Tag: In Cold Blood

6 Best True-Crime Books of All Time

Titles You’ll Recognize And Some You Won’t

A good true-crime book takes you inside a world you’ll probably never enter and acquaints you with people you might best avoid. Here are six that I’ve read more than five times each and think that you’ll enjoy at least once.

1. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
This is ground zero of true-crime entertainment. Truman Capote, who first made a splash at age 23 with the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, spent years researching the buildup to the 1959 collision between the clean-living Clutters of Kansas and Perry Smith and Richard Hickcock — who cut the Clutters’ phone line, broke into the house, and killed four members of the family.
Claim to fame: The book created a genre, the nonfiction novel. Oh, and it has sold 100 million copies.
Infamy: The surviving Clutters hated In Cold Blood because of the way it portrays the family’s mother.

2. Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by Nicolas Pileggi (1985)
The basis for the movie Goodfellas, the book describes the improbable marriage and the rise and fall of Mafia associate Henry Hill. True-crime writer Nicholas Pileggi said that, before he started the book, he had grown tired of hearing “illiterate dons” portraying themselves as “benevolent godfathers” — but he found Henry Hill fascinating because he was articulate and intelligent and had an outsider’s eye for the workings of mob operations from the ground up.
Fun fact: The author is the widower of Nora Ephron, who wrote feel-good comedies When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle.
Misdemeanor: Wiseguy ends with Henry Hill becoming law-abiding. He did no such thing in reality.

3. Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss (1983)
Handsome, overachieving Special Forces surgeon Jeff MacDonald seemed to have an ideal life until his wife, Colette, and little daughters were slaughtered in their house in Fort Bragg in 1970. Jeff, 26, said that acid-crazed hippies did it, but he ultimately was found guilty of the three murders. The author gives the backstory of the MacDonalds’ blond-on-blonde union as well as the transition of Freddy Kassab — Colette’s stepfather — from defender of his popular son-in-law to the driving force behind his conviction.
Controversy: Jeff MacDonald successfully sued Joe McGinniss, to whom he had given access to his life because he thought the writer would portray him as innocent.
Intrigue continues: Now past 80 years of age, MacDonald is imprisoned in FCI Cumberland but still has many supporters. The late New Yorker magazine journalist Janet Malcolm advocated for MacDonald’s innocence.

4. Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas by Nicholas Pileggi (1995)
If you liked the movie version of Casino and are interested in how betting emporiums worked back when men in pinky rings owned them and people wore gowns and suits to play slots, you’ll want to read the book version. It traces the life of Frank Rosenthal, an oddsmaker who looked nothing like Robert De Niro but nonetheless ingratiated himself to organized crime figures by giving them sports-betting tips that paid off. They, in turn, recruited him to manage the Stardust and two other Las Vegas casinos with mob ties. The book also details the early life of Geri McGee Rosenthal, the showgirl who entered into a mostly dreadful marriage with Frank.
Definitely an antihero: The real Frank Rosenthal was more pompous and egotistical and abusive to his wife than “Frank Rothstein” was in director Martin Scorsese’s film.
Power trip: Rosenthal really did micromanage his employees in a quest for quality control. He fired a union-protected kitchen worker for undercooking eggs.

5. Bloodletters and Badmen: A Narrative Encyclopedia of American Criminals from the Pilgrims to the Present by Jay Robert Nash (1973)
You have to love a writer who tells you what color Al Capone’s eyes were and how tall Bonnie Parker was. The physical descriptions of the criminals are fun, but the big draw is Nash’s storytelling. The encyclopedia includes many now-forgotten offenders, like Ernest Ingenito, who gunned down seven of his in-laws dispersed around southern New Jersey in 1950, and Earle Nelson, “who made a habit of strangling landladies in the late 1920s.” The hard-covered edition of the book has more pictures than the paperback.
Summary offenses: Nash clearly takes dramatic license in some of his vignettes.
Difference of opinion: Unlike Truman Capote, Nash had no compassion for Perry Smith.

