In Cold Blood

Dick Hickock is Perry’s partner in crime and foil. He is a 28-year-old man who comes from a stable and loving family lived a relatively typical life before graduating from high school. Dick was a good student and a star athlete with the overall appearance—blue eyes, blond hair, and a lean but toned build—of “an American-style ‘good kid’” (36). Dick himself is heavily invested in this ability to conform to the American masculine ideal and spends a great deal of time asserting his heteronormative masculinity through jokes and innuendos about his sexual conquests. He also rejects the notion that the crimes he committed say anything about his personality or psychology, often describing himself as “a normal.”

Dick’s very insistence on his normalcy speaks to a fundamental insecurity. Although Dick is the more dominant partner in his relationship with Perry, even Perry himself comes to see much of Dick’s supposed toughness as bluster. Notably, Dick panics when he tries to kill Herbert. Dick’s hard-nosed facade is in part a reaction to the disappointment of not being able to afford college, His blue-collar jobs railways and in garages are stereotypically “manly,” but also far removed from his teenage desire to become an engineer. In addition, Dick’s sexual and romantic history is not as clean as he might wish; he is twice-divorced and experiences pedophilic urges he feels “sincerely ashamed” of (232).

The tension between how Dick presents himself and his real self is reflected in his facial disfigurement, which subtly twists his otherwise all-American looks. Capote writes, “[T]he lips were slightly aslant, the nose askew and his eyes not only situated at uneven levels but of uneven size” (35). Brain damage from the same car crash may also be responsible for Dick’s impulsivity and aggressiveness, given that his problems with the law largely began after he sustained a concussion. Regardless, Dick as he appears in In Cold Blood is a relatively cold person with a deep-seated envy of anyone better off in life, who uses his intelligence—a test administered in prison estimates his IQ at 130—to manipulate those around him.

Al Dewey is the Garden City representative of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation; he previously served as both a county sheriff and an FBI agent, so he is well-positioned to serve as the lead detective on the Clutter case. At 47, he is an upright and devoted family man whose Christian faith plays an important role in his life and the lives of his wife and two young sons. Though generally practical in nature, Dewey dreams of one day retiring to a country farm.

This dream, like Dewey’s life in general, is upended by the Clutter case. The brutality and senselessness of the crime surpass anything Dewey has seen before. Even if he did not know the Clutters personally, the crime would prove trying. Dewey’s commitment to solving the murders quickly becomes obsessive, and as the weeks go by, it begins to take a toll on his physical health.

Dewey’s dogged pursuit of the truth eventually pays off in the apprehension and conviction of Dick and Perry. Nevertheless, he continues to feel a nagging dissatisfaction with how the investigation played out. Dewey begins the investigation with the belief the Clutter murderers knew and hated their victims; as a result, he finds the truth of the matter—that the killers chose the Clutters virtually at random, and that it was largely chance circumstances that goaded Perry into killing them—hard to accept. In this sense, Dewey is a stand-in for Capote himself who, in recounting the story of the Clutters and their killers, seeks to find narrative and psychological meaning in an act that seems to lack “meaningful design” (283).

Herbert Clutter is the owner of River Valley Farm. He is the husband of Bonnie Clutter and the father of Nancy, Kenyon, Beverly, and Eveanna. Herbert is 48 but still strong and relatively youthful in appearance. Capote writes, “Mr. Clutter cut a man’s figure. His shoulders were broad, his hair had held its dark color, his square-jawed, confident face retained a healthy-hued youthfulness” (6). He is also One of the most prosperous residents of Holcomb, Herbert is well-known and respected for his many contributions to the community.

A devout Methodist, Mr. Clutter is a disciplined man who adheres to a clear daily schedule, avoids alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine, and “[has] no use for card games, golf, cocktails, or buffet suppers served at ten—or, indeed, for any pastime that he felt did not ‘accomplish something.’” (39). He also expects his employees to abide by a strict no-drinking policy. Nevertheless, he is a kind and fair man “known for his equanimity, his charitableness, and the fact that he paid good wages and distributed frequent bonuses” (11). This is part of what makes his murder—and the murders of Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon—so frightening to the community; if a family as universally liked as the Clutters could be killed, it suggests that no one is safe.

Bonnie Clutter is Herbert Clutter’s wife, and the mother of Nancy, Kenyon, Eveanna, and Beverly. Always sensitive and reserved, Bonnie suffered bouts of severe postpartum depression after the birth of each of her children, which eventually gave way to a more chronic malaise. Capote writes, “She knew ‘good days’ and occasionally they accumulated into weeks, months, but even on the best of the good days [...] she could not summon the social vitality her husband’s pyramiding activities required” (31).

