IN COLD BLOOD (PART 3): THE ANSWER

IN COLD BLOOD PART 3: THE ANSWER — PERRY SMITH’S CONFESSION, THE CLUTTER MURDERS, AND CAPOTE’S DARKEST CHAPTER

 In Part 3 of Crimery’s four-part In Cold Blood series, Jennifer Novotney takes you into the section Truman Capote withheld until the book’s emotional breaking point: “Answer.” This is the episode where the 46-day manhunt ends in Las Vegas, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock are arrested, and Perry finally tells Alvin Dewey what happened inside the Clutter house. The script centers on the arrest, the interrogation, the long drive back to Kansas, the full confession, and the literary choices that make this section one of the most studied passages in true crime history. 

This episode explores the actual murder account of Herb Clutter, Bonnie Clutter, Nancy Clutter, and Kenyon Clutter, the false promise of the safe that never existed, the split between Dick Hickock’s version and Perry Smith’s version, and why Capote frames Perry’s confession as the emotional center of In Cold Blood. It also breaks down Capote’s technique — the shift into present tense, the dual timeline of confession and memory, and the way he forces readers to sit inside horror rather than observe it from a distance.

You’ll also hear why Holcomb’s relief after the arrests was tangled with disbelief, why the “answer” in this section is not closure, and how Part 3 sets up the final chapter of the story: the trial, death row, Capote’s ethical controversies, and the cost of turning murder into literature.

If you’re reading along, this is the episode where everything breaks open.

Host: Jennifer Novotney

Website: www.crimery.show

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

Keywords:
In Cold Blood Part 3, In Cold Blood Answer, Truman Capote podcast, Clutter family murders, Perry Smith confession, Dick Hickock confession, Alvin Dewey, Holcomb Kansas murders, true crime book podcast, literary true crime, nonfiction novel, Capote analysis, Crimery, Jennifer Novotney

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Shortly after 5 p.m. on December 30th, 1959, a stolen 1956 Chevrolet pulled up to the Las Vegas post office on Stewart Avenue. A stocky man with a greasy pomador and a noticeable limp climbed out of the passenger side, walked up the steps, and went inside to pick up a package he had mailed to himself from Mexico. The driver, taller, darker blonde hair, one side of his face slightly off from the other, waited outside the car. Two Las Vegas police officers on routine patrol noticed the car. They had been given mugshots of two men wanted for questioning in connection with the quadruple murder in Kansas. They had a stolen license plate number, and the plate on the Chevrolet matched. The stocky man came back out carrying a cardboard box. He slid into the passenger seat. The car pulled away from the curb. And two blocks later, on Main Street near Bridger Avenue, officers O. C. Pigford and Francis Macaulay pulled ahead of the Chevrolet, stopped, drew their guns, and ended a 46-day manhunt that had stretched from Kansas to Mexico to Florida and back again. Inside the cardboard box Perry Smith was carrying were letters, notebooks, old souvenirs, a dictionary he treasured, and the boots he had worn the night he murdered the Clutter family. He had mailed the evidence to himself, and then he came back to pick it up. I'm Jennifer Novotny, and this is Crimary. In episode one, we met the clutters and watched their world get built. Nancy's cherry pie, Kenyon's Hope Chest, Herb's decency, Bonnie's quiet suffering, all of it set inside a town so small and so trusting that no one locked their doors. In episode two, we met the killers and watched their world fall apart. Perry's shattered childhood, Dick's hollow confidence, their fraying partnership on the road. Now in part three, answer, those two worlds finally collide. Not in the clutter house, we already know what happened there. Even if we don't yet know the details. They collide in the backseat of a car on a highway stretching from Las Vegas to Garden City, Kansas, when Perry Smith finally opens his mouth and tells Alvin Dewey everything. This is the episode where you get what Capote has been withholding since page one, the full account of what happened inside the clutter house on the night of November 15th, 1959. Told in Perry Smith's own words, from the car ride back to Kansas, handcuffed in the back seat, with Alvin Dewey sitting beside him. But I'm not just going to walk you through the story. I want to show you how Capote writes this section, the choices he makes with tense, with structure, with point of view, because this is where his craft is at its most extraordinary. The confession seen in Answer is studied in writing programs for a reason. It's a masterclass in how to deliver the