What if 'In Cold Blood' got it wrong about Walker murders?
The taut prose of the book “In Cold Blood” propelled Truman Capote into the literary stratosphere in 1965.
BORN OF ‘BLOOD'
Truman Capote's groundbreak-ing book spawned a host of books, movies and other pop culture items:
Films and plays
• There have been three film adaptations: “In Cold Blood,” “Capote” and “Infamous.”
• It was made into a 1996 television miniseries.
• It inspired an opera called “Failing Kansas.”
• It inspired songs “The Corner” by Smoking Popes and “Honest Goodbye” by Bad Religion.
• It gave rise to a 2005 graphic novel called “Capote in Kansas.”
• It led to a 1966 documentary, “With Love from Truman.”
• Then there was the 2004 documentary, “Truman Capote: The Tiny Terror” . . .
• . . . and a 1994 one-man theater piece, “The Truman Capote Talk Show” . . .
• . . . and the 1975 play “Tru.”
Some noteworthy books
• “Capote: A Biography” by Gerald Clarke, 1988.
• “Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career” by George Plimpton, 1997.
• “Dear Genius: A Memoir of My Life with Truman Capote” by Jack Dunphy.
• “Truman Capote and the Legacy of ‘In Cold Blood' ” by Ralph Voss, 2011.
Trumpeted by the author as a “nonfiction novel,” anticipated in 1962 by Newsweek as “the overwhelmingly factual book (Capote) has been working on for more than two years,” this intimate account of a 1959 quadruple homicide in rural Kansas became an instant classic, the standard for true-crime writing, and the basis for a box-office hit.
But as the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office prepares a request from Kansas authorities for the exhumation of “In Cold Blood” villains Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, Capote's masterpiece will no doubt be revisited by admirers and critics alike.
That examination will be especially acute if — as Sarasota Det. Kimberly McGath speculates — DNA evidence links the two to an equally horrific family slaughter in Osprey on Dec. 19, 1959.
Just weeks after the Nov. 16, 1959, murders of Herb Clutter, his wife and their two teenagers outside Holcomb, Kan., the bodies of Cliff and Christine Walker and their two young children were discovered with gunshot wounds in their ranch house just south of Sarasota.
“In Cold Blood” places the two drifters in Tallahassee at the time of the Walker bloodbath. Osprey is nearly 300 miles south of the state capital. Florida investigators would later discover that Hickock and Smith were in Miami on the morning of the Walker murders.
Fifty-three years later, the Walker crimes remain unsolved.
As local detectives pursue cold-case leads tying Smith and Hickock to Sarasota on the date of the Walker murders, age-old questions about Capote's motivations, scruples and literary style are inevitable. In fact, Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, suggests that one of Capote's legacies is actually an antecedent to “highly modern lapses in ethical techniques” in media.
Several academicians who have studied the “In Cold Blood” phenomenon express serious reservations over a Smith/Hickock connection to the Walker tragedy — not because they doubt the pair's capacity for violence, but because of how the Walker massacre was conducted.
In Capote's account, Smith quickly shotgunned the Kansas victims to death to abbreviate their suffering and to spare 16-year-old Nancy Clutter from being raped by Hickock.
In the Osprey case, the clothing of Christine Walker, 23-year-old mother of two, was found with semen stains. Two-year-old Debbie was shot and then drowned in the bathtub.
“If they did this killing, they would be acting differently from the Kansas case, with the rape by Hickock allowed by Smith, and the children so young,” said Tom Averill, English professor at Washburn University in Topeka, Kan. “If they were the killers, it would show their desperation, and their further breakdown.”
“Perry Smith was as prudish as an old-maid aunt — a strange thing to say about a killer, I know, but true nonetheless. He didn't allow Hickock to rape Nancy Clutter, and I don't think he would have allowed him to rape Christine Walker, either.
“Nor do I think the man who made Herb Clutter comfortable before slitting his throat would have drowned 2-year-old Debbie Walker in a bathtub.”
‘Quite the controversy'
Capote was a fastidious researcher with an obsession for details. His marathon investment in the Clutter murders — which culminated in a double execution on April 14, 1965 — was hailed as a triumph of “New Journalism.” The book laid the groundwork for a risky, interpretive and personalized style of literary nonfiction often invoked by the likes of Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer.
Preferring to transcribe conversations from memory rather than take notes during interviews, Capote boasted that “In Cold Blood” was “immaculately factual” upon publication.
“One doesn't spend almost six years on a book, the point of which is factual accuracy, and then give way to minor distortions,” he said.