6. On the Run: A Mafia Childhood by Gina and Gregg Hill (2004)
Although they rejected his criminality, the children of Henry Hill inherited his ability to describe an esoteric world from the inside and out. Their side of the story reveals more of Henry’s id than Wiseguy and Goodfellas did. Gina and Gregg write about a life of garbage bags full of marijuana, adult sex parties that took place in front of them as kids, the uncertainty of having an alcoholic dad whose cash reserve could go from five figures to zero in a day, and the heartbreak of having to move around the country after the family entered the witness protection program.
All in the picture: The book reveals early family photos that satisfy readers’ curiosity about how they looked.
Quite a racquet: The son was a USTA-ranked tennis player as a teenager.

That’s all for this post. Please make sure to leave a comment or share the post on social media.

Until next time, cheers — Rebecca Reisner

Book cover of Forensic Files Now
Book in stores and online

In Cold Blood’s Newest Infusion

Q&A with ‘And Every Word Is True’ Author Gary McAvoy

Just a quick post this week about a new book related to the bestseller that helped lay the groundwork for Forensic Files and all other true-crime entertainment: In Cold Blood.

Gary McAvoy, author of "And Every Word Is True," a new book about the Clutter murders and "In Cold Blood"
Gary McAvoy

Truman Capote’s tome about the murders of four members of a wholesome Kansas farm family created the first nonfiction novel.

In Cold Blood demonstrated how character development, recalled conversations, a sense of place, and a narrative thread could make a real-life crime story as absorbing as a work of fiction like Tom Sawyer or a movie like Gone with the Wind.

The immediate success of In Cold Blood elevated Capote from a darling within literary circles to the most famous author in the U.S. He died in 1984, but his book never will.

Ever since it debuted in 1966, In Cold Blood has invited conjecture about what Capote left out of the story and whether it was really the definitive account of the shotgun deaths of Bonnie and Herb Clutter and their teenage children, Nancy and Kenyon, at the hands of intelligent lowlifes Perry Smith and Richard Hickock.

The ex-cons robbed the Clutters on November 15, 1959, because they mistakenly believed the house contained a safe with $10,000. Instead, they found barely $50 in cash.

A widely distributed picture of the Clutters, minus their surviving elder daughters, Beverly and Eveanna. Clockwise from bottom left: Nancy, Bonnie, Herb, and Kenyon.
The four victims.

The latest development in the In Cold Blood saga comes from Gary McAvoy, a writer and dealer of literary memorabilia who freaked out Kansas officials when they learned he was planning to auction off two notebooks that belonged to Harold Nye, a KBI agent who worked on the Clutter case.

Nye’s son, Ronald, wanted to help defray his ex-wife’s medical expenses with the proceeds of the sale, according to McAvoy. While Kansas did everything possible to stop his plans, McAvoy used the notebooks as part of his research for a book, And Every Word Is True, about hidden evidence and alternative theories related to the Clutter murders.

“Reading material from various sources just doled out shock after shock,” McAvoy says. “I saw information that showed there was so much more to the story than Capote wrote. And the fact that the state of Kansas sued us after 50 years shows there are still secrets being kept.”

While In Cold Blood makes KBI agent Alvin Dewey into the humble central hero of the investigation, the notebooks show the importance of Harold Nye’s work on the case, according to McAvoy.

Harold Nye Notebook Page
One of Harold Nye’s notebooks

The unsung Nye reportedly didn’t care much about the spoils of association with the glamorous Capote. On the other hand, Alvin Dewey and his wife, Marie, attended Capote’s Black and White Ball and dined with the likes of Gloria Vanderbilt. Marie Dewey received a $10,000 consulting fee for the movie version of In Cold Blood, according to McAvoy’s book.

With six years of legal battles having ended, And Every Word Is True will debut March 4, 2019.

I was glad to get an early look at McAvoy’s book. I became an In Cold Blood fan after coming across an ancient hardcover version in a Florida vacation rental years ago. Since then, I’ve read and watched everything I could find about the case.

And Every Word Is True has some new and salacious revelations.

The author answered my questions in a phone interview on January 13. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow:

When did you first hear of the Clutter killings? In the late 1960s. I was in Germany after being drafted for the Vietnam War and started reading In Cold Blood. The book was gripping. I could not stop turning pages.

