IN COLD BLOOD (PART 4): THE CORNER

IN COLD BLOOD PART 4: THE CORNER, THE EXECUTIONS, AND WHAT TRUMAN CAPOTE GOT WRONG

In the final episode of Crimery’s four-part series on Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, host Jennifer Novotney takes you through the last chapter of one of the most famous true crime books ever written. This episode covers the trial of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the guilty verdict, their years on death row at the Kansas State Penitentiary, and the executions that brought the Clutter family murders to their legal end. 

But this episode goes further than the case itself. Jennifer also breaks down the deeper story behind In Cold Blood: Capote’s relationship with Perry Smith, the emotional cost of finishing the book, the ethics of narrative nonfiction, and the major scenes and details that Capote may have fabricated, altered, or reshaped for dramatic effect. From Alvin Dewey and “The Corner” to Perry’s final words and the book’s controversial ending, this is a close look at how a masterpiece can also be morally and journalistically complicated. 

If you care about true crime, Truman Capote, In Cold Blood analysis, the Clutter murders, Perry Smith, Richard Hickock, or the line between fact and storytelling, this is the episode to hear.

Listen now at crimery.show

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote, In Cold Blood Part 4, The Corner, Jennifer Novotney, Crimery podcast, Clutter family murders, Perry Smith, Richard Hickock, Alvin Dewey, Holcomb Kansas murders, Kansas State Penitentiary, death row, capital punishment, true crime podcast, narrative nonfiction, nonfiction novel, Capote fabricated scenes, Capote ethics, In Cold Blood ending

Transcript

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In prisoner slang at the Kansas State Penitentiary, they had a name for the gallows. They called it the corner. If an inmate was taken to be executed, the others would say he had gone to the corner. On April 14, 1965, five years, five months, and one day after the murders of the Clutter family, Richard Hickcock and Perry Smith went to the corner. Dick went first. He told the KBI agents he held no hard feelings. He shook each of their hands. Then he climbed the 13 steps and was hanged. He was pronounced dead at 12.41 a.m. Perry went next. His last words were, I think it's a hell of a thing to take a life in this manner. I don't believe in capital punishment, morally or legally. He was pronounced dead at 1.19 a.m. Alvin Dewey watched them both die. All four KBI agents who had worked the case were in the room. Dewey, Nye, Church, and Dunce. When it was over, Dewey did not feel relief. He didn't feel closure. He felt something he hadn't expected to feel. And that Capote captures in the final pages of his book with devastating honesty. I'm Jennifer Novotny, and this is Crimary. In episode one, we built the world, The Clutters, Holcomb, The Locked Doors. In episode two, we met the killers, Perry's shattered childhood, Dick's Hollow Confidence. In episode three, we heard The Confession, the full account of the night told in Perry's own words, written by Capote in present tense, so you felt like you were in the room. Each episode has been a step deeper into this book. Now in part four, The Corner, we reach the end of the story, the trial, the verdict, five years on death row, and the executions. But this episode is about more than how it ends for Perry and Dick. This is also where we finally talk about Capote himself, his relationship with Perry Smith, the things he fabricated, the ethical cost of the book, and the question that has followed this masterpiece for 60 years. Can a work of nonfiction be this brilliant and this dishonest at the same time? I promised you at the beginning of the series that I would give you two things, the story and the craft behind the story. This episode delivers on both. The first half is the final chapter of the Clutter case. The second half is the reckoning with the man who wrote it. This is in cold blood, the corner. The trial of Richard Hickcock and Perry Smith took place at the Finney County Courthouse in Garden City, Kansas, from March 22nd to March 29, 1960, just over four months after the murders. Neither Dick nor Perry took the stand. The prosecution's case was built on the confessions, on Floyd Wells' testimony as the informant who broke the case, on the physical evidence, the boot prints, the binoculars, the radio, the cord, and on the testimony of Alvin Dewey, who recounted Perry's confession in detail. Dewey told the court about Dick's plan to leave no witnesses. He told them about Dick's attempt to assault Nancy and how Perry stopped it. He told them Perry had retracted his original claim that Dick shot the women and had taken responsibility for all four killings. The defense tried to introduce psychiatric testimony. A psychiatrist who had examined both men believed Perry may have suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and that Dick may have had a personality disorder. But under the McNaughton rule, the legal standard for insanity in Kansas at the time, the psychiatrist was only allowed to answer yes or no to whether the defendants knew right from wrong. That was it. No explanation, no context, no discussion of Perry's childhood, his mental health history, or the psychological dynamics between the two men. The jury heard almost none of it. The jury deliberated for 45 minutes. They found both men guilty on all four accounts of first-degree murder. The sentence was death by hanging. 