In Cold Blood By Truman Capote Essay - 2,050 words

IN COLD BLOOD BY TRUMAN CAPOTE IN COLD BLOOD by TRUMAN CAPOTE On the night of November 15, 1959, in the little town of Holcomb, Kansas, Herbert W. Clutter, his wife, Bonnie, and their teen-aged children, Nancy and Kenyon, were savagely murdered in their home by blasts from a shotgun held inches from their faces. wrote E. Fremont-Smith in his Books of the Times (10 January, 1966). Herbert Clutter was found in the basement, his throat also slashed; Bonnie and Nancy were in their bedrooms; Kenyon had been propped up comfortably on a downstairs couch. There seemed to be no motive for the crime, and no useful clues. An initial suspect, Nancy Clutters young boy friend, was quickly released after a lie-detector test.


A painstaking sifting of the Clutters livers, friends and acquaintances revealed nothing except that the Clutters seemed the least likely candidates for murder in all Kansas. The story begins earlier that same year. Capote paints a picture of an ordinary family a middle-aged farmer, his wife, their two youngest children living their lives together out in the west Kansas desert. Truman Capote, describes the events preceding and following the murder of the Clutter family in their small town Kansas home. This "nonfiction novel" is based on events that truly happened but are portrayed novelistically. Capote depicts the thoughts, actions, and conversation of the killers in the weeks and hours before the murders.


Also depicted is the homey domestic life of the doomed Clutter family, denizens of the good and virtuous life in small town Kansas. The details of the crime were gruesome enough. What makes it truly horrifying to the citizens of Holcomb was the lack of any visible reason for it. The Clutters were not just any family; they were the most prosperous and respected family in the region, admired for their uprightness, piety, hard work and good deeds. Their wealth, from Herbert Clutters well-managed wheat farm, seemed almost a sign of grace; the children, Nancy and Kenyon, were everything American parents could want friendly, talented, generous, active in mind and body, excellent students. Bonnie suffered periods of depression, but had been a faithful wife for 25 years and was obviously a warm and capable mother and homemaker. A great many people knew the Clutters, and apparently there was not an enemy among them.


That is one side of Truman Capotes remarkable, splendidly written "true account" the underserved, hideous slaughter of an ideal American family. On the other side, in subtle balance, is the story of their destroyers, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith. They had never met the Clutters before entering their home and shooting them down, and afterward they scarcely bothered, scarcely were capable of covering their tracks. Capote lays out the story with apparent honesty, resisting the temptation to dress up the characters as romanticized heroes and villains. In particular, the reader is forced to view Perry Smith and Dick Hicock not as a pair of monsters, but as two human beings who happened to commit a disgraceful crime. They came from as different a world as you could find in rural America at the time.


Perry Smiths family was broken and violent. Hed 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: Perrys favorite movie was "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," and he was certain that if he could only get to Mexico, hed find treasure of his own there. Capote gives us an empathetic and fascinating look at a murderers psyche through his portrait of Perry Smith. Though he suffers from a physical deformity as the result of an accident, has an interesting look about him: "It was a changelings face, and mirror-guided experiments had taught him how to ring the changes, how to look now ominous, now impish, now soulful; a tilt of the head, a twist of the lips, and the corrupt gypsy became the gentle romantic." Dick Hickocks ambitions were slightly less delusional; he just wanted to take the money and run off somewhere he wouldnt be found. Hickock was also scarred; a car accident had put an unnerving asymmetry into his otherwise handsome face.


Hickocks family was poor but relatively stable. He had a penchant for passing bad checks, but the Clutter murders left his family confounded. The novel continues with efforts, eventually successful, of law enforcement and justice to identify, track down, arrest, interrogate, convict, and finally execute the killers is detailed, and the story ends with the visit of a family friend to the small country graveyard where the family was laid to rest. "In Cold Blood" is the result of six years of intensive interviewing, research and writing. It is reportage in a depth we have not seen before. As he told himself in interview to George Plimpton (1966): one morning in November, 1959, while flicking through The New York Times, I encountered on a deep-inside page, this headline: Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain. Truman Capote went to Kansas after reading about the Clutter murder in the newspaper, and, despite being most un-Kansan, was able to win the confidence of virtually everyone involved with the crime Clutter friends and neighbors, the police and eventually the murderers.


He was on the courthouse steps when Hickock and Smith were returned to Holcomb. He visited them in jail, and at Smiths request, was present as a witness at their hanging. Part of Capotes equipment is his carefully trained memory: he took no notes while interviewing, and nothing was taped; instead, he listened, and thereby won extraordinarily candid accounts. E. Fremont-Smith (10 January 1966) wrote in The New York Times Book Review, When "In Cold Blood" was published last fall in four installments in The New Yorker, it was preceded by an "Editors Note: All quotations in this article are taken either from official records or from conversations, transcribed ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Essay Tags: cold blood, truman capote, capote, the killers, clutter

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