worst information imaginable in a way that makes the reader feel it in their body. And once you see how it works, you'll never read it the same way again. I need to be honest with you. This is the hardest section of the book. If the first two episodes built something, this one breaks it open. What comes out is not easy to hear, but it's the reason this book exists and the reason we're here. This is in cold blood answer. Let me set the scene for how this ends. By late December 1959, Perry and Dick are running on fumes. They've burned through Mexico, hitchhiked back through California, stolen a car in Iowa, passed bad checks across Kansas City, spent Christmas in Miami, and drifted west again toward Las Vegas. They have no money and no plan. Dick is secretly thinking about ditching Perry. He's sick of Perry's harmonica, his aches, his superstitions, his whispering voice. Perry's having premonitions that they're about to be caught. He keeps mentioning Floyd, the connection who could tie them to the clutters. And Dick keeps brushing him off. Somewhere in the desert southwest, they pick up a boy and his grandfather hitchhiking. The kid tells them they can make money picking up empty soda bottles along the roadside. So these two men, who six weeks ago murdered a family in their home, spent an afternoon combing the shoulders of a desert highway for glass bottles worth a few cents each. They make about$6, and they're thrilled. That's where they are. On December 30th, they roll into Las Vegas. Perry needs to pick up a box of personal belongings he shipped to General Delivery at the post office from Mexico. It's the same box of keepsakes we talked about in episode two. The letters, the notebooks, the dictionary, the scraps of a life he cannot let go of. He also shipped his boots. The boots he wore inside the clutter house. The boots that left the bloody print Dewey's team photographed at the crime scene. They park on Stewart Avenue. Perry goes inside. Dick waits in the car thinking about how to ditch Perry and start fresh with the casino check kiting scheme he's cooked up. Neither of them notices the patrol car. Two Las Vegas police officers, O. C. Pickford and Francis Macaulay, spot the stolen Kansas plates and recognize the car from an all points bulletin. They have mugshots of both men. They watch Perry limp down the steps carrying his cardboard box. They watch him get in the car. They follow the Chevrolet two blocks. Then they pull ahead, stop, withdraw their guns, and it's over. No chase, no standoff, no shootout. Two men who killed a family of four are arrested during a routine traffic stop, two blocks from a post office at 5.25 in the afternoon. They've been free for 46 days. Back in Kansas, it's late afternoon on December 30th. Alvin Dewey is at home. His wife Marie is getting ready for a New Year's Eve party. For 46 days, Dewey's lived inside this case. He's barely slept, he's driven his agents to exhaustion. He's walked through the clutter house so many times that he knows every creak in the floorboards. He's dreamed about the killers and woken up reaching for them. The phone rings, Dewey answers. And the voice on the other end tells him that two men matching the descriptions of Richard Hickcock and Perry Smith have been arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada. They were driving a stolen car. They had the boots. Dewey hangs up the phone and grabs his wife and holds her. He apologizes for spoiling her party. She tells him it's the best way he could have spoiled it. Their sons have been afraid. Afraid the killers would come for their family. Afraid their father would never come home from work. Now it's over. Except it's not over. Not for Dewey. Because having the killers in custody is only half of it. He still needs a confession. The physical evidence, the boot print, the binoculars, the radio might not be enough to convict without one. And Dewey knows that if these two men stick to their story, there's a chance they walk. Dewey flies to Las Vegas immediately. He's going to bring them home, and he's going to make them talk. In the Las Vegas County jail, the four KBI agents split up. Harold Nye and Broy Church take Dick in one room. Alvin Dewey and Clarence Dunce take Perry in another. And what follows is one of the most gripping sequences in the entire book. Both men think they're being held for parole violations and the stolen car. They have rehearsed a cover story for the night of November 14th. They went to Fort Scott, Kansas to visit Perry's sister, spent the night with two prostitutes in Kansas City, whose names they don't remember, then headed west. It's thin, but it's all they have, and they've practiced it. The agents are patient, they let Dick settle in. They ask about the bad checks, which Dick confesses to cheerfully. He's always enjoyed talking