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On November 14, 1959, two men entered a small house on a farm hoping to steal a safe full of cash. Their plan was to get rip of any witnesses. Perry Smith and Richard Hickock killed all four members of the Clutter family by knife and shotgun and only managed to get $40 and a radio.
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
Truman Capote was a strange man and brilliant writer. Throughout his life he wrote a few other popular novels. His idea for In Cold Blood came from reading a small section of a newspaper in 1959 regarding the murders of four people in Kansas. He decided to travel there and worked on the novel for five years, compiling 8,000 pages of notes to eventually write his masterpiece, In Cold Blood.
Characters
'In Cold Blood'...is a masterpiece--agonizing, terrible, possessed, proof that the times, so surfeited with disasters, are still capable of tragedy. The tragedy was existential. The murder was seemingly without motive. The killers...almost parodied the literary anti-hero....There are two Truman Capotes. One is the artful charmer, prone to the gossamer and the exquisite....The other, darker and stronger, is the discoverer of death....He has traveled far from the misty, moss-hung Southern-Gothic landscapes of his youth.'
Perry Smith Smith was one of the two who were in on trying to rob the Clutter Family of the supposed 'safe' they had in their house. Well the robbery didn't work out but he murdered all four of the Clutters living on the farm at the time.
Richard Hickock Hickock went by 'Dick' mostly, and he was the mastermind behind the murdering of the Clutters with Perry Smith. He did not kill any of the Clutters though, Smith did that job.
Alvin Dewey The leader of the investication of the Clutter family murders. Dewey gets extremely wrapped up in the case, not even sleeping at times, but solving it is very gratifying for him.
Herbert Clutter He was the father of the Clutter family and owned a large farm in Kansas known as River Valley Farm. He was murdered by Perry Smith.
New York Times Book Review
Smith and Hickock were driven by greed. In the past they had gotten into trouble, but never close to what they had done to the Clutter family. at the very house shown above. They were convicted of murder, and to repay their depts, it would cost them their lives. Five years after being found guilty, in 1965 the two were hanged.
Very few clues were found in the Clutter house and there were none as important as this one. With the help from the murderers' fellow inmate Floyd Wells and this bootprint, Alvin Dewey and his team of investigators caught the criminals.
After the murder the Perry and Dick fled to Mexico they hitchhiked and had some fun fishing. But inside, neither were completely satisfied. Both were afraid of getting caught. Their fears became reality when they were tracked down in Las Vegas about two months after the murders. They were low on money and could not stay in Mexico any longer, which proved to be their downfall.
At Garden City Jail, the two convicts met some other psychopaths who committed murders. One man even killed his whole family. Also while inside, Perry was writing in a journal while Dick was messing around and devising a plan for escape. That tells all what the two guys are about. Perry is pretty deep and wishes he was smarter. Dick is just a classic bad guy. At their end, Perry feels remorse for what he did and Dick just acts stale.
