50 år sedan familjen Clutter mördades - "med kallt blod"

When the two men broke into the Clutter home, they claimed to have a diagram drawn up by a man they met in prison – Floyd Wells. They wanted to rob the Clutters – but wanted much more than the small amount at the home.

McAvoy said the problem with that claim, is that Wells had never been to that house before.

“Floyd Wells could not have drawn that map because he’d never been in the new house,” he said. “he was hired by Herb clutter for only seven months and his term ended months before the family moved into the new house. So he couldn’t have drawn that map.”

He said there are more contradictions but there’s still no question the two were guilty. But he suspects there was a third person involved.

Across six decades, the case still resonates online, and remains controversial, with unresolved concerns among reporters, writers and enthusiasts. In 2012, police in Florida theorized that Hickock and Smith killed a second family of four, the Walkers, at a tenant ranch house in the town of Osprey near Sarasota, a little more than a month after the Clutter killings. Clifford and Christine Walker, their three-year-old son and two-year-old daughter were shot to death with a .22-caliber gun on December 19, 1959. Mrs. Walker had been raped.

Numerous witnesses claimed seeing Hickock and Smith in west Florida around that time. The men did travel in their stolen ’56 Chevy from Kansas through Florida, with Hickock writing a series of bad checks for cash, before making their way west, then south to Mexico and then Las Vegas. They bought things at a store in Sarasota several days before the Walker killings and stayed at a motel in Miami until the day before. The only highway running west and north out of Miami then was U.S. 41, which cut through Osprey. Witnesses placed the suspects in Tallahassee on December 21 or 22. Both men denied participation in the Walker slayings and passed polygraphs tests in 1960, but in the years since, experts have raised serious doubts about the reliability of the technology used in such tests back then.

The Clutters, their killers, even Capote himself, are all long gone. But remarkably, the 14-room farmhouse in Holcomb still stands, eerily looking much as it did that fateful night in 1959.
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Now, this four-bedroom home and the roughly 9 acres it sits on will be going on the market again. The question remains: Will it ever be able to shed its bloody past?
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What may wind up helping—or hurting—the sale of the Clutter house is that it's practically the same as when the Clutters lived there.

"Everything is original in that house, just about," says Wieland, who touted the two fireplaces as well as the bathroom on the main floor with a glass block enclosure for the bathtub and shower. "It's so different, but it's really neat."

But residences where brutal crimes took place typically sell for a 10% to 15% discount, say real estate appraisers. And while the stigma typically diminishes over time, the more famous the home, the more difficult it can be to find a buyer offering a good price.

If the home is in good shape, it could fetch anywhere from $150,000 to $200,000, theorizes local real estate agent Tamara Hunter of Heritage Realty.