about his cons. They ask about his family background, his marriages, his work history. Dick is relaxed. He's been interrogated before. This is all routine stuff. Then Roy Church shifts the tone. He tells Dick that the KBI did not fly four agents all the way to Las Vegas for a check kiting case. And Harold Nye leans in and says something that Dick is not expecting. That Dick and Perry left a living witness at the clutter house. There is no living witness. The clutters are all dead, every one of them. It's a bluff, a lie the agents are telling to see how Dick reacts. And Dick reacts exactly the way a guilty man reacts. He turns gray. His eye twitches. He blurts out, I'm no goddamn killer. Nobody has mentioned killing. Nobody has used the word murder. The agents only said they had a living witness. And Dick's first instinct is to deny being a killer. He has just told them everything they need to know. The agents press harder. They tell Dick that the cover story about Fort Scott does not hold. Perry's sister never lived there, and the post office was closed on Saturday, which means part of the timeline does not work. They showed Dick a photograph of a bloody bootprint found at the crime scene. And Dick looks at it. And the last wall comes down. Perry Smith killed the clutters, he said. It was Perry. I couldn't stop him. He killed them all. And just like that, no hesitation, no agonizing, the man who planned the robbery, who drove 400 miles, who insisted they leave no witnesses, who recruited Perry specifically because he thought Perry could pull the trigger, gives up his partner without a second thought to save himself. He does it the way you would return a library book. Casually, completely. As if Perry were something he had borrowed and no longer needed. This is who Dick Hickcock is. This is the normal he's been calling himself the entire book. And when the moment of truth arrives, his version of normal is to let someone else hang for what they did together. Now I want you to notice something about how Capote writes these interrogation scenes. He doesn't give you Dick's full confession. He gives you the setup, the bluff, the bootprint, the breakdown. And then he gives you the result. Perry killed them all. But he does not let Dick narrate the crime. He saves that for Perry. This is a deliberate choice. Capote is deciding on your behalf whose version of the night you will experience. And he chooses Perry every time. He gives Perry the detail, the psychological depth, the voice. Dick gets a few sentences and a betrayal. This is Capote the writer making an editorial decision that shapes everything you believe about what happened in that house. Perry, in the other room, doesn't know what Dick has said. Not yet. When the agents question him, he sticks to the cover story. Fort Scott, the prostitutes. He's calm. He gives nothing. The next day the two men are placed in separate cars for the long drive from Las Vegas back to Garden City, Kansas. It's hundreds of miles of open road. Perry rides with Dewey and Dunce. Dick rides with Nye and Church. A motorcade of law enforcement vehicles stretches across the desert. And it's during this drive, hour after hour, across the flat, empty landscape, the same kind of landscape where the clutters lived and died, that Capote gives you the scene he's been building toward for the entire book. At first Perry says nothing. He stares out the window. He's sullen. He gives one word answers. Dewey's patient. He's waited six weeks for this. He can wait a few more hours. At some point during the drive, Dewey casually mentions the story about the man Perry killed with the bicycle chain. The story Perry has invented in prison to make Dick think he was dangerous. The story only Dick would know. Perry goes still, because if Dewey knows about the bicycle chain, it means only one thing. Dick has talked. Dick has given him up. Dick has dropped his guts all over the floor. Perry turns around in his seat and looks through the rear window at the car behind them, where Dick is riding. He stares at it for a long time, and then something breaks in him. Not grief, not anger exactly, but a kind of exhausted resignation. The partnership is over. The last person on earth who was supposed to have his back has sold him out. There is nothing left to protect. And Perry begins to talk. I thought it was a stunt. I didn't believe you. The dick let fly. The tough boy. Oh, a real brass boy. Wouldn't harm the fleas on a dog. Just run over the dog. What follows is the most detailed, most disturbing, and most important passage in the entire book. Perry does not hold back. He tells Dewey everything. The approach to the house, the unlocked door, the search for the safe, the binding of the family, the hours of waiting, the argument with Dick, and the killings themselves. He tells it in the