Floyd Wells and Herb Clutter’s employer-employee relationship

Floyd Wells and Herbert William Clutter’s employer-employee relationship began in 1948, when Wells, then a nineteen-year-old drifter looking for work in western Kansas, was hired at Herbert William Clutter’s River Valley Farm. Though the job lasted about a year, Wells remembered the employer’s generosity and the Clutter family with affection. That history later gave Wells both a personal reason to speak up about the murders and a troubling connection to the information Dick used to plan them.

Employment at River Valley Farm

Wells found work at River Valley Farm in the autumn of 1948, near the Colorado border. He stayed through the winter and left sometime in 1949 because he felt restless and wanted to move on, not because of a quarrel with his employer. Herbert William Clutter treated him well, paid good wages, and, when a worker was short before payday, might advance five or ten dollars. Wells also remembered that bonuses came quickly when earned.

Wells described his regard for Herbert William Clutter as unusually strong: he liked him as much as any man he had met and remembered the whole family as kind. At the time, the younger children, Nancy and Kenyon, were about five or six; the older daughters were already in high school. That personal memory mattered later, when Wells had to decide whether to disclose what he knew about the family’s killers.

Information Dick Took from Wells

In 1959, Wells and Dick shared a cell at Lansing State Penitentiary for about a month, while Dick was nearing parole. As they discussed jobs and past work, Wells described his year at a substantial wheat farm in western Kansas. He also recalled telling Dick that Herbert William Clutter was wealthy and that running his operation could cost ten thousand dollars in a week. When Dick pressed him about the family, the children’s ages, the route to the house, and whether there was a safe, Wells said he remembered a cabinet or safe behind the desk in the office.

Wells later understood the consequence of those conversations: Dick repeatedly described a plan for himself and Perry Smith to rob the farm and kill anyone who could identify them. Wells did not believe Dick intended to carry it out, and he said he had not tried to dissuade him. The information Wells had shared about the farm and its occupants nevertheless became part of Dick’s account of the prospective target. Perry Smith later recounted that Dick had drawn him a diagram of the house and described a safe and cash; Wells’s recollection therefore helps explain how Dick acquired details that shaped the plan.

From Former Employee to Informant

After learning that the Clutter family had been murdered, Wells initially stayed silent. He feared retaliation from other prisoners and worried authorities might treat him as an accessory because he had supplied information about the family and property. A newspaper report of a reward did not immediately overcome those fears. He waited as news coverage dwindled and investigators remained without an answer.

Wells eventually confided in a religious fellow prisoner, who urged him to approach the proper authorities and arranged for him to be called to the deputy warden’s office without drawing attention to the source. Remembering that Herbert William Clutter had done him no harm and had once given him fifty dollars at Christmas, Wells spoke first to the deputy and then to Warden Hand. Hand called Logan Sanford, who in turn contacted Alvin Adams Dewey. Wells’s former employment thus became part of the investigative chain: the trust and concrete knowledge acquired at the farm helped Dick identify it, while Wells’s decision to disclose what he knew helped direct the authorities toward the men responsible.

The Relationship’s Significance

The relationship was brief in duration but consequential long afterward. Wells had not left the farm on bad terms and remembered Herbert William Clutter’s generosity rather than grievance; yet, in prison, ordinary details about the employer’s wealth, household, and office were transformed into intelligence for a robbery plan. The same memories that connected Wells to the crime also made his silence difficult to sustain. His eventual report did not erase his earlier disclosure, but it changed his role from an unwitting source of useful information into a witness who helped expose what Dick had told him.