeral home and during their autopsies. A third set of crime scene photos turned up in files kept by Alvin Dewey, whose son Paul, a retired attorney now living in Bend, Oregon, discovered them when the creators of “Cold Blooded” contacted him for information about the case. “While looking through my father’s case files, I found them and sent them to the KBI,” Dewey says. “I said: ‘Please destroy them or do whatever it is you do.’ I didn’t hear back from them, but presume they complied. I didn’t show the photos to anyone.”

In Dewey’s opinion, it’s best for any photos of this nature to be locked away. “I can’t imagine how bad it would feel to the Clutter family to have those photos in circulation,” he said. (The KBI did not respond to a request for comment about Dewey’s photos.)

John Andrews, a high school classmate of mine who worked for the Finney County Sheriff’s Office for 36 years, starting in 1983 and retiring as an undersheriff, told me he didn’t know how the photos were leaked but that he wasn’t surprised, pointing out that this sort of thing happens as time passes, especially since copies of the photos exist in more than one place.

“In the 10 or 20 years after the murders occurred, control of the photos was probably more restrictive,” Andrews said. “But, as time went on, it probably became less so.” He said the sheriff’s office collection does not contain the funeral home or autopsy photos. He was unaware they existed until I mentioned them, but said it seems logical that such photos were taken during those examinations.

The sheriff’s office is still careful with its collection. According to Gaye Beasley, the department’s administrative manager, the materials — which include photographs, documents and newspaper clippings — are bundled in seven notebooks that members of the public can see by appointment. Nothing can be photocopied or photographed without permission, and the current sheriff, Steven R. Martinez, does not allow people to take photos or obtain copies of crime scene shots that show the deceased victims.

If the Hackman photos are not put under seal, they will probably be handled in a way similar to what’s done at the sheriff’s office in Garden City: Members of the media or the public who want to see depictions of deceased bodies would have to view them at the sheriff’s office in Santa Fe County, following their rules. According to Amanda Lavin, an attorney with the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, it’s unclear how any autopsy photos — which would be in the OMI’s records — would be handled, since OMI is not a law enforcement agency. My guess is that, even if people are ultimately allowed to view them, they’ll have to go in to see them, and they won’t be allowed to make copies or take photos.

Balancing free information and privacy

Repeated attempts to reach the creators of both documentary films I watched were unsuccessful, so I wasn’t able to ask how they obtained the crime scene photos. Ultimately, I decided it was probably pointless to keep asking around: The photos are out there, and it’s reasonable for the Hackman estate to fear that the same thing will happen to them in the future. Once again, the Clutter case provides a useful example. Initially, the crime scene photos were available for viewing by the public but kept secure, but that security was breached. The funeral home and autopsy photos are in private hands, and are not available for public viewing. Will things remain that way forever?

Gary McAvoy has had occasion to think about this, starting with the auction that never happened. It’s his hope now that his collection will someday be part of the Truman Capote papers at the New York Public Library. But he says his digital images of the autopsies will not be included.

The person I spoke with who owns both the crime scene and funeral home photos has always been scrupulous about keeping those images secure. This individual, who has asked that I not use their name, currently has no plan to donate the collection to an archive.

In short, the photos seem secure for now. But I still have no idea who gave crime scene images to the documentary filmmakers. It’s possible that somebody else out there has them — and may also have the autopsy and funeral home photos.

Whatever happens in the future, I believe it’s important for people to balance enthusiasm for freedom of information with reflection about what it’s like to be anywhere near a hyper-scrutinized event like the Hackman deaths or the Clutter murders.

Along those lines, I’ve often thought about the surviving Clutter relatives, and about Dr. Fenton, who was not in law enforcement but had to confront the most graphic parts of the crime. Fenton got only a brief mention by Capote but comes up at greater length in “Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee,” a 2006 biography by Charles J. Shields. There’s a scene in which Capote and Lee are present when Fenton is paid a visit by Dewey. Fenton is depicted as a man who’s nervous in the presence of Dewey, Capote and Lee, so much so that he stammers — that’s mentioned twice.

“[Fenton] stammered the next day during introductions,” Shields wrote in an account drawn from the Capote papers. “And because Detective Dewey’s presence implied that the visit had some official importance, Fenton was anxious to impress his visitors.”

That story doesn’t capture the person I heard about as a teenager. Fenton had served hard time as a POW in Europe during World War II. According to his children, Tom and Annette, he was a bombardier in the Army Air Corps; his crew’s plane was shot down over Germany and he spent two and a half years in a stalag. That experience had to be traumatic, but it was also motivational.

“Being a prisoner of war made him want to be a doctor and help people,” Tom explained. “It gave him an adventurous spirit to live life. Surviving prison camp gave him hope. The Clutter murders gave him sorrow.” Fenton returned from Germany and became a doctor and a respected member of the medical staff at St. Catherine. He took a dim view of “In Cold Blood.” Annette remembers that he called it “the commercialization of a tragedy.”

What I think is a more accurate picture comes from an account gathered by another Garden City native: Rosemary Hope, the fourth of the Hope daughters. In 2024, she wrote an essay about her parents’ interactions with Capote and Lee, and she’s hoping to write a book about how the crime and the media sensation that followed affected her parents and family. (The Fentons and Hopes lived next door to each other on a scenic street called Gillespie Place.)

As part of that project, in 2007, Rosemary interviewed Elaine Fenton, who died in 2012. (Robert died in 1996.) As Elaine recalled, on Sunday morning, just hours after the murders, Robert took their two boys to church, unaware of what had happened. Elaine stayed home because she wasn’t feeling well. At some point, the phone rang. She was told: “Come pick up your boys. The doctor has been called away.” She drove to the family’s church — First United Methodist, which the Clutters attended and where their funeral was held — and saw that people were stunned and crying because they’d heard the news.

Dr. Fenton was among the first on the crime scene that day. When he came home that afternoon, around 3 p.m., he had a set of notes he needed someone to type up for him. “I typed the notes,” Elaine recalled. He came home and said, ‘I don’t want you to type them.’ Then, two days later, he said he didn’t know who he could ask to type them, so he asked me.”

At the trial, which started on March 22, 1960, Fenton testified during the second day, describing in detail the position and condition of each of the four bodies. In Elaine’s interview with Rosemary, she remembered that he was especially shaken by the sight of Kenyon’s body. He’d been tied up, and was sprawled on a basement couch.

“The one that got him was Kenyon,” she said. As Elaine recalled, when the movie came out, Robert did not want to see it. It opened in mid-December of 1967, but it wasn’t shown in Garden City until Feb. 28, 1968. At that point, the oldest Fenton son, Steve, was 14, just a year younger than Kenyon was when he died in 1959.

“He didn’t want to see the movie, but I did,” Elaine said. “I wanted to know. He said he didn’t want me to go alone, so he went. But he up and left before Kenyon was killed.”