In Cold Blood

by Truman Capote

Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.

At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them—four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again—those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.

The Rupp family were Roman Catholics, the Clutters, Methodist—a fact that should in itself be sufficient to terminate whatever fancies she and this boy might have of some day marrying.

“My husband cares more for those trees than he does for his children,” and everyone in Holcomb recalled the day a small disabled plane crashed into the peach trees: “Herb was fit to be tied! Why, the propeller hadn’t stopped turning before he’d slapped a lawsuit on the pilot.”

“Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.”

He may successfully accumulate, but he does not accumulate success, for he is his own enemy and is kept from truly enjoying his achievements.”

He had liked him but not considered him especially worth cultivating until, one day, Perry described a murder, telling how, simply for “the hell of it,” he had killed a colored man in Las Vegas—beaten him to death with a bicycle chain. The anecdote elevated Dick’s opinion of Little Perry; he began to see more of him, and, like Willie-Jay, though for dissimilar reasons, gradually decided that Perry possessed unusual and valuable qualities. Several murderers, or men who boasted of murder or their willingness to commit it, circulated inside Lansing; but Dick became convinced that Perry was that rarity, “a natural killer”—absolutely sane, but conscienceless, and capable of dealing, with or without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows. It was Dick’s theory that such a gift could, under his supervision, be profitably exploited.

If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity. So blow your nose.”

How was it possible that such effort, such plain virtue, could overnight be reduced to this—smoke, thinning as it rose and was received by the big, annihilating sky?

But the diary notation that most tantalized Dewey was unrelated to the Clutter-Rupp, Methodist-Catholic impasse. Rather, it concerned a cat, the mysterious demise of Nancy’s favorite pet, Boobs, whom, according to an entry dated two weeks prior to her own death, she’d found “lying in the barn,” the victim, or so she suspected (without saying why), of a poisoner: “Poor Boobs. I buried him in a special place.”

“Of all the people in all the world, the Clutters were the least likely to be murdered.”

Imagination, of course, can open any door—turn the key and let terror walk right

Nothing is more usual than to feel that others have shared in our failures, just as it is an ordinary reaction to forget those who have shared in our achievements.

And there were half a hundred other items he had decided he must take with him, among them his treasure maps, Otto’s sketchbook, and two thick notebooks, the thicker of which constituted his personal dictionary, a non-alphabetically listed miscellany of words he believed “beautiful” or “useful,” or at least “worth memorizing.” (Sample page: “Thanatoid = deathlike; Omnilingual = versed in languages; Amerce = punishment, amount fixed by court; Nescient = ignorance; Facinorous = atrociously wicked; Hagiophobia = a morbid fear of holy places & things; Lapidicolous = living under stones, as certain blind beetles; Dyspathy = lack of sympathy, fellow feeling; Psilopher = a fellow who fain would pass as a philosopher; Omophagia = eating raw flesh, the rite of some savage tribes; Depredate = to pillage, rob, and prey upon; Aphrodisiac = a drug or the like which excites sexual desire; Megalodactylous = having abnormally large fingers; Myrtophobia = fear of night and darkness.”)

Envy was constantly with him; the Enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.

Later, over cigarettes and coffee, Perry returned to the subject of thievery. “My friend Willie-Jay used to talk about it. He used to say that all crimes were only ‘varieties of theft.’ Murder included. When you kill a man you steal his life. I guess that makes me a pretty big thief.

Perry was confused, mistaken, it was not possible for any man to be that devoid of conscience or compassion. Perry said, “Why? Soldiers don’t lose much sleep. They murder, and get medals for doing it. The good people of Kansas want to murder me—and some hangman will be glad to get the work. It’s easy to kill—a lot easier than passing a bad check. Just remember: I only knew the Clutters maybe an hour. If I’d really known them, I guess I’d feel different. I don’t think I could live with myself.

The Row’s two night guards, arriving at work on an autumn evening in 1961, had a piece of news. “Well,” one of them announced, “seems like you boys can expect company.” The import of the remark was clear to his audience: it meant that two young soldiers, who had been standing trial for the murder of a Kansas railroad worker, had received the ultimate sentence. “Yessir,” the guard said, confirming this, “they got the death penalty.” Dick said, “Sure. It’s very popular in Kansas. Juries hand it out like they were giving candy to kids.” One of the soldiers, George Ronald York, was eighteen; his companion, James Douglas Latham, was a year older. They were both exceptionally personable, which perhaps explains why hordes of teen-aged girls had attended their trial. Though convicted of a single slaying, the pair had claimed seven victims in the course of a cross-country murder spree.

Shultz filed his habeas corpus petition, and the Kansas Supreme Court commissioned one of its own retired justices, the Honorable Walter G. Thiele, to conduct a full-scale hearing. And so it came to pass that almost two years after the trial, the whole cast reassembled in the courtroom at Garden City. The only important participants absent were the original defendants; in their stead, as it were, stood Judge Tate, old Mr. Fleming, and Harrison Smith, whose careers were imperiled—not because of the appellant’s allegations per se, but because of the apparent credit the Bar Association bestowed upon them.

IN THE DISPOSITION OF CAPITAL cases in the United States, the median elapsed time between sentence and execution is approximately seventeen months. Recently, in Texas, an armed robber was electrocuted one month after his conviction; but in Louisiana, at the present writing, two rapists have been waiting for a record twelve years. The variance depends a little on luck and a great deal on the extent of litigation. The majority of the lawyers handling these cases are court-appointed and work without recompense; but more often than not the courts, in order to avoid future appeals based on complaints of inadequate representation, appoint men of first quality who defend with commendable vigor. However, even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably, first in the state courts, then through the Federal courts until the ultimate tribunal is reached—the United States Supreme Court. But even defeat there does not signify if petitioner’s counsel can discover or invent new grounds for appeal; usually they can, and so once more the wheel turns, and turns until, perhaps some years later, the prisoner arrives back at the nation’s highest court, probably only to begin again the slow cruel contest.

“He was innocent as a little child, some kid with a box of Cracker Jack. He’d never once been with a woman. Man or mule. He said so himself. Maybe that’s what I liked about him most. How he wouldn’t prevaricate. The rest of us on the Row, we’re all a bunch of bull-artists. I’m one of the worst. Shoot, you’ve got to talk about something. Brag. Otherwise you’re nobody, nothing, a potato vegetating in your seven-by-ten limbo.

“The poor lady. She wrote the warden, and asked him if she could speak to Perry the next time she came here. She wanted to hear from Perry himself how he killed those people, how I never fired shot one. All I can hope is that some day we’ll get a new trial, and Perry will testify and tell the truth. Only I doubt it. He’s plain determined that if he goes I go. Back to back. It’s not right. Many a man has killed and never seen the inside of a death cell. And I never killed anybody. If you’ve got fifty thousand dollars to spend, you could bump off half of Kansas City and just laugh ha ha.”

“Well, what’s there to say about capital punishment? I’m not against it. Revenge is all it is, but what’s wrong with revenge? It’s very important. If I was kin to the Clutters, or any of the parties York and Latham dispensed with, I couldn’t rest in peace till the ones responsible had taken that ride on the Big Swing. These people that write letters to the newspapers. There were two in a Topeka paper the other day—one from a minister. Saying, in effect, what is all this legal farce, why haven’t those sonsabitches Smith and Hickock got it in the neck, how come those murdering sonsabitches are still eating up the taxpayers’ money? Well, I can see their side. They’re mad ’cause they’re not getting what they want—revenge. And they’re not going to get it if I can help it. I believe in hanging. Just so long as I’m not the one being hanged.”