45 minutes. After a week-long trial covering the most brutal crime in Kansas history, 12 men needed less than an hour to decide. That number tells you something about the case, but it also tells you something about the time and the place. This was Western Kansas in 1960. The clutters were beloved. The evidence was overwhelming, and the McNaughton rule had made sure the jury never heard the full picture of who these two men were. As Perry and Dick were led from the courtroom, Perry said to Dick, No chicken-hearted jurors, they. And they both laughed. It is the last moment in the book where they're still partners, still sharing a dark joke that only they understand. After this, they'll barely speak again. Now, here's what I want you to notice about how Capote writes the trial. He doesn't give it much space. Compared to the pages and pages he devoted to Perry's backstory, to the investigation, to the confession, the trial itself is compressed. And that compression is a choice. Capote is telling you through the structure of the book that the trial isn't where the real reckoning happens. The legal system delivers a verdict, guilty, but the book has already delivered something more complicated. A picture of two men so detailed, so contradictory, so human that a simple guilty or not guilty can't hold it all. There's also something Capote is doing with the McNaughton rule that's worth your attention. By showing you what the psychiatrist was not allowed to say, by including the suppressed testimony in the book, even though it was excluded from the trial, Capote is putting you in a different position than the jury. The jury made their decision based on limited information. You, the reader, have everything. And Capote wants you to feel the gap between what the law allows and what the full truth requires. He's not telling you the verdict was wrong, he's telling you it was incomplete. A week after the verdict, Perry and Dick are transferred to Death Row in the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas. In prison slang, death row is called the corner, which is where the title of this section comes from. When an inmate is taken to be executed, the others say he's gone to the corner. They will spend the next five years there. Think about that. Five years of knowing exactly how your life will end, and not knowing when. Five years of execution dates set and then postponed. Five years of appeals filed and denied. Five years of waiting in a small cell for the phone call that says tomorrow. Perry and Dick live in adjacent cells but barely communicate. The partnership that survived a quadruple murder can't survive death row. They have nothing left to say to each other. Dick reads erotic novels and law books and writes letters to anyone who will listen. Perry goes on a hunger strike and has to be force fed after a week. He hears voices. He has a recurring dream of performing in a nightclub for an audience of dead inmates. He asks the voice he hears, where is Jesus? And once he wakes up shouting, The bird is Jesus. The parrot from his childhood dream has followed him to death row. While in the Garden City jail awaiting trial, Perry had been cared for by Josephine Meyer, the assistant sheriff's wife, who cooked his meals and treated him with kindness. She found him gentle. Her husband, who had been one of the first at the crime scene, told her she would feel differently if she had seen what he saw. Mrs. Meyer's compassion for Perry is one of the most quietly affecting threads in the book. A woman who sees a broken person where the law sees a killer. Perry also receives a letter from Don Cullivan, an old army acquaintance who read about the case in the newspapers. Don visits Perry in jail and they share a meal. Don is a devout Catholic who wants to save Perry's soul. Perry tells Don the truth. He's not sorry. He feels no remorse. Don is horrified, but doesn't abandon him. He keeps visiting. He testifies at the trial about the need for Christian forgiveness. He's one of the only people in Perry's life who stays. Their fellow inmates include Lowell Lee Andrews, a former honors student at the University of Kansas who murdered his entire family and then calmly reported it. Andrews is everything Perry wishes he was. Educated, articulate, precise. And Perry hates him for it. Andrew