IN COLD BLOOD (PART 1): THE LAST TO SEE THEM ALIVE

In this special Crimery series opener, host Jennifer Novotney is back and takes you inside In Cold Blood — the true crime classic that changed American storytelling forever. This is Part 1: The Last to See Them Alive, covering the 1959 Clutter family murders in Holcomb, Kansas, the quiet wheat-town world they lived in, and the writing genius that made Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood one of the most important true crime books ever published. 

Before the killers are fully known, before the investigation unfolds, this episode focuses on the victims: Herb Clutter, Bonnie Clutter, Nancy Clutter, and Kenyon Clutter — and the final ordinary day before everything was destroyed. Jennifer breaks down the opening structure of In Cold Blood, Capote’s “nonfiction novel” approach, and why this first section remains one of the most studied openings in true crime and American literature. 

If you’re searching for:
 In Cold Blood podcast, Truman Capote true crime, Clutter family murders, Holcomb Kansas murders, true crime book analysis, or Jennifer Novotney Crimery, this episode is for you.

What you’ll hear in this episode:
 How Truman Capote turned the Clutter murders into a literary landmark
Why Holcomb, Kansas mattered so much to the emotional power of the case
Who the Clutters really were before they became victims
How Capote used suspense, crosscutting, and characterization to reshape true crime writing
Why In Cold Blood still influences modern podcasts, documentaries, and crime storytelling today

This is Part 1 of a 4-part Crimery series on In Cold Blood.

Host: Jennifer Novotney
Show: Crimery

Website: www.crimery.show

Buy "In Cold Blood" https://amzn.to/4sCZUj2

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There is a stretch of western Kansas where the land is so flat, so endless, that the horizon doesn't feel like a boundary. It feels like an invitation to disappear. In 1959, a village called Holcomb sat on that high wheat plain. 270 souls, a grain elevator, a post office, a cafe where farmers drank coffee and talked about nothing much because nothing much ever happened. And then, on a November morning, someone found the clutters. A father, a mother, a 16-year-old daughter, a 15-year-old son, bound, gagged, and shot in their own home. Nothing taken but a transistor radio, a pair of binoculars, and less than$50. The crime itself is devastating. But what makes it immortal, what kept it on the New York Times bestseller list, what earned it a permanent place in the American literary canon, is the way one man chose to tell it. This is a story about murder, but it is also a story about storytelling. And over four episodes, I'm going to walk you through both. I'm Jennifer Novotny, and this is Crimary. My entire professional life has been built around close reading, taking a text apart, understanding how it works, and showing people things they would never see on their own. I love to teach the classics: Frankenstein, Dracula, Wuthering Heights, The Turn of the Screw. And every year I watch a new generation of students discover that these books are not dusty relics. They are alive, they are dangerous, they are more relevant than ever. In Cold Blood is one of those books. And over the next four episodes, I'm going to do for you what I do in my classroom every day. Walk you through a masterpiece, section by section, and show you what makes it extraordinary. Not just as a true crime story, though it's one of the greatest ever written, but as a work of literature that permanently changed the way Americans tell stories about violence. This is in cold blood, the last to see them alive. To understand this book, you have to understand who wrote it and why. Truman Capote was born in New Orleans in 1924. His parents divorced when he was a toddler, and his childhood was defined by abandonment and relocation. Shuffled between relatives in small town Alabama, largely raised by elderly cousins, while his mother pursued a different life in New York. He identified himself as a writer by the time he was eight years old. And by his own account, he spent most of his childhood practicing the craft the way other children practiced piano. He was a prodigy. His short story Miriam, published in Mademoiselle in 1945, when he was just 20 years old, caught the attention of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf and led to a contract for his first novel. That novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, landed in 1948 and became as famous for its provocative author photo, a young Capote reclining, gazing seductively into the camera, as for its prose. Breakfast at Tiffany's followed a decade later and cemented his reputation. But Capote wanted more than reputation. He wanted to be considered one of the great American writers. And by the late 1950s, he had become convinced that the path to greatness lay not in fiction, but in something no one had quite attempted before, applying the techniques of the novel, scene setting, character development, narrative suspense, psychological interiority to a real event, a factual story, told with the power and beauty of literature. He called this idea the nonfiction novel, and he was waiting for the right story. On November 16, 1959, he found it. A short article ran in the New York Times about a quadruple murder in rural Kansas. A prosperous farmer, his wife, and their