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.)

Bonus Quote of the Day (John Gregory Dunne, on the Trio at the Heart of the Simpson Case)

“A black ex-athlete growing older ungracefully, tenuously living a white life on the limited visa of his contract as a television pitchman; his beautiful battered ex-wife trying at age thirty-five to start over after half a lifetime on someone else’s tab; a waiter and unsuccessful male model uncertain whether to become a restaurateur or a paramedic, collecting business cards from the men on whose tables he waited in case one might decide to invest in his dream restaurant: these were characters of considerable and ambiguous particularity. With the events of June 12, however, when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were found slashed and stabbed to death, and with the arrest of Orenthal James Simpson for killing them, all three lost whatever identity they had in the frantic search to find some larger meaning that would explain the crime. The story demanded a moral: youth wasted, promise denied, spousal abuse, domestic violence, the race card. Show me a hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald once jotted in his notebook, and I will write you a tragedy.”— John Gregory Dunne, “The Simpsons,” in Regards:The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (2005)

In the summer of 1994, while up at the Stratford Festival in Canada, I chatted with a fellow playgoer during a performance of Othello. I couldn’t help noticing some similarities between the title character and O.J. Simpson, I told him. “Yes,” he answered. “The trouble is, everybody else is noticing it, too. It’s become a cliché.”

I understood perfectly what he meant. Still, with so many people following the events, the number of cultural comparisons already being drawn to what was shaping up as the Crime of the Nineties was already staggering.

In a prior post, I drew parallels to the 17^th century Italian murder case immortalized in Robert Browning’s narrative poem The Ring and the Book and the Simpson case. But today, on the 20^th anniversary of the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, other aspects of this cause celebre remain to be explored.

Older brother Dominick was the one who wrote more, in essays and fiction (Another City, Not My Own), about the Brentwood tragedy, largely fueled by his never-ending rage as a father whose own daughter had been murdered. 

But John Gregory Dunne also wrote incisively about this, whether including elements of it in his final novel, Nothing Lost, or in the piece quoted above, which appeared originally in The New York Review of Books three months after the killings and the infamous Bronco chase watched by 95 million Americans at one point or another.

Dunne had a particular vantage point on the principals in the case: he lived in Brentwood, just like the defendant, Los Angeles DA Gil Garcetti, Mayor Richard Riordan, and Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz. Thus, he knew about the aspirations and environment of the community examined with so little insight by the rest of the media. 

Before the case had even come to trial, Dunne was already jaundiced about certain aspects, notably the racial angle that Simpson’s defense team would exploit. (“So assiduously had he [Simpson] pursued racial neutrality that he had become estranged from prominent elements of Los Angeles’ black leadership.”)  

And, as the “Bonus Quote of the Day” indicates, he was especially attuned to the quiet desperation, the grasp for the last chance, that animated O.J., Nicole and Ron alike.

Twenty years later, Dunne’s essay still stands up well. He noticed, even then, how some commentators were striving “to find some larger meaning that would explain the crime.” 

Last month, in the same magazine where John Gregory Dunne’s brother vented his moral outrage about what was happening before his eyes, Lili Anolik sought for a similar overarching theme. Terming the case “TV’s first reality show,” Anolik accused Simpson, “regardless of whether the jury got it right or the jury got it wrong,” of murdering popular culture.

This is a way too cute formulation. Above all else is this: two people were murdered in the most brutal fashion that night. O.J.’s defense team, unable to find a plausible explanation for who might have murdered them besides the defendant, simply threw fairy dust in the eyes of the jury. 

Most outrageously, after the not guilty verdict, Simpson announced that he would immediately start searching for her killer—as if the answer couldn’t be found in his home mirror. In Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau  properly mocked this pretense, devoting an entire week’s worth of the strip to “O.J. Simpson, Detective.”