corrects Perry's grammar, which drives Perry wild. It's a small, almost comical detail, but it tells you something essential about Perry, even on death row. What hurts him most is being reminded that he never got the education he craved. Dick, meanwhile, finds an attorney named Russell Schultz, who agrees to file appeals. The case works its way through the system. It reaches the United States Supreme Court three times. Each time the court refuses to hear it. Execution dates are set and postponed. Loel Lee Andrews is executed on November 30th, 1962. Dick and Perry watch from their cells. They can see everything except the gallows itself, which is just out of view. More years pass, the outside world mostly forgets about them. And Capote, who has been waiting for the ending of his book, grows increasingly desperate. Here's where the structure of the book makes a remarkable move. The first three parts covered about eight weeks, from the murder through the confession. This final section covers more than five years. And Capote compresses those years into a handful of pages. The pacing changes completely. Where the earlier sections were dense with detail and scene and dialogue, the corner moves in summary. Months pass in a sentence, years pass in a paragraph. This is not lazy writing, it's the opposite. Capote is matching the pace of the prose to the experience of the characters. Death row is monotony. It's waiting. There is nothing to dramatize because nothing happens. And Capote lets the emptiness of those years show on the page. The same way he lets the fullness of the clutter's last day show in part one. He trusts the structure to do the emotional work. The final execution date is set for April 14, 1965. This time, there are no more appeals, no more stays, no more postponements. The United States Supreme Court has refused to hear the case for the third and final time. The Kansas Supreme Court has set the date, and the machinery of the state begins to move toward the warehouse on the prison grounds where the gallows is waiting. Alvin Dewey arrives at the state penitentiary late that night. He does not want to be there. He doesn't have to be there. His work on the case ended years ago. The moment Perry confessed. But he's come anyway, because after everything he's been through with these two men, he feels he owes it to the clutters to see it through to the end. He also feels, although he doesn't say so, that he owes it to Perry. The execution chamber is in a warehouse at one end of the prison compound. Dewey finds it to be a bleak, undignified space, cluttered with lumber and debris. Capote describes it as a bleakly lighted cavern. It doesn't look like a place where justice is carried out. It looks like a place where something unpleasant happens and no one bothers to clean up. The gallows itself is a simple wooden platform with 13 steps, a trapdoor, and a length of rope. That's all it takes to end a human life. A small group of witnesses has assembled. Reporters, prison officials, the four KBI agents who worked the case, Dewey, Nye, Church, and Dunce. The men who tracked Perry and Dick across the country, interrogated them in Las Vegas, drove Perry back to Kansas in the backseat of a car while he confessed. All of them are here. They've earned the right to see this through. Dick goes first. He's brought in, he's calm, almost casual, the way he's been through almost every moment of this ordeal. Dick Hickcock has always had the ability to put on a surface that does not crack. Even when everything underneath is falling apart. He tells the assembled witnesses that he holds no hard feelings. Then he does something that still, 60 years later, is hard to make sense of. He walks over to each of the four KBI agents and shakes their hand. Dewey, Nye, Church, Dunce. The men who put him here. He shakes their hands like a man leaving a business meeting. Your podi doesn't interpret this moment for you. He just reports it. And you can read it a dozen different ways. Maybe Dick forgave them. Maybe he was performing one last con. The charming criminal going out with style. Maybe he genuinely felt no hatred because he had never felt much of anything. Dick Hickcock was a surface to the very end. And Capote lets him stay a surface. He's hanged. He's pronounced dead at 12 41 a.m. It takes him nearly 20 minutes to die. Hanging is not as quick as the movies make it look. Then it's Perry's turn. Perry's brought in, he sees Dewey, and he winks at him. Think about that for a minute. Perry Smith is 10 minutes from his death. He sees the man who arrested him, who interrogated him, who listened to his entire confession in the backseat of a car, who's become in some unspoken way the closest thing Perry has to a friend in the last five years. And he winks. It's a private gesture, a small acknowledgement between two men who share the worst story either of them will ever know. It's almost affectionate. And then it passes, and