Wikipedia Deep Dive

In Cold Blood

12 min read

On the night of November 14, 1959, two men drove more than four hundred miles across Kansas to murder a family they had never met, all for a safe that didn't exist.

The Clutter family—Herb, Bonnie, and their two youngest children Nancy and Kenyon—were bound, gagged, and shot in their farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas. The killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, walked away with less than fifty dollars, a portable radio, and a pair of binoculars. Six years later, a book about these murders would transform American literature and invent a genre we now call true crime.

The Perfect Score That Wasn't

Herb Clutter was everything a Kansas farmer aspired to be. He employed as many as eighteen farmhands on his prosperous spread, and they admired him for his fair treatment and good wages. His two older daughters had already started their adult lives; his younger children, sixteen-year-old Nancy and fifteen-year-old Kenyon, were still in high school. His wife Bonnie struggled with what Capote would describe as debilitating depression, though her family later disputed this characterization.

Richard Hickock had heard about Herb Clutter from a former cellmate named Floyd Wells, who had once worked on the Clutter farm. Wells told Hickock that Clutter kept large amounts of cash in a safe. This was a lie—or at least a wild exaggeration. Herb Clutter conducted essentially all his business by check. There was no safe filled with money.

But Hickock believed it. He called it "a cinch, the perfect score." He contacted another former cellmate, Perry Smith, and the two men hatched a plan to rob the Clutters and start new lives in Mexico.

They entered through an unlocked door while the family slept.

What Happened in That House

When Hickock and Smith woke the Clutters and discovered there was no safe, the robbery became something far worse. They bound and gagged the family. They searched the house for anything of value and found almost nothing.

What followed remains difficult to read, even decades later.

Perry Smith slit Herb Clutter's throat and then shot him in the head. Capote later quoted Smith's recollection of that moment: "I didn't want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat."

Kenyon, Nancy, and Bonnie were each killed with a single shotgun blast to the head. The two men left with their meager haul—less than fifty dollars in 1959, equivalent to about five hundred forty dollars today.

For the rest of their lives, Hickock and Smith would contradict each other about who killed the two women. Smith initially claimed in his oral confession that Hickock murdered them, but refused to sign that version. He later said he wanted to take responsibility for all four deaths because he felt sorry for Hickock's mother. "She's a real sweet person," Smith said. Hickock always maintained that Smith committed all four murders alone.

Six Weeks on the Run

The killers might have gotten away with it. For six weeks, investigators had no solid leads. Hickock and Smith drifted through the country, eventually making their way to Las Vegas.

Then Floyd Wells—the same former cellmate who had told Hickock about the nonexistent safe—heard about the murders and contacted the prison warden. He named Hickock and Smith as likely suspects.

On December 30, 1959, police arrested both men in Las Vegas. After interrogation by detectives from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, both confessed.

A Trial That Changed Nothing and Everything

The trial took place in March 1960 at the Finney County courthouse in Garden City, Kansas. It lasted only eight days. Both defendants pleaded temporary insanity.

This is where the case becomes a study in the limitations of how American law handles mental illness.

The court used something called the M'Naghten rules to evaluate the defendants' sanity. These rules, named after a nineteenth-century British case, ask a simple question: did the defendant know right from wrong at the time of the crime? If yes, they can be tried. If no, they cannot.

The problem is that human psychology doesn't work this way. A person can know that murder is wrong and still be profoundly mentally ill. The psychiatrist Karl Menninger called the M'Naghten test "absurd." Legal scholar James Marshall argued that the rules are "founded on an erroneous hypothesis that behavior is based exclusively on intellectual activity and capacity."

The defense asked that Smith and Hickock undergo comprehensive psychological testing. The court denied this motion. Instead, three local general practitioners—not psychiatrists—examined the defendants and pronounced them sane.

