It was 50 years ago this coming Sunday that Diana Selsor, 16, learned that her uncle Herbert, 48, aunt Bonnie, 45, and cousins Nancy, 16, and Kenyon, 15, had been slaughtered, hands tied behind their backs, in their farmhouse near Garden City, Kansas, writes Mike Hendricks in the Kansas City Star. It was a high-profile crime, the details splashed across front pages from coast to coast. The murders might have been largely forgotten by now had it not been for Truman Capote's groundbreaking book “In Cold Blood.”
For that, Edwards and others in the family remain eternally bitter. “It has been, to me, a great injustice,” she said. “They were complex people, and (Capote) turned them into cardboard figures.” Edwards has written a remembrance for a small newspaper in Silver City, N.M., where she works as a cultural anthropologist and mental health counselor. The account can be seen at kansascity.com. Hendricks says the Clutters' immediate family had avoided the media ever since Capote turned their personal sorrow into articles in the New Yorker and a nonfiction novel.