Of the people in the world, the Clutters were the least likely to be murdered.
I’m not one for mysteries or true-crime dramas. I generally skip the gruesome news stories. But Truman Capote’s 1966 ground-breaking news report cum novel(?) is considered a classic in the nonfiction world—something I felt I had to read in order to be educated. Let me save you the time; in November of 1959, a respectable Kansas family was brutally murdered in the dead of night. We know this and the identities of the perpetrators from the start, but Capote takes 343 pages, or 14 ½ hours of narration, to take us inside the heads of the two cons who did it, the victims (adults and children alike), their friends and neighbors, the investigators, and possibly the arguably in the pasture. The only puzzle piece missing is the motivation and method. All of which is to say you might find it tedious midway through. Add to that the frustration of numerous attestations to creative falsehoods embedded in the account, and the work’s sensationalism outweighs its journalism.
What I, as a graphologist, found most compelling was the psychological profiles of the killers, complete with detailed descriptions of their handwriting. This account is detailed to the Nth degree, which is both its strength and its weakness.
For a summary of the crime, watch this brief Newsweek documentary. Then check out Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Academy Award winning performance in Capote (2005), the biopic of the investigative storyteller.