But Ralph Voss, author of “Truman Capote and the Legacy of ‘In Cold Blood,' ” estimates that about 90 to 95 percent of Capote's acclaimed work was factually accurate. “He was telling everyone the book was 100 percent true,” Voss said. “It was quite the controversy.”
As Capote would confess to biographer Clarke, the entire final scene of “In Cold Blood,” a chance meeting at the Clutter graveyard between a lead investigator and a family friend, was fabricated.
Clarke's book inspired “Capote,” the critically acclaimed film that won an Academy Award for Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2005. The Hollywood treatment focuses on the drama behind the sensitive profile of Smith delivered by “In Cold Blood.” Capote bonded emotionally with Smith, but that was based largely on deception and manipulation.
Capote refused to publish his book until it reached its logical conclusion with the state-ordered deaths of Smith and Hickock. As the appeals process dragged on, Capote abandoned his pledge to retain stellar legal representation for them. “If they should get (a new trial),” he privately complained, “I will have a complete breakdown of some sort.” To another source, he lamented, “my sanity is at stake.”
Capote's mental state begs the question: How might strong evidence for a Smith-Hickock link to a quadruple homicide in Florida have factored into a story whose open-ended deadline was taking a toll on this New Journalism pioneer?
“I'm not sure it changes the Kansas story, in terms of the crime, and detection,” said Averill, who recently donated a Capote-autographed first-edition copy of “In Cold Blood” to Washburn University. “But I'd wonder why more mention of this killing, and the whole flight section of the book, wasn't more detailed.”
“The Florida case certainly would have prolonged the story, and, most likely, the executions,” he added.
Clarke doesn't believe the inference that Capote soft-peddled his characters' other potential crimes “just for the sake of a clean and simple narrative.” A confidant of Capote, as well as the author of “Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote,” Clarke asserts his subject could not have known more about the Walkers than the police did.
“The killers talked to him about the Clutter murders, but not the Walker murders,” Clarke said. “And since they were condemned to die anyway, they would have had no reason to remain silent.”
Truth: The big loser?
But should a DNA link to the Walker killings emerge, the literary impact would be profound, said Boston University professor William McKeen.
“If it turns out to be true, that this wasn't the whole story, it would be like finding out after all these years that Scarlett O'Hara was a transvestite,” said McKeen, a Hunter Thompson biographer who teaches about “In Cold Blood” as part of his New Journalism curriculum.
“Perry Smith is given a fairly sympathetic treatment as a guy who got caught up in the moment. But if it turns out he was involved in other murders, too? It'll be like, ‘Oh,' ” McKeen said. “ ‘In Cold Blood' will still be regarded as a great book because Capote's such a brilliant and elegant writer, but there will be a taint to it.”
In that event, Syracuse pop culture critic Robert Thompson would anticipate future editions including addenda to the Walker murders.
On the other hand, Thompson said he has always read “In Cold Blood” through the prism of literature, not as a definitive history. “If you're serious about finding out what happened on Dec. 7, 1941, first you read the contemporary accounts,” he said. “Then you go to the good, solid histories. But if you want a feeling for that experience, the history books probably aren't going to give you a feeling like a movie will. Fiction turns data into experience. Fiction gives you things that just-the-facts can't do. But New Journalism doesn't mean you sacrifice facts.
“If you look at some of those writers of the '60s and '70s, you can see the advanced artistry in their beautiful, mythically resonant capturing of the zeitgeist,” Thompson said. “Guys like Mailer and Wolfe and Capote made it look easy, but it's hard to do.”
Among the perils associated with New Journalism were the tight relationships writers forged with their subjects.
The sex scandal involving Gen. David Petraeus and his biographer, Paula Broadwell, is only the latest example of the sort of boundaries that have been disintegrating for decades. In Capote's case, the compassion he felt for Smith may have been triggered by Capote's own parallel childhood of neglect and abandonment.
Either way, the biggest loser, Thompson said, is truth.
“Just five years ago, I thought it was important to teach students about straight-up, old-school journalism,” Thompson said. “I'm not so sure today I'd be confident about giving that advice, in the context of a collapsing industry.
“There are so many online opportunities for telling stories, mostly for little or no pay, that encourage snarky language, vernacular language, usually in the first person. And it's the kind of thing that's done so poorly, so often.”
On the other hand, the next revelation in the “In Cold Blood” story will require no literary filters.
Writes Washburn's Averill: “I'd certainly be interested in the results of a DNA test.”