two teenage children, killed in the night by unknown assailants for no apparent reason. The killers had not yet been identified. Something about the story seized Capote. Not just the horror of the crime, but the setting. This impossibly remote, wholesome, weak country hamlet, where nothing had ever happened. The contrast between the idyllic and the brutal, the mystery of motive. He contacted William Sean, editor of The New Yorker, and proposed traveling to Kansas to write about it. Sean agreed, and Capote brought along one person for the trip, his childhood friend, a quiet young woman from Alabama named Nell Harper Lee. She had just written, but not yet published, a novel of her own, and it was called To Kill a Mockingbird. Together they arrived in Holcomb in December of 1959. The killers had not yet been caught. The town was locked in grief and paranoia. And Capote began the research that would consume the next six years of his life. He interviewed hundreds of residents. He examined court documents, trial transcripts, police files. He befriended the lead KBI investigator Alvin Dewey. And most consequentially, after the killers were captured, he befriended them too. Particularly Perry Smith, whose troubled childhood and artistic pretensions resonated with something deep in Capote. The result was In Cold Blood, first serialized in four parts in The New Yorker in the fall of 1965, then published as a book in January 1966. It became an instant bestseller. It made Capote a millionaire. It remains the second best-selling true crime book in publishing history, only behind Helter Skelter. And it is the book that, whether you know it or not, created the genre you're listening to right now. Every true crime podcast, every serial documentary, every deep dive investigation into a cold case, the DNA of all of it runs through in cold blood. Now I want to pause here and say something as your guide, not just as your host. This book is not beyond criticism. We'll get to that in episode four because there are important things Capote got wrong, things he fabricated, and ethical reckoning with his methods that deserves its own full discussion. But we're not there yet. Right now we're here to read the book, to enter it on its own terms, to see what Capote built and to understand why it works so extraordinarily well as a piece of writing. The criticism will mean more once you understand the craft. So let's go to Kansas. Capote opens this book with one of the most celebrated first paragraphs in American nonfiction. The first paragraph opens with The Village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call out there. Some 70 miles east of the Colorado border. The countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more far west than middle west. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive. Horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them. What you just heard is Capote working as a painter. He's not telling you about Holcomb. He is placing you there. He wants you to feel the wind, see the flatness, understand the isolation. And every single detail is selected with precision. The way a novelist selects details, not the way a journalist lists facts. Notice the word choices. This is not a town description in a guidebook. Capote gives you the emptiness first, the vastness. Other Kansans call this place out there. That phrase does an enormous amount of work. It tells you that even within Kansas, a state most Americans already think of as the middle of nowhere, Holcomb is further out. Holcomb is the edge. And this matters for everything that follows, because the entire emotional engine of this book depends on you believing that what happened here could not have happened here. The murder shatters the world precisely because the world was so intact. In 1959, Holcomb was home to roughly 270 people. It sat in Finney County, about seven miles west of Garden City, which served as the county seat and the nearest real town with nearly 12,000 people. Holcomb had a feed store, a gas station, a tiny cafe, Hartman's, where the men gathered for coffee. There was a schoolhouse, a post office, the Acheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway ran through it. The grain elevator rose above the flat plain like a church steeple. The economy was wheat and cattle. The people were Methodist, Church of Christ, Baptist. They left their doors unlocked. They waved at every car that passed. If your truck broke down, your neighbor came and fixed it before you asked. Capote gives you all of this not as exposition, but as atmosphere. He wants you to feel the rhythm of life in Holcomb, the smallness, the sameness, the way the seasons turned around, planting and harvest, and how the social world revolved around church on Sunday, coffee at Hartman's Cafe during the week, and high school sports on Friday nights. Garden City, seven miles east, was where you went for anything you couldn't get in Holcomb. But mostly you didn't need to go anywhere. Your world was right here. And this is not just local color, this is structural. Capote is building the container so that when he shatters it, you feel every crack, every unlocked door that will soon be locked, every neighbor who will soon eye every other neighbor with suspicion. The world before the crime has to be fully real for the world after the crime to be fully devastating. This is the world Capote needed you to know before he destroyed