Perry Smith In Cold Blood Essay

Truman Capote’s novel, In Cold Blood, follows the chilling, morbid, and completely accurate quadruple homicide of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas and explains, in great detail, the personalities, thoughts, and origins of the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Capote is able to capture the vulnerability of Perry and Dick and challenges the reader to think about what a criminal actually entails and represents. The common mold of a criminal consists of anti-social values, criminal peers, antisocial personality, dysfunctional family, low self-control, and substance abuse (Hegger). Perry Smith fits into all of these aspects one way or another, making him an ideal representation of how most criminals act and think. In the novel, In Cold

Perry grew up in a family where his parents did not care about his well-being and future. His mother was a prostitute and would constantly be intoxicated while around Perry and his siblings. Perry also grew up with the vacancy of a father figure, and when he lived with his father, Perry felt ignored, invisible, and unappreciated. As Perry described his childhood through his own eyes he said, “I had this great natural musical ability. Which Dad didn't recognize. Or care about. I liked to read, too. Improve my vocabulary. Make up songs. And I could draw. But I never got any encouragement - from him or anybody else” (Capote 133). Perry believed that he could have done great things if he had been given the opportunity and attention needed to be successful. Perry blamed his parents and the fact that they could not provide for him what every parent should, constant and unwavering love and care; he believed they were at fault for his downfall and criminal lifestyle. Not only was Perry verbally victimized, but he was also physically mistreated. Perry was physically neglected by his caretaker while he resided at a Salvation Army children's shelter and described his perpetrator by saying, “Oh,

It is revealed throughout In Cold Blood that Perry suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, which is “a subtype of schizophrenia in which the patient has delusions (false beliefs) that a person or some individuals are plotting against them or members of their family” (Nordqvist). When a psychologist at Perry’s trail was explaining his mental state during the Clutter murders, he explained, “...when Smith attacked Mr. Clutter he was under a mental eclipse; deep inside a schizophrenic darkness, for it was not entirely a flesh-and-blood man he ‘suddenly discovered’ himself destroying, but ‘a key figure in some past traumatic configuration’” (Capote 302). Perry was not acting out in reason or with a stable psychological mind, but instead, he was almost in a trance and captured by the emotional release he was feeling as he shot the Clutters. Perry did not know what he did or why he did it, but instead he took the pent up anger and frustration he felt about his father and used it as fuel to murder the Clutter family, which further proves the turmoil and confusion Perry was mentally experiencing. Not only did Perry endure the hardship of a mental illness, he was also completely and utterly regulated and