quipowerty's Full Review: Truman Capote - In Cold Blood: A True Account of a...
Main Essay: It all began in November 1959 when a newsman (aka reporter) named Truman Capote was sitting on his desk, drinking his morning coffee, when he ended up reading about the brutal murder of a Kansas farm family in a local newspaper, namely the Clutter family. A few days later, Capote packed up his bags and his hat, and began the long drive to Holcomb, KS, for reasons that I still can’t fully comprehend.
This began the long odyssey towards what has turned out to be the premier non-fiction novel of the 20th Century. The story of the discovery of the bodies is told from a witness who accompanied the police in the house. All the victims had been tied up, and then shot in the face or in the head, he recalls. The father, Herb Clutter, had used all his strength to free his hands just before being shot. Also shot dead were Nancy Clutter, the youngest daughter, the son Kenyon, and their mother Bonnie.
All the townsfolk mourned their passing. They included Bobby Rupp, Nancy’s ex-boyfriend who was considered by police as the chief suspect until evidence proved otherwise. There was the Ashida family, Japanese Americans who had been in internment camps during WWII. There was Susan Kidwell, Nancy’s childhood friend who also hoped to be her college roommate. Then there was Special Agent Dewey, a Kansas state police investigator who was the chief agent in the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, who lived not far from Holcomb, and had a wife and two sons like any family man.
Then the way the two killers manipulated each other is focused on much more highly after the murderers flee the scene. Smith is shown as the cool quiet guy with a complicated personality, struggling in his relationship with Hickock, who is described here as a simple-minded sociopath. Capote also deliberately belittled the method of their capture (a speeding stop in Las Vegas that turned into a murder arrest after a background check on the driver.)
Most notable is an S&M aspect to the story. This is where Smith (after his capture) describes how they bound Nancy Clutter hand and foot (and did the same to all the other family members), and then Smith watched in horror as Hickock talked openly of raping the girl. Smith advised against it. Tragically it mattered little, since the family was killed soon afterwards, along with Nancy. When asked about the amount of money taken from the home, Smith replied, “Between forty and fifty dollars.”
The two were tried and convicted, and the rest of the story describes how they spent their last days on Death Row in a Kansas prison, alongside another criminal pair, Ronald York and John Latham, who had committed a murder spree across several states. It’s actually scary to think about the damage the four of them would have done if they had all worked together in a single crime. Also present in the cells was Lowell Andrews, convicted of killing his entire family.
Alvin Dewey was present in July 1965 when Richard Hickock arrived to step up to the gallows, with Perry Smith waiting his turn…
Capote, just for the record, never mentioned himself or his own name in the body of the story. He told the story from the viewpoints of those in the story, such as the two killers, Alvin Dewey, and a few dozen eyewitnesses. Capote believed that a good journalist writes articles in the third person, and always seeks to keep himself in the background.
The writing style is still graphic and descriptive although the words killed and murdered aren’t mentioned much in the story. The crime itself and its immediate aftermath, as previously mentioned, received its descriptions from eyewitnesses and in one case from Perry Smith himself. The inclusion of the personal accounts, told from the persons’ viewpoints, is the book’s greatest strength. The witnesses who first found the Clutter family bound and shot described the scene in graphic terms, and almost couldn’t control themselves when explaining what they saw.
Smith, by contrast, talked dryly and almost nonchalantly about his role in the killings. To read the graphic style of what he said is to realize how cold and emotionless a criminal can become once he’s committed a heinous crime. This will leave people asking questions on how these types of creatures exist at all. Capote’s book does not fully answer that question, and its tendency to make people ponder about this is one of the book's greatest strengths.
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