Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is a crime story of Homeric proportions that explores the violent murder of the Clutter family in 1959 and the lives of their killers. But there is much humanity in these pages, too. One humanizing setting is the county jail in Garden City, Kansas, where the two killers were initially confined.
As Capote describes it, “Institutional dourness and cheerfulness coexist on the fourth floor of the Finney County Courthouse. The presence of the county jail supplies the first quality, while the so-called Sheriff’s Residence, a pleasant apartment separated from the jail proper by steel doors and a short corridor, accounts for the second.”
Reading this passage as a teenager I was astounded that a sheriff and his wife (for most sheriffs were—and still are—men) could set up housekeeping only steps away from a grim row of jail cells populated with petty criminals, felons and murderers.
But in Finney County, the arrangement was even more intimate than this, as Capote notes. “The jail contains six cells; the sixth is actually only an isolated unit situated inside the sheriff’s residence—indeed it adjoins the…kitchen. ‘But,’ says Josie Meier [the undersheriff’s wife], ‘that don’t worry me. I enjoy the company. Having someone to talk to while I’m doing my kitchen work…'”
Many years after my initial reading of In Cold Blood, I recalled this seemingly reckless floor plan and the unexpected connection between the undersheriff’s wife and an accused killer. I was just beginning to plot a mystery novel set in the 1930s Dust Bowl, with the case solved by a sheriff, Temple Jennings, and his wife, Etha. I decided that having a single cell adjoining the Jennings’ apartment was ripe with potential. Moving the cell into the kitchen would be even better. In my fictional Jackson County Courthouse, a lone cell occupies one corner of the family kitchen. Etha stores root vegetables there when it’s not in use.
Now, every interaction between Temple, Etha, and the young prisoner who is housed there had the potential to provoke a cyclone of tension. In the Finney County jail, at the time of the Clutter family murders, the sheriff’s residence, on the fourth floor of the courthouse, was occupied by Undersheriff Wendle Meier and his wife, Josephine. According to Capote, Mrs. Meier “cooks and sews for the prisoners, darns, does their laundry…and looks after their five-room apartment, with its gemütlich mélange of plump hassocks and squashy chairs…”
Perry Smith, one of two men arrested for killing the Clutters, was locked up in the isolated cell adjoining the kitchen. Capote paints Mrs. Meier as a “direct and practical woman” with a kind face. Her initial impression of Smith was that he was “very shy.” Eventually he told her he liked Spanish rice and she promised to make some for him.
“…he smiled kind of, and I decided—well, he wasn’t the worst young man I ever saw.”
This interplay between Mrs. Meier and Smith, as well as their daily physical proximity, fascinated me. As I wrote the scenes between Etha and a young prisoner housed in her kitchen, I drew on the push and pull of this odd pairing.
Although knowing that at least one courthouse had such an arrangement was enough justification to use a similar blueprint in my story, the history major in me longed to know more. So while eking out early drafts, I indulged in the preferred diversion of many novelists….research.
Restorative rooting in county histories and digital newspaper morgues revealed that in rural areas of late 19th and early 20th century America, it was the norm for the sheriff’s residence and the jail to share adjacent spaces. Sometimes the sheriff and his family would live in an actual house with a jail tacked on the back. Other arrangements were similar to Finney County’s, with the family living quarters and jail sharing the top floor of the courthouse. Thick concrete walls and steel doors mostly kept the prisoners and family separate.
B.J. Alderman in The Secret Life of the Lawman’s Wife describes one such set-up in Allegan County, Michigan:
“The jail cells were behind the family quarters. Prisoners came in through the side door, went through the sheriff’s office and right into the cell area….the male prisoners were fed by lining up outside the kitchen door that had a 2 ½-by-2 ½-foot barred pass-through in the door between the family quarters and the cells.”
Jon Craig, the son of a sheriff, recalls an even more intimate floor plan. Craig lived with his parents and siblings in that same Finney County courthouse where the Clutter family murderers were housed years earlier. Craig told a local reporter that the family’s apartment “was right next to the jail and when prisoners were brought up the stairs, they had to go through the sheriff’s living room to be taken to the cell.”
I now felt comfortable putting a jail cell smack dab in Etha’s kitchen. But would it be plausible that she would form a motherly relationship with a young man in the cell? Further digging told me “yes.”
