88 pages • 2 hours read
Truman CapoteIn Cold Blood
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1 Summary: “The Last to See Them Alive”
In 1959, Holcomb is a small agricultural town in western Kansas. Herbert Clutter owns the River Valley Farm, where he lives with his wife Bonnie and his two youngest children, 16-year-old Nancy and 15-year-old Kenyon. On the morning of the murders, Herbert oversleeps, having stayed up late to see Nancy home from a date with her boyfriend, Bobby Rupp. After a light breakfast, he goes outside to his prized fruit orchard.
Meanwhile, Perry Smith eats breakfast at a cafe in Olathe, Kansas. As he waits for Dick Hickock to arrive, Perry pores over a map of Mexico, dreaming of lost treasure.
Back at the Clutters,’ Nancy receives a phone call from a neighbor asking her to help her daughter Jolene bake a pie. Nancy agrees, although it requires her to reorganize her busy schedule which includes tutoring another child, running errands, and sewing dresses for her older sister Beverly’s wedding. On a phone call with her best friend, Susan Kidwell, Nancy describes her distress about her relationship with Bobby. Her father wants the couple to break up, because Bobby is Catholic and the Clutters are Methodist.
Meanwhile, Dick and Perry drive to a body shop where Dick outfits their car for the long trip to Holcomb, where they plan to steal ten thousand dollars from Herbert Clutter’s safe. As an alibi, Dick tells his parents he will be in Fort Scott visiting Perry’s sister.
After helping Jolene with her pie, Nancy leaves for an appointment. As she waits for her mother to pick her up, Jolene makes awkward conversation with Bonnie Clutter, whose recurring bouts of depression give her an anxious and distracted demeanor.
Having finished their work on the car, Perry and Dick clean themselves up in the garage bathroom. Both men are “fastidious” (34) about their appearance, and both are disfigured as a result of prior road accidents; Dick’s face is slightly lopsided, and Perry’s legs healed poorly from severe fractures.
Meanwhile, Herbert presides over a 4-H meeting in Garden City. He recommends giving an award to Mrs. Hideo Ashida, the wife of a local tenant farmer. Thanking him afterwards, Hideo confides that her husband may move the family to Nebraska.
In the afternoon, Dick and Perry stop in Emporia to buy supplies, including rubber gloves and rope. Perry wants to use black stockings as face masks, but they struggle to find any.
Back in Holcomb, Kenyon works on a hope chest for Beverly’s wedding and chats with Paul Helm, the farm’s groundskeeper. Nancy returns from a ride on the family horse, and the siblings bicker good-naturedly as Helm leaves for the evening.
At a Catholic hospital, Dick tries to buy black stockings from the nuns. Meanwhile, Perry reflects on the real reason for his return to Kansas: he hopes to reunite with a friend and fellow ex-convict named Willie-Jay. Perry only followed through on his promise to meet Dick at the cafe because he couldn’t locate his friend. Dick returns to the car empty-handed, all but admitting he didn’t try to find stockings.
In his home office, Herbert meets with a life insurance agent and finalizes plans to take out a $40,000 policy. As he signs the first check, he reflects on his life’s achievements and his hopes of passing the family business on to his children.
While Dick drives, Perry strums his guitar, sings, and tries unsuccessfully to converse with Dick about traveling to Mexico and Japan.
Bobby Rupp visits the Clutters to watch television and leaves sometime after 10:30 p.m. Describing the evening to the police later on, he wonders whether someone hid in the trees as he left.
In Garden City, Dick and Perry stop for gas. Dick chats with the attendant and privately worries that Perry—who is in the bathroom trying to massage away the pain in his legs—has cold feet. However, when Dick bangs on the bathroom door, Perry reemerges. They arrive in Holcomb just as Nancy, who always stays up latest, prepares for bed.