Perry sobers and the moment's gone. He is asked for his last words. I think it's a hell of a thing to take a life in this manner, he says. I don't believe in capital punishment, morally or legally. Maybe I had something to contribute. Something. He pauses. Then, according to Capote, he says, it would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize. He's hanged and pronounced dead at 1.19 a.m. Dewey watched it all. And what he feels is not what he expected. He had spent more than five years consumed by this case. He'd walked through the clutterhouse dozens of times. He'd sat in a car with Perry for hundreds of miles, listening to the worst story he'd ever heard. He had wanted justice and he'd worked for it. Now he is watching the man who killed his friend swing from a rope in a warehouse. And what he feels is not satisfaction or relief. It's something closer to pity. Capote writes that Dewey looked at Perry and could not help but notice his childish feet. That detailed childish feet is pure Capote. In the final moment of Perry's life, the writer who spent six years studying this man chooses to describe his feet. Not his face, not his hands, feet. Small, stunted, and damaged, the feet of a boy in a man's body. It's an image that refuses to let you see Perry as a monster. Even now, even as he hangs for what he did. And that, more than almost any other detail in the book, tells you where Capote's sympathies lay. Capote writes, Steps, Noose, mask. But before the mask was adjusted, the prisoner spat his chewing gum into the chaplain's outstretched palm. Dewey shut his eyes. He kept them shut until he heard the thud snap that announced a rope broken neck. Like the majority of American law enforcement officials, Dewey is certain that capital punishment is a deterrent to violent crime. And he felt that if ever the penalty had been earned, the present instance was it. Now, I have to tell you something important. Those words I read to you, Perry's apology, may not be exactly what he said. Bill Brown, the editor of the Garden City Telegram, was standing just a few feet away and recorded Perry's actual final statement. In Brown's version, there was no apology at all. Perry said he thought capital punishment was legally and morally wrong. He said he could have contributed something to society. He said he had no animosities toward anyone involved in the case. And then he said, I think that is all. That was it. No apology. No moment of remorse. Just a final statement against the death penalty and a man walking to his execution with the same contradictions intact he had carried his entire life. Capote added the apology. He gave Perry a moment of remorse that, according to the journalist who was closer to the gallows than Capote was, did not happen. This brings us to the part of this episode I've been building towards since episode one. Truman Capote called In Cold Blood immaculately factual. He said it in a 1966 New York Times interview. He said it on television. He said it in every conversation he had about the book for the rest of his life. He staked his reputation on the idea that this book was not just beautifully written, but completely, verifiably true. He claimed he had invented a new genre, the nonfiction novel. And the nonfiction part was supposed to be the foundation of the whole thing. It's not completely true, and the ways in which it's not true matter. Over the past 60 years, researchers, journalists, family members, and people who were actually in the room when these events happened have identified a long list of things Capote fabricated, altered, or got wrong. I want to walk you through the most significant ones. Because as a reader of this book, you deserve to know where the line between fact and craft was crossed. Let me start with the biggest one, the final scene of the book. In the last pages of In Cold Blood, Alvin Dewey visits the Clutter family graves at Valley View Cemetery in Garden City. He walks through the cemetery past the graves of people connected to the case. And when he reaches the Clutter plot, he finds Susan Kidwell, Nancy's best friend, standing there. They have a warm, hopeful conversation about the future. Susan is doing well. She's in college. Bobby Rupp has gotten married. Life has moved on. It's one of the most famous endings in American nonfiction. It has made readers cry for 60 years. And it never happened. Dewey himself confirmed that the scene was invented. He never ran into Susan Kidwell at the cemetery. He told interviewers plainly that Capote made it up. Capote invented it because he needed an ending that felt like resolution. And reality did not provide one. There was no meeting, there was no closure, there was just a detective who watched two men die in a warehouse and then went home and tried to live the rest of his life. The second major fabrication is the scene where KBI agent Harold Nye visits Dick Hickcock's parents. In the book, Nye goes