This Day in Literary History (Execution in the ‘Double Indemnity’ Murders)

January 12, 1928—Her trial was sensational, so why should her execution have been any different? And so, Ruth Brown Snyder—having washed down Chicken Parmesan with pasta Alfredo, ice cream, two milkshakes, and a 12-pack of grape soda—was executed after her lover, weak-willed corset salesman Henry Judd Gray, for their part in the murder of Snyder’s husband. This first execution of a woman in New York’s Sing Sing in nearly 30 years was recorded on film by a reporter, who covertly shot it with a miniature camera taped to his ankle, with the indelible image of the woman strapped in the electric chair with a mask over her face displayed the next day for readers of the New York Daily News.

At another, earlier time, authorities might have hesitated about executing a mother of a young child. But this 32-year-old Queens housewife was a brassy, curvy blonde given to dancing and taking rooms for afternoon sex at the Waldorf during Prohibition while her husband stayed home minding their daughter. In short, in the court of public opinion, she was not just a flapper, but a flapper who, given her age and way of life, should have known better. She had to be punished, and was, for convincing Gray to kill her husband, Albert Snyder, the editor of Motor Boating Magazine (where she had once worked as his secretary). The details--coming home late with her husband on the night of the March 1927 killing, having sex with her lover while her husband slept, then beating Albert with a dumbbell herself when Gray botched his first attempt at the hit--only increased animosity toward her.

The Snyder-Gray murder might have ended as simply an entry in an encyclopedia of crime, except that two literary friends were inspired by the case to write two of their more celebrated works. H.L. Mencken, the cynical editor of The American Mercury and columnist at the Baltimore Sun, took the occasion of a review of Doomed Ship, Gray's posthumously published memoir, to draw ironic moral lessons from the case of the "Putty Man":

“Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone. Run a boy through a Presbyterian Sunday-school and you must police him carefully all the rest of his life, for once he slips he is ready for anything.”

Mencken’s column on the case was short, and it departed from his usual subjects—politics, literature, music—but it went on to become among his most appreciated works. One of his acolytes at the Sun and the Mercury, James M. Cain, even helped create an entire literary genre when he was inspired by the case to write Double Indemnity (1936). In the pioneering example of roman noir, or hard-boiled crime fiction, he incorporated one of the most breathlessly reported facts about the case—that Snyder took out personal injury insurance on her husband for $50,000 and double indemnity in case of death—wove it into Cain’s own personal knowledge both of selling insurance in his younger days and of clandestine affairs, and produced a fast-moving novel of suspense that the public—and Hollywood—snapped up.

Billy Wilder’s 1944 adaptation of the novel is one of the foundations of film noir, and the element that audiences found so intriguing, just as tabloid readers had done more than a decade earlier—a femme fatale leading a clueless lover to his destruction—would be incorporated down the years in other films such as Body Heat and The Last Seduction.

This Day in Crime History (“Son of Sam” Spree Ends With Arrest)

August 10, 1977—After round-the-clock tips and endless footwork, after 13 months, six people dead and seven wounded, after countless screaming tabloid headlines, the “Son of Sam”—a serial killer who had held millions in fear—was arrested as a result of the simplest of reasons: a parking ticket.

Two days after the murder of the latest victim, Stacy Moskowitz—whose shooting, because it broke the pattern of young blonde women shot in the borough of Queens, had brought the entire city of New York practically to a fever pitch of terror—an eyewitness told police she had witnessed a suspicious-looking man not long before in the vicinity of the crime, ripping a parking ticket off his car.

That sent police on a frantic search of every parking ticket issued in the area. When detective Ed Zigo followed up the lead on one-- issued to a yellow Ford Galaxie—he had one question he couldn’t shake: “What is a Jewish guy from Yonkers doing parked in an Italian neighborhood at two in the morning?''

It turned out the car was registered to a 24-year-old postal worker, David Berkowitz, who claimed his neighbor’s Labrador retriever had ordered him to kill—pursuing his victims in lovers’ lanes or on quiet streets, appearing seemingly out of nowhere to aim through car windows or at close range with his .44 caliber pistol. On the 10th, Berkowitz was outside his house when the police appeared, with guns drawn. The scent of mortality he had inflicted on others for over a year now clung to him.