Both killers suffered severe accidents in their youth. A car crash left Hickock with askew facial features (Capote noted that he looked normal when he smiled). Smith’s legs were damaged so badly in a motorcycle wreck that some sources describe him as “crippled.” But he could walk and do manual labor despite chronic pain.
Richard Hickock and Perry Smith

While researching your own book, what was it like to see the 17 original crime scene photos, with the victims shot in the head? I’m not someone with morbid curiosity but I’m also not squeamish, and I was honestly revolted by the photos. I was unprepared for them. It’s hard for me to square that Perry Smith was a part of this, as brutal as these images are.

Does that mean you agree with Capote’s portrayal of Perry Smith as a sensitive self-educated victim of a horrific childhood? Having read Perry’s writing, yes. He left a notebook with tabs from A to Z. He drew the Earth under “E” and writes about meteors under “M.” It was just an amazing font of knowledge. He wrote poetry and musings on life, and none of it said anything that would indicate he was a killer. Smith always referred to the Clutter murders as a horrible nightmare that should have never happened.

KBI agents Alvin Dewey and Harold Nye both worked on the Clutter murder case portrayed in "In Col Blood"
Alvin Dewey and Harold Nye

Were you surprised to learn that Perry Smith had a son?
I knew this years ago through my own research, but Jewell James doesn’t want to talk about it to writers. There’s a scene in the Sundance special [Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders] where he’s walking along Puget Sound.

Your book says Capote took Harold Nye and his wife to gay-friendly nightspots, some with drag shows — in Kansas, no less. What’s the backstory? Capote was back in Kansas in the early 1960s and wanted more information for his book and wanted to open Nye’s eyes — Harold was homophobic. According to Ron, his mother, Joyce, was furious and she must have been hoodwinked to go there. 

And Every Word Is True Cover by Gary McAvoy
Coming soon

In Cold Blood portrayed Herb Clutter as an ethically and morally perfect man — church-building, 4H-leading, cookie-baking, anti-tobacco, anti-drinking. Your book presents some other intelligence. Nancy wrote in her diary that Herb had started smoking. He was also said to be having an affair with the wife of a business associate. And Herbert Clutter had made enough enemies that Dewey, who was good friends with him, at first thought the murders were grudge killings. I leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions.♠

And Every Word Is True, published by Literati Editions, will be available on Amazon and everywhere books are sold on March 4.

10 Surprises from Cold-Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders

A Sundance TV Docuseries Digs Deep

If you’re an In Cold Blood reader, you probably feel a little cheated — out of images. The same few pictures of the four members of the Clutter family who were murdered in 1959 in Holcomb, Kansas, have shown up in the media for decades.

Eveanna and Bonnie Clutter. Eveanna and her sister Beverly survive but won’t talk to media

You might also have a pent-up need for more insight into the Clutters. The wholesome farm family and their killers — Perry Smith and Dick Hickock — were the subjects of In Cold Blood, which established the nonfiction novel genre and made Truman Capote the most glamorous writer in the U.S.

Well, now Sundance TV can help you out.

Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders, produced by Joe Berlinger (Paradise Lost), taps into the mother lode of unpublished pictures of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon Clutter as well as Hickock and Smith.

Gratis deal. It also shares rare video footage and audio recordings and new interviews with Kansans who knew the Clutters and discuss their feelings in an unpretentious way.

More good news: Sundance TV is offering a seven-day trial membership via SundanceNow.com, so you can watch the 4-part bingefest online for free.

Here are 10 revelations from the series:

1. The surviving relatives of Bonnie Clutter who hated In Cold Blood because it portrayed her as emotionally impaired weren’t necessarily just being defensive. The docuseries features people who knew her well and remember her as a great hostess and a lot of fun.

Perry Smith in the army

2. The family of killer Richard Hickock tried to make amends once Dick turned into a petty criminal. They would give a gift of a horse to parties he had wronged.

3. Although she didn’t appear on camera, one of Herb and Bonnie Clutter’s granddaughters gave voice interviews to the documentary makers. It’s surprising because her mother, Eveanna Mosier — Nancy and Kenyon’s older sister — shunned the press and never liked In Cold Blood.