alone. He sits with Dick's father and mother, pieces together Dick's background, gets the emotional texture of a family destroyed by a son they thought they knew. It's a beautifully written scene, and it's one of the sources of information the book uses to build Dick's backstory. According to Harold Nye's own notebooks, discovered decades later and published by his son, that's not how. It happened. Multiple agents went together to the Hickok home. Only Dick's mother was there. His father was not present. Capote altered the scene to make it more dramatic, to make Nye a solo character, and to create an intimacy between investigator and family that didn't actually exist. Harold Nye himself felt betrayed by how Capote used his work. And he spent years trying to correct the record. The third fabrication is about the timing of the investigation. In the book, when Floyd Wells calls the KBI from his prison cell to tell them about Dick Hickok, Alvin Dewey acts on the tip immediately. The book presents it as a lightning bolt, the moment everything turns. In reality, KBI records show there was a five-day delay before the KBI acted on Wells' information. Because Dewey still believe the murders were committed by someone local. That delay matters. Some investigators have argued that if KBI had moved faster, Perry and Dick might have been caught before they reached Florida, where they're suspected of killing another family, the Walkers, less than five weeks after the clutter murders. If that's true, Capote's compression of the timeline, his decision to make Dewey look more decisive than he actually was, helps obscure the fact that four more people may have died because the investigation moved too slowly. That's not a minor stylistic change. That's altering the historical record in a way that protects a living person at the expense of the truth. Then there's the matter of Capote's methods. He did not take notes during his interviews. He did not use a tape recorder. He claimed he had trained his memory to retain conversations with 90% accuracy. Whether you believe that is up to you, but it means that every quoted conversation in this book, every word attributed to Perry, to Dick, to Dewey, to the townspeople of Holcomb, is Capote's reconstruction, not a transcript. He's asking you to trust that his memory is as good as a tape recorder. Researchers who've gone through them have found that the quotes attributed to specific people in the book sometimes appear in the notebooks without any name attached. Disembodied observations that Capote later assigned to named characters. He was, in other words, doing exactly what he accused reality of failing to do, providing the right person to say the right thing at the right moment. And then there's Bonnie Clutter. The surviving Clutter daughters, Ivana and Beverly, who were no longer living at home in 1959, objected strenuously to how Capote depicted their mother, Bonnie, in the book is a shut-in, a woman destroyed by clinical depression. A woman who's been essentially absent from her family's life for years. That's the version of Bonnie that appears on the page. It's a version that serves the narrative: a fragile, suffering woman whose death feels almost like a mercy. The daughter said it was not true. They said their mother was loving, active, engaged with her community. They said her depression had been exaggerated, her isolation invented, her real personality erased. They identified what they said were a long list of inaccuracies in the book, specifically about Bonnie. And Capote never addressed their complaints. He never issued a correction, never apologized. Ivana and Beverly spent the rest of their lives trying to correct the record about their mother, and the book has outlived their corrections. For most readers, Capote's Bonnie is the only Bonnie they will ever know. That's the deepest violence this book commits. The Clutters were murdered on November 15, 1959. But Bonnie Clutter was written into a version of herself that her own daughters didn't recognize. And that version has become the official one. The book, in that sense, killed her twice. Finally, between the New Yorker serialization in 1965 and the Random House book publication in 1966, Capote made close to 5,000 changes to the text. Many were stylistic, but some were factual changes that altered the record. The number of churches in Holcomb, the times at which certain events happened, the details of who was present at key moments. Jack Debellis, a critic who compared the two versions line by line, found that many of the changes were substantively factual, not just cosmetic. Capote kept editing the truth even after it was in print. None of this means the book is worthless. It means the book is not what Capote said it was. It's not immaculately factual. It's a work of extraordinary writing that takes liberties with the truth when the truth doesn't serve the narrative. And the question you have to ask yourself