“I am the 'Monster' -- 'Beelzebub' -- the chubby behemouth,” one of his notes had taunted police. “I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game -- tasty meat. The wemon of Queens are prettyist of all. It must be the water they drink. I live for the hunt -- my life. Blood for papa.”

It’s impossible to convey to people who were not born yet or even not then in their teens during the “summer of Sam” the dread engendered by Berkowitz. The sale of guns and locks soared. Because all his victims, till Moskowitz, had been long-haired brunettes, young women took to cutting their hair or dyeing it blonde.  Her murder, because it broke with his usual M.O., led The New York Post to announce: “No One Is Safe from Son of Sam.”

The murder, apprehension and incarceration of Berkowitz brought to the surface questions of tabloid irresponsibility. The New York Daily News had become part of the story when Berkowitz sent one of his letters to the paper’s star columnist, Jimmy Breslin. The paper showed it to the police first, then published only part of the message. 

But involvement in the story made Breslin’s editor, Mike O’Neill, uncomfortable. “I would not argue that everything we did was exactly the way I would have liked,” he later told The New York Times.

No such qualms existed for Rupert Murdoch, who had recently acquired the New York Post. Only a few weeks before the Moskowitz murder, the paper's coverage of New York's blackout left the overwhelming impression that a race war was about to break out in the city. 

Now, for the second time that summer, he displayed to American readers the sensationalistic coverage that had, unfortunately, made him a force in British journalism. At one point, the paper printed excerpts from a novel that, they claimed, “might have” set the Son of Sam off on his rampage.

As time went on, the chosen instrument for Murdoch to get into the circulation sweepstakes was fellow Australian émigré Steve Dunleavy. Several years ago, when the hard-drinking, wenching Aussie retired, friends and rivals recalled him as displaying a kind of raffish charm. That is really far too kind to someone who scoffed at other members of his trade as overly beholden to the “Columbia School of Journalism.”

For all the profession’s many, many sins, all too much on display in recent years, it’s useful to be reminded that it was Dunleavy and Murdoch, not they, who breached one particular wall: common decency. 

After one of the later Berkowitz shootings, Dunleavy entered the hospital where the victim had been brought, donned scrubs so he could pass as a surgeon, then found and interviewed the victim’s family.

Concerns that normal, decent people might have had—about assuming a fake identity, breaching hospital security, intruding on victims’ relatives in a time of stress and grief—were brushed aside in an effort to get a story.

When Berkowitz was captured, the paper managed to smuggle out of prison a photo that ended up on the front page. The headline: SAM SLEEPS. Never sufficiently explained was how the Post managed to penetrate security at the correctional facility.

Those who have followed the scandal in Britain over the News Corp.’s use of intercepted cellphone calls--and of how News of the World bribed Scotland Yard officials-- will find the paper’s role in the Berkowitz case all of a piece with later events. 

"Half truth, half speculation" is how one biographer, Thomas Kiernan, described "Murdoch journalism" for the PBS Frontline documentary, "Who's Afraid of Rupert Murdoch"? 

The publisher brought malleble Fleet Street ethics to this country, and America has not been the better for it.

(The image accompanying this post shows the second page of the first “Son of Sam” letter.)

This Day in Presidential History (Lincoln Client Beats Murder Rap)

November 30, 1856—At 3 in the morning, after six hours of deliberations, the jurors in a sensational murder trial in Springfield, Ill., came to an agreement. When the prosecution and defense teams assembled, citizens discovered, frequently to their anger, that the victim’s wife and nephew, accused of adultery and charged with administering him poison before beating him to death, had been acquitted—due in no small part to their counsel, an attorney reputed to be among the best in central Illinois: Abraham Lincoln.

Some years ago, I remember reading that during his time on the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall was the only one of the justices then serving who had ever defended men on death row. It made me wonder how many Presidents had similar experiences.

As it happened, 27 of our nation’s chief executives have had a legal education, taught law, or held a legal post, but far fewer, I suspect, have ever defended men subject to the death penalty. In fact, only two come immediately to mind: John Adams, who managed to win the acquittal of redcoats for their involvement in the Boston Massacre, and Lincoln.

