By SHAJIA AHMAD

Special to The Hays Daily News

HOLCOMB -- The last person to see the Clutter family alive said the community finally is giving the family the recognition it always deserved.

"Up until this year, there wasn't anything in this little town of Holcomb besides the house to remember the family," said Bobby Rupp, who was dating Nancy Clutter at the time of her death and who worked more than a year with community members to create a memorial for family slain Nov. 15, 1959.

Rupp, a Holcomb resident, points out most of the people who knew the Clutters are no longer around.

"I wanted people in Holcomb to remember the Clutters for the right reasons, so that even 50 years from now we can still look at (the memorial) and see how important they were to the community."

It's those achievements that are engraved in granite at the memorial in a brief but comprehensive biography of Herb and Bonnie Mae Fox Clutter and their children, Nancy, 16, and Kenyon, 15.

For several years, Rupp, who investigators initially suspected might have been involved in the murders, has gotten phone calls -- some in the middle of the night and some far from Kansas -- from individuals asking about a memorial.

After months of planning and designing, and with nearly $23,000 in donations to fund the project, members of the Clutter Memorial Committee, including Rupp, have provided an answer.

The memorial was dedicated in September at Holcomb Community Park.

Debbie Mader has lived in Holcomb all her life but said she had little idea about who the family was or the extent of their involvement in the community before the memorial.

Several of Herb Clutter's contributions in a town of only a few hundred residents in his time are revealed in gold letters: president of both the Kansas and National Wheatgrowers associations, a board director and president of the Garden City Cooperative Equity Exchange and member of other state and national agricultural committees and boards, as well as a well-respected and prominent Holcomb farmer.

In addition, the memorial reads that the entire family was involved extensively with church and social activities at First United Methodist Church in Garden City, where Herb taught adult Sunday school, Bonnie taught in the children's division, and the two children participated in youth groups and choir.

Now, when out-of-town patrons at her family's Holcomb restaurant, El Rancho, ask about the memorial, Mader points them just a few block west to the park, where lights illuminate the circular memorial at night.

"It's just beautiful, and it's something everyone can go and see because it's accessible," Mader said. "It also takes on a more personal view of the family, which is a nice gesture."

Mader was only 3 when the Clutter family was murdered, the events of which famously are chronicled in Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." The book or subsequent films, however, are not mentioned at the memorial's site.

And the family's killers -- Perry Edwards Smith and Richard Hickock -- merely are identified as "intruders" intending to rob the family that night.

Many in Holcomb, including Rupp, believe Capote's account and films have overshadowed the family's legacy.

Others feel tribute could have been paid to the well-respected family much sooner.

"You think the town would have done something by now, but no one did," said Holcomb resident Casey Richmeier, 30. "I wonder if it took 50 years for the people in charge to find some closure with what happened."

His friend, Holcomb resident Debbie Danler, agreed.

"Why did it take so long?" Danler, 53, asked. "The people affected the most aren't really around anymore, and if it had happened sooner, it might even have been easier for them to put together."

During a previous meeting of the committee members last year, Clifford Hope Jr., Herb Clutter's former attorney, passed around a letter from author Nelle Harper Lee, a childhood and lifetime friend of Capote who accompanied her fellow writer to Finney County and helped him with his book. Members of the committee had consulted both Lee and two surviving family members, Beverly English and Eveanna Mosier, who have mostly shied from media's limelight through the years. In her handwritten letter to Hope, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author also speculated a memorial should have been built long before.

"You'd be surprised to know how one simple slat of wood can lay a family to rest," Lee wrote in her letter dated July 14, 2008.

In the months leading up to the tragedy's golden anniversary, Rupp has fielded questions from people wondering why now is the time to dedicate a memorial to the family.

Rupp generally answers, "Why not now?"

"It's just something I felt strongly about, something that we needed to have in Holcomb," Rupp said.

Duane West, a former Finney County attorney who worked with state prosecutors to convict Hickock and Smith during the March 1960 trial, agreed. "The memorial is here to emphasize the family, and rightly so," West said.

Less than half a mile from his Holcomb home, Rupp, now retired and in his late 60s, goes out to water the shrubs and plants taking root around the circular memorial in the park, when he runs into people "from all over," he said: Scott City, Hugoton, Wichita, and passersby on the Old U.S. Highway 50 that runs through the town of about 5,000.

There still is some landscaping work to be done -- rocks to be laid as mulch and a drip irrigation system to be installed -- and Rupp also hopes by next summer to build a small structure engraved with the memorial's dedication date: Sept. 12, 2009.

City Council members donated the area of the park where the memorial sits.

Holcomb's maintenance workers are responsible for the memorial's upkeep.

"But as long as I'm around, I'll be watching over it, too," Rupp said and chuckled.