4. As a child, Perry Smith sustained a severe penile injury when a nun hit him with a flashlight. The book made mention of other nun-inflicted abuse at school because Smith was a bed wetter — but it never revealed anything quite as perverse.

Eveanna, Beverly, Nancy, and Kenyon Clutter.

5. Nancy Clutter’s boyfriend Bobby Rupp said that he looked up to her father as a role model despite that the book alleged Herb Clutter pressured Nancy to break up with Bobby because he was Catholic and the Clutters were Methodists.

6. At age 28, Richard Hickock sounded like a weary old man in a recording of his police questioning. Capote portrayed him as ever-charming, sly, and upbeat.

7. The psychiatrist who evaluated Smith and Hickock after their arrest and Smith’s army buddy who testified for him at the trial are still alive and appear on camera.

8. In Cold Blood and the Clutter case garnered so much attention that even David Hickock, the brother of killer Richard Hickock, snagged a writer to pen his biography.

Flo Buckskin, the mother of Perry Smith
Flo Buckskin was Perry Smith’s mother

9. The filmmakers somehow managed to get hold of two photos of Perry Smith’s parents, Flo Buckskin and Tex Smith, who performed in rodeo shows together before they had four kids and she sank into alcoholism.

10. “Olathe” (as in “Olathe, Kansas”) is pronounced “oh-lay-thuh.”

That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR

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In Cold Blood Slideshow

Click on any image to view this post as a slideshow.

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In Cold Blood: No Saints in Kansas

A Girl Detective Takes on a Quadruple Homicide

Just a brief post this week since I went a little off the rails with the long-form blogging last time.

I like Truman Capote’s writing and true-crime stories so much that it’s hard to stop elaborating.

The first In Cold Blood post discussed how the flamboyant Capote created a new literary genre, and last week’s explored his alleged efforts to snuff out a competing manuscript.

Never stop. But when the subject is In Cold Blood, there’s always more.

The tale of the brutal collision between the wholesome Clutter family and two dissolute criminals in Holcomb, Kansas, has been fascinating readers since the book hit the best-seller list in 1966.

Now, Soho Press has a new telling of the story coming out in November.

The novel No Saints in Kansas offers the tale through the eyes of the fictional Carly Fleming, a 15-year-old who recently moved to Kansas.

Carly was just beginning a friendship with Nancy “the town darling” Clutter when the teenager was murdered along with three members of her family on November 15, 1959.

Taking the initiative. In the early days of the investigation, detectives (in real life, too) suspected that Bobby Rupp, Nancy’s boyfriend, was the culprit who tied up, robbed, and shot her and her brother, Kenyon, and their parents, Herb and Bonnie.

Carly, who feels protective of Bobby, launches her own investigation in order to clear his name.

And speaking of going off the rails, Carly sneaks onto the murder scene, barges in on a press conference, and does her own ballistics tests.

She ends up grounded and arrested. Nevertheless, she persisted.

Hometown girl. If all this sounds like a novel for a teen audience, it’s because it is. Soho Press is publishing the book as young adult fiction.

Murderers Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. Smith later said that he liked Nancy Clutter and could see she was trying to put him at ease. He shot her anyway.

I enjoyed the telling just the same, especially because author Amy Brashear brings credibility to the characterizations.

Brashear and her family moved to Finney County, Kansas, in 1991, when she was 9.

That’s 33 years after the homicides, but locals hadn’t stopped talking about them, and probably never will.

Lose the halo. The author grew up around people old enough to have known the Clutters personally and still feel the psychic trauma caused by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock’s crime.

I found the novel engaging also because it seems to confirm something that I’ve always suspected: that Nancy Clutter wasn’t quite the perfect human being that Capote portrayed.

(“You’ve idolized that poor dead woman beyond all human recognition,” as Ruth and Augustus Goetz wrote in The Heiress.)

That and other story elements made No Saints in Kansas a nice read.

Nice holiday gift. I caught a couple of examples of anachronistic language in No Saints in Kansas. The first known use of “face-plant” was in 1982, according to Webster‘s, and I suspect people didn’t say “sounds like a plan” back in the 1950s.

But it’s not the author’s fault that this reader makes her living by pointing out errors; I’m an editor by day.

