A look at the brutal murders that inspired a foundational work in the true crime genre

“Until one morning in mid-November 1959, few Americans – in fact, few Kansans – had ever heard of Holcomb.” wrote Truman Capote in his groundbreaking non-fiction novel, In cold blood.

That all changed on November 15, 1959, when the horrific problem remained unsolved murder of a family of four brought the writer’s attention to Capote and Harper Lee (A friend for life who wrote her own articles on the case, in addition to her contribution to Capote’s research). Holcomba small farming town in western Kansas.

“In the earliest hours of that November morning, a Sunday morning, certain strange noises collided with the normal nighttime Holcomb noises – with the howling hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of sinking tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles,” Capote wrote in the opening pages of his book. “At that time, not a single soul in the sleeping Holcomb heard them – four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six lives.”

The first four lives lost were those of the victims: prosperous farmer Herbert Clutter; his wife, Bonnie; and their two teenage children, Nancy and Kenyon. The last two were the murderers of the Clutters.

The Tuinstad telegrama local newspaper, reported that the family had all been bound and gagged, their hands tied behind their backs before being shot in the head. Family friends who dropped their daughter off to go to church with the Clutters discovered the bodies strewn around the house.

“This is the worst crime I have ever seen in Kansas,” Logan Sanford, director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, told the newspaper. Telegram. For six weeks the crime would remain unsolved and the killers uncaught. Western Kansas was left in a state of fear.

Capote came up with the idea for In cold blood after reading a short, simple article hidden deep in the New York Timeswhich announced: “Rich farmer, 3 of the family killed.” This brutal crime on the Kansas prairies provided a perfect opportunity to write what he called a “non-fiction novel”, a work of factual reporting and tireless research that uses literary techniques, characters and narrative structure to illuminate the deeper truth and background of a story. Although the author has invoiced In cold blood as a true story based on interviews with the Cutters’ killers and others involved in the case, he later said was criticized for fictionalizing aspects of the murders.

Like the police investigation revealed and Capote’s book – first serialized in the New Yorker in 1965 and then published as a novel in 1966 – later detailedthe cold-blooded murderers were Perry Edward Smith and Richard Eugene Hickock, recently paroled criminals who had met while serving a prison sentence for burglary at the Kansas State Penitentiary. Inmate Floyd Wells, a former farmhand of the Clutters, told Hickock that the family kept a large amount of cash in a safe in their home. In a small, remote town where the neighbors kept their doors open, the job seemed, as Hickock later described it to Capote, a “piece of cake.”

On the night of November 14, Hickock and Smith drove 400 miles through Kansas to the Clutter House, where the family was sleeping. In the early hours of November 15, the pair entered through the unlocked door. After herding the family to the bathroom, the two men discovered there was no safe. The promised fortune had been the great story of a farmhand. Then the blood of the would-be thieves began to run cold. A “piecemeal” of a robbery turned into a mess when they tied up, gagged and murdered the Clutters in their own home.

In Cold Blood (1967) ORIGINAL TRAILER [HD 1080p]

“No witnesses” was the two men’s mantra during their long drive through Kansas, Capote reported In cold blood. Indeed, leaving no witnesses, Hickock and Smith took what little loot they could find: a portable radio, a pair of binoculars, and less than $50 in cash.

The two men remained on the run for just over six weeks. Las Vegas Police arrested them on December 30, and they went to process on March 22, 1960.

Herbert’s younger brother, Arthur Clutter, represented his family in the courthouse. “I just want to take a good look at it [Smith and Hickock]”, he told the press. “I just want to see what kind of animals they are. The way I feel, I could tear them apart.

The jury found Hickock and Smith guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. The men were convicted to hang. The fifth and six deaths from the bloody events of the morning of November 15, 1959 came almost six years later, on April 14, 1965, when the state of Kansas executed Hickock and Smith for their crimes.

Holcomb, that small neighboring town on the prairie, was forever changed. As Capote wrote: ‘Afterwards the townspeople, who had hitherto had so little fear of each other that they rarely bothered to lock their doors, had fallen into a fantasy in which they recreated them again and again – those gloomy explosions which stimulated a fire of distrust in the glare of which many old neighbors looked at each other. strange and like strangers.”