In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood is the story of an apparently motiveless murder of an innocent family, and the ramifications for the town and people involved. The full title of the text is In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences, which hints at Capote’s dual focus on both the crime and its reverberations. But it is also a text that combines the credibility of a real story, the freedom of a documentary, the allure of a film, and the precision of poetry. This synthesis of genres and styles is something we will examine throughout this Text Guide, and is always worth keeping in mind when we talk about the narrative itself.

The Clutter family – Mr Herb Clutter and Mrs Bonnie Clutter, and their two youngest children Nancy and Kenyon – were brutally killed in their Kansas farm home on Sunday 15 November, 1959. The murderers were Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, two ex-convicts out on parole for petty theft who had heard rumours in prison that Mr Clutter kept $10,000 in a safe in his home, though this turns out to be false information. The two men plan to carry out a robbery, but leave having shot four innocent people.

From here, the book makes temporal shifts between the town of Holcomb where the Clutters lived and where the townsfolk struggle to accept and understand the violent and seemingly random attack in their community, and the stories of Dick and Perry who flee the state but are later apprehended by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, led by investigator Alvin Dewey who was a friend of the Clutter family.

Over the course of Dick and Perry’s interactions, we learn more about their lives and the various tragedies and accidents that have befallen them, leaving them fractured and damaged both physically and psychologically. In the end, they are sentenced to death and held on Death Row in a Kansas prison for years before they are executed on April 14th, 1965.

The text opens with the introduction to and immediate murder of the Clutters, and ends with the execution by hanging of Perry and Dick. Hence, the story is bookended by death, but also concerns itself with what caused these events and what happens as a consequence. In this sense, this is almost like a mystery novel: we know that Perry and Dick were killed because they murdered the Clutters, but why were the Clutters murdered? This is the central premise that Capote seeks to unravel.