Summary and Analysis of In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences

Based on the Book by Truman Capote

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• Publisher: Worth Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781504043823
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of In Cold Blood tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Truman Capote's book. Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. This short summary and analysis of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote includes:

• Historical context
• Chapter-by-chapter summaries
• Detailed timeline of important events
• Important quotes
• Fascinating trivia
• Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work

About Truman Capote's In Cold Blood: A masterpiece of true crime and literary nonfiction, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood is the story of a 1959 multiple murder in rural Kansas. Combining journalistic research with masterful storytelling, Capote reconstructs the events surrounding the killing of the Clutter family and the crime's aftermath—from the last day of the Clutters' lives to the day their murderers are executed. Gripping, chilling, and suspenseful, In Cold Blood is a pioneering work of nonfiction and a highly acclaimed modern American classic. The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.

Summary

Part I: The Last to See Them Alive

On November 14, 1959, the members of the Clutter family are living out an ordinary autumn Saturday on River Valley Farm, unaware that it will be their last. Herb Clutter, the family patriarch, awakens at seven and eats a light breakfast before taking a walk on his farm. Later in the morning, he drives out to Garden City, Kansas, where he leads a meeting of the Finney County 4-H Club.

Mr. Clutter’s only son, fifteen-year-old Kenyon Clutter, accompanies his father to the 4-H meeting and spends the rest of his afternoon varnishing a mahogany hope chest he made as a wedding present for his older sister Beverly. (The two eldest Clutter children no longer live at home: Eveanna, married, lives in Illinois, while Beverly is studying to be a nurse in Kansas City.)

Nancy Clutter, the sixteen-year-old “town darling,” flits between several engagements: she chats with her close friend Sue Kidwell on the phone, teaches a neighbor girl how to bake a cherry pie, helps another local girl with a trumpet solo, and runs several errands for her mother, Bonnie Clutter, who has only recently returned from a two-week stay in a psychiatric hospital. Mrs. Clutter rises briefly, but soon returns to bed.

Later that afternoon, Mr. Clutter purchases a $40,000 life insurance policy; after dinner, Nancy’s boyfriend, Bobby Rupp, comes over to watch television. He leaves around ten o’clock with plans to see Nancy again the next day.

Meanwhile, a black 1949 Chevrolet leaves Olathe, Kansas, around three o’clock and drives toward Holcomb, four hundred miles away. Driver and passenger are Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, two ex-convicts who celled together at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing.

The two men talk; Perry plays his guitar. They stop in Emporia, Kansas, where they purchase a pair of rubber gloves and a roll of white nylon rope; they also try and fail to buy black nylon stockings. They eat dinner in Great Bend, and drive on into Holcomb as a full moon rises over the prairie.

The Clutters, devout Methodists, often drive a young friend, Nancy Ewalt, to Sunday church services in Garden City—but on Sunday, November 15, 1959, the Clutter family does not seem to be awake when Nancy Ewalt arrives at their door. Nancy Ewalt and her father drive to the home of Sue Kidwell, to ask if she knows where the family might be. Sue doesn’t know. They go back to the Clutter house and the two girls go inside.

They run out screaming. Nancy Clutter is dead.

Later, the sheriff, along with a high school teacher, a deputy, and Mr. Ewalt, discover the bodies of the other three family members. Mrs. Clutter, like Nancy, had been bound, hand and foot, with nylon rope and killed with a shotgun blast to the head. Kenyon and Mr. Clutter lay dead downstairs: Kenyon on the couch, bound and shot like his mother and sister, and Mr. Clutter in the furnace room, with his throat cut and a bullet wound in his head.

The news spreads through Holcomb. Mother Truitt and Mrs. Myrtle Clare, Holcomb’s mother-daughter postmistresses, see two ambulances driving toward the Clutter farm. Bobby Rupp learns of his girlfriend’s death when Mr. Ewalt stops by the Rupp farm that afternoon.

National headlines speak of the violent murders, and rumors circulate among friends and acquaintances throughout Holcomb.

In Olathe, Kansas, the two young killers sleep. Perry Smith collapses on a motel bed; Dick Hickock nods off on the couch at his family home. Dick and Perry are exhausted: they have driven more than eight hundred miles in the past twenty-four hours.

Part II: Persons Unknown

Faced with the gruesome murder of a respected family, the townspeople of Holcomb begin to fear and distrust each other. They lock their doors at night. In Hartman’s Café and at the post office, wherever people meet, theories and gossip abound. A question reverberates throughout the town: Who killed the Clutters? And another, perhaps more urgent question follows: Why?

Alvin Adams Dewey, the Garden City representative of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, believes with relative certainty that two suspects, not one, committed the murders. Though clues are sparse at the crime scene, investigators find two footprints: one a bloody Cat’s Paw half-sole mark, the other an impression made by a diamond-pattern sole. From a few other clues—the pillow beneath Kenyon’s head and the way Nancy was tucked into her bed—Dewey concludes that at least one of the killers felt some compassion for the Clutters.

The investigation originally focuses on Bobby Rupp, Nancy Clutter’s boyfriend—he was the last to see the family alive. Herb Clutter had recently encouraged Nancy to stop seeing Bobby, as the Clutters were Methodist and the Rupps were Catholic. But Bobby Rupp passed a polygraph test, and Dewey believes he is innocent.

Without a single clear suspect, Dewey, along with Kansas Bureau of Invest...

Table of contents

• Title
• Disclaimer
• Contents
• Context
• Overview
• Summary
• Timeline
• Cast of Characters
• Direct Quotes and Analysis
• Trivia
• What’s That Word?
• Critical Response
• About Truman Capote
• For Your Information
• Bibliography
• Copyright