as a reader is, does that matter? If the book is this good, does it matter that some of it's not true? I think it matters not because the fabrications ruin the book. They don't, but because Capote insisted on calling it fact. If he had admitted from the beginning that he was shaping, compressing, inventing where necessary, the conversation about this book would be completely different. The problem isn't that he altered reality. The problem is that he lied about altering it. And that lie has been repeated by every publisher, every blurb, every classroom, and every review of this book for 60 years. The lie is now part of the book's legacy. Capote wanted to invent a genre. What he actually invented was a trap that every nonfiction writer after him has had to navigate. The temptation to tell a true story so well that the truth starts bending to serve the story. There's one more thing we have to talk about, and this is the hardest thing. Truman Capote's relationship with Perry Smith went beyond journalism. How far beyond is a matter of debate that has never been fully resolved. Some biographers believe Capote fell in love with Perry. Others believe he simply recognized a version of himself. Both were abandoned children, both were outsiders, both were small men with big ambitions and artistic souls that the world hadn't rewarded. Capote himself once said that he and Perry were like brothers who grew up in the same house. Except Perry went out the back door and Capote went out the front. They spent hundreds of hours together over six years. Capote visited Perry on death row regularly. He brought him books, he wrote him letters. He even sent him money. He helped him find lawyers. And his notebooks now at the Library of Congress show something that Capote never publicly admitted. He paid both Perry and Dick$100 each, significant money in the early 1960s, and a serious ethical breach for a journalist covering a capital murder case. The people you are writing about are not supposed to be on your payroll. Perry called Capote his friend. Whether Capote deserved that title is one of the hardest questions the book raises. Because there's the truth that sits underneath everything. Capote needed Perry and Dick to die. He couldn't finish the book without an ending. And the ending he wanted, the ending the book required, was their execution. For five years on death row, every appeal, every postponement, every stay of execution delayed the completion of this masterpiece. His publisher was waiting. The New Yorker was waiting. The world was waiting. And Capote couldn't deliver because his subjects would not stop breathing. Think about the position that put him in. He'd become close to Perry. He'd spent more time with him in some ways than he'd spent with almost anyone else in his life. And he needed Perry to die so he could finish a book that would make him famous. Every time a court granted Perry another stay, every time an appeal bought Perry another month, Capote felt two things at once. Relief that Perry was alive and frustration that his book couldn't be finished. Those two feelings can't coexist cleanly. They tore him apart. His mental health deteriorated. At first, he'd helped Perry and Dick find lawyers to file appeals. Whether this was genuine concern for their lives or a strategy to extend his access to them is impossible to know. Probably it was both. And Capote himself may not have known which motive was stronger. But toward the end, as the appeals dragged on year after year, Capote pulled away. He stopped communicating with them. He stopped helping, he avoided their telegrams. He couldn't face what his own book needed from him. It took Harper Lee, his childhood friend, who'd been with him from the very beginning, who'd helped him gain the trust of Holcomb in 1959, to force him to read one of Perry's final pleading letters. When the execution date was finally set, Capote was in Switzerland. He flew back for it. He sat in a folding chair in the warehouse. He watched Dick die. He watched Perry die. He saw Perry's childish feet. He heard Perry's last words. And then he got in a car. A few miles from the prison, he had to pull over. He wept for two hours. He couldn't drive. Whatever he had told himself about needing the ending, whatever professional distance he'd tried to create, whatever story he'd rehearsed in his head about why this had to happen, it all collapsed in that car on the side of a Kansas road. He'd watched someone he cared about die, and he had needed that death to finish his book. That contradiction sat inside him for the rest of his life, and it ate him alive. In Cold Blood was published in January 1966 and made Capote the most famous writer in America. It made him a millionaire many times over. The New Yorker serialization had already been a sensation. Copies sold out across Kansas, and the story became the most talked-about magazine piece in years. The book followed in January