The Making of a True Crime Classic

Ed Ayers:
The whodunit nature of Lizzie Borden’s trial has captivated audiences for generations. By one account, there are some 580 books about Lizzie Borden, 120 videos and 90 theatrical pieces, including ballets, plays and even an opera. For one famous writer, the appeal of this next story wasn’t whodunit but why done it?

Ed Ayers:
It all started in mid-November 1959. Truman Capote, of Breakfast at Tiffany’s fame, was in his New York City apartment when an article in the newspaper caught his eye. The story described how the family of a wealthy wheat farmer was found shot to death in Holcomb, Kansas. They had been killed by shotgun blast at close range after being bound and gagged, the article read. There were no signs of struggle and nothing had been stolen but the telephone lines had been cut.

Sara Sligar:
When Capote found this he wanted to find a sort of like, case or a situation or story that he would be able to explore in this long form way.

Ed Ayers:
Sara Sligar is an expert on true crime and pop culture.

Sara Sligar:
I think he was immediately drawn to this with this specific end goal of writing a really long form story about it and eventually the book, In Cold Blood.

Ed Ayers:
Capote was so drawn to the story that soon after hearing about the murders of Herbert Clutter, his wife Bonnie and his kids, Nancy and Kenyon, he packed his bags and flew to Kansas. Capote took his childhood friend, Harper Lee, with him. The same Harper Lee who wrote the classic book, To Kill A Mockingbird.

Sara Sligar:
Capote was from the South and had this interest in writing about areas of the United States that had a really strong regional inflection as he saw but at the same time he had lived in Manhattan for a really long time at this point and was very much a sort of Manhattan socialite. That’s actually why Harper Lee joined him because she had been … He thought of her, they had been childhood friends, so he thought of her as much more grounded in the South and so maybe more able to access this really regional area of the Midwest and so sort of saw her as someone who could help smooth over some of the interactions that he had with local people.

Ed Ayers:
So that’s what they did, right? They rushed to Holcomb and how soon after the arrest did they arrive?

Sara Sligar:
They actually arrived well before the arrest. There were a month or two before the two men who committed the murders were apprehended. There was actually at the beginning when they first arrived there was a lot of suspicion that it had been somebody in the town who had done it. There weren’t a lot of outsiders in the town and it was sort of assumed that people who had come from outside of the town would have been noticed or that there must have been some kind of personal motivation.

Ed Ayers:
Truman Capote’s book, In Cold Blood, was the culmination of his time in Kansas and if you ask Capote, it was the first true crime book ever published. Sara Sligar says many others begged to differ.

Sara Sligar:
There’s a lot of debate about whether or not this was the first true crime novel. I think that what you could certainly say is that it is, this book, I cannot overstate how successful it was. Even reviewers at the time when it came out in 1966, reviewers at the time were like, “This is the most talked about book of the year.” It was getting coverage everywhere, everybody was reading it. Although there, I think, were certainly many different types of long form journalism that explored some of the psychological ramifications of crimes, there were also a lot of novelizations or film versions of crimes that had actually happened.

Ed Ayers:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Sara Sligar:
The extent to which this just was a cultural landmark cannot be overstated. That’s really, I think, why it’s become remembered as the first true crime book and why it’s also remembered as a foundational moment in long form journalism and narrative non-fiction, as well.

Ed Ayers:
Even though Capote’s narrative style kind of erased himself, how much of its visibility and importance came from him being a participant observer in the trial?

Sara Sligar:
Capote did erase himself totally from the narrative. He doesn’t ever use the word, “I,” there’s one moment in the entire book when he refers to a journalist and he means himself. However, I think a big part of what made the book so popular was this sense that people were getting a behind the scenes version of events.

Ed Ayers:
So it’s controversial in many ways but how would you describe the book for people who haven’t read it?

Sara Sligar:
Although the phrase, “Non-fiction novel,” is very controversial, I do think that’s a good way of like, a point of entry into understanding what a book like, In Cold Blood, is because it’s this long form journalistic account of these murders and of the motivations of the men who committed them. The very first chapter of the book, the first part, looks at the lives of this family, everything they did in the last day of their lives. Then it moves into a section that’s about the investigation, tracking down these men. We find out very early on that these two men, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith committed the crime and so it goes back and forth between their perspective as they’re on the run and the police perspective as they’re tracking them down. Then it goes on to show after they’re apprehended, their trial, explores the sort of criminal justice system and then their incarceration and execution. It’s really a wholistic look at this crime and it’s aftermath.

Ed Ayers:
That really is remarkable that it’s not the usual whodunit question, right? But rather we know whodunit and then we try to figure out why. Is that the-

Sara Sligar:
Exactly, yes.

Ed Ayers:
Is that the question that drives the book?

Sara Sligar:
Yes.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah.

Sara Sligar:
Yeah, we call it a, “Why done it?” You could think of, also you could think of books or crime books as either a whodunit, a how done it or a why done it. This is sort of a combination of a how done it and a why done it. So you’re really, the big motivation for the book is trying to understand why they committed this crime and what the sort of background was that shaped these two individuals, Perry and Dick, and brought them to a place where they would do something so horrific.

Ed Ayers:
So how does Capote describe these men and does he seem somewhat drawn to them?

