Killers In Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

Killers Often remembered and memorialized are the unfortunate victims of a homicide, and the executioners of the crime, the killers, are left away to rot in their graves, with their stories buried under the soil with them. In the true crime novel In Cold Blood, the author Truman Capote recounts the slaughter of a family of four in the quiet, once-ordinary town of Holcomb, Kansas by a pair of seemingly ruthless murderers. However, unlike most recounts, Capote’s work also focuses on the story and point of view of each criminal, letting readers familiarize with them. His comprehensive coverage of the killers, Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Smith, provides readers with a greater understanding of the two men. Perry Smith, 34-years-old when he

Capote reveals that when Perry was young, “His mother, an alcoholic, had strangled to death on her own vomit.” Out of her four children, “only the younger girl, Barbara, had entered ordinary life...Fern, the other daughter, jumped out of a window of a San Francisco hotel,” and his older brother had “one day driven his wife to suicide and killed himself the next” (Capote, 110-111). In Perry’s twisted family, his only remaining relatives are his sister and his father, but both of them want nothing to do with him. Barbara deliberately changes her address and hides it from him so that they have no way of reuniting. Even his father abandons him in Alaska, leaving poor little Perry alone to fend for himself. His childhood, his handicap, and his loneliness are all reasons why audience members cannot help but pity him. Capote’s portrayal of Perry appeals to his readers’ pathos and tugs at their heartstrings. Perry was also “such a kid, always wetting his bed and crying in his sleep, (‘Dad, I been looking everywhere, where you been, Dad?’)” (Capote, 108). Using a metaphor, Capote convinces readers that Perry is only a child in a grown man’s body. His habits of wetting his bed and crying for his father further

At first, Dick boasts about his plan to kill “eight or even twelve” people just for money and wants to leave “plenty of hair on...those walls,” with no witnesses remaining (Capote, 37). His word have an unnerving and chilling effect; he comfortably accepts, and even brags about, taking twelve lives. He goes so far as to describe it in gory detail: he will blast off their heads - all twelve - and then decorate the walls with their blood and hair. The revolting image from Dick’s words highlight his heartless character. All he has in his mind is money. He does not even have the basic respect for human life. Furthermore, he reveals that even his partner, Perry, is just a tool for him to use. Before, Perry told him about a murder that he committed - a false tall tale - but “The anecdote elevated Dick’s opinion of Little Perry...Dic became convinced that Perry was á natural killer’...[and] it was Dick’s theory that such a gift could, under his supervision, be profitably exploited” (Capote, 54-55). Here, Capote uses personification to characterize Perry’s life, a quality that caused Dick to take interest in Perry. Dick wanted to exploit his partner - he did not care about Perry’s feelings at all. Crazily, he viewed Perry’s ability to kill as a “gift.” His diction, his description of such a horrid quality as a “gift” further adds on to