Author Amy Brashear

I’d recommend the book for any preteen or young teen reader who likes detective stories and true crime.

It’s a good introduction to a U.S. tragedy that Truman Capote made sure will never become arcane.

That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR

 

Book cover
To order the book:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books-a-Million
Target
Walmart
Indie Bound

In Cold Blood: Alternative Facts

The Story Capote Didn’t Want Us to Buy

The last post mentioned a new development related to Truman Capote’s 1966 best seller, In Cold Blood.

The four murder victims

A report surfaced a few years ago that at the same time Capote was researching his book, another writer was working on a telling from a different perspective.

Dark horse. Capote’s version of a quadruple slaying that took place in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959, relied heavily on interviews with one of the two killers: Perry Smith, whom Capote portrayed as a sensitive drifter marred by abuse and hardship.

The other writer, an uncelebrated newspaperman named Mack Nations, was helping to edit an account called High Road to Hell penned by Smith’s partner in crime: Richard Hickock, a tall Kansan whom Capote portrayed as a personable but remorseless conman, killer, and would-be rapist.

Media coverage about the existence of High Road to Hell dates back to 2009. What’s new is that the son of the late Wichita Eagle reporter is spearheading a campaign to draw attention to it.

Michael Nations, who works as a probation officer, has posted a seven-part video series on YouTube to present some facts about his father’s work.

Smeared. The video series, titled Footprints Found Inside ‘In Cold Blood,’ is a simple effort, just the younger Nations talking to a video camera in front of his garage and later in an easy chair inside his house.

“Many negative and demeaning things were written and published about my father years after his death on December 24, 1968,” Michael Nations says on camera. “I believe it only fitting that what I have presented on his behalf as both a reporter and writer will be credited to him.”

I watched all seven parts. While not absorbing, the series hits a few high notes, particularly in outlining Capote’s attempts to undermine the competing manuscript.

A list of the interesting points from the video series will follow, but first a bit about Smith and Hickock’s crime and In Cold Blood for readers unfamiliar with the events:

Safe house. On November 15, 1959, Richard Hickock, 28, and Perry Smith, 31, slipped through an unlocked door into Herb and Bonnie Clutter’s house and cut the phone lines.

The ex-cons thought that the Clutters, who owned River Valley Farm in Holcomb, Kansas, had a safe containing $10,000 in cash in their house.

Back in 1959, that seemed like the score of a lifetime, or at least enough to finance a jobless existence for a few years.

Hickock acquired his belief about a money-filled metal box when he shared a jail cell with Floyd Wells, a onetime employee of River Valley Farm.

Wells had been inside the Clutters’ house and described its layout in detail to Hickock.

Terrified family. Although Wells got the floor plan correct, he was wrong about the safe. It didn’t exist and, in fact, friends of Herb Clutter later recalled his using checks to pay for nearly everything, even a purchase of $1.50, according to In Cold Blood.

Unfortunately, Hickock had no doubts about a safe. He recruited Smith, another prison friend, for a robbery plan.

Hickock, Smith

After sneaking into the Clutters’ house, the two woke up the family members by shining flashlights in their faces.

They tied up the couple and their two youngest children, Nancy and Kenyon. (The Clutters’ adult daughters, Eveanna and Beverly, didn’t live at home.)

Sex criminal. Hickock, who had a history of targeting underaged girls, admitted that he knew from Floyd Wells’ account that Nancy would be a teenager by then.

He allegedly acknowledged that he intended to rape Nancy, 16, but that Smith had stopped him.

After Hickock and Smith found no safe in the location Wells had specified, they searched throughout the five-bedroom three-bathroom house. Herb Clutter assured them there was no safe.

No church that day. They gave up and stole what little cash family members had in the house, less than $50, plus 15-year-old Kenyon’s transistor radio. They executed each of the Clutters with a gunshot to the head at close range.

Smith and Hickock then fled Holcomb, eventually hiding out in Mexico.

Meanwhile, two of Nancy’s friends entered the house and discovered the bodies; they were planning to go to church with the Clutters and were concerned when no one answered the door.

News of the murders shocked and terrified Holcomb. All the Clutters, but especially Herb and Nancy, were popular in the community.