Sara Sligar:
Yeah there’s, I think, a real fascination on Capote’s part as he goes deeper and deeper into the story. I mean, he worked on this book for six years. I guess maybe almost seven years technically. The first two years are when most of the action is happening but then there’s like five years when the men are in prison awaiting execution and he’s still interviewing them, going to them, he’s really their main visitor, especially Perry Smith who really doesn’t have any family and who Capote becomes quite attached to in that they really form a sort of back and forth. Also, it’s a very intimate thing to try to understand why someone did something like this, to go so far into their history. He tracks down family members or old colleagues or acquaintances. There is a real fascination for it and he did go to witness their execution, which he did not want to do and almost backed out of but he said it was the worst day of his life and he did it because he felt he had to. He felt it was the thing he had to do for the story. I think he also felt a level of debt to these men whose story he had sort of taken and turned into the … And knew it was going to be such a phenomenon.

Ed Ayers:
My understanding is that he didn’t actually tape record any of the conversations but just did them by memory? That sounds a little suspect. Did people criticize him at the time for that?

Sara Sligar:
Yes, yeah, he got a lot of criticism at the time and today. Capote had, well how he put it was that he had decided some years earlier to train himself to recall conversations perfectly and so he claimed he had a 95% recall rate. It is not clear how he measured this. Clearly some stuff is also embroidered upon and you can also tell that because there is this really great study that a scholar did where he looked comparatively of the version that was published in The New Yorker and then the version that was published as the book and he found almost 5,000 changes between these and some of those are changes to actual documents, changes to quotes, changes to things that as a journalist you would say, “Oh this is a thing that cannot be changed.” Capote definitely changed them. We have the receipts and that scholar was Jack De Bellis, also I want to give credit to, so something incredibly thorough.

Ed Ayers:
Well it’s a good thing this is a novel, right, and not the official court record. This is a part in the late ’50s, early ’60s that you’ve written about a due process revolution when it came to the legal system but what do you mean by that and how does that interact with what you just told us about In Cold Blood?

Sara Sligar:
The due process revolution was a series of decisions that was made in the mid 20th Century by the Supreme Court that federally standardized criminal rights across the country. So actually a lot of things that we think of as criminal rights that everyone can kind of take for granted such as the right to an attorney, the protections against illegal search and seizure, a whole lot of things were not federally standardized even before 1965 in some cases. Some states had these rights or gave these rights to their citizens, some didn’t, but this was actually a really, really massive overhaul in the criminal justice system but I definitely do think that In Cold Blood is in conversation with a lot of these changes that were happening at the time and you can even see in the sections that are depicting the court room sequences, the trial, you can see references to criminal procedures that are being developed. So one particular area that Capote was really critiquing is the idea of the insanity defense and the way …

Sara Sligar:
The insanity defense as a concept has been around for a long time but the particular way that it’s implemented and the shape it took changed a lot in the mid 20th Century and Capote really talks a lot about the different kind of dimensions of this and how they feed into criminal justice reform. So there’s absolutely, I think, a lot of the conversation about crime, about criminal behavior that is motivating Capote’s interest in criminal psychology is also something that’s happening in the criminal justice system.

Ed Ayers:
So in the book the insanity plea is of crucial importance. Can you tell us how that worked?

Sara Sligar:
The idea of an insanity defense had been around for a really long time but even though there are all these huge changes happening in the sort of psychology and sociology spheres there was a lot of rethinking of how criminal behavior and how psychology actually work. The standard that was being used in Kansas at this time was from the 1840s, it’s called the M’Naghten test and it was just a question of like, “Did the defendant know what they were doing was wrong at the time that they committed it?” This really like, yes, no answer. One thing that’s really interesting about In Cold Blood and I think one of its really valuable interventions is that Capote says, “That’s really insufficient to understanding who these people were and the possible reasons why they may have committed the crime.” There were actually extremely long details, sort of psychiatric profiles that were produced but they weren’t allowed to be admitted into evidence. Because it’s a book it’s a narrative account, it’s not a trial, Capote’s able to kind of introduce explanations without having to come down hard on the idea of like, “Well should these men have been exonerated or not exonerated?” But one thing I think that’s really valuable about the book and looking at it in conjunction with the legal system is that it creates a lot more space for these really complex ideas of psychology and of human behavior.

Ed Ayers:
It sounds like In Cold Blood brought together a lot of things that were happening at the time. You’d mentioned that Capote himself said that the day of the execution of the murderers was the worst day of his life but what was the impact of this book on him other than making him rich and famous?

Sara Sligar:
It did destroy him in a lot of ways. He died a few decades later but a lot of people who knew him said that he was just, yeah, he was never the same after working on this. He struggled a lot with addiction, he had a lot of trouble writing. It was really emotionally taxing for him and I do think it’s a great work of art but it’s explored a little bit in, there’s that great film, Capote, with Catherine Keener and Philip Seymour Hoffman. They sort of explore some of the psychological toll I think in a quite responsible way.

Ed Ayers:
So you’ve just written your own crime book but it’s a novel, not non-fiction. What did you learn from Capote and what was it like shifting from the study of true crime to the writing of crime fiction? How do you navigate that?

Sara Sligar:
I do think from Capote as a writer his attention to detail and the kind of vividness of it, the way he can kind of immerse you in an atmosphere I find really successful and certainly something that I emulate. My book, even though it is not true crime, it does think a lot about these ethical questions of representing crime and criminal behavior, the ways in which there are popular stories that get told are different from what might really happen in someone’s life.

Ed Ayers:
Sara Sligar is the author of Take Me Apart. She’s also a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California.