In Cold Blood

In the early hours of November 15, 1959, the Clutter family of Holcomb, western Kansas, was brutally murdered: father Herbert, mother Bonnie, sixteen-year-old daughter Nancy and fifteen-year-old son Kenyon, all shot at close range. Almost no clues were left at the scene, and the small town sank into fear and suspicion. Two repeat offenders just paroled from Kansas State Penitentiary—Dick Hickock and Perry Smith—drove more than four hundred miles to rob the Clutters after a cellmate told them the family kept a large sum of cash. They found no safe, took only a few dozen dollars, a pair of binoculars and a radio. Six weeks later the two were caught; in 1965 they were hanged. After reading a newspaper report of the case, Capote traveled to Kansas with his childhood friend Harper Lee, later the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, and interviewed the victims' family and friends, neighbors, police and the killers. The work took six years and left thousands of pages of notes, and out of it came this book. The narrative advances along four alternating threads: the Clutters' daily life before the murders, the killers' journey across states toward the house, the flight and manhunt after the crime, and the trial and hanging. Called the first "nonfiction novel," it laid the foundation for true-crime writing as we know it today.