An experienced psychiatrist from the state mental hospital did examine them privately. He found definite signs of mental illness in Smith and believed that previous head injuries might have affected Hickock's behavior. But under Kansas law at the time, this opinion couldn't be admitted because the psychiatrist could only testify about whether the defendants were sane at the moment of the crime—not about their broader mental health.

The jury deliberated for forty-five minutes.

Both men were found guilty. The conviction carried a mandatory death sentence.

Five Years on Death Row

Smith and Hickock appealed their convictions multiple times. They argued that the sanity determinations were flawed, that media coverage had biased the jury, and that their attorneys had provided inadequate assistance. Their appeals reached the United States Supreme Court three times. Each time, the Court refused to hear the case.

On April 14, 1965, after five years on death row at the Kansas State Penitentiary, both men were executed by hanging.

Hickock went first. He was pronounced dead at 12:41 in the morning after hanging for nearly twenty minutes. Smith followed and was pronounced dead at 1:19.

Enter Truman Capote

For the first few months after the murders, Hickock and Smith were just another crime story, barely noticed outside Kansas. That changed because of a small, flamboyant writer from New Orleans who read a brief article about the killings in The New York Times.

Truman Capote was already famous. He had published "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "Other Voices, Other Rooms." He was a fixture of New York society, known for his high-pitched voice, his wit, and his connections to the rich and celebrated.

He was also, it turned out, obsessed with the Clutter murders.

Capote traveled to Kansas with his childhood friend Harper Lee—who would soon publish her own masterpiece, "To Kill a Mockingbird." Lee helped Capote gain the trust of the reserved Kansas locals, who might otherwise have been suspicious of this strange little man from the big city.

Over the next six years, Capote compiled eight thousand pages of notes. He interviewed residents and investigators. He obtained letters from Smith's army buddy who was present at the trial. Most importantly, after the killers were captured, he conducted extensive personal interviews with both Smith and Hickock.

Capote was particularly fascinated by Perry Smith. In the book, Smith emerges as the more complex and sensitive of the two killers—a portrait that has been both praised and criticized.

The Non-Fiction Novel

What Capote created was something genuinely new, or at least newly refined. He called it a "non-fiction novel"—a work that reads with all the narrative power of fiction but is supposedly grounded entirely in fact.

The book uses a triple narrative structure, alternating between the lives of the murderers, the victims, and the other residents of Holcomb. It examines the psychology and backgrounds of Hickock and Smith in extraordinary detail. It treats their complex relationship—before, during, and after the murders—as a kind of dark character study.

This technique was part of what came to be called New Journalism, a style of writing in which authors follow events as they unfold in real time, immersing themselves in their subjects rather than maintaining journalistic distance. Capote didn't just report on the story; he lived alongside it for years.

"In Cold Blood" was first serialized in The New Yorker in 1965, then published as a book in 1966. It was an instant sensation—both a critical triumph and a commercial blockbuster. To this day, it remains the second-best-selling true crime book ever published, behind only Vincent Bugliosi's "Helter Skelter" about the Charles Manson murders.

The Truth About the Truth

Capote always insisted that "every word" of "In Cold Blood" was true. This claim has not held up well.

In 1966, the same year the book was published, journalist Phillip K. Tompkins traveled to Kansas and interviewed some of the same people Capote had spoken to. He found significant discrepancies.

Take Josephine Meier, the wife of the Finney County undersheriff. In Capote's telling, she and Perry Smith developed a meaningful connection during his imprisonment. Capote describes her hearing Smith cry and holding his hand. When Tompkins asked her about this, Meier denied all of it. She said she spent little time with Smith and didn't talk much with him.

True-crime writer Jack Olsen was blunter: "I recognized it as a work of art, but I know fakery when I see it. Capote completely fabricated quotes and whole scenes."

When confronted with Olsen's criticism, Capote's response was dismissive: "Jack Olsen is just jealous."

