On the night of November 15th, 1959, four shots were fired, signaling the death of four members of the Clutter family – Herb Clutter, his wife, Bonnie Clutter, and their two teenage children, Nancy and Kenyon – in their Holcomb, Kansas house.
One day later, Truman Capote was reading a 300-word crime briefing in that day’s The New York Times article. Standing at just less than 5’3 and possessing a high-pitched feminine voice, Capote
wasn’t just openly gay but flamboyantly so. Already an established American author, he was quickly intrigued by the ongoing murder, immediately pitching a story to his editor, William Shawn, at The New Yorker, who agreed to fund his investigative trip.
Capote descended in Kansas on December 1st, 1959, with a pen in hand and a flair for self-promotion. The perpetrators – Perry Smith and Richard “Dick” Hickock – were arrested just 30 days after. After seven years of observation, psychological profiling, and investigations, a local tragedy was turned into a national spectacle through the publishing of his book In Cold Blood: A True Account of A Multiple Murder and Its Consequences in 1966.
To this day, a central question lingers for readers, academics, and journalists alike: Capote painted the criminals with a nuance rarely afforded. Was this journalistic empathy or sensationalized pity? Were Holcomb and the Clutter family just secondary characters to hold up a contrast of the killers? Is this a spotlight of underreported perspectives or leverage of the quiet for the loud?
Truth holds that Capote invested unquantifiable effort and time into this investigation. “The book took everything out of him. He was so sensitive. He wasn’t a tough nut,” said Capote’s personal friend C.Z. Guest.
Throughout his investigation, Capote had grown increasingly close with the killers — in particular — Perry Smith, who like Capote, “was the son of an alcoholic mother who abandoned him and a father who had disappointed him.”
I like to tell a tale Truman had told me. “During one of his death row interviews with Smith, “Pretty” grabbed Truman’s ballpoint pen and pressed it right against his eyeball while he held him by the back of his head for something like fifteen minutes. It was an act of love you see, as well as an act of terror,” said Diana Vreeland, Capote’s mentor and editor-in-chief at Vogue.
That was before 1966, before Capote’s celebrity boom following the publishing of In Cold Blood. In Capote: A Biography (1988), Gerald Clarke described Capote’s life thereafter as a descent from “Black and White Ball to excess alcohol and drugs.” Black and White Balls refers to exclusive masquerade parties Capote would host alongside his “swans” – elegant, wealthy socialites with whom he associated himself ostensibly. During this time, Capote checked in multiple times for rehab and was arrested more often for drunk driving. His planned novel Answered Prayers never met his publishing deadline, cementing his career transition from dedicated journalist to “tabloid fodder,” something many described as a “downward spiral” of his literary legacy.
Yet, Capote’s plummet meant something deeper for others. It echoed the sensationalistic crime reporting and “American Dream” he himself criticized in In Cold Blood; it was a hypocrisy of the powerful, a theatrical illusion constructed for a melodramatic rise to fame.
Or was it simply an unfortunate off-track from an ambitious author’s original intentions? “Truman told me he always felt guilty about not doing enough for them, about using them, ” recalls Bianca Jagger, a close friend, after Capote witnessed the murderers’ execution at their request.
Whatever the interpretation, Capote’s controversial yet pioneering work illuminates journalism’s choke on selective empathy. Think the media’s obsession with “hot criminals” — Jeremy Meeks’ mugshot in 2014, “The Menendez Brothers Are Back!” headlines, and Luigi Magione’s viral “fashion show” – while victims are overshadowed for their unjustified suffering.
Likewise, Capote has developed a certain detachment from the true victims of the crime – criticizing the dehumanization of criminals yet leaning towards Smith’s troubled charisma through an unusual, somewhat manipulative, relationship.
Can today’s journalism still find Holcomb?
Unfortunately, sensationalism and journalistic truth remain symbiotic factors that uphold today’s media. Recall Trump’s narrative of the “forgotten” working class, casting people like Smith and Hickock as products of a rotting system, shadowing the innocent Clutters as perpetrators. On the other side, progressives tell the tale that the Clutters’ prosperity is a stake in the nation’s wealth gap, with the killers as the ones “uncared” for. Such unfiltered stories are indiscriminately parroted through modern platforms like X and greater media outlets, blurring the lines between a journalism of truth versus one of economic gain, popularity, and sensationalism.
With it comes its perils – a powerful force that sways national policy, vilifying too broadly while sympathizing with a selective few. While popularity is needed for a message to be read, it also erodes trust and distorts chaos.
While facts mattered, the frenzy mattered more. While it may have been Capote’s rigorous research that stylized Smith’s sufferings in the late 20th century, “10 Shocking Facts About the Clutter Killings #TrueCrime” may receive more attention through the self-run algorithms we rely on today.
Yet, In Cold Blood leads readers to a pivot. Just like what eclipsed the voices of Holcomb was concurrently Capote’s selling point that humanized criminals, the book reminds us to use sensationalism’s “pull” to spotlight the underrepresented but not override its margins. Today is not a world where we can dance in black and white. It is a time we learn to balance the loud and the lost, to navigate sensationalism’s power through our own criticality.
*In Cold Blood was first published as a four-part series in The New Yorker in 1965, then in book form in 1966.
Written by Julia Jiang