Alderman was told by a sheriff’s daughter that her mother, Leila Pedersen, “took on the role of teacher for inmates” in the 1920s and 30s in Chippewa County, Minnesota. After the daughter left for school each day, Mrs. Pederson frequently took out her blackboard and asked the young, uneducated men in the cells “who wants to learn to read and write?”
Researching this article I learned that Ann Rule, the author of the best-selling The Stranger Beside Me about Ted Bundy, came from a family that had several connections to the criminal justice system. Her grandfather was the sheriff of Montcalm County, Michigan.
According to Rule’s website:
“When Ann spent her summer vacations with her grandparents in Stanton, Michigan, she helped her grandmother prepare meals for the prisoners in the jail. She wondered why such friendly, normal-appearing, men were locked behind bars, and why the sweet woman in the cell upstairs—who taught Ann to crochet—was about to go on trial for murder. That was the beginning of her lifelong curiosity about the ‘Whys’ behind criminal behavior.”
As I mulled over my characters in the early stages of plotting, I also wanted to ensure that Etha had a plausible role to play in helping to solve the murder of a fast-talking rainmaker during the Dirty Thirties. Mystery series, in which an amateur sleuth stumbles upon a succession of dead bodies while on vacation, while gardening, while playing croquet, while changing a tire, strike me as forced and improbable. I wanted Etha’s participation to be authentic. And again a bit of research came to the rescue.
Since the wives of many rural sheriffs lived on-site, almost all of these women had duties connected to the jail. They ordered supplies, admitted and fed prisoners and did the laundry. These arrangements are described by Ken Kerle, retired editor of American Jails magazine, as “mom and pop jails” to reflect the family-business approach to managing the lock-ups.
[F]or many a small-town sheriff with little or no back-up, he frequently counted on his spouse to book, search and lock-up prisoners as well as to ride shotgun with him as needed.In The Secret Life of the Lawman’s Wife, Alderman lists deputy, bailiff, administrative assistant, laundress and cook as among the unofficial duties of a sheriff’s wife. And for many a small-town sheriff with little or no back-up, he frequently counted on his spouse to book, search and lock-up prisoners as well as to ride shotgun with him as needed.
On the night of April 18, 1931, an African-American prisoner was rushed to Carroll County, Tennessee, after the jail where he was originally held was stormed by a lynch mob. Carroll County Sheriff J. Clint Butler and his wife, Pearlie, anticipated that the streets around their own courthouse would also be choked with the same angry men set on vengeance. The couple made a plan. Early the next morning, the sheriff hid in the dining room with the keys to the cell block. As cars began pulling up to the courthouse, Mrs. Butler alone emerged to address the mob.
When the angry men demanded that she let them into the jail, Mrs. Butler called out, “You may shoot me down but I will not open the door.” In newspaper reports she added, “I told them that they couldn’t try to run anything like that over me.”
There are a number of accounts of sheriffs’ wives either thwarting prison escapes or capturing escapees in the article “All in the Family: The Role of the Sheriff’s Wife in 20th-Century Mom and Pop Jails” by Rick Ruddell and Ken Leyton-Brown.
Take the Apanoose County Jail in southern Iowa which was rocked by several jail-break attempts in August of 1902. Two prisoners had already escaped earlier that month. On a Thursday morning, another attempt was made and the sheriff was seriously injured. Newspaper accounts state that, “The sheriff’s wife seized an ax and, with the assistance of Deputy Bevington, who had a revolver, forced the prisoners back to their cells.”
Toward the end of In Cold Blood, Mrs. Meier, the undersheriff’s wife, recalls the day Perry Smith and Dick Hickock received their guilty verdicts and were returned to the jail.
“…after everyone was gone I start to wash some dishes—I heard [Smith] crying. I turned on the radio. But I could hear him crying like a child….I went to him. The door of his cell. He reached out his hand. He wanted me to hold his hand and I did…”
While plotting Death of a Rainmaker, I remembered Capote’s description of White’s jail cell just steps away from the undersheriff’s kitchen. I remembered the Clutter family’s deaths. I remembering the killers drive to Mexico.
But Mrs. Meier made the most lasting impression. Like Mrs. Meier, my Etha is a big-hearted woman who recognizes the longing in the forced nonchalance of prisoners and tramps. Who studies the pinched mouth of a motherless child. Who notices the downcast gaze of dispossessed farmers squatting in the shade of the hardware store, their rough palms hanging empty between their knees. Who takes all this in and extends her hand.
Featured image: San Augustine, Texas. Mrs. Jim Halberd [i.e., Halbert], wife of the sheriff, washing turnip
greens.