it. And now I want to draw your attention to something Capote does that is easy to miss if you're reading quickly, but devastating if you slow down. After he establishes the town, he introduces the Clutter family, and he does it in a very specific way. Herbert Wesley Clutter was 48 years old. He was born in 1911, grew up on a farm near Larne, Kansas, and graduated from Kansas State College with a degree in agriculture. He had worked as a county extension agent before settling into farming in 1939, eventually building one of the most respected operations in western Kansas. He raised wheat, feed grains, cattle, and sheep. He employed as many as 18 farmhands at a time, and he was known for paying well and treating people fairly. He served on the Holcomb School Board, the Farm Bureau, the 4-H Advisory Committee. He was the first president of the National Association of Wheat Growers and helped found the Kansas Association of Wheat Growers. He had been appointed to the Federal Farm Credit Board by President Eisenhower. He did not drink, he did not smoke. He conducted all his business by check because he believed in keeping meticulous records. There was no large amount of cash in the Clutter home. There never had been. His wife, Bonnie Mae Fox Clutter, was 45. They had married in 1934 and had four children, three daughters and a son. The two eldest daughters, Evina and Beverly, had married and moved away. The two remaining at home were their pride and heartbreak. Bonnie suffered from what Capote describes as prolonged bouts of depression, what we would now likely call clinical depression. She had withdrawn over the years, rarely leaving the house, spending long stretches in her room. This portrayal of Bonnie is one of the most contested elements of the book. The clutter daughters later objected strenuously to how their mother was depicted, arguing that Capote exaggerated her illness and turned a loving, devoted woman into a shut-in. I bring that up now because I want you to hold that in your mind as we read. Part of what the series will teach you is how to be a critical reader of nonfiction. Capote had reasons for shading Bonnie's character the way he did. It served the emotional architecture of the book. But whether it was fair to Bonnie May Clutter is another question entirely. Nancy Mae Clutter was 16. She was a junior at Holcomb High School. And by every account, she was the kind of teenager who makes you believe in the future. She was class president, she was a skilled musician who gave piano and clarinet lessons to younger girls in the community. She was a 4-H member who had won statewide honors. She baked pies. She taught younger girls how to do needlework. She had a horse named Babe that she cared for herself. She also had a boyfriend named Bobby Rupp, the star of the high school basketball team. Capote pays careful attention to this relationship because it introduces one of the only points of tension in the clutter household. Herb Clutter did not fully approve of Bobby. Not because Bobby was a bad kid, but because Bobby was Catholic and the clutters were Methodist. It's a small human detail, the kind of ordinary family friction that exists in every household. And Capote includes it because it does something essential. It makes the clutters real. They're not a perfect family, they're a family. A father who worries too much about the wrong things. A daughter who loves someone her father wishes she wouldn't. These are people you recognize. Bobby Rupp was the last person outside the family to see the clutters alive. He came over that Saturday evening to watch television with Nancy. He left around 10 p.m. The lights went out, and that was the end of everything. Kenyon Neil Clutter was 15. He was a sophomore, quiet, bespectacled, more reserved than his sister. If Nancy was the public face of the Clutter children, Kenyon was the private one. His world was hunting, woodworking, and tinkering with machines. His father had let him buy an old pickup truck, even though he didn't have a driver's license yet. Another small telling detail about Herb Clutter's character. That he trusted his son enough to let him own something he couldn't technically use yet. It was a vote of confidence in the future. Kenyon was building a hope chest in his basement workshop. It was almost finished. He had built it himself out of mahogany, lined it with cedar, and he intended to give it to his older sister Beverly as a wedding present. She was engaged, and Kenyon planned to present it at Thanksgiving. I want to pause on that hope chest because it's one of the most devastating details in the entire book. A hope chest, by tradition, is a container for the things a young person gathers for the rest of their life ahead. Linens, keepsakes, treasured objects. It's by its very nature an expression of faith that there will be a future worth preparing for. Kenyon was building one with his own hands. It was almost done. And Capote places this detail exactly where he does because he knows what it will do to you when you come back to it later, after you know what happens. This is the kind of detail that separates literature from reporting. A journalist would tell you that Kenyon Clutter was 15 and was killed in his home. Capote tells you about the hope chest, and the hope chest breaks your heart in a way that the bare facts alone can't. Now step back with me for a moment and look at what Capote has done with the