Sale of the Clutter estate and Babe the horse

The Sale of the Clutter estate and Babe the horse was held at River Valley Farm on March 21, 1960, one day before the trial of Perry Smith and Dick began. It converted a murdered family’s working farm into a public auction, drawing more than five thousand people to Holcomb and marking the end of the longtime employees’ service there. As the property passed into new hands, the sale made the loss visible in the emptying of the farm and in the departure of Nancy Clutter’s horse, Babe.

The Sale and the Approaching Trial

On March 14, eight days before the scheduled opening of the trial, defense lawyers asked Judge Tate to postpone it. One reason was that Dick’s father was too ill to testify. The other was the timing of the auction: a large notice had appeared in shop windows, banks, restaurants, and the railway station, advertising the sale of the Herbert W. Clutter estate at the Clutter homestead on March 21. The defense argued that the signs, together with newspaper and radio advertisements, would keep the case in the minds of prospective jurors. One hundred and fifty people had been called as potential jurors, and the auction was to take place the day before the trial.

Judge Tate denied the request without comment. The sale therefore proceeded as scheduled, with the trial looming over it. The auction was not merely a private transfer of farm property: it was the first public opportunity to visit the Clutter place since the killings had been discovered. That circumstance brought some visitors out of curiosity, even as the sale’s practical purpose was to dispose of the estate’s contents.

An Unprecedented Crowd

Earlier in the year, the Japanese neighbor Hideo Ashida had auctioned his farming equipment before moving to Nebraska. His sale, regarded as successful, drew fewer than a hundred customers. The Clutter auction attracted slightly more than five thousand people, the largest auction crowd in the history of western Kansas. Cars arrived from across much of the state and from Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas, and Nebraska, forming a line along the lane to River Valley Farm.

The scale of the gathering exceeded even local expectations. The Ladies’ Circle of the Holcomb Community Church prepared food in one of the barns: two hundred homemade pies, two hundred and fifty pounds of hamburger meat, and sixty pounds of sliced ham. The turnout also reflected the season. By mid-March the snow had melted, but the fields remained too wet for farm work, and the thawed ground around the property was muddy. The weather made a drive to the sale possible for people with little to do outdoors, while the reopened farm drew those who wanted to see the place for themselves.

Some visitors crossed the newly green lawn toward the unoccupied Clutter home and peered through its windows. The orchard and lane were beginning to show spring growth, but the house was empty. The contrast between the renewed landscape and the absence of its family gave the public visit an uneasy quality without changing the auction’s businesslike purpose: bidders had come to buy equipment and goods, and the estate was to be sold piece by piece.

The Farm Dispersed

The auctioneer offered the equipment and supplies needed to operate a ranch: tractors and trucks, wheelbarrows and tools, unused lumber, milk buckets, branding irons, horseshoes, rope and harness, sheep dip, and tin washtubs. Even a bunch of rusty keys found a buyer. The crowd had come principally for bargains, but the range of lots made the sale a dismantling of the farm’s everyday operations as well as a disposal of property.

Nothing remained unsold. A young cowboy wearing pale-yellow boots bought Kenyon Clutter’s coyote wagon, the worn vehicle Kenyon had used to chase coyotes on moonlit nights. Its sale was one of the few moments when an ordinary object carried a particular family memory: the wagon had belonged to the boy whose life, like those of the other Clutters, was now absent from the place where it had been used.

Paul Helm, Vic Irsik, and Alfred Stoecklein served as stagehands, hauling smaller items onto and off the auctioneer’s platform. Each was an old, still-loyal employee of Herbert W. Clutter. Helping dispose of the possessions was their final service at River Valley Farm. The property had been leased to an Oklahoma rancher, and strangers would henceforth live and work there. As the sale progressively reduced the visible contents of Herbert W. Clutter’s domain, Helm regarded the event as a second funeral: the family had already been buried, and now the material world of the farm was disappearing as well.

Babe’s Departure

The livestock corral was the last part of the sale. Most of its contents were horses, including Babe, Nancy Clutter’s large, aging mare. Susan Kidwell, one of Nancy’s schoolmates, watched the bidding. She had adopted one of Nancy’s orphaned pets, a cat, and wished she could take Babe too, but had nowhere to keep a horse.

Kidwell’s attachment came from the rides she and Nancy had shared. They had ridden Babe through wheat fields on summer evenings, then down to the river, where the mare waded against the current. The horse’s sale thus put a price on an animal that had been part of the girls’ friendship and of their ordinary life together. Yet the bidding was slow. A Mennonite farmer who thought he might use Babe for plowing bought her for seventy-five dollars.

As the farmer led the mare out of the corral, Kidwell ran forward. She raised a hand as if to wave goodbye, then clasped it over her mouth instead. That restrained gesture closes the account of the auction on a personal loss rather than a successful bid. Babe’s departure completed the sale of the livestock and gave the dispersal of the estate a final, intimate consequence: Nancy’s friend could not keep the horse, and the animal left the farm where the two girls had ridden together.

Significance

The auction brought two forms of public attention into the same place. For most attendees it was an opportunity to buy ranch goods at low prices; for others, it was a rare chance to enter the Clutter property after the killings. Its timing also placed the estate’s dispersal directly beside the trial, despite the defense’s unsuccessful attempt to delay the proceedings. The crowd’s size showed how strongly the case had drawn people to the farm, while the practical sale moved the property toward a new use.

The event’s sequence—equipment sold, longtime workers completing their final day, the farm passing to a new lessee, and Babe led away—made the loss tangible without restoring the family to the place. The auction closed the farm’s life under the Clutters and opened it to strangers. Kidwell’s farewell to Babe gives that larger transfer its clearest human measure.