To cope with her anxiety and depression, Bonnie relies heavily on her deep religious faith; has also spent time in and out of psychiatric institutions over the years. As such, she remains the only member of the Clutter family who is out of step with the American ideal. In that respect, it’s noteworthy that one of the few treatments Bonnie found helpful involved taking a job outside the home at a time when women of her social class rarely did so. Capote writes, “On the advice of a doctor, who had thought the experience would aid her to regain ‘a sense of adequacy and usefulness,’ she had taken an apartment, then found a job—as a file clerk at the Y.W.C.A.” (31-32). Tellingly, Bonnie ultimately returns home because she feels guilty for having enjoyed “the adventure” too much (32), which suggests that her problems with mental illness stem at least in part from dissatisfaction with her experiences as a wife and mother. In this sense, Bonnie’s story reveals the fractures and tensions that exist even within the seemingly perfect Clutter family. She is 45 at the time of her death. 

Nancy is the Clutters’ youngest daughter. She is 16 at the time of her death and described by Capote as a “pretty girl, lean and boyishly agile” with “short-bobbed, shining chestnut hair” and “darkly translucent” eyes (22). Thanks to her organizational skills—a trait she shares with her father—Nancy balances numerous activities and talents: she is “a straight-A student, the president of her class, a leader in the 4-H program and the Young Methodists League, a skilled rider, an excellent musician (piano, clarinet), [and] an annual winner at the county fair (pastry, preserves, needlework, flower arrangement” (20). She shares these skills with the rest of the community, tutoring younger girls in music and home economics, and her outgoing, generous, and bubbly personality make her a favorite with all of Holcomb.

Nancy’s poise and collectedness are especially evident in the moments before her death, when she stashes a watch in the toe of her shoe to prevent it from being stolen. She also adopts a friendly and calm demeanor with Dick and Perry in an attempt to talk them down. 

Kenyon is the Clutters’ youngest child and only son. At the time of his death, he is 15 and six feet tall, with “hemp-colored” hair and a tall, “lanky” but “sturdy” build (44). In terms of personality, he resembles his mother more than his father; Kenyon is reserved and somewhat dreamy, with a tendency to lose himself in his various hobbies. He especially building, tinkering with, and inventing things, including a hope chest for his sister Beverly’s wedding. He and his best friend spend much of their time outdoors on hunting trips or excursions to the Sand Hills, where they race coyotes in their truck. Although Kenyon and Nancy squabble, Bobby Rupp says that deep down “they were very close—closer than most brothers and sisters [...] because they’d been alone together so much, what with Mrs. Clutter away and Mr. Clutter gone to Washington, or wherever” (59).

Sue Kidwell is Nancy’s best friend, despite being a year younger and quite different in temperament. Sue is reserved, “sensitive,” and “imaginative,” with a tendency toward “melancholy” (24). Physically, she is “a tall, languid young lady with a pallid, oval face and beautiful pale-blue-gray eyes” (68). The two girls are extremely close and plan to study art together at Kansas State University—a dream Sue ultimately pursues alone after Nancy’s death.

Sue and Nancy’s friendship is also notable in that it echoes a pattern present in relationships like the one between Perry and Dick. Whereas Nancy grows up in a family that resembles the nuclear ideal—a mother, a father, and four children leading a comfortable middle-class existence—Sue does not; her father abandoned his wife and child when Sue was very young, and she now lives in a small apartment with her mother, who works as a music teacher. Sue is therefore yet another example of someone whose life falls short of the American Dream.

Bobby Rupp is Nancy’s boyfriend. They met in the first grade and dated on and off since eighth grade. As a result, he is well-acquainted with the Clutters, even spending time with them on family holidays like Christmas.

Nevertheless, the staunchly Methodist Mr. Clutter doesn’t entirely approve of Nancy’s relationship with Bobby, whose family is Catholic. Although Nancy accepts that the relationship will end when they graduate high school, she’s under some pressure from her father to break things off before that. This potential motive leads the detectives to consider Bobby a suspect early on in the investigation, but he clears himself of suspicion by passing a polygraph. At the end of the novel, Sue Kidwell reveals that Bobby finally moved on from Nancy’s death and married. 

During their time on Death Row, Perry and Dick encounter five other men: a Black “hymn-singing” man named Earl Wilson (359), an “effeminate youth” named Bobby Joe Spencer (359), the spree killers George Ronald York and James Douglas Latham, and Lowell Lee (“Andy”) Andrews. Andy—an “enormous, weak-eyed boy [...] who wore horn-rimmed glasses and weighed almost three hundred pounds” (359)—is by far the most significant of these men, both because of his relationship to Dick and Perry and because of the nature of his crimes; he murdered his parents and sister because he wanted to use the inheritance to fulfill his dream of becoming a “master criminal” (360). The outlandishness of these fantasies, coupled with his emotional flatness, led psychiatrists to diagnose Andy with schizophrenia. Like Perry’s case, Andy’s therefore raises questions about the nature of moral responsibility. However, it is Dick that Andy befriends, since Perry feels threatened by Andy’s university education.

Although minor characters compared to Andy, York and Latham are noteworthy in that their relationship parallels Dick and Perry’s. York and Latham are opposites in both looks and history; York is tall, “blond and blue-eyed” (372), and comes from a loving family background, whereas Latham is a “short young man with foxy brown eyes animating a compact, cute little face” who grew up poor and neglected (372-373). The murders they commit together are therefore another example of a crime caused by “a certain frictional interplay between the perpetrators” and their personalities (344).