Clutter family as a whole. He is not simply listing biographical facts about the victims, he's constructing them as literary characters. Every detail he includes is chosen because it will magnify the horror of what's coming. Nancy's goodness, Kenyon's quiet projects, Herb's rigid decency, Bonnie's vulnerability. These are not neutral facts. They're the emotional investments that Capote is making on behalf of the reader. Knowing that the more you love this family, the more the crime will wound you. And notice who gets the most detailed treatment, not Herb, the patriarch, though he is prominent. It's the children, Nancy and Kenyon, the ones with the most unlived life ahead of them. This is deliberate. The loss of a child is the most universally devastating form of grief. Capote knew that. He was writing for maximum emotional impacts, and he calibrated every portrait accordingly. This is the technique of tragedy, and it's as old as literature itself. Aristotle called it pathos, the suffering that the audience witnesses and fuels. Shakespeare understood it when he wrote the death of young Prince Arthur in King John, or the suffocation of the princes in Richard III. You must know the victim before you can mourn them. Kerpodi is working in that same tradition. He is not a crime reporter, he is a tragedian. Kerpodi reconstructs the final day of the clutter's lives in extraordinary detail. And the literary power of this section comes from a technique that I want you to pay close attention to, because it's the engine of the entire first section of the book. It's called parallel narration, or if you prefer the cinematic term, cross-cutting. Capote alternates. He gives you the clutters going about their Saturday, and then he gives you the killers approaching, back and forth. The normal and the monstrous, drawing closer to each other mile by mile, hour by hour. The two timelines that the reader knows will converge, running side by side like train tracks heading for the same station. On the clutter side, Herb goes about his Saturday business. He talks to a farmhand, he takes care of errands. Nancy spends part of her afternoon teaching a neighbor girl, Jolene Katz, how to make cherry pie, walking her through the steps with the patience and warmth that defined her. She had promised Jolene's mother she would teach the girl, and Nancy Clutter kept her promises. Nancy and her protege, Jolene Katz, were also satisfied with their morning's work. Indeed, the latter, a thin 13-year-old, was agog with pride. For the longest while she stared at the blue ribbon winner, the oven hot cherries simmering under the crisp lattice crust. And then she was overcome and hugging Nancy, asked, Honest, did I really make it myself? Nancy laughed, returned the embrace, and assured her that she had, with a little help. In the evening, Bobby Rupp comes over. He and Nancy watch television. With Kenyon. Herb and Bobby exchange a few words, polite, slightly stiff, the way a father talks to his daughter's boyfriend when he's not entirely sold on the relationship. Bobby leaves around 10 p.m. Nancy goes to bed. Kenyon goes to bed. Herb locks the front door, but leaves the side door unlocked, as he always did. Bonnie is already in her room. It's an ordinary Saturday night in an ordinary American home. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is unusual. And Capote lingers here in the ordinariness because he knows exactly what he's doing. He's letting you settle in. He's letting you feel safe. And then he cuts away. 400 miles east in Olatha, Kansas, two men climb into a 1949 Chevrolet. Richard Hickok, 28 years old, a former high school athlete from eastern Kansas, considered smart but undisciplined, is driving. Perry Smith, a 31-year-old drifter, the child of rodeo performers, bounced between his alcoholic mother, orphanages, and detention homes after his parents split, is riding shotgun. They have a knife, a 12-gauge shotgun, rope, and black stockings to use as masks. They stop for gas. They buy rubber gloves. Everything is methodical. Everything is preparation. They're heading for a house they've never seen, to rob a man they've never met. Based on a tip from a former cellmate named Floyd Wells, who told Hickok that Herb Clutter kept a safe full of cash in his home. There is no safe. There never was. Herb Clutter did not keep cash. He wrote checks for everything, down to the smallest purchase. The entire premise of this crime is built on a lie told by a fellow inmate trying to sound important. And Capote does not editorialize. He doesn't say this is ironic. He does not say the tip was false. And four people will die for nothing. He simply shows you both sides of the story moving toward their intersection and lets the dramatic irony do the work. You, the reader, already know there's no safe. The killers do not. And the clutters are asleep. This cross-cutting continues. Capote will give you a page of the clutters, warm and domestic, and then drop you back into the car with Perry and Dick, cold and purposeful, eating in a diner, buying supplies, driving through the Kansas night. The distance between them shrinks with every paragraph. I want you to notice something about the pacing here. As the two timelines get closer to converging, Capote speeds up the cuts. Early in the section, you get long, leisurely passages about the clutter's family routines. By the end, the switches come faster, the paragraphs get shorter, the