car, handcuffed, his voice flat and precise. And here's where I need you to pay attention to what Capote does as a writer, because it's one of the most remarkable craft decisions in the book. He switches to present tense. The entire book up to this point has been written in past tense. Things happened. People said, Perry remembered. Everything is at a remove. You're being told a story about something that already occurred. But during the confession, the past tense drops away. Suddenly it's happening now. You are inside the clutter house. It's after midnight. You are watching. This is not a small thing. Tense is one of the most powerful tools a writer has. And most readers never consciously notice it. Past tense creates distance. It says, this already happened, you're safe, someone survived to tell the story. Present tense removes that safety net. It puts you in the room. There's no guarantee of how it ends because on the page it has not ended yet. Capone uses present tense only here, nowhere else in the book. He saves it for the confession scene the way a musician saves the key change for the final chorus. And by the time you realize the tense has shifted, you're already inside the house with Perry. And there's no way out except through. There's also something happening with the point of view here that's easy to miss. The confession is told on two levels simultaneously. On one level, you're in the car with Dewey and Perry, driving across Kansas. On the other level, you're in the clutter house, seeing the night unfold through Perry's memory. Capote's running these two timelines on top of each other, telling the event and the event itself, so that the act of confessing and the act of killing blur together. Perry is reliving it as he tells it, and so are you. Here is what Perry tells Dewey. They arrived at the clutter house sometime after midnight. The side door was unlocked, as it always was. They entered with a flashlight, a 12 gauge shotgun, a hunting knife, rope, tape, and black stockings to wear as masks. Dick was certain there was a safe with$10,000 in it. Perry had doubts but went along because Dick seemed so sure, and because Perry had nowhere else to go. They found Herb Clutter first. He was asleep in his ground floor bedroom. They woke him, took him to his office, and demanded to know where the safe was. Herb told them calmly that there was no safe. He did not keep cash. He conducted all his business by check. He offered to write them a check right then. He offered them everything in his wallet. He was not panicking. He was negotiating. He was trying to buy the survival of his family with the only currency he had. His composure. Notice what Capote does here. Even inside Perry's confession, even filtered through the killer's memory, Herb Clutter emerges as the man we met in episode one. Steady, decent, trying to do the right thing under impossible pressure. Capote makes sure you see Herb clearly one final time before he dies. This is not an accident. The victim must be fully alive to the reader at the moment of the killing, or the killing means nothing. Capote spent 80 pages building herb clutter. This is why. Dick did not believe him. They went through the house room by room, waking each member of the family, Bonnie in her bedroom, Nancy in hers, Kenyon in the basement. They searched everywhere. There was no safe. There had never been a safe. The entire reason these two men had driven 400 miles? The entire premise of Dick's perfect score was a lie told by a bored convict in a prison cell. Perry told Dewey that at this point he wanted to leave. He said he told Dick, Count me out. If you want to go through with this, do it alone. But Dick would not leave. And Perry did not leave without Dick. The same desperate need that had kept them together across thousands of miles of highway, the need to not be alone kept Perry inside that house at the moment it mattered most. They bound the family. Herb and Kenyon were taken to the basement. Herb was placed on a mattress box on the concrete floor. Kenyon was laid on a small couch in the playroom with a pillow tucked behind his head. Bonnie was tied and gagged and put back in bed upstairs. Nancy's hands were tied behind her, and she was tucked into her bed. Her mouth was not taped. And here's the detail that had haunted Alvin Dewey for six weeks: the care. The tucking in, the pillow, the mattress box. Someone who was about to execute these people took the time to make them comfortable first. Perry told Dewey it was him. He did it. He could not explain why. And this is the place where Capote's writing matters. He does not explain it either. He doesn't tell you what the tucking in means. He doesn't psychoanalyze Perry in this moment. He simply puts the detail on the page and lets it sit there, unexplained, disturbing, human. That restraint