Adhesive tape

Adhesive tape is an everyday material that acquires a grimly practical role in the Clutter family murders. The narrative tracks it through three settings: a drugstore where Dick and Perry Smith buy it while traveling, the Clutter home where tape is used on family members, and an investigator’s desk where recovered pieces are preserved as evidence. Its path makes the tape tangible across the crime’s planning, execution, and investigation, while its commonness limits how far it can point toward a perpetrator.

Purchase on the Journey

At a drugstore during the journey toward the high plains, Dick and Perry Smith buy two thick rolls of adhesive tape. The purchase follows a large dinner in Great Bend: Perry, who has only fifteen dollars left, is prepared to have a modest meal, but Dick pays for a full spread and then the two go to the drugstore. The account places the tape among ordinary travel provisions, not as an object whose purpose is announced. Its weight in the story emerges only through what investigators later find in the house.

The purchase is one detail in the men’s journey, and the book gives it force through sequence rather than an explicit explanation. It appears shortly before their arrival in Finney County, as they continue by car toward Garden City. The subsequent discovery that adhesive tape has been used in the house makes the drugstore transaction newly significant. The evidence establishes this order and association, but does not identify the recovered material by brand or prove that those particular rolls were the ones used. That distinction matters: the purchase is a concrete clue in the narrative, while the evidentiary account also stresses how difficult it is to turn such a common object into a unique identifier.

Use in the Clutter Home

When the family is discovered, tape is one part of a repeated method of restraint. Kenyon is found bound and gagged with adhesive tape; his hands and feet are secured with cord. Bonnie’s mouth has also been taped, and the account describes Mr. Clutter’s mouth as taped, with the tape wound around his head. The narrative thus distinguishes the roles of two materials: tape is used to gag, while cord binds family members in several different arrangements. Treating them as interchangeable would obscure the specific details investigators and witnesses record.

Tape’s placement on the victims indicates a controlled effort to silence them as well as restrain them. Yet the account does not turn the object into a complete explanation of how the crime unfolded. A witness’s recollection describes the different arrangements and the state of the rooms, while investigators consider the shared features of the bindings. The tape is one element in a wider pattern, alongside the cord and the severed telephone wires; the cut wires are not described as tape, even though both details belong to the larger problem of communication being disabled. Their proximity in the investigation underscores the difference between a material used on people and the separate means by which the household’s telephones were made unusable.

Collection and Evidentiary Limits

After the crime, investigators collect the adhesive tape and the lengths of cord removed from the victims, sealing them in plastic sacks on a desk temporarily lent to Alvin Adams Dewey. The materials are preserved as possible courtroom exhibits, but their presence does not immediately resolve the case. The tape and cord are common products obtainable throughout the United States, so investigators regard neither as especially promising in isolation. The book gives that limitation equal weight with the objects’ disturbing use: preservation is necessary, but possession of an exhibit is not the same as having a distinctive clue.

Dewey’s desk also holds twenty enlarged glossy photographs taken at the crime scene. He studies them for details that might escape notice in ordinary viewing, and the narrative contrasts this search with the limited promise of the tape and cord. The photographs reveal shoe impressions, including dusty tracks that became visible on film and a separate, conspicuous half-sole impression on a mattress box. Those impressions offer investigators a different kind of lead; the tape remains part of the material record, but is not presented as having the same identifying force. Its evidentiary value is therefore real but bounded: it documents how the victims were silenced and restrained, while its widespread availability frustrates any simple inference about its source.

Narrative Significance

The tape’s changing status gives the object a compact narrative arc. Before the crime, it is one of two thick rolls selected in a drugstore during a trip. In the house, it is part of a method imposed on family members. Afterward, it is handled, sealed, and examined as evidence. Each transition alters how the reader understands the same ordinary commodity without changing its physical identity. The purchase gains significance retrospectively, but the investigation cannot make that retrospective connection conclusive on the basis of the material alone.

The book also keeps the tape within a larger account built from physical traces and human testimony. It names the tape among materials removed from the victims, but the account of the discovery comes through a witness’s recollection, while the investigative narrative describes how the collected items were assessed. That layering makes the object both a concrete trace and a reminder of evidentiary uncertainty. Adhesive tape helps establish what happened in the home; its commonness prevents it from answering, by itself, the more consequential question of who was responsible.