The Clutters were tied up in separate rooms and killed at close range by shotgun blasts. But they were surprised to find almost no money in the house everyone but the robbers, it seemed, knew that the farm owner, Herbert Clutter, paid only with checks.īefore arriving at the farm, Smith and Hickock had agreed that no witnesses could be left behind, whether or not the robbery was successful.

The killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, both of them ex-convicts, had intended to rob the family, which they knew to be well-off. Their trip resulted in “In Cold Blood,” which made his name synonymous with the true crime genre.īy then he was 35 and had already achieved fame and fortune with his fiction, which included “Other Voices, Other Rooms” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” But “In Cold Blood,” which reconstructed in stark detail the murders at the Clutter farm, was a radical departure for him. “Reporting can be made as interesting as fiction, and done as artistically,” he told Plimpton.Īccompanied by his childhood friend Harper Lee, the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Capote made his way to Kansas to investigate the murders of the Clutter family. The first people he shared his nonfiction novel idea with, he said, thought of it as merely a remedy for writer’s block. “The human heart being what it is, murder was a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time,” he told George Plimpton in a 1966 interview in The New York Times. Crime, he decided, could be the perfect vehicle. When he began writing professionally, Capote, who died 32 years ago today, theorized that journalism and creative writing could come together in the form of what he called the “ nonfiction novel.” The subject had to be right, however with journalism underpinning such a novel, the pitfall was that it could quickly date itself. He soon realized that it was the story he had been waiting to write for 20 years. In 1959, Truman Capote stumbled on a short article in The New York Times about a gruesome quadruple murder at a Kansas farm.

In koelen bloede by Truman Capote