On the day before she died, Nancy taught a little girl how to make a cherry pie and helped another local girl with a violin solo.

Herb oversaw construction of the First Methodist Church in Garden City, served on the Federal Farm Credit Board, and was the first president of the National Wheat Growers Association.

Michael Nations

Chance encounter. Although their murders weren’t huge news on a national level, the Clutters were affluent enough to merit a short mention in the New York Times.

If not for Truman Capote’s coming across the item by chance, few people outside of Western Kansas would know about the Clutters or Smith or Hickock today.

Capote, a glamorous, already successful 5-foot-3-inch-tall novelist, called up William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, and announced he was heading to Kansas to start working on a story about the crime.

Complex character. For Capote, it turned into a six-year odyssey that included forging a close relationship with lead Kansas Bureau of Investigation detective Alvin Dewey and his well-read wife, Marie, followed by an intimate friendship formed with Perry Smith and some acquaintanceship with Hickock.

The 2004 movie Capote with Philip Seymour Hoffman portrays the writer as a compassionate advocate for Perry Smith on one hand, and on the other, an inveigler impatient for Smith and Hickock’s executions to happen so he could finally slap an ending on In Cold Blood and get it published.

Capote began serializing the story in The New Yorker in 1965, and the book came out in January 1966 to great acclaim. It was translated into 30 languages.

Cut to the video. But back to Michael Nations and his 2017 video series: He asserts that High Road to Hell was suppressed and his father wrongly treated.

Who wanted to thwart Hickock and Nation’s effort? First, there was Capote, of course. He’d invested too much of his time in researching the story to let some enterprising local get in his way.

Also, according to Nations, the Kansas prison and law-enforcement officers who worked with Capote wanted Capote’s story to be the definitive account of their work. Capote portrayed Alvin Dewey as the hard-charging yet humble hero of the investigation and prosecution of the two killers.

Truman Capote circa 1966

A 2017 Wall Street Journal story by Kevin Helliker reports that Dewey let Capote know about the existence of the Hickock script, and it was only then that Capote began visiting death row to interview Smith and Hickock.

Subtle bribery? Michael Nations reads from a letter to Dewey in which Capote calls Nations’ work “preposterous.”

In the same letter, Capote mentions that the Deweys will be welcome to use a Colorado vacation home he plans to buy.

Capote also allegedly refers to Nations as a “bastard reporter” and an income tax cheater and suggests that his own work will offer the Deweys immortality.

Also during the video series, Nations holds up an ancient dog-eared paperback copy of In Cold Blood and says that each crease represents a fact contradicted by letters Hickock wrote to Mack Nations in 1961.

Callous criminal. Nations is probably right about at least some mistakes within In Cold Blood. Other researchers throughout the years have written about errors and possible fabrications in Capote’s work.

While Nations contends In Cold Blood contained falsehoods regarding Hickock’s story, he doesn’t dispute Capote’s portrayal of Hickock as amoral and heartless.

Hickock said in his letters to Nations that he considered people dying to be no big deal (“there are plenty of people to take their place”), he felt cheated that he didn’t get to shoot the Clutters (Smith did that himself, with Hickock’s complicity), and he liked the media coverage and felt proud of his unique criminal achievement.

Among Michael Nations’ other statements, assertions, and opinions presented in the video series:

  • Mack Nations sold an article about his work on the case to a magazine called Male in 1961.
  • There still exist 200 letters Hickock wrote to Mack Nations. The Kansas Historical Society in Topeka has them now.
  • Capote never liked Richard Hickock because the ex-con gave interviews to Mack Nations before speaking with Capote.
  • At some point, authorities banned all reporters except for Capote from interviewing the killers.
  • Michael wrote his own, unpublished exposé, In My Father’s Shoes, in which he transcribed Hickock’s letters to Mack Nations. He asserts that Capote stole some of the content from the letters.
  • Floyd Wells told Hickock he saw a safe in the Clutters’ home and witnessed Herb Clutter retrieving cash from it to pay workers. But at the trial, Wells testified only that he “thought” there was a safe.

