Portraits and Observations by Truman Capote
TC: In other words, you don’t question the act of murder. You consider it “good” because it “happens.” Justifiable.
RB: I have my own justice. I live by my own law, you know. I don’t respect the laws of this society. Because society doesn’t respect its own laws. I make my own laws and live by them. I have my own sense of justice.
TC: And what is your sense of justice?
RB: I believe that what goes around comes around. What goes up comes down. That’s how life flows, and I flow with it.
TC: You’re not making much sense—at least to me. And I don’t think you’re stupid. Let’s try again. In your opinion, it’s all right that Manson sent Tex Watson and those girls into that house to slaughter total strangers, innocent people—
RB: I said: Who says they were innocent? They burned people on dope deals. Sharon Tate and that gang. They picked up kids on the Strip and took them home and whipped them. Made movies of it. Ask the cops; they found the movies. Not that they’d tell you the truth.
TC: The truth is, the LaBiancas and Sharon Tate and her friends were killed to protect you. Their deaths were directly linked to the Gary Hinman murder.
RB: I hear you. I hear where you’re coming from.
TC: Those were all imitations of the Hinman murder—to prove that you couldn’t have killed Hinman. And thereby get you out of jail.
RB: To get me out of jail. (He nods, smiles, sighs—complimented) None of that came out at any of the trials. The girls got on the stand and tried to really tell how it all came down, but nobody would listen. People couldn’t believe anything except what the media said. The media had them programmed to believe it all happened because we were out to start a race war. That it was mean niggers going around hurting all these good white folk. Only—it was like you say. The media, they called us a “family.” And it was the only true thing they said. We were a family. We were mother, father, brother, sister, daughter, son. If a member of our family was in jeopardy, we didn’t abandon that person. And so for the love of a brother, a brother who was in jail on a murder rap, all those killings came down.
TC: And you don’t regret that?
RB: No. If my brothers and sisters did it, then it’s good. Everything in life is good. It all flows. It’s all good. It’s all music.
TC: When you were up on Death Row, if you’d been forced to flow down to the gas chamber and whiff the peaches, would you have given that your stamp of approval?
RB: If that’s how it came down. Everything that happens is good.
TC: War. Starving children. Pain. Cruelty. Blindness. Prisons. Desperation. Indifference. All good?
RB: What’s that look you’re giving me?
TC: Nothing. I was noticing how your face changes. One moment, with just the slightest shift of angle, you look so boyish, entirely innocent, a charmer. And then—well, one can see you as a sort of Forty-second Street Lucifer. Have you ever seen Night Must Fall? An old movie with Robert Montgomery? No? Well, it’s about an impish, innocent-looking delightful young man who travels about the English countryside charming old ladies, then cutting off their heads and carrying the heads around with him in leather hat-boxes.
RB: So what’s that got to do with me?
TC: I was thinking—if it was ever remade, if someone Americanized it, turned the Montgomery character into a young drifter with hazel eyes and a smoky voice, you’d be very good in the part.
RB: Are you trying to say I’m a psychopath? I’m not a nut. If I have to use violence, I’ll use it, but I don’t believe in killing.
TC: Then I must be deaf. Am I mistaken, or didn’t you just tell me that it didn’t matter what atrocity one person committed against another, it was good, all good?
RB: (Silence)
TC: Tell me, Bobby, how do you view yourself?
RB: As a convict.
TC: But beyond that.
RB: As a man. A white man. And everything a white man stands for.
TC: Yes, one of the guards told me you were the ringleader of the Aryan Brotherhood.
RB (hostile): What do you know about the Brotherhood?
TC: That it’s composed of a bunch of hard-nosed white guys. That it’s a somewhat fascist-minded fraternity. That it started in California, and has spread throughout the American prison system, north, south, east and west. That the prison authorities consider it a dangerous, troublemaking cult.
RB: A man has to defend himself. We’re outnumbered. You got no idea how rough it is. We’re all more scared of each other than we are of the pigs in here. You got to be on your toes every second if you don’t want a shiv in your back. The blacks and Chicanos, they got their own gangs. The Indians, too; or I should say the “Native Americans”—that’s how these redskins call themselves: what a laugh! Yessir, rough. With all the racial tensions, politics, dope, gambling and sex. The blacks really go for the young white kids. They like to shove those big black dicks up those tight white asses.
TC: Have you ever thought what you would do with your life if and when you were paroled out of here?
RB: That’s a tunnel I don’t see no end to. They’ll never let Charlie go.
TC: I hope you’re right, and I think you are. But it’s very likely that you’ll be paroled some day. Perhaps sooner than you imagine. Then what?
RB (strums guitar): I’d like to record some of my music. Get it played on the air.
TC: That was Perry Smith’s dream. And Charlie Manson’s, too. Maybe you fellows have more in common than mere tattoos.
RB: Just between us, Charlie doesn’t have a whole lot of talent. (Strumming chords) “This is my song, my dark song, my dark song.” I got my first guitar when I was eleven; I found it in my grandma’s attic and taught myself to play it, and I’ve been nuts about music ever since. My grandma was a sweet woman, and her attic was my favorite place. I liked to lie up there and listen to the rain. Or hide up there when my dad came looking for me with his belt. Shit. You hear that? Moan, moan. It’s enough to drive you crazy.
