In Cold Blood

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Term Paper Title	In Cold Blood
# of Words	1333
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	5.33

In Cold Blood
Upon arriving in Holcomb, a small congregation of buildings on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, Perry and Dick, two men recently paroled for petty crimes, left almost no evidence behind except for a bloody footprint and a radio they stole from the Clutter house.  In the investigative nonfiction murder story "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote, the story of Perry and Dick and the night of November 15, 1959 is relived.  This fast-paced and straightforward documentary talks about the nature of American violence, and details the motiveless murder of four members of the Clutter family and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, but not before the reader gets to know Dick and Perry almost to well at times.
While reading Truman Capote's nonfiction novel, "In Cold Blood," Capote's presentation of the facts surrounding the murders of an obscure Kansas farmer and three of his family members becomes almost frightening.  At many times, the author of this paper was left wondering why this book was having such an effect on him and why it seemed so realistic to him.  Initially, one may think the answer to be that the book was a true account-because these things had actually happened, and they were not simply a fictional story produced by some author's overactive imagination.  However, it becomes apparent it wasn't just the horrific story of these murders that is troubling, but the aspect of how Capote tells the story that makes reading it uneasy.
Unlike many other murder stories, Capote not only discusses the criminals and their role in the crime, but their childhoods, their lives right before the crime, and their lives after the conviction until the executions.  This may be because he was able to establish such rapport with these two men through countless hours of interviews over many years.  The reader of "In Cold Blood" is given the cold, hard facts about the murderers, and the effect of their previous lives on their actions and thoughts regarding the matter.  This draws the reader closer to the men than they would, perhaps, like to be.  Capote talks about the lives of both killers previous to the murders in fairly significant detail.  In the case of Perry Smith, his parents divorced early in his childhood and neither his mother nor father really wanted him.  This produced feelings of abandonment and uselessness early on in Perry and affected the rest of his life.  Capote brings up a letter written to the Kans...

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