Summary of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

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Book Information:

Author : Capote, Truman

Title : In Cold Blood

Publisher : Random House

Original Publication Date : 1965

Book Outline:

In a small town in Kansas a family of four were murdered for no apparent reason.

The murderers ran for a few years and finally they were caught, tried, and

accused for murder. In 1965 they were hung for the crime.

In the story a family was killed for no reason. This well respected farming

family had no enemies, and no quarrels. Although they were wealthy, Mr. Clutter

never kept cash in the house. The whole region and eventually the country was

shocked by the randomness and brutality of the act, in much the same way it was

by the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The two men in which didn't even know the

Clutter family went into their house and shot all four of them.

There were two main characters. Dick is the first one that I will talk about.

Dick was 33 years old and he did not have the best character. Dick was one who

helped participate in the killing of the Clutter family. I didn't like him from

the very beginning. He struck me as the type that is your friend one minute and

enemy the next. Perry is the other charecter that I will talk about. Perry

wasn't as bad as Dick but yet he still struck me as having a bad character for

what he did to the family. It took me awhile to get a good impression of Perry.

Perry was a really nice guy and I think that he just got mixed in with the wrong

crowd. At the beginning, when they first started to kill all of the family

members, they had them tied up and Perry didn't want to kill the family but he

thought that if he acted like he was gonna kill Mr. Clutter then Dick would stop

him. Then they would let them all go but when Dick didn't stop him Perry became

a mad man and went ahead and killed the whole family. Later at the gallows Perry

started to have second thoughts a little to late so he tried to starve himself

but didn't succeed. He was finally hung, during the hanging period he apologized

to everyone for what he did.

"This is it, this is it, this had to be it, there's the school, there's

the garage, now we turn south." To Perry, it seemed as though Dick was muttering

jubilant mumbo-jumbo. They left the highway, sped through a deserted Holcomb,

and crossed the Santa Fe tracks.

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