![]() Unaware of the gravity of their son’s misdeeds, the Hickocks proceed to corroborate many of the details in the account of the jailhouse snitch. (The Kansans of “In Cold Blood” drink a lot of coffee.) Nye is crafty: he says nothing of the murders, maintaining instead that he is seeking Hickock for parole violations and check fraud. Approaching a humble, four-room farmhouse, Nye discovers that Hickock is not home-but his parents are. “Her hands were wet she dried them, sat down at the kitchen table, sipped her coffee opened the envelope.”Įven as Marie pulls out mugshots of the killers, her husband has already sent one of his agents, Harold Nye, to Richard Hickock’s last known address. Without a word, he passes his wife a manila envelope. “Dewey poured two cups of coffee,” Capote writes. His wife, Marie, has no inkling of this development, so she greets him with a recitation of the household emergencies that have occupied her day: the family cat attacked a cocker spaniel one of their boys fell from a tree. Then, quite suddenly, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation received a tip from a prison inmate who said that the murderer may have been his former cellmate, Richard Hickock-with possible assistance from an accomplice, Perry Smith.Ĭapote sets the scene: Alvin Dewey, the taciturn lead detective, returns home that night, flush with the knowledge that he finally has a break in the case. Nineteen days had passed since the ghastly murder of four members of the Clutter family, in their house on the high plains of western Kansas, and detectives still had no clue who might have done it. There’s a terrific sequence midway through Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” which was called into question, recently, by a report in the Wall Street Journal. ![]()
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