Accuracy Of In Cold Blood

Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood claims to be a true account of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. Pioneering a new genre, Capote attempted to mix the poetic and literary elements of fiction with factual information, calling it the “non-fiction novel.” However, he failed to do so, sacrificing fact for fiction, shaping the events of the murder in his vision in order to make a statement about criminals and capital punishment.

Capote tried to claim that his entire book was true to the point where it was even without “minor distortions.”In his interview with George Plimpton, “The Story Behind a Nonfiction Novel,” Capote tells of how he trained himself to transcribe conversation without using a tape recorder; he was able to

get within ninety-five percent accuracy which he said was “as close as you need.” (Plimpton) His accuracy can be questioned due the fact that he never took any notes, yet he claimed to remember all the details of his interviews verbatim.

This would make the reader question if what they're reading is just something Capote thought he remembered a person telling him as he could easily mix up what had been said to him. Capote’s accuracy can also be questioned due to the sheer amount of revisions he made before releasing the novel as five thousand were made in the ten weeks before In Cold Blood was published. “Though one assumes that revisions represent corrections, verifiable evidence might reveal otherwise,” Jack De Bellis wrote in “Vision and Revisions: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.” Capote erred in identifying the placement of Hickock and Smith’s tattoos, putting them on the wrong sides of the men’s bodies in the published edition. Even mishandling small details makes the reader question Capote’s credibility due to the many discrepancies that were found after the book’s publication. Errors that could've been corrected were never changed and there were mistakes that “even a reader of Life or Newsweek might uncover with little difficulty.” (De Bellis) Larger discrepancies were uncovered as well in “In Cold Fact” by Phillip K. Tompkins such as the excerpt from official

records of Perry Smith’s own words which contradict Capote’s portrayal of the murder. “There is hardly an implication of either ‘brain explosion,’ or ‘mental eclipse,’ or ‘schizophrenic darkness’ at this critical moment.” (Tompkins) The author’s own depiction of the murder contradicts the title of his novel as well as being highly inaccurate. While shown as an unplanned mental break, Perry Smith knew what he was doing; it was a premeditated murder. Smith’s sanity may have been questioned, but he was found sane under the law as he was capable of knowing right and wrong. Capote fabricated events and people’s words plenty of other times in the book as well, sacrificing fact for fiction, like when Nancy’s horse, Babe, was sold as a plow horse for seventy-five dollars. Tompkins quoted Pearman’s article which depicted the real, much happier ending that the horse ended up with where she was sold for nearly two hundred dollars, raised colts, and was used by the Y.M.C.A. to train children to ride. This causes the reader to suspect that many of Capote’s accounts were fabricated for literary effect, providing the flourishes he needed to make the murder more haunting and poetic.
Capote also showed a clear bias toward the murderers, especially toward Perry Smith.

At the end of the seventy-seventh chapter of the novel, Capote created sympathy for Smith by having Mrs. Meier say “I heard him crying. I turned on the radio. Not to hear him. But I could. Crying like a child. He'd never broke down before, shown any sign of it. Well, I went to him. The door of his cell. He reached out his hand. He wanted me to hold his hand, and I did, I held his hand, and all he said was, ‘I’m embraced by shame.’” In “In Cold Fact,” Tompkins stated that in his telephone conversation with Mrs. Meier, she said that she'd never heard him cry or say that he was embraced by shame. In fact, she actually saw very little of Smith and hadn't told Capote such things either. (Tompkins) Not only did he fabricate this event, but it was created purely to make the reader feel for the murderer. This is displayed in the many times that Capote delves into Smith’s past as well, telling of the traumas he faced as a child. He displays far less sympathy for Hickock, however, as he depicts him as a “shifty-eyed sociopath whose intellectual heights reach no higher than girlie and car magazines,” according to J. J. Maloney in “In Cold Blood: A Dishonest Book.” Hickock was portrayed as a man who had a nice childhood, but he grew into a man with no morals as he stole and pursued little girls, like the twelve-year-old he tried to seduce while in Miami with Smith along with trying to rape Nancy Clutter

before she was murdered. “A guy like Hickock, who feigns a tough front, would never, ever admit to being a child molester, which is how Capote portrayed him. As a literary device, Capote chose to do good guy/bad guy. He picked Smith, the actual murderer, to be the good guy- a great literary twist, but not necessarily true.” (Maloney) Maloney speculated that Capote’s portrayals of the men stemmed from him falling in love with Smith as he tried to depict the man sympathetically despite Smith being the one that killed the Clutter family without the aid of Hickock. Capote tried to depict Smith as a dreamer who was driven to murder due to his past trauma, calling it a “schizophrenic darkness” which wasn't the case. His bias incorrectly portrays the men, not showing what they were actually like, further discrediting the attempt at non-fiction.
Capote struggled with being objective, putting himself and his own opinions into the novel as he wrote. According to Capote, before Smith was hanged, he chose to make this statement: “‘I think,’ he said, ‘it’s a helluva thing to take a life in this manner. I don’t believe in capital punishment, morally or legally. Maybe I had something to contribute, something-’ His assurance faltered; shyness blurred his voice, lowered it to a just audible level. ‘It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize.’” In “In Cold Fact,” Tompkins proves this falsity by quoting the account of Bill Brown, who actually saw Smith get executed as Capote couldn’t watch. The only part Capote got right was Smith’s opinion on the death penalty. (Tompkins) By changing Smith’s last words, he aimed to make a statement about how capital punishment shouldn't be supported instead of providing a true account of the events surrounding the murder. With Capote going into extensive detail about both Hickock and Smith’s pasts, he attempted to humanize the murderers, trying to get the reader to see them as people rather than criminals; once a person becomes a criminal, people tend to forget that they're just as human as someone who's never been convicted of a crime. This hints toward the double meaning of the novel’s title, which makes the reader question if the murderers were killed in the same cold blood that their victims were.
As Capote was primarily a fiction writer, he struggled to write a journalistic piece that truly reflected the events of and the people involved in the murder of the Clutters. He failed to include the correct details, the correct characterizations of people, and the correct events that surrounded the murder. Due to the many inaccuracies in the novel that still existed after publication, the reader is able to see past the account of the murder itself and see that not only was Capote trying to pioneer a new genre, but he was also trying to protest the death penalty and the cruel treatment of criminals.