TC: Listen to me, Bobby. And answer carefully. Suppose, when you get out of here, somebody came to you—let’s say Charlie—and asked you to commit an act of violence, kill a man, would you do it?
RB (after lighting another cigarette, after smoking it half through): I might. It depends. I never meant to … to … hurt Gary Hinman. But one thing happened. And another. And then it all came down.
TC: And it was all good.
RB: It was all good.
HANDCARVED COFFINS
A NONFICTION ACCOUNT OF AN AMERICAN CRIME
(1979)
March, 1975.
A town in a small Western state. A focus for the many large farms and cattle-raising ranches surrounding it, the town, with a population of less than ten thousand, supports twelve churches and two restaurants. A movie house, though it has not shown a movie in ten years, still stands stark and cheerless on Main Street. There once was a hotel, too; but that also has been closed, and nowadays the only place a traveler can find shelter is the Prairie Motel.
The motel is clean, the rooms are well heated; that’s about all you can say for it. A man named Jake Pepper has been living there for almost five years. He is fifty-eight, a widower with four grown sons. He is five-foot-ten, in top condition, and looks fifteen years younger than his age. He has a handsome-homely face with periwinkle-blue eyes and a thin mouth that twitches into quirky shapes that are sometimes smiles and sometimes not. The secret of his boyish appearance is not his lanky trimness, not his chunky ripe-apple cheeks, nor his naughty mysterious grins; it’s because of his hair that looks like somebody’s kid brother: dark blond, clipped short, and so afflicted with cowlicks that he cannot really comb it; he sort of wets it down.
Jake Pepper is a detective employed by the State Bureau of Investigation. We had first met each other through a close mutual friend, another detective in a different state. In 1972 he wrote a letter saying he was working on a murder case, something that he thought might interest me. I telephoned
And so it was that I found myself one cold March night sitting with Jake Pepper in his motel room on the wintry, windblown outskirts of this forlorn little Western town. Actually, the room was pleasant, cozy; after all, off and on, it had been Jake’s home for almost five years, and he had built shelves to display pictures of his family, his sons and grandchildren, and to hold hundreds of books, many of them concerning the Civil War and all of them the selections of an intelligent man: he was partial to Dickens, Melville, Trollope, Mark Twain.
Jake sat crosslegged on the floor, a glass of bourbon beside him. He had a chessboard spread before him; absently he shifted the chessmen about.
TC: The amazing thing is, nobody seems to know anything about this case. It’s had almost no publicity.
JAKE: There are reasons.
TC: I’ve never been able to put it into proper sequence. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing.
JAKE: Where shall we begin?
TC: From the beginning.
JAKE: Go over to the bureau. Look in the bottom drawer. See that little cardboard box? Take a look at what’s inside it.
(What I found inside the box was a miniature coffin. It was a beautifully made object, carved from light balsam wood. It was undecorated; but when one opened the hinged lid one discovered the coffin was not empty. It contained a photograph—a casual, candid snapshot of two middle-aged people, a man and a woman, crossing a street. It was not a posed picture; one sensed that the subjects were unaware that they were being photographed.)
That little coffin. I guess that’s what you might call the beginning.
TC: And the picture?
JAKE: George Roberts and his wife. George and Amelia Roberts.
TC: Mr. and Mrs. Roberts. Of course. The first victims. He was a lawyer?
JAKE: He was a lawyer, and one morning (to be exact: the tenth of August 1970) he got a present in the mail. That little coffin. With the picture inside it. Roberts was a happy-go-lucky guy; he showed it to some people around the courthouse and acted like it was a joke. One month later George and Amelia were two very dead people.
TC: How soon did you come on the case?
JAKE: Immediately. An hour after they found them I was on my way here with two other agents from the Bureau. When we got here the bodies were still in the car. And so were the snakes. That’s something I’ll never forget. Never.
TC: Go back. Describe it exactly.
JAKE: The Robertses had no children. Nor enemies, either. Everybody liked them. Amelia worked for her husband; she was his secretary. They had only one car, and they always drove to work together. The morning it happened was hot. A sizzler. So I guess they must have been surprised when they went out to get in their car and found all the windows rolled up. Anyway, they each entered the car through separate doors, and as soon as they were inside—wham! A tangle of rattlesnakes hit them like lightning. We found nine big rattlers inside that car. All of them had been injected with amphetamine; they were crazy, they bit the Robertses everywhere: neck, arms, ears, cheeks, hands. Poor people. Their heads were huge and swollen like Halloween pumpkins painted green. They must have died almost instantly. I hope so. That’s one hope I really hope.
TC: Rattlesnakes aren’t that prevalent in these regions. Not rattlesnakes of that caliber. They must have been brought here.
JAKE: They were. From a snake farm in Nogales, Texas. But now’s not the time to tell you how I know that.