False revelation. While those contentions sound believable, Michael Nations’ biggest bombshell is hard to swallow: that Hickock and Smith committed the Clutter robbery on a contract basis for a man named Roberts and they either received or expected to receive $1,000 or more from Roberts in return for their efforts.

Hickock may have told this particular tale to Mack Nations, but that doesn’t make it believable.

As the Wall Street Journal article by Kevin Helliker argues:

“The reasons to discount Hickock’s claim go beyond his lack of credibility as a pathological liar. If he and Smith were paid to kill the Clutters, why didn’t they use that information to try negotiating their way off death row? Why were they dirt poor before and after the crime?”

Nancy Clutter, left

Widening market. After viewing Michael Nations’ video series, I’m still confused as to whether or not he possesses a copy of his father and Hickock’s High Road to Hell manuscript. He mentions that his dad sent a copy to Kansas investigators at their request but never got it back.

Capote may have very well pressed authorities to suppress Nations’ account.

He probably didn’t need to, though.

The public fascination was and is strong enough that a competing book would likely have only stoked greater interest in the Clutter case — and ultimately led critics to conclude that Capote’s book was the greater literary achievement.

That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR

In Cold Blood: Murders That Live On

New Variations on Truman Capote’s Storytelling

This week’s post starts a little sabbatical from Forensic Files to concentrate on some new developments related to the classic true-crime book In Cold Blood.

One of many editions

Truman Capote’s story of the slaughter of four members of a well-liked Kansas farming family in 1959 established a new literary genre: the nonfiction novel.

Cradle to gallows. Capote interviewed people connected with the Clutters, who were terrorized and shot during a home invasion — way before someone invented that term — waged by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, a couple of young ex-cons.

By interspersing that intelligence with information from interviews with investigators and Perry Smith, Capote created a 343-page narrative that included in-depth backstories of the characters, a moment-by-moment narrative of the murders, and coverage of the police work, convictions, and eventual executions of the killers.

Of the two truants, Smith by far had the more sympathetic story, or at least Capote portrayed it that way. The son of a Native American mother and white father who once had a happy marriage and worked together as rodeo performers, Smith suffered from a series of long-running tragedies.

Unexpected bromance. His mother sank into severe acoholism, her four kids lived in an orphanage for a time, and two of them committed suicide. An accident left Smith with mangled legs and constant pain.

Smith and Capote developed a bond during the time he was researching his book.

A Young Truman Capote

Capote, too, came from an unstable household damaged by alcoholism, but he found a way out and turned himself into a member of the glittering literati of his day.

He had early success with his novels Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in 1948 when he was 23, and The Grass Harp three years later. His novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, later the basis for the Audrey Hepburn movie of the same name, came out in 1958.

But In Cold Blood was his blockbuster. It has sold 100 million copies, according to Study.com.

There are at least three movies based on the story.

Wholesome, meet dissolute. My favorite, the 2005 release Capote with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener, portrays the author’s efforts to make a literary conquest out of the quadruple homicide that rocked the Kansas town.

I’ve seen the film about the same number of times I’ve read the book In Cold Blood, at least four. The story of the unlikely face-off between the high-functioning 4-H-meeting-attending Clutter family and the two margin-dwelling assailants makes for an unusual American tableau.

The means of storytelling was a precursor to books such as Sebastian Junger’s 1997 best seller, The Perfect Storm, which featured a reconstructed story of a commercial fishing boat that disappeared.

Fortunately, Capote’s book probably will never vanish from the public consciousness, and two new developments related to the story have recently emerged.

First, information about a manuscript that told the story of the Clutter homicides through the eyes of Dick Hickock has leaked out. A seven-part sparsely viewed story about the manuscripts exists on YouTube. I will give it a watch and report back.

Smith (top) and Hickock

Fresh retelling. And coming up in November, Soho Press is publishing No Saints in Kansas, a novel told from the perspective of a fictional friend to the real-life Nancy Clutter, the dynamic 16-year-old at the center of In Cold Blood.

The author, Amy Brashear, grew up near Holcomb.

No Saints in Kansas is written for a teenage audience, but I’m going to give it a read myself and report back on it just the same. It might make a nice holiday gift for a nascent true-crime fan in the family.

That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — R.R.

Update: Read part 2.

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