rhythm accelerates. This is cinematic editing applied to prose, and it produces a physical sensation of dread in the reader. Your heart rate actually increases. You want to look away, the way you do in a horror film when you know the killer is in the house, but you cannot stop reading. And this is where I want to stop and teach you something about Capote's technique that distinguishes this book from virtually all true crime writing before it. In traditional crime reporting, you get the crime first and the story afterward. What happened, then who did it, then why. The structure follows the investigation. Capote inverts this entirely. In In Cold Blood, you meet the victims before you meet the crime. You live with them. You eat breakfast with herb clutter. You watch Nancy bake a pie. You see Bobby Rupp leave the house at around 10 p.m. and the lights go out. And only then, only after you have lived a full day in this family's world, does the violence arrive? The effect is devastating because you are not reading about victims. You're reading about people. And the difference between those two things is the difference between journalism and literature. And here I want to highlight what might be the most brilliant structural choice in the entire book. At the end of the last to see them alive, Capote brings the killers to the door. He gets you to the moment. The clutters are asleep. Hickok and Smith are outside, the side door is unlocked. And then Capote does not show you the murders. He cuts away. The section ends. And when the next section opens, the clutters are already dead. You learn about the crime the way the town of Holcomb did. Through discovery, through shock, through the slow and sickening accumulation of terrible details. Friends arrive at the house the next morning, a Sunday, because the clutters have not shown up for church. The clutters always showed up for church, so something is wrong. And then someone goes inside. Approximately a thousand people attended the Clutter family funeral at the first Methodist church in Garden City. A thousand people in a county seat of twelve thousand. That's nearly one in ten residents. The parents were buried side by side, Nancy to the left, Kenyon to the right. A large stained glass window at the church was later dedicated in the family's memory. And after the funerals, something happened to Holcomb that Capote captures with devastating precision. The doors that had always been unlocked were now locked. The neighbors who had always waved at every car now watched them with suspicion. The trust that had defined this community for generations evaporated in a single night. Because the killers had not yet been caught, and nobody knew if they would come back or if they were someone the town already knew. Capote writes about this transformation, this death of innocence in a community, with the same care he brings to everything else. And it introduces a theme that runs through the entire book. The idea that violence does not just destroy its immediate victims, it destroys the world those victims live in. The whole comb that existed before November 15th, 1959, was gone. It couldn't be rebuilt. And every resident who survived became, in some sense, a secondary victim of a crime they had nothing to do with. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We'll explore all of that in episode two. What I want you to sit with right now is the structural decision Capote made here in this first section. This is an extraordinary choice for a writer to make. Capote knew every detail of what happened inside that house. He'd spent years interviewing both killers. He knew who was taken where, who was tied up, how, who said what. He could have put it all right here, at the climax of the first section, and given the reader the full horror. Instead, he withholds it, he makes you wait. He forces you to experience the aftermath before you understand the act. So why did he do this? Because Capote understood something fundamental about dread. The imagination is always worse than the fact. By leaving the murders offstage in this section, he lets your mind do the work. You fill in the blanks, you picture what happened behind those walls. And whatever you imagine is, for you, worse than anything Capote could have described on the page. This technique has a name in literature. It's called ellipses, the deliberate omission of key events for dramatic effect. You will get the full account of the murders later in the book, when Perry Smith finally tells the story in his own words. Capote does not spare you forever, but when those details finally arrive, they hit differently. They hit harder. Because you have already lived with their absence. You have already imagined the worst. And then the truth turns out to be worse than what you imagined. Before we close, I want to pull back and talk about why the last to see them alive is studied in literature courses around the world. Because it's not simply a well-told crime story, it's a structural innovation that changed American writing. First, the parallel narration I described. This braiding of two timelines, the victim's last day and the killer's approach, was not standard practice in nonfiction in 1959. Novelists did this, filmmakers did this, journalists did not. So Capote borrowed a narrative technique from fiction and applied it to fact. And in doing so, he showed an entire generation of writers what nonfiction