(Outside, crusts of snow laced the ground; spring was a long way off—a hard wind whipping the window announced that winter was still with us. But the sound of the wind was only a murmur in my head underneath the racket of rattling rattlesnakes, hissing tongues. I saw the car dark under a hot sun, the swirling serpents, the human heads growing green, expanding with poison. I listened to the wind, letting it wipe the scene away.)
JAKE: ’Course, we don’t know if the Baxters ever got a coffin. I’m sure they did; it wouldn’t fit the pattern if they hadn’t. But they never mentioned receiving a coffin, and we never found a trace of it.
TC: Perhaps it got lost in the fire. But wasn’t there someone with them, another couple?
JAKE: The Hogans. From Tulsa. They were just friends of the Baxters who were passing through. The killer never meant to kill them. It was an accident.
See, what happened was: the Baxters were building a fancy new house, but the only part of it that was really finished was the basement. All the rest was still under construction. Roy Baxter was a well-to-do man; he could’ve afforded to rent this whole motel while his house was being built. But he chose to live in this underground basement, and the only entrance to it was through a trap door.
It was December—three months after the rattlesnake murders. All we know for certain is: the Baxters invited this couple from Tulsa to spend the night with them in their basement. And sometime just before dawn one humdinger of a fire broke out in that basement, and the four people were incinerated. I mean that literally: burned to ashes.
TC: But couldn’t they have escaped through the trap door?
JAKE (twisting his lips, snorting): Hell, no. The arsonist, the murderer, had piled cement blocks on top of it. King Kong couldn’t have budged it.
TC: But obviously there had to be some connection between the fire and the rattlesnakes.
JAKE: That’s easy to say now. But damned if I could make any connection. We had five guys working this case; we knew more about George and Amelia Roberts, about the Baxters and the Hogans, than they ever knew about themselves. I’ll bet George Roberts never knew his wife had had a baby when she was fifteen and had given it away for adoption.
’Course, in a place this size, everybody more or less knows everybody else, at least by sight. But we could find nothing that linked the victims. Or any motivations. There was no reason, none that we could find, why anybody would want to kill any of those people. (He studied his chessboard; he lit a pipe and sipped his bourbon) The victims, all of them were strangers to me. I’d never heard of them till they were dead. But the next fellow was a friend of mine. Clem Anderson. Second-generation Norwegian; he’d inherited a ranch here from his father, a pretty nice spread. We’d gone to college together, though he was a freshman when I was a senior. He married an old girl friend of mine, wonderful girl, the only girl I’ve ever seen with lavender eyes. Like amethyst. Sometimes, when I’d had a snootful, I used to talk about Amy and her amethyst eyes, and my wife didn’t think it was one bit funny. Anyway, Clem and Amy got married and settled out here and had seven children. I had dinner at their house the night before he got killed, and Amy said the only regret she had in life was that she hadn’t had more children.
But I’d been seeing a lot of Clem right along. Ever since I came out here on the case. He had a wild streak, he drank too much; but he was shrewd, he taught me a lot about this town.
One night he called me here at the motel. He sounded funny. He said he had to see me right away. So I said come on over. I thought he was drunk, but it wasn’t that—he was scared. Know why?
TC: Santa Claus had sent him a present.
JAKE: Uh-huh. But you see, he didn’t know what it was. What it meant. The coffin, and its possible connection to the rattlesnake murders, had never been made public. We were keeping that a secret. I had never mentioned the matter to Clem.
So when he arrived in this very room, and showed me a coffin that was an exact replica of the one the Robertses had received, I knew my friend was in great danger. It had been mailed to him in a box wrapped in brown paper; hi
TC: And was there a picture of him?
JAKE: Yes. And I’ll describe it carefully because it is very relevant to the manner of Clem’s death. Actually, I think the murderer meant it as a little joke, a sly hint as to how Clem was going to die.
In the picture, Clem is seated in a kind of jeep. An eccentric vehicle of his own invention. It had no top and it had no windshield, nothing to protect the driver at all. It was just an engine with four wheels. He said he’d never seen the picture before, and had no idea who had taken it or when.
Now I had a difficult decision. Should I confide in him, admit that the Roberts family had received a similar coffin before their deaths, and that the Baxters probably had as well? In some ways it might be better not to inform him: that way, if we kept close surveillance, he might lead us to the killer, and do it more easily by not being aware of his danger.
TC: But you decided to tell him.
JAKE: I did. Because, with this second coffin in hand, I was certain the murders were connected. And I felt that Clem must know the answer. He must.
But after I explained the significance of the coffin, he went into shock. I had to slap his face. And then he was like a child; he lay down on the bed and began to cry: “Somebody’s going to kill me. Why? Why?” I told him: “Nobody’s going to kill you. I can promise you that. But think, Clem! What do you have in common with these people who did die? There must be something. Maybe something very trivial.” But all he could say was: “I don’t know. I don’t know.” I forced him to drink until he was drunk enough to fall asleep. He spent the night here. In the morning he was calmer. But he still could not think of anything that connected him with the crimes, see how he in any way fitted into a pattern. I told him not to discuss the coffin with anyone, not even his wife; and I told him not to worry—I was importing an extra two agents just to keep an eye on him.
TC: And how long was it before the coffin-maker kept his promise?