Episode 1: Towards a Mirage

In 1959, Truman Capote travelled to Holcomb, Finney County, west Kansas with his friend and writer Nelle Harper Lee. Their journey was incited by an article in the New York Times about Richard "Dick" Hickock and Perry Edward Smith killing four members of the Clutter family in their home, River Valley Farm: Herb, his wife Bonnie and two of their children Nancy and Kenyon. Six years later Capote published In Cold Blood, a non-fiction novel documenting the killings and subsequent murder trial.

Mirroring the original pair of travellers, photographer Tara Darby and musician JM Lapham went to Holcomb last November – the 50th anniversary of the murders – to try to understand why Capote became so consumed by his story and how the city bears its legacy today.

Tara Darby: Our drive along route 156 was sublime. The sun lay low in the sky like a sunrise and we travelled with wide skies down this ghost road stopping periodically to photograph abandoned houses, old signs and trees. I was nervous as we approached Garden City – such strange incidents and impulses had drawn us here.

The road is unchanged – the same one Dick and Perry would have driven on. JM and I wondered what music they might have listened to on their road trip, or if we had heard any of the same songs unknowingly.

This house made me think of Perry, his father, John "Tex" Smith, and their attempt to build the Trapper’s Den Lodge in Alaska. All their physical and creative energy expended on a venture doomed to fail. Capote wrote that Perry’s life was "an ugly and lonely progress toward one mirage and then another." The frustration and pain of this failure led to a terrible argument in which Perry tried to strangle his father and Tex, the Lone Wolf, pulled out a gun and shot him. The gun wasn’t loaded, but the intention was there. In a moment of mania Tex had tried to kill his own son.

One mirage and then another led to the Clutter killings: false information about a safe at River Valley Farm given by Floyd Wells, a fellow prisoner of Dick’s from a previous stint in jail; Dick’s erroneous perception that Perry had killed before; the promise of an unattainable Mexican dream at the end of the rainbow. Every miserable incident of their lives culminating in a night of unrelenting, pointless horror. A myriad of dreams turned to dust.

 

Tara Darby is a photographer based in Hackney, London. She is a regular contributor to Another, Dazed & Confused and many other international publications. She is currently working on a short film and upcoming exhibition

JM Lapham is a musician based in Austin, Texas. He has recorded albums with the band, The Earlies, for Names / 679, and collaborated with Micah P. Hinson on The Late Cord for 4AD. He is currently finishing an album for an as yet untitled new project