Police have exhumed the bodies of the two killers who were the subject of author Truman Capote’s greatest work, the “nonfiction novel,” In Cold Blood. According to CNN, DNA evidence may tie Richard Hickock and Perry Smith to another mass murder, half a continent away from the site of their original crime.

In 1965, Smith and Hickock were put to death by hanging for the murder of farmer Herbert Clutter, his wife and two of their four children, a crime that took place on the night of November 15, 1959. After the killings, the two men stole a car and fled to Florida, where it in now believed that they killed another family.

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According to the website Live Science, on December 19, 1959, 34 days after the Clutter murders, “Cliff and Christine Walker and their two children were shot to death at their home in Osprey, Fla., 10 miles south of Sarasota.”

The family’s two-year-old daughter was found drowned in a bathtub. Christine Walker’s body showed signs of sexual assault.

Kyle Smith, Deputy Director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation confirmed to the Associated Press that bone fragments have been obtained from each of the killers’ corpses to compare with DNA samples of semen taken from Christine Walker’s underwear.

Smith and Hickock have been suspects in the Walker murders since 1960, but new DNA matching techniques could finally solve a case that has been cold for decades.

“Our interest is providing closure to the Walker family,” Smith told the AP. “Obviously, where these perpetrators are dead, it’s not going to result in any prosecution,” but that “there’s a lot of historical interest as well.”

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