Flashback, November 1959: Kansas Murders Inspire Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’

The brutal murder of four members of the Clutter family in mid-November 1959 reverberated not only throughout the village of Holcomb in western Kansas, but across the United States—enough to bring a horde of out-of-town reporters to this quiet community in the American heartland.

One non-journalistic observer who arrived within a week, New Yorker contributor Truman Capote, initially startled the community—including the case’s investigators—with his high-pitched, almost squeaky, whine, a scarf that nearly trailed to the floor, and visits to big-city gay and lesbian bars that shocked straitlaced area residents.

Six years later, after gaining the confidence of these locals—along with the two ex-cons eventually apprehended and executed for the Clutter murders—Capote would publish a classic of the true-crime genre and a pioneering example of “The New Journalism” combining fact with fiction, In Cold Blood.

Over the course of more than half a century, this so-called “nonfiction novel” on the crime and punishment of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith (who, ironically, killed the Clutters for a safe full of cash that didn’t exist) retains its gruesome fascination.

The events were also recounted in a 1967 movie and 1996 TV miniseries based on Capote’s book, two biopics (Capote and Infamous) on how the author wrote his account, and a four-part Sundance TV documentary that tracked the case in more in-depth detail.

When the book came out, there was some low-level buzz of curiosity about how Capote could remember so much dialogue and so many details with such seeming accuracy.

He did have a good deal of solid documentation: the transcript of the killers’ trial; boxes of letters and newspaper clippings in his home; notebooks filled with on-scene descriptions; and interviews that either he or his childhood friend, To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee, conducted.

But especially after Capote’s death in 1984, more questions have been raised about the book’s accuracy—everything from the relative importance of key figures to scenes and dialogue entirely invented.

The first person I knew who disputed Capote’s claim that he didn’t take notes during interviews because of his great memory was Norman Mailer, at a winter 1981 talk to writing graduate students at Columbia University’s School of the Arts that I covered for the college newspaper.

"I love Truman Capote in 82 ways, but he's a terrible liar," the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner said, provoking laughter from the class. "I know he doesn't remember conversations we've had two or three days ago."

Interviewees for George Plimpton’s 1997 oral history biography, Truman Capote, differed with the subject’s account on several details, including that Hickock intended to rape teenage victim Nancy Clutter; that Capote exaggerated the role of lead detective Alvin Dewey in tracking down the killers; and that Dewey closed his eyes during one of the executions.

Nearly two decades later, Ben Yagoda’s Slate article, using contemporaneous notes by an initial fact-checker from The New Yorker, thoroughly deconstructed the masterful publicity claims that, “despite having the stylistic and thematic attributes of great literature, the account of four brutal murders in Kansas was completely true.”

Among the outright departures from truth taken by Capote were:

*a poignant final scene between Dewey and a teenage friend of Nancy Clutter, completely invented to provide closure for the narrative;

* describing the actions of someone who was alone, and later killed in the multiple murders;

*claiming that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation had immediately acted upon a crucial lead, when in fact its five-day wait gave Hickoff and Smith time to reach Florida;

*interior monologues to which neither Capote nor anyone else could be privy.

A few years after Yagoda’s article, in focusing on the Clutters rather than their killers, the Sundance TV documentary Cold-Blooded highlighted how Capote had sensationalized the crime and split the community of Holcomb in half over his account.

In Cold Blood represented a problematic literary triumph. Its commercial and critical success encouraged other writers to follow Capote’s departures from accuracy in service to a more novelistic approach—all of which makes readers mistrustful of the basic facts of journalism.

That is a shame, because, as a painstaking stylist, Capote created a haunting meditation on lives blighted and snuffed out—that of upstanding local businessman Herbert Clutter and his family, of course, as well as Smith, who suffered through a nearly Dickensian childhood before his descent into darkness.

Capote fully achieved his intention of depicting what he called, in an interview with The New York Times, “this collision between the desperate, ruthless, wandering, savage part of American life, and the other, which is insular and safe.”

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1967 film adaptation of In Cold Blood, with Scott Wilson and Robert Blake as, respectively, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith.)