Although the basic components of murder in cold blood have persisted - random victims, nonsensical or accidental motives, whiteness as violence - terms like “mass shooting” and “domestic terrorism” have replaced Capote’s “multiple murder,” and rightly so. Armed robbery taken to the limits of sanity. Two white men, one gun, four bodies (Holcomb).Ĭapote subtitled his classic, “a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences.” For Capote and his readers, the phrase “multiple murder” suggested an extraordinary crime. Variations on a theme since 1965, with a single constant: Two white men, four guns, thirteen bodies (Columbine) one white man, three guns, twelve bodies (Aurora) one white man, three guns, twenty-eight bodies (Sandy Hook) one white man, one gun, nine bodies (Charleston). The fiftieth anniversary of In Cold Blood has passed with little fanfare, perhaps because the story is tired. They are characters, flawed and rounded, antiheroes who binge or starve and whose experiences of the world correlate roughly with our own. Perry on the other hand, was without appetite he subsisted on root beer, aspirin, and cigarettes.” Despite their crimes, Dick and Perry are not inhuman killers, or so Capote leads us to believe. “During the past few days he’d known a hunger that nothing - three successive steaks, a dozen Hershey bars, a pound of gumdrops - seemed to interrupt. According to In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s creative history of the crime, the meal included “several chicken-salad sandwiches… an untouched hamburger and a glass of root beer.” Dick eats Perry’s hamburger, then orders another. On November 17 th, 1959, three days after executing the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith had lunch at the Eagle Buffet in Kansas City.
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