is one of the things that makes this book so much more powerful than a standard true crime account. A lesser writer would interpret the detail for you. Capote trusts you to sit with it. And the fact that you cannot make sense of it, that a man can tuck someone into bed and then shoot them in the head is the point. The crime doesn't make sense. It's not supposed to. Dick went upstairs. He wanted Nancy. Perry followed him and stopped it. He told Dick he would kill him if he touched her. So Dick backed off. And then the moment came. Perry was standing over Herb Clutter in the basement. Herb was on the mattress box, bound, gagged, looking up at a man he had never met before tonight. And Perry told Dewey, I did not want to harm this man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat. I want to pause on those sentences because they're doing something extraordinary on the page. Perry starts with empathy. He liked Herb. He respected him. The first three sentences build towards something that sounds like mercy, soft spoken. That word almost sounds tender, and then the fourth sentence demolishes everything the first three build. The pivot from soft spoken to I cut his throat happens with no transition, no explanation, and no warning. It's the most famous passage in the book. And it works because the violence arrives in the sentence the same way it arrived for Herb Clutter. Suddenly, without logic, from someone who seemed, until that instant, like he might let you live. Capote is not just reporting what Perry said. He's arranging Perry's words so that the reader feels the same whiplash the clutters felt. You think you were safe, and then you are not. Just before I taped him, Mr. Clutter asked me, and these were his last words, wanted to know how his wife was, if she was alright. And I said she was fine, she was ready to go to sleep. And I told him it wasn't long till morning, and how in the morning somebody would find them, and then all of it, me and Dick and all, would seem like something they dreamed. I wasn't kidding him. I didn't want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman, soft spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat. Herb's throat was cut, and then Perry shot him in the head with the shotgun. Then he walked into the playroom and shot Kenyon. Then upstairs, Nancy, then Bonnie. Four shots, four shells retrieved. They left the house with a transistor radio, a pair of binoculars, and less than$50 in cash. Four lives for less than$50 and a radio. The entire thing, from the time they entered the house to the time they drove away, took roughly two hours. And in those two hours, something happened to Perry Smith that he would spend the rest of his life trying to understand and failing. He was not the same person when he left that house as when he entered it. Something broke inside him, or something that had been broken his entire life, finally came all the way apart. The rage that had been building since the orphanage, since his mother's death, since every hand that had ever hurt him. It found the wrong people. The clutters had nothing to do with Perry Smith's pain, but they paid for it anyway. Now here's what makes this section of the book so important and so troubling. You have two confessions from two men who were in the same house on the same night. And they don't match. Dick told the agents that Perry killed all four clutters, and that he couldn't stop him. In Dick's version, he's a bystander. He was there, sure. But Perry did the killing. Dick wants you to believe he's guilty of robbery but not murder. Perry's initial confession told a different story. He said he killed Herb and Kenyon, but that Dick shot the two women, Nancy and Bonnie. He said Dick was the one who went upstairs and pulled the trigger twice. But later, Perry changed his story. He took responsibility for all four killings, every single one. His reason? He said he was sorry for Dick's mother. He didn't want Eunice Hickok to believe her son had killed anyone. He said she was a real sweet person. Think about that. A man who murdered four people is worried about hurting a fifth person's feelings? It makes no sense. And it makes perfect sense. Because Perry Smith was always a mess of contradictions. A man who tucked his victims into bed, who stopped his partner from assaulting a girl he was about to kill. Who carried a box of keepsakes and a dream about a yellow parrot and a lifelong ache for a father who never came back. He's not consistent. He's human. And that's what makes him so difficult to sit with. Neither man ever testified in court about who killed whom. Both refused. And to this day, the question of who shot Nancy and Bonnie Clutter remains officially unresolved. But Capote clearly believed Perry's version. The way he writes the confession, the present tense, the