Olsen later admitted this was partly true—he was jealous of the money the book made. But he stood by his criticisms. "That book did two things," he said. "It made true crime an interesting, successful, commercial genre, but it also began the process of tearing it down."

Even Alvin Dewey, the lead investigator whom Capote portrayed heroically in the book, acknowledged that at least one scene was invented. The emotional moment where Dewey visits the Clutters' graves? It never happened. Capote made it up.

More significantly, the book depicts Dewey as the brilliant detective who cracked the case. But files from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation tell a different story. Floyd Wells came forward on his own to name Hickock and Smith as suspects. And Dewey didn't immediately act on this information the way the book suggests.

What the Book Did to Holcomb

The murders and the book that immortalized them left deep scars on the small Kansas community.

A 1966 article in The New York Times described how "neighborliness evaporated" in Holcomb after the killings. "The natural order seemed suspended. Chaos poised to rush in."

Fifty years later, in 2009, the Huffington Post asked Kansas residents about the lasting effects. Many said they had lost their trust in others. Doors that had always been unlocked were now locked. Strangers were viewed with suspicion.

Some residents felt that Capote had exploited their tragedy. He had arrived in their community during the worst moment in its history, gained their trust, extracted their stories, and turned their grief into entertainment and profit.

The Prosecutor's Complaint

Duane West, the prosecutor in the case, had his own objections to the book. He had been friendly with Capote during the writing process—Capote even invited him to New York to see "Hello, Dolly!" and meet Carol Channing afterward.

But their relationship soured when Capote's publisher asked West to sign a non-compete agreement preventing him from writing his own book about the murders. West refused.

West's main criticism was that Capote "failed to get the true hero right." He believed the person most responsible for solving the case was Richard Rohlader, who took a photograph proving that two culprits were involved. Without that picture, West argued, the crime might never have been solved.

The Unsolved Connection

There's a footnote to the Clutter murders that remains unresolved. "In Cold Blood" mentions that Hickock and Smith were also suspected of involvement in the Walker family murders—another brutal killing that shares eerie similarities with the Holcomb crime.

This connection has never been proven. It remains one of many mysteries surrounding the two killers.

What Capote Took Away

Writing "In Cold Blood" changed Truman Capote.

He spent six years immersed in the details of murder, interviewing the killers, attending the trial, waiting through their appeals, and finally witnessing their executions. By the end, he opposed the death penalty—a position he attributed directly to his experience with the case.

He was also bitterly disappointed that the book didn't win the Pulitzer Prize. He believed he had created something unprecedented, and the lack of official recognition wounded him.

After "In Cold Blood," Capote never completed another major work. He spent the rest of his life working on a novel called "Answered Prayers," which was never finished. He descended into alcoholism and drug addiction. Many who knew him believed that the Clutter case had broken something in him.

The Genre It Created

Whatever its flaws, "In Cold Blood" invented the modern true crime genre. Before Capote, crime writing was largely the province of pulpy paperbacks and sensational newspaper coverage. After him, it became possible to write about murder with literary ambition.

The book demonstrated that real crimes could be examined with the same psychological depth and narrative sophistication as fiction. It showed that killers could be portrayed as complex human beings rather than simple monsters—a choice that still generates controversy.

Today, true crime is everywhere: podcasts, documentaries, prestige television series, bestselling books. The genre has its critics, who argue that it exploits victims and sensationalizes violence. But its roots trace directly back to that Kansas farmhouse and the small, strange man who decided to write about what happened there.

Tompkins, the journalist who first documented Capote's fabrications, offered perhaps the fairest assessment: "Capote has achieved a work of art. He has told exceedingly well a tale of high terror in his own way. But by insisting that 'every word' of his book is true he has made himself vulnerable to those readers who are prepared to examine seriously such a sweeping claim."

In other words, "In Cold Blood" is a masterpiece. It's just not entirely true. And perhaps that tension—between art and accuracy, between storytelling and journalism, between the facts and the narrative we impose on them—is the most American thing about it.