and became an instant bestseller. It was adapted into a 1967 film that won critical acclaim. It was translated into dozens of languages. In November 1966, Capote threw the black and white ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York. 540 guests, the most exclusive invitation in America. A celebration of himself and his triumph. Everyone who mattered in American culture was there. He was on top of the world. And Truman Capote never published another book. He spent the next 18 years working on Answered Prayers, a tell-all novel about the wealthy socialites he'd spent years charming and befriending. The women he called his swans. The most glamorous women in America, who'd welcomed Capote into their homes, their marriages, their secrets. He was supposed to write a book about them that would be his proust, his greatest social novel, his second masterpiece. He published excerpts in Esquire magazine in 1975 and 1976. What people read horrified them. Capote had used their secrets, their confidences, their most private moments as raw material for fiction, so thinly disguised that everyone recognized themselves. Affairs, addictions, cruelties, the worst things his friends had ever told him in confidence. He put it all on the page. The parallels are hard to miss. Capote built in cold blood on the trust of the people of Holcomb and the killers in their cells. He built answered prayers on the trust of his New York friends. In both cases, he took what people gave him and turned it into a story that served him more than it served them. The difference is that the people of Holcomb could not fight back. The swans could, and they did. He drank, he took pills, he appeared on television talk shows barely coherent, a shadow of the sharp, witty, hilarious man who had dazzled the world a decade earlier. He slurred his words, he rambled, he told an interviewer with a strange, distant smile, the obvious answer is that eventually I'll kill myself. He was not really joking. He'd become a cautionary tale in his own lifetime. The writer who had it all and threw it away. He died on August 25th, 1984, at the age of 59, at the home of his friend Joanne Carson in Bel Air, California. The cause was liver disease complicated by drug intoxication. He'd been working on answered prayers for 18 years and never finished it. What existed was published posthumously. It was fragments, pieces of a book that a man had started and could not complete. The six years in Kansas, the relationship with Perry, the execution he watched from a folding chair in a warehouse. Whatever happened in that process, it broke something in Capote that the fame and the money and the parties could not repair. He went into Kansas as one of the most promising writers of his generation. He came out with a masterpiece and a wound that never closed. Perry Smith got the gallows. Truman Capote got 19 more years and spent every one of them dying. I want to close by talking about the final scene of In Cold Blood, because even though it is fabricated, it's one of the most carefully crafted endings in American nonfiction. And understanding how it works and why Capote felt he needed to reinvent it, tells you something important about the book and about the man who wrote it. In the book's last pages, Alvin Dewey visits Valley View Cemetery in Garden City. He walks past the graves of people connected to the case. Judge Tate, who presided over the trial and later died of pneumonia. Bonnie Jean Ashida, the daughter of a clutter neighbor, killed in a car accident. The landscape is heavy with death. Then he reaches the clutter plot, and standing there is Susan Kidwell, Nancy's best friend. Susan tells Dewey that she is doing well, she's in college, she and Nancy had planned to go together. She's living the life they had imagined for themselves. Bobby Rupp, Nancy's boyfriend, has gotten married. Life has moved on. And then in the final sentences, the wind blows across the wheat, and the book ends. None of this happened. Capote invented it, but look at what it does. After more than 300 pages of violence, grief, dread, and moral complexity, Capote gives you something the rest of the book refuses to provide hope. Susan Kidwell survived. She went to college. She is living a life that Nancy Clutter didn't get to live. Bobby Rupp has moved on. Dewey is at peace. And by placing Susan at Nancy's grave, Capote creates a moment where the dead and the living exist in the same frame, where the loss and the continuation sit side by side and the continuation wins. It's a beautiful ending, it's a comforting ending, and it's a lie. Capote invented it because the real story doesn't end that way. The real story ended with two men swinging from a rope in a warehouse and a writer pulling his car over to cry for two hours. And four people who are still dead, and a town that never quite recovered, and a mother whose surviving daughters will spend the rest of their lives trying to