Truman Capote - In Cold Blood - A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences

Dewey’s wife dozed, but she awakened when she felt him leave their bed, heard him once more answering the telephone, and heard, from the nearby room where her sons slept, sobs, a small boy crying. “Paul?” Ordinarily, Paul was neither troubled nor troublesome—not a whiner, ever. He was too busy digging tunnels in the backyard or practicing to be “the fastest runner in Finney County.” But at breakfast that morning he’d burst into tears. His mother had not needed to ask him why; she knew that although he understood only hazily the reasons for the uproar around him, he felt endangered by it—by the harassing telephone, and the strangers at the door, and his father’s worry-wearied eyes. She went to comfort Paul. His brother, three years older, helped. “Paul,” he said, “you take it easy now, and tomorrow I’ll teach you to play poker.”

Dewey was in the kitchen; Marie, searching for him, found him there, waiting for a pot of coffee to percolate and with the murder-scene photographs spread before him on the kitchen table—bleak stains, spoiling the table’s pretty fruit-patterned oil cloth. (Once he had offered to let her look at the pictures. She had declined. She had said, “I want to remember Bonnie the way Bonnie was—and all of them.”) He said, “Maybe the boys ought to stay with Mother.” His mother, a widow, lived not far off, in a house she thought too spacious and silent; the grandchildren were always welcome. “For just a few days. Until—well, until.”

“Alvin, do you think we’ll ever get back to normal living?” Mrs. Dewey asked.

Their normal life was like this: both worked, Mrs. Dewey as an office secretary, and they divided between them the household chores, taking turns at the stove and the sink. (“When Alvin was sheriff, I know some of the boys teased him. Used to say, ‘Look over yonder! Here comes Sheriff Dewey! Tough guy! Totes a six-shooter! But once he gets home, off comes the gun and on goes the apron!’”) At that time they were saving to build a home on a farm that Dewey had bought in 1951—two hundred and forty acres several miles north of Garden City. If the weather was fine, and especially when the days were hot and the wheat was high and ripe, he liked to drive out there and practice his draw – shoot crows, tin cans—or in his imagination roam through the house he hoped to have, and through the garden he meant to plant, and under trees yet to be seeded. He was very certain that some day his own oasis of oaks and elms would stand upon those shadeless plains: “ Some day. God willing.”

A belief in God and the rituals surrounding that belief—church every Sunday, grace before meals, prayers before bed—were an important part of the Deweys’ existence. “I don’t see how anyone can sit down to table without wanting to bless it,” Mrs. Dewey once said. “Sometimes, when I come home from work—well, I’m tired. But there’s always coffee on the stove, and sometimes a steak in the icebox. The boys make a fire to cook the steak, and we talk, and tell each other our day, and by the time supper’s ready I know we have good cause to be happy and grateful. So I say, Thank you, Lord. Not just because I should—because I want to.”

Now Mrs. Dewey said, “Alvin, answer me. Do you think we’ll ever have a normal life again?” He started to reply, but the telephone stopped him.

The old Chevrolet left Kansas City November 21, Saturday night. Luggage was lashed to the fenders and roped to the roof; the trunk was so stuffed it could not be shut; inside, on the back seat, two television sets stood, one atop the other. It was a tight fit for the passengers: Dick, who was driving, and Perry, who sat clutching the old Gibson guitar, his most beloved possession. As for Perry’s other belongings—a card-board suitcase, a gray Zenith portable radio, a gallon jug of root-beer syrup (he feared that his favorite beverage might not be available in Mexico), and two big boxes containing books, manuscripts, cherished memorabilia (and hadn’t Dick raised hell! Cursed, kicked the boxes, called them “five hundred pounds of pig slop!”)—these, too, were part of the car’s untidy interior.

Around midnight they crossed the border into Oklahoma. Perry, glad to be out of Kansas, at last relaxed. Now it was true—they were on their way. On their way, and never coming back—without regret, as far as he was concerned, for he was leaving nothing behind, and no one who might deeply wonder into what thin air he’d spiraled. The same could not be said of Dick. There were those Dick claimed to love: three sons, a mother, a father, a brother—persons he hadn’t dared confide his plans to, or bid goodbye, though he never expected to see them again—not in this life.

Clutter—English Vows given in Saturday ceremony: that headline, appearing on the social page of the Garden City Telegram for November 23, surprised many of its readers. It seemed that Beverly, the second of Mr. Clutter’s surviving daughters, had married Mr. Vere Edward English, the young biology student to whom she had long been engaged. Miss Clutter had worn white, and the wedding, a full-scale affair (“Mrs. Leonard Cowan was soloist, and Mrs. Howard Blanchard organist”), had been “solemnized at the First Methodist Church”—the church in which, three days earlier, the bride had formally mourned her parents, her brother, and her younger sister. However, according to the Telegram ’ s account, “Vere and Beverly had planned to be married at Christmas time. The invitations were printed and her father had reserved the church for that date. Due to the unexpected tragedy and because of the many relatives being here from distant places, the young couple decided to have their wedding Saturday.”

The wedding over, the Clutter kinfolk dispersed. On Monday, the day the last of them left Garden City, the Telegram featured on its front page a letter written by Mr. Howard Fox, of Oregon, Illinois, a brother of Bonnie Clutter. The letter, after expressing gratitude to the townspeople for having opened their “homes and hearts” to the bereaved family, turned into a plea. “There is much resentment in this community [that is, Garden City],” wrote Mr. Fox. “I have even heard on more than one occasion that the man, when found, should be hanged from the nearest tree. Let us not feel this way. The deed is done and taking another life cannot change it. Instead, let us forgive as God would have us do. It is not right that we should hold a grudge in our hearts. The doer of this act is going to find it very difficult indeed to live with himself. His only peace of mind will be when he goes to God for forgiveness. Let us not stand in the way but instead give prayers that he may find his peace.”

The car was parked on a promontory where Perry and Dick had stopped to picnic. It was noon. Dick scanned the view through a pair of binoculars. Mountains. Hawks wheeling in a white sky. A dusty road winding into and out of a white and dusty village. Today was his second day in Mexico, and so far he liked it fine—even the food. (At this very moment he was eating a cold, oily tortilla.) They had crossed the border at Laredo, Texas, the morning of November 23, and spent the first night in a San Luis Potosi brothel. They were now two hundred miles north of their next destination, Mexico City.

“Know what I think?” said Perry. “I think there must be something wrong with us. To do what we did.”‘

“Did what?”

“Out there.”

Dick dropped the binoculars into a leather case, a luxurious receptacle initialed H.W.C. He was annoyed. Annoyed as hell. Why the hell couldn’t Perry shut up? Christ Jesus, what damn good did it do, always dragging the goddam thing up? It really was annoying. Especially since they’d agreed, sort of, not to talk about the goddam thing. Just forget it.