The next morning, around nine a.m., a farmer named Clarence Ewalt tries to drop his daughter Nancy Ewalt off at River Valley Farm. When no one in the house responds, the Ewalts visit Susan who, after an unsuccessful attempt to phone the Clutters, returns to the farm with the Ewalts. This time, Nancy Ewalt and Susan venture inside, only to run out screaming. Blood covers the walls of Nancy Clutter’s bedroom. Clarence tries to call an ambulance, but the Clutters’ phone lines are cut.
Returning to Susan’s apartment, Clarence calls Sheriff Earl Robinson. Ewalt and another resident of the building—a teacher named Larry Hendricks—return to River Valley Farm with Robinson. Searching the house, they find the four Clutters bound and shot: Nancy and Bonnie in their respective bedrooms, Kenyon in the basement, and Herbert—whose throat is also cut—in the furnace room. As more police and ambulances, arrive, Hendricks overhears Alfred Stoecklein, who lives and works on the Clutters’ land, tell the undersheriff that he and his wife were awake most of the night but didn’t hear anything.
Meanwhile, news of the crime spreads to Holcomb’s post office and cafe. What most disturbs people is the fear that someone from the community committed the murders. One resident says, “All we’ve got out here are our friends. There isn’t anything else” (81). As the day passes, relatives of the Clutters arrive in Garden City, including the family’s two surviving daughters, Beverly and Eveanna.
Meanwhile, Perry and Dick return to Olathe. As Perry sleeps in a hotel room, Dick rejoins his family for Sunday dinner, later falling asleep as they all watch TV.
Part 1 Analysis
Capote’s investigation into the Clutter murders began when he read an article about the then-unsolved case in The New York Times. As a result, Capote’s plans for the novel changed over time. What Capote initially believed would be a story about the impact of a violent crime on a small tight-knit community became a psychological novel concerning the personalities and backstories of the killers.
As the first part of the novel demonstrates, these two subjects are interrelated. At first glance, Herbert and his family live in a world far removed from the activities of two petty criminals like Dick and Perry. The Clutters are a prosperous, respectable, middle-class family that epitomizes the mid-20th century American ideal: a husband, a wife, and two children, a business Clutter built himself, an active involvement in the community, and a strong Protestant faith. By contrast, Dick and Perry respectively come from lower-middle class and impoverished origins. Perry grew up in a broken and abusive home and generally avoids close relationships as an adult. Dick’s sporadic employment history includes a string of blue-collar jobs, and he is already twice-divorced by the age of 28.
Therefore, it seems unlikely that the Clutters would even cross paths with their killers, much less fall victim to them. Throughout this first Part, however, Capote stresses the interconnectivity of these two very different worlds. This is evident in the section’s structure, which relies more heavily on juxtaposition than any other part of the book. Although Capote will rotate between different viewpoints throughout In Cold Blood, here he routinely alternates between Dick and Perry’s narrative and the Clutters’ narrative. The way Capote transitions between these scenes is also significant, in that he often does so by highlighting an unexpected parallel. This, for instance, is how Capote introduces Perry: “Like Mr. Clutter, the young man breakfasting in a café called the Little Jewel never drank coffee” (15). A few pages later, Capote makes a similar connection between Dick taking pride in the “thorough job” he does outfitting his car and “Nancy and her protégée, Jolene Katz, [who are] also satisfied with their morning’s work” on a cherry pie (27).
The question of how Dick and Perry came to murder the Clutters is one Capote explores in the work’s coming sections. However, in juxtaposing the lives of the murderers and their victims as he does in Part 1, Capote already hints at an answer. In a certain sense, it’s precisely the fact that those lives are so dissimilar that proves disastrous; neither Dick nor Perry have access to the American Dream that the Clutters largely enjoy. This provides the men with their ostensible motive for breaking into River Valley Farm and generates enormous resentment toward anyone they perceive as more powerful or fortunate than they are. Although the Clutters are not responsible for Perry and Dick’s struggles, In Cold Blood suggests that the happiness and success of people like the Clutters will always be fragile in a society that leaves others so far behind.
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