Word: cluttered
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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County Sheriff Earl Robinson and Garden City police found the other bodies: Wife Bonnie in an upstairs bedroom, Herb Clutter and his son Kenyon in the basement. The killers had murdered coolly, systematically. They had bound their victims hand and foot with nylon cord, gagged Nancy with a scarf and the others with two-inch-wide adhesive tape. Then, one by one, they had slaughtered the Clutters, shooting each in the face with a shotgun held a few inches away. Before or after shooting Herbert Clutter, the murderers had cut Clutter's throat. Whatever terrible rage seethed inside them...
...showplace farm of Herbert Clutter, set in the peaceful, prosperous, picture-book country west of Garden City, Kans. (pop. 11,000), seemed the nation's least likely setting for coldblooded, methodical murder. And the Clutter family seemed the nation's least likely victims. Herb Clutter, 48, a well-heeled wheat-grower, was just about the most prominent man in the region. He was chairman of the Kansas Conference of Farm Organizations and Cooperatives, a former member of the federal Farm Credit Board, a civic leader who headed the building committee that got Garden City's new Methodist...
...Every Sunday the Clutters took two neighboring farmers' teenage daughters to the Methodist Church in Garden City, seven miles from the Clutter farm. When the two girls knocked on the door of the Clutter house on Sunday morning last week, nobody answered. The only explanation they could think of seemed comically out of character: the normally early-rising Clutters had overslept. Finding the door open, the two girls went inside, ambled upstairs to wake Nancy. At the top of the stairs, they froze: Nancy was lying on her bed, her hands tied behind her back, her face mangled...
...Miles. The sheriff and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation were baffled. The crime seemed motiveless. So far as the citizens of the region knew, Clutter had no enemies. Searchers found no sign of robbery: jewelry and a wallet in plain view had been left untouched. An examining physician certified that mother and daughter had not been sexually molested...
...killers had left no clues behind. The cord and tape they used to bind and gag their victims were stock items that could have been purchased in any town in the U.S. There were plenty of fingerprints around, but the house of the busy, friendly Clutters had been "like a railroad station," as a neighbor put it, and the prints could have belonged to any of numerous visitors. One thing seemed certain to the Clutters' friends and neighbors: so methodical a crime could not have been committed by strangers who came upon the farm by chance. "When this...