money, with which they planned to start new lives. Although they observed that the victims' family were "sweet," this did not prevent them from committing the murder—one murderer, Smith, even thought the victim, Herb Clutter, was "nice" right up until he killed him.

The jury, too, were quick to convict and were unmoved by sentiment. Convicting in forty minutes, they were described as the opposite of "chicken-hearted"—so we can argue that their blood, too, was cold as they sentenced the murderers, knowing that they would be sending them to their deaths.

The title of Truman Capote’s 1966 true crime classic “In Cold Blood” works on multiple levels. Dick and Perry murdered the Clutter family for no real reason; they killed in a purposely ruthless manner, without feeling and with cruel intent, which is the basic definition of doing something in cold blood. However, Capote wants the reader to take the title one step further. Dick and Perry are executed at the end of the novel, and there are many people in America who think that execution is a form of murder. Perhaps Capote is suggesting that the American justice system killed Dick and Perry in cold blood. And finally, there’s Holcomb, Kansas. Before the Clutter murders it was a quiet small town with traditional values and a Norman Rockwell-like innocence. The Clutter murders and the trial and execution of Dick and Perry murdered a small town’s innocence in cold blood.

Capote's journalistic novel chronicles the robbery attempt by Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, a plan that Hickock devised while incarcerated.  While in a Kansas prison Hickock had heard from another inmate that Herb Clutter for whom he had worked at one time, kept large amounts of cash in his home safe.  With Smith, Hickock planned to rob the Clutters of their money.

On November 14,1959, after driving across Kansas, Hickock and Smith attempted to rob Clutter, but upon learning that he paid all his bills by check and had virtually no money in the house, Smith coldly slit his throat and then shot him in his head.  When interviewed, Perry Smith said,

I didn't want to harm the man.  I thought he was a very nice gentleman.  Soft spoken.  I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.

After Smith shot Clutter, he put a single shotgun blast into the heads of the remaining family members.  This was the first mass murder of such brutality committed in the United States.  Smith's senseless and brutal, cold-blooded killing of the Clutter family and Smith's obvious detachment of feeling and psychoses, Capote was prompted to use the phrase "cold blood" in his title.

During Perry's incarceration after his trial, Capote visited him constantly, having bribed the officials into giving him carteblanche to come and go as he wished.  Smith, a child of institutions had many stages of his development arrested in the infantile stage:  he wet the bed, sucked his thumb, and cried out for "Daddy" in his sleep.  He prefered root beer to beer or coffee.  Being of mixed heritage, Indian and Irish, Perry had many psychological problems that Capote found fascinating, and, perhaps, felt were the cause of Smith's detached, cold killing of his victims.

I have suggested elsewhere that one important theme in Truman Capote's book is the way two young men may be relatively harmless when they are separate but can make a lethal combination when they get together. They are like two chemicals that are innocuous in separate bottles but can create an explosion when mixed together. Dick Hickock and Perry Smith are small-time delinquents who are both trying to impress each other with how BAD they can be. Neither one of them would have committed such a horrendous crime by himself, but when they get together they goad each other into doing terrible things to innocent people. The fact that it took two of them acting in tandem to commit the murders also made it possible for the police to catch them and get them to confess. A similar thing happened in the so-called Crime of the Century in the 1920s, when Loeb and Leopold murdered a young boy just for the "thrill." Leopold later wrote an interesting book about it titled 99 Years to Life. Capote was undoubtedly familiar with it.

One of the main themes in Capote's book is the issue of nature vs. nurture.  For example, did the killers become this way because of the environment in which they were raised, or is there some innate evil about these men that propelled their henious crimes? Through his extensive interviews, Capote tries to get to the bottom of this question.  In the end, it seems that nurture may have played a larger role, but nature may also have played a significant part.  Many people who have similiar background (alcoholic parents, suicide, abuse) do not go on to become killers.  In Capote's estimation, I would argue that he sees Smith and his partner, Willy Jay, as being a lethal (literally) combination of the two:  perhaps two-thirds nurture and one part nature. 

The main theme of Truman Capote's jounalistic novel In Cold Blood is Nature vs. Nurture. Working as a journalist for The New Yorker, Capote noticed the article about the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, a small farm town in which people were so secure that they did not lock their doors at night, and became intrigued by the crime. When Capote went to Kansas with a ‘‘meaningful design’’ of his own in which he originally intended to find out why the crime was committed, he soon discovered that he became more interested in the personalities of criminals. During his jounalistic investigations, Capote was intrigued by the one murderer, Perry Smith, who shot the members of the Clutter family in what was labeled as a psychological accident. 

To some critics, In Cold Blood examines the critical role of psychological accidents in the recreation of the crimes. However, critic Phyllis Frus, holds that Capote's method affords the murders' explanation and rationalization within a framework of middle-class ideology and psychological analysis.  Thus, Capote's method used for the writing of his book is "interpretive journalism."  Intrigued by the background of Perry Smith, Capote explored the idea that the half-Irish and half-Indian Smith was a tragic formula, concluding from information that he gathered that Smith was innately intelligent, talented, and sensitive, but his psyche was 

warped and eroded by neglect, abuse, humiliation, and unresolved emotional trauma.

Perry Smith's mother was an alcoholic who died as she aspirated, his siblings committed suicide, his father was a transient who kept Perry from establishing himself and acquiring friends at any school.  Capote's account of Perry's having taught himself to paint, play the guitar, and speak with impeccable grammar, along with his repulsion of any vulgar literature while incarcerated leads the reader to believe that Smith was, indeed, victimized by his horrible environment.