care, the psychological depth makes it clear that Perry is the one telling the truth, even when the truth destroys him. Dick is the one who lies to save himself. Whether that framing is fair, whether Capote's obvious closeness to Perry colored his judgment? We'll get to that in episode four. But for now, this is the version the book gives you, and it's devastating. Back in Holcomb, the news of the arrest comes over the radio at Hartman's Cafe, and the town's reaction is not what you would expect. There's relief, yes. Some people cry, but there's also something stranger doubt, confusion. Even something like disappointment, because the killers are strangers. They're not from Holcomb. They had no connection to the clutters. They came from 400 miles away, based on a bad tip from a prison cellmate. And they killed a family that they had never met for a safe that didn't exist. Some people in Holcomb cannot accept this. After six weeks of suspecting each other, after six weeks of locked doors and loaded guns and whispered accusations, the idea that it was all random, that there was no deeper motive, no local conspiracy, no one who wanted clutter out of the way feels almost worse than the alternative. Because if it was random, it means there's no way to prevent it from happening again. You can't protect yourself from a thing that has no logic. Capote captures this perfectly. The doors stay locked. Some of the families who left town never came back. The whole calm that existed before the murders is gone. And knowing who did it does not bring it back. The drive from Las Vegas to Garden City takes the better part of two days. Perry rides in the back seat with Dewey, and during those hours, something happens between the two men that's one of the strangest dynamics in the book. Dewey was Herb Clutter's friend. He spent six weeks consumed by this case. He has barely slept. His marriage has been strained. He's walked through the clutter house more times than he can count, trying to understand what happened there. And now the man who did it is sitting next to him in the backseat of a car, telling him everything, and Dewey is just listening. He doesn't yell, he doesn't threaten, he doesn't break down. He asks quiet questions. He lets Perry talk because he needs the confession. Because he's been waiting for this for 46 days. And because this is the part that is hard to explain. There's a strange intimacy in the car. Capote describes it without quite naming it. These two men are sharing the worst night of both of their lives. Dewey lost a friend in that house. Perry lost whatever was left of his soul. And for the duration of this drive, they're the only two people in the world who fully understand what happened there. When the motorcade finally arrives in Garden City, a large crowd is waiting outside the Finney County Courthouse. They have come to see the killers walk from the car to the jail. Reporters, townspeople, people who knew the clutters, people who've been afraid for six weeks and want to see with their own eyes that the men responsible are in handcuffs. Perry and Dick are let inside, and the case moves from investigation to trial. But the story, the real story, the one Capote set out to tell, is already over. Everything that matters has already been said in the back seat of that car. This is the scene Capote held back since page one. Through two full sections of the book, through the clutter's last day, through the town's collapse, through Perry's entire childhood, through the investigation and the manhunt and the arrest, he withheld this scene. And now you have it. Think about what you knew before Perry opened his mouth in that car. You knew the clutters, their warmth, their decency, Nancy's cherry pie, Kenyon's hope chest. You knew Holcomb, the unlocked doors, the grain elevator, the world that was destroyed. You knew Perry, his dead siblings, his broken legs, his parrot dream, his boxes of keepsakes. You knew Dick, his bluster, his I'm a normal, his casual cruelty. And then Perry tells you what happened, and you feel everything at once. Horror at what was done to the clutters, grief for the family you came to know in episode one, something uncomfortably close to pity for the man doing the telling, the man who tucked his victims into bed before he shot them. And rage at Perry, at Dick, at the randomness of it, at the fact that four people are dead because a convict told a lie about a safe that never existed. If you only felt one of those things, the book failed. But if you felt all of them at once, if you're sitting with a tangle of emotions that you can't sort out, that Capote did exactly what he set out to do. And I want you to see the craft behind the feeling because it didn't happen by accident. Capote spent two full sections of his book making sure you would feel exactly this way