Part I: The Last to See Them Alive
The family Clutter of River Valley Farm in the villiage Holcomb in the State of Kansas, consists of four persons: the father, Herbert William Clutter, forty-eight years old, his wife Bonnie Fox, three years younger, and the two children, daughter Nancy of sixteen, and son Kenyon of fifteen. Two other childeren, Eveanna and Beverly, have already left the house. Eveanne has married and is mother of a babygirl, Beverly has engaged to a young biology student and is studying for a nurse.
The master of the farm is a selfmade, prosperous farmer universally respected for his sterling character, farming skill and modesty. His wife is a delicate woman who has been troubled for many years by a post natal depression after the birth of her son of which she doesn’t recover. Nancy is an intelligent, efficient, kindly and thoroughly lovable girl. Kenyon is a lanky boy already taller than his father, and as intelligent as Nancy, but more sensitive and less sociable.

It is Saturday, November 14, 1959. Two young men are driving to River Valley Farm in a black 1949 Chevrolet sedan. Some time ago they have been cell-mates at Kansas State Penitentiary. Perry Smith, the son of an Irish father and a Cherokee mother, both professional rodeo-riders, is a romantically-minded, dreamy neurotic haunted by the memories of his childhood, which he spent in miserable circumstances among loveless people. His friend Dick Hickock comes from a humble but respectable family. Dick, whose intelligence ia above average, is filled with a burning desire for riches and sexual experience. He twice married a girl of sixteen and divorced twice too.
Perry Smith and Dick Hickock shared a cell in Kansas State Penitentiary. After the release of Smith, Hickock was placed in the cell of Flloyd Wells, who has worked at the Clutter farm for a while. When Flloyd tells Hickock about Clutter’s greath riches, his interest is immediately aroused and asks many detailed questions. Dick is glad to hear that there is a safe in the Clutter house, containing some ten thousand dollars cash. Dick boasts that he is going to rob Clutter together with his mate Perry once he gets out of jail, adding confidently that he "will leave no witnesses". Wells has thought that Dick’s declaration is as braggery, something everyone in prison utters himself in a strange way, but in reality that person doesn’t carry it out.
Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Kansas people, have ever heard of Holcomb. It’s a village of 270 inhabitants, a quiete place where everybody knows each other. No crimes ever happened until then in the earliest hours of that Sunday morning on 15 November 1959. At that time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb hears the four shotgun blasting, which ends six human lives (inclusive the criminals).
Bobby Rupps ( Nancy’s boyfriend), departs from the house shortly before midnight. The following morning the dead bodies are discovered by Susan Kidwell, Nancy’s best friend and Nancy Ewald, another friend, who usually accompany the Clutters to the Methodist services on Sundays in Herb’s car.
When the news spreads there is panic all over and the people are afraid and lock the doors at night. Part One concludes with Perry and Dick 400 miles away, sleeping.

Part 2: Persons Unknown
The Clutter family has been horribly murdered by bullets through their heads and Herb’s throat has been cut through. The second part of In Cold Blood focuses on the investigation of the murder, which initially doesn’t go well. The first suspected person is Bobby Rupp, but he is soon cleared of suspicion, as is Alfred Stoecklein, Clutter’s resident hired man.
The crime is apparently motiveless and all but clueless. Robbery seems out of the question, for the murderers have got away with only forty or fifty dollars in cash and Nancy’s portable radio.
The agent responsible for this case is the forty-seven years old Alvin Adams Dewey. He has known the Clutters very well. The police does all they can: a total of eighteen men are assigned to the case full time. Among them some of the ablest investigators of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. But they make little progress, though they receive hundreds of tips and follow up various clues that end up nowhere. Meanwhile Dick and Perry are quite close to the scene of the crime, making preparations in a Kansas hotel for a journey abroad.
Because they have been disappointed in the amount of money the crime has yielded - there has been no safe at all, Dick passes dud cheques in shops to raise funds.On November 21, having loaded their car with luxury goods obtained by means of false cheques, they set out for Mexico. Here they have a good time living at the expense of a vacationing German lawyer. When the German goes home and their money runs out, they sell their car and hitchhiked back to the Unites States.

