Last week I mentioned Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood as a candidate for the first modern true crime book. This week, I review a more recent look at the crime that inspired Capote. Cold Blooded is a four-episode documentary presented by SundanceTV.
The Crime and the Book
In the wee morning hours of Sunday, November 15, 1959, two ex-convicts broke into the home of Herb and Bonnie Clutter in the small village of Holcomb, Kansas. Richard Hickock and Perry Smith expected to find a safe stuffed with money. Instead, they left with barely $50 in cash, a pair of binoculars, and a transistor radio. They also left behind the dead bodies of Herb and Bonnie and two of their four children, Nancy and Kenyon (two older daughters no longer lived at home).
Capote read about the crime in the New York Times and decided it was the perfect subject for his concept of a “nonfiction novel,” a factual account using novelists’ techniques. He headed to Kansas with his friend, writer Harper Lee, in tow. The resulting book wasn’t published until 1965, six years after the crime. In Cold Blood was an instant sensation and a best-seller. It really put Capote on the map and made him famous. But not everyone back in Kansas was happy with the book or the 1967 film based on it.
Surviving family members felt the book and the film didn’t portray the Clutters’ lives fully or even accurately, and instead sensationalized their deaths. Some also felt that Capote was overly empathetic to Hickock and Smith at the expense of their victims. Nor surprising, perhaps, because the writer spent considerable time interviewing the two killers.
A New Documentary — Cold Blooded
SundanceTV released the four-episode documentary, Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders, in 2017. It uses archival film, audio clips, and interviews with surviving friends and members of the Clutter family to tell a more complete story.
The first episode presents the Clutters in a level of detail that In Cold Blood didn’t. It deals with the murders, of course, but is sympathetic to the victims. Friends and relatives also relate their reaction to the news of the deaths.
Episode two follows the hunt for the killers. The names of Hickock and Smith emerged early in the investigation, offered up by a former cellmate of Hickock’s who found the reward money too tempting to resist. Identifying suspects was easier than finding them, although police arrested the pair in Las Vegas, Nevada barely just five weeks after they violated the Clutter home.
Hickock’s and Smith’s trial is the subject of the third episode. Held in Garden City, the largest town near Holcomb and the seat of Finney County, the trial was of immense local interest although it attracted little national attention at the time. Given that Hickock confessed shortly after his arrest, naming Smith as the actual triggerman, it was hardly surprising that the jury returned two convictions for first-degree murder. Judge Roland H. Tate sentenced the pair to death by hanging.
The final episode tracks the case through Hickock’s and Smiths appeals and execution. It also examines the effect that the book and film versions of In Cold Blood had on the Clutter family and the town of Holcomb.
Evaluation
Cold Blooded is a balanced account of a tragic event and how it affected the people involved. The participation, anonymously, of a Clutter granddaughter and great-granddaughter lend an air of accuracy that is sometimes missing from Capote’s book. Viewers see how the crime affected friends, family, and neighbors.
The series is also the story of the investigation. It focuses largely on Alvin Dewey, the lead investigator from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. Even though two suspects quickly emerged thanks to Hickock’s former cellmate, locating, tracking, and arresting the fugitives is an interesting story in itself.
Recommendation
The Clutter family that viewers meet in Cold Blooded is three-dimensional and human, more than simply victims. It is a worthy epilogue to In Cold Blood and is worth watching.