You would think, a century and a half after his death, that there would be nothing left to write about the Great Emancipator, but you would be wrong. One of the richest avenues for exploration in Lincolnia involves the quarter-century from his admittance to the Illinois bar in 1836 to his departure for Washington to become President at the time of the nation’s greatest crisis.

Editions of his private letters and public papers have been issued for many years, but to a large extent his legal work remained uncollected and unexplored. That has begun to change significantly. Now, instead of having to travel to Springfield to laboriously review the records of his cases, scholars can peruse them at any time of the day from the comfort of their homes, through a Web site called “The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln.”

Michael Connelly has written about “The Lincoln Lawyer,” but the 16^th President was the real McCoy. Lincoln was involved in approximately 5,000 cases during his 25 years as an attorney, with his most significant client being the Illinois Central Railroad. As Stephen B. Oates notes in Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths, one special mark of his high standing in the state was that he argued appeal cases for other attorneys, including participating in 243 cases before the Supreme Court of Illinois.

A number of these were dry as dust, but 30 cases that Lincoln took on were murder trials. The large American public, if they know anything about the latter at all, are likely to have gleaned their information from the 1939 John Ford classic, Young Mr. Lincoln, starring Henry Fonda.

That motion picture is far better for its bravura storytelling and loving depiction of communal events that evoke nostalgic Americana (e.g., tug-of-wars, pie-eating contests) than for conveying the reality of history. It was based only loosely on a real-life murder case, one that occurred not when Lincoln was just starting out but in 1858, when he had already established his legal reputation and was in the midst of his campaign for the Senate against incumbent Stephen A. Douglas.

That film got one thing right--Lincoln did indeed use an almanac to prove that the prosecution’s star witness could not, as claimed, have witnessed a murder by the light of the moon. However, Lincoln did not then use Perry Mason-style cross-examination to expose the actual murderer, but merely secured the acquittal of his client.

Something similar happened in the case of George Anderson, a successful Springfield blacksmith found bludgeoned to death in May 1856. Suspicion quickly turned to his widow and nephew, who were rumored to be having an affair. So sensational were the circumstances that the case would be the most notorious seen in the city for the rest of the century.

Lincoln could have worked for the prosecution, but eventually threw in his lot for the defense team because he believed the two innocent of the crime. His contribution to the case was crucial: persuading the judge to exclude testimony suggesting that Jane and Theodore Anderson had engaged in adultery, an act itself in violation of the law at the time. In her account, The Case of Abraham Lincoln, Julie Fenster observed that Lincoln’s gambit was critical in undercutting the prosecution’s attempt at suggesting a motive for the crime.

Lincoln and the rest of the defense team succeeded in saving Jane and Theodore Anderson from the gallows. But the case of the cuckolded blacksmith was never solved.

The case does, however, open a window into a comparatively little-known aspect of the President’s pre-White House life: his legal practice. Lincoln’s office contained, according to a former student and clerk named Gibson Harris, “somewhat dilapidated” furniture and a floor that was never scrubbed. Potential clients who had been told he was an ace attorney might have received an initial shock upon looking at his cluttered desk, which usually contained a bundle of papers into which he would quickly stuff items he thought might be relevant soon.

“Some years ago,” his partner William Herndon recalled, “on removing the furniture from the office, I took down the bundle and blew from the top the liberal coat of dust that had accumulated thereon. Immediately underneath the string was a slip bearing this endorsement, in his hand: 'When you can't find it anywhere else, look in this.'"

His legal practice allowed Lincoln to regain his psychic bearings and secure income for his growing family when he returned to Springfield, after a single, disappointing term in Congress, in 1849. When he departed the city, for what turned out to be for good, in 1861, Lincoln contemplated a similar outcome after his time as President was up. "If I live I'm coming back some time,” he told Herndon, “and then we'll go right on practising law as if nothing had ever happened."

All kinds of blogs have dealt, in one way or another, with President Lincoln (including, on certain posts, the one you’re reading now). But one of the more interesting ones I’ve come across is The Abraham Lincoln Blog, maintained by Geoffrey Elliott.