could be. Think about every true crime documentary you've ever watched that cross-cuts between the victim's life and the killer's movements. That technique comes from here. It comes from this book. Second, the character construction. Capote gives you enough of each clutter to make them real. Not saintly, not flattened into victimhood, but real. Herb's rigid decency and his quiet disapproval of Bobby Rupp, Bonnie's isolation, and the way the family worked around it. Nancy's almost impossible goodness, Kenyon's quiet introversion, and his hope chest. These are people drawn with the care of a novelist, living in a world you can see and smell and hear. When students ask me what the difference is between flat characters and round characters, a distinction first made by E. M. Forrester in aspects of the novel, I point them to the clutters. A flat character is a type. A round character surprises you. The clutters surprise us because they're specific. Third, the control of information. Capote knows everything that is going to happen, and the reader knows the broad strokes. The clutters will die, but Capote manages suspense anyway because he controls the pace of revelation. He lets you forget for a page or two what's coming. He lets you settle into the warmth of this family's life, and then he cuts to the two men in the car and your stomach drops. This is what Alfred Hitchcock called the difference between surprise and suspense. Surprise is a bomb going off without warning. Suspense is showing the audience the bomb under the table, and then making them watch the characters eat dinner. Capote shows you the bomb, and then he makes you watch the clutters live their last Saturday. Fourth, the prose itself. Capote was above all a stylist. He once said that he believed sentences, paragraphs, and chapters should be constructed so that not a single word or punctuation mark was out of place. And you can feel that discipline on every page of this section. His descriptions are sensory and economical. He does not waste a word and he does not overwrite. The beauty of the language creates a devastating contrast with the ugliness of the content. It's as if a great painter chose the most horrific subject imaginable and rendered it with the most exquisite technique. The beauty does not diminish the horror. It deepens it because you realize that someone took this much care to show you something this terrible. Fifth, this is something I especially want my students to understand: the moral positioning of the narrator. Capote doesn't tell you how to feel about any of this. He doesn't editorialize. He doesn't write, it is a tragedy that this family was taken from us. He simply shows you Nancy teaching a girl to bake a pie, and then shows you two men loading a shotgun into a car. He trusts you to feel the weight of the juxtaposition on your own. And this technique borrowed from Flaubert and Chekhov, the invisible narrator, the author who removes himself from the text and lets the facts speak. It's extraordinarily difficult to do well, and Capote does it better here than almost anyone in the history of American prose. This combination, novelistic structure, careful characterization, strategic withholding, exquisite prose, and moral restraint is what makes in cold blood not just a true crime book, but a work of American literature. And the last to see them alive is its foundation. Everything the book achieves in the three sections that follow depends on what Capote builds here: the dread, the empathy, the sense of a world that was whole and is now shattered. It all begins in these pages. So let me leave you with something to think about before episode two. The section we just explored, The Last to See Them Alive, is a beginning. It's a foundation, and Capote designed it to do a very specific job, to make you care about a family you never met in a town you have never visited deep enough that what happens to them feels personal. So if you're reading the book alongside the series, you already know whether he succeeded. If the clutters feel real to you, if you find yourself thinking about Nancy's cherry pie or Kenyan's hope chest, or Bonnie alone in her room, then Capote has done his work. And everything that follows in the next three sections depends on that emotional groundwork holding. In our next episode, we enter Persons Unknown. The clutters have been found. The town is in shock. The investigation begins under KBI agent Alvin Dewey. And Capote takes us inside the minds of the two men who did this: their flight across the country, their strange and volatile relationship with each other, and their psychology. It is in Persons Unknown that Capote asks the question this entire book is really about. What kind of person does this? And how do we write about them? And how do we try to understand them without losing our own humanity in the process? That's a literary question, an ethical question, and a deeply personal one for Capote, who became closer to these killers than any journalist should. If you're reading along, finish part one and read through part two before the next episode. Pay attention to how differently Capote writes about Perry Smith versus Dick Hickok. Notice who gets more interiority, who gets more sympathy, and ask yourself why. If you're just here to listen, that's perfectly fine too. I will always give you everything you need. Thanks for joining me. I'm Jennifer Novotny, and this is Crimary.