when the confession arrived. He gave you the clutters first, made you love them, made you live inside their world for an entire section before destroying it. That's the grief you feel now. Then he gave you Perry, made you know him, gave you his orphanage, his dead siblings, his parrot dream, his boxes of keepsakes, made you understand him. That is the pity you feel now. And then he withheld the murders, held them back through two full sections, building the dread, letting your imagination fill the gaps, so that when the confession finally arrives, it lands like a punch you have been bracing for since page one. The order in which Capote gives you information is the single most important decision in the book. Victims first, killer second, crime last. If he had put the murder scene at the beginning, you would have flinched and moved on. By putting it here, after you know everyone involved, after you have spent hours inside both the clutters' lives and Perry's life, the crime becomes unbearable. Not because of the violence, because of the people. Notice what Capote does with the tense shift. The entire book up to this point is written in past tense. Things happened, people said, Perry remembered. But during the confession, Capote switches to present tense. It's happening now. You're there. It's no longer a story someone is telling you. It's a thing you're witnessing. That shift is not a trick. It's the book's way of telling you this is the moment. Everything before was preparation. Everything after is consequence. This is the center. And what sits at the center is not just a crime. It's the collision of two Americans that we're never supposed to meet. On one side, the clutter's world, wheat and church and unlocked doors, a father who wrote checks instead of carrying cash. A daughter who baked pies for the neighbors, a boy building a hope chest for his sister's wedding. On the other side, Perry Smith's world, orphanages and broken legs, a mother who choked on her own vomit, siblings who killed themselves, a yellow parrot that never came. The safe that did not exist is the cruelest detail of all, because it means these two worlds collided over nothing. A lie, a fantasy, a story that a bored convict told to pass the time in a prison cell. Four people died for a thing that was never real. When Perry finished his confession on that long drive back to Kansas, Dewey sat with what he had heard. He had his answers, he knew who, he knew how. He even knew in the broadest sense why. A botched robbery, a non-existence safe, two men who had crossed a line they couldn't come back from. But knowing all of that didn't make anything better. Knowing does not bring people back. And the answer to the question, who killed the clutters, turns out to be far less satisfying than six weeks of not knowing had suggested it would be. That's what the title of this section really means. The answer is not closure. It's not justice, it's not peace. It's just information. And information, Capote shows us, is not the same thing as understanding. You can know every fact about a crime, every name, every timeline, every detail of the blood and the rope and the tape. And still not understand how a man who thought Herb Clutter was a very nice gentleman could cut his throat. That gap between knowing and understanding is where this book lives, and it's where it will leave you. In our final episode, we enter part four, The Corner, the trial, the conviction, death row, five years of appeals, and the executions of Perry Smith and Richard Hickok on April 14th, 1965, on a warehouse gallows at the Kansas State Penitentiary. Part four is a different kind of story than what we've been through. The suspense is gone, there's no mystery left. What remains is the long grinding machinery of the justice system and the question of whether these two men deserve to die for what they did. Capote has strong feelings about this, and they do come through in the writing. Episode four is also where we finally talk about Capote himself, his relationship with Perry, the ethical questions surrounding the book, the things he fabricated, the accusation that he was rooting for the executions because he could not finish the book until his subjects were dead. And the toll in cold blood took on Capote, the man who wrote the definitive American true crime story, and then never published another book. This series has been about the masterpiece Capote created. The final episode is also about the price he paid for creating it. If you're reading along, finish part three and read through part four before the final episode. Pay attention to how the book feels different once the confession is behind you. Something changes, the urgency fades. What replaces it is harder to name, but you'll feel it. Thank you for joining me. I'm Jennifer Novotny, and this is Crimary.