Part III: Answer
Though the detectives have unearthed some clues, they would probaly never have discovered the identity of the murdereres, if Flloyd Wells had not read about the crime in the newspaper and decided to report to the authorities about his contact with Dick Hickock, thereby collecting a reward of one thousand dollars. From then it’s easy going for the police.
After their return from Mexico, Dick and Perry steals a car, passes false cheques again and spends the money on a holiday in Miami. From there they travel to Perry’s birthplace Las Vegas, where the police catches them at last. They are interrogated and soon make a full confession, Perry ultemately admitting that it’s he who has actually killed the four Clutters with a shotgun.

Part IV: The Corner
During the period of their trial in Garden City, Kansas, Dick and Perry are confined in the county jail, where the undersheriff’s wife takes good care of them. Dick’s parents often come to see him, but neither Perry’s father nor his sister visits him of even writes to him. Only an old Army friend of Perry’s, named Don Cullivan, is interested in him and unsuccessfully tries to "save his soul", by converting him to Christianity.
At the trial, the judge rejects the defence’s proposal to have Dick and Perry subjected to a specialized psychiatric examination. Instead he appoints a commission of three Garden City practioners, who presently announce that neither prisoner suffers from any mental disorder. When a qualified psychiatrist afterwards examines them privately, he finds both to be mentally abnormal, Perry more than Dick. When he is called to the witness-stand, however, he cannot only answer ‘yes’ to the question whether they knew right from wrong at the time of the commission of the crime. Dick Hickock and Perry Smith are sentenced to death penalty.
The two criminals are removed from Garden City jail to Kansas State Penitentiary in April 1960. Here they await execution in two of the twelve cells that comprises Death Row.
Friday, May 13, 1960, the day on which they are to die, passes harmlessly for Dick and Perry because the Kansas Supreme Court grants them a stay pending the outcome of appeals for a new trial filed by their lawyers. Perry starts a hunger strike and has to be forced-fed until a postcard from his father revives his interest in life.

The Kansas Supreme Court finds that the prisoners have received a constitutionally fair trial and sets a new date of execution, October, 25, 1962. But Dick and Perry get a reprieve from a Federal Judge and evades this date. Numerous appeals filed within the frame-work of the Federal-court system avoid two more execution dates: August 8, 1963, and February, 18, 1965. The case is carried three times to the United States Supreme Court, which finally decrees that their lives must end on Wednesday, April 14, 1965. On that day, almost five years after their conviction at Garden City, Dick Hickok and Perry Smith are executed by hanging. Dewey and Capote are present and see how they die.
SHORT OUTLINE SECONDARY LITERATURE: In Cold Blood


Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans on 30 September 1924, in the Touro Infirmary in New Orleans, to mother Nina, a sixteen-year-old Alabama beauty queen, and father Arch Persons, a travelling salesman.When he was four years old, his parents were divorced, his mother later married a Spanish Cuban textile manufacturer named Joseph Garcia Capote. After his parents’ separation he was raised mostly by elderly aunts and cousins.
As his mother hadn’t any time for Truman she left him behind at the age of two in the family’s house in Monroeville, Alabama, with four elderly unmarried cousins, three women and one man."I felt isolated from other people", he recalls. "I had few friends my own age, most of them were much older than I". [p.12 The worlds of TC] His first close childhood friends of his own age were his neighbours during these years: Nelle Harper Lee and her brother Edwin.Capote could read at four before starting school, and recalls that amoung his favorite books were the Hardy Boys and the Rover Boys.
He began writing at the age of ten and completed his first novel: Old Mr. Busyman, a prize-winning chapter was published by a Mobile, Alabama, newspaper and a nasty local scandal followed when citizens recognized characters and exploits.
Af fifteen, Capote went to New York to live with his mother and her second husband, who adopted the youth and gave him his name. After leaving Alabama, Capote attended a number of private schools, including Trinity School and St. John’s Academy in New York, and spent one year at Greenwich High School In Millbrook Capote disliked school and as many of his teachers considered him mentally subnormal, his parents sent him to a psychiatric clinic, where he was much to his satisfaction classified as a genius.
At seventeen he took a minor position at the New Yorker, and was either fired or resigned in 1943.
The publication of Other Voices, Other Rooms, in 1948, brought Capote a reputation as a...








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