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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
Just over 40 years ago, a dandified New York reporter named Truman Capote traveled to Kansas to investigate the shotgun murder of a farm family. The result changed journalism forever.
Jan 22, 2002 | "In Cold Blood" began, as the story goes, when Truman Capote came across a 300-word article in the back of the New York Times describing the unexplained murder of a family of four in rural Kansas.
"Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15 [1959] (UPI) -- A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged ... There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut."
Capote seized on the grisly story and went down to Kansas to turn it into a book. He spent six years researching "In Cold Blood," and claimed to have invented a genre, the nonfiction novel; later, Tom Wolfe and others would include "In Cold Blood" in their own movement, known as New Journalism.
Both inventions are old hat now, and, more than 35 years after its publication, "In Cold Blood's" radicalism is a lot less apparent. But still the book stands out as a masterfully controlled recounting of murder and its aftermath and the people involved.
Gossip-slinging and accusations swirled about Capote in the sensational months after the book's publication in late 1965, all of it a mere harbinger of the even nastier gossip and accusations that would cloud his later life. But there's no hint of that in Capote's best novel. His meticulous, even obsessive reporting allowed his characters to tell the story, and the result is the best true-crime novel you ever couldn't put down.
Herbert Clutter was a successful farmer and community leader, a man known for his fairness, his loyalty to his invalid wife and his aversion to dealing in cash. (That was a fact that, had it been known to his future assailants, might have kept all four Clutters alive.) The family is almost too much of a 1950s fantasy to be believed. Nancy, a straight-A student and award-winning pie-maker, was dating a high school basketball star.
Kenyon, the bookish youngest Clutter, was building a cedar chest to give to his oldest sister, Beverly, on her wedding. They were regular churchgoers, active in the 4-H. As Holcomb residents would later tell detectives, there was no one who didn't like the Clutters.
Their killers came from as different a world as you could find in rural America at the time. Perry Smith's family was broken and violent. He'd lost two siblings to suicide, and a parent to alcoholism. Half-Cherokee, half-Irish, Smith had a "runty" build, thanks to a motorcycle accident that left him with disfigured legs and an addiction to aspirin and glorified daydreams. It was one of those daydreams that sent him out to the Clutter place: Perry's favorite movie was "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," and he was certain that if he could only get to Mexico, he'd find treasure of his own there.
Dick Hickock's ambitions were slightly less delusional; he just wanted to take the money and run off somewhere he wouldn't be found. Hickock was also scarred; a car accident had put an unnerving asymmetry into his otherwise handsome face. Hickock's family was poor but relatively stable. He had a penchant for passing bad checks, but the Clutter murders left his family confounded. Where did such an ordinary boy muster up so much evil?