correct the record. That's not the ending of a masterpiece. That's the ending of a nightmare. And Capote, who understood better than anyone that a book needs an ending that earns everything the reader has been through, chose to give you the ending the story deserved, instead of the ending the story had. Notice what he does with the wind and the wheat in the final sentences. He brings you back to where the book began, the high wheat plains of western Kansas, the landscape he painted so carefully in the opening pages. The book ends where it started. The land endures, the wheat grows, the wind blows, life goes on. It's a closing image borrowed from the oldest tradition of storytelling. The world was here before these events, and the world will be here after. The people are gone, the place remains. As a piece of writing, it's close to perfect. As a piece of reporting, it's a fabrication. And that contradiction is the whole book in a single scene. Whether that was the right choice, whether a nonfiction writer has the right to invent a scene to make the truth feel more true, is the question that in cold blood leaves you with. And it's a question that every true crime podcast, every documentary, every piece of narrative nonfiction produced in the 60 years since this book was published has had to answer for itself, including this one, including the one you're listening to right now. Let me leave you with this. In Cold Blood is not a perfect book. It contains fabrications, it's bias towards Perry Smith, it doesn't give the Clutter family the same depth it gives their killer. It shortchanges Bonnie Clutter. It inflates Alvin Dewey's role. It invents its own ending. It's built on a relationship between a journalist and a subject that crossed every ethical line the profession has. And at the same time, it's a masterpiece. Both of those things are true. They don't cancel each other out. The fabrications don't erase the brilliance of the writing. And the brilliance of the writing doesn't excuse the fabrications. You have to hold both. That's what it means to be a thoughtful reader of a book you admire. Capote set out to prove that nonfiction could be as powerful, as moving, as beautifully constructed as the greatest novels. And he succeeded. In Cold Blood reads like a novel because Capote wrote it like one. With the tools of fiction, the instincts of a storyteller and the obsessive attention to detail of a man who believed every word and every punctuation mark mattered. But he also proved something he didn't intend to prove. That when you apply the tools of fiction to real events, the temptation to prove the truth is almost impossible to resist. Capote couldn't resist. He shaped facts into narrative. He turned real people into characters. He invented scenes that served the story better than what actually happened. And in doing so, he created a work that is simultaneously the greatest true crime book ever written, and a cautionary tale about the limits of telling true stories. Over these four episodes, I've tried to give you two things the book itself and the tools to read it with clear eyes. You've seen what Capote does with structure, the parallel narration, the withholding, the tense shift, the compression of five years into a handful of pages at the end. You've seen what he does with character, the clutters built with care so their loss would wound you. Perry given depth so his crime would confuse you. Dick left as a surface so his evil would chill you. And you've seen what he does with the truth, the shaping, the inventing, the line between craft and dishonesty that he crossed more than once. Every true crime podcast you've ever heard, including this one, exists in the space that in cold blood opened up. Every time a storyteller takes real events and shapes them into a narrative, they're walking the line Capote walked. The question is always the same: how much shaping is too much? When does a true story become a good story that used to be true? There's no clean answer to that question. Every writer has to find their own line. Every reader has to decide what they're willing to accept. Capote didn't answer those questions. He made them unavoidable. And that might be his greatest achievement. I want to end where the book ends, with the wind blowing over the wheat. The clutters are gone, Perry and Dick are gone. Capote is gone. Alvin Dewey is gone. Everyone who sat in that warehouse in April 1965 is gone. But the book remains. And the questions it asks about violence, about empathy, about the stories we tell about the worst things people do are as alive today as they were in 1966. If you've read along with me over these four episodes, you've not just read a book, you've read it the way it deserves to be read. Slowly, carefully, with attention to what is on the page and what is hiding underneath it. This has been a journey, and I'm grateful you took it with me. I'm Jennifer Novotny, and this is Primary.