Clutter family "In Cold Blood" killings: Fifty years ago this week.
In Cold Blood. There are few book titles that so vividly recall the incident that sparked their writing, in this case the brutal murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb Kansas.
Those murders occurred 50 years ago this week, on November 15, 1959.
Truman Capote wrote the book, his painful experiment with novel-like non fiction, ably assisted by his childhood friend, Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird.
The killings have overshadowed the small town of Holcomb for a half century.
The trial of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith mesmerized the nation, bringing reporters from all over the world as the so-called “Scopes Monkey Trial” did 34 years earlier in Dayton Tennessee.
Their eventual execution brought little closure for the town’s people, many of whom believed Capote’s work was a commercial exploitation of the victims.
Those brutally murdered were prominent farmer and Holcomb community leader Herbert Clutter, his wife, Bonnie Me Fox, and their children, Kenyon, 15 and Nancy, 16. Hickock and Smith allegedly believed Clutter kept a large amount of money in the house.
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