In Cold Blood: Cold Case Files Taint Truman Capote Classic
Photo Credit: Steve Schapiro/CorbisTruman Capote’s masterwork of murder, “In Cold Blood,” cemented two reputations when first published almost five decades ago: his own, as a literary innovator, and detective Alvin Dewey Jr.’s as the most famous Kansas lawman since Wyatt Earp. But new evidence undermines Mr. Capote’s claim that his best seller was an “immaculately factual” recounting of the bloody slaughter of the Clutter family in their Kansas farmhouse.
It also calls into question the image of Mr. Dewey as the brilliant, haunted hero. A long-forgotten cache of Kansas Bureau of Investigation documents from the investigation into the deaths suggests that the events described in two crucial chapters of the 1966 book differ significantly from what actually happened.
Separately, a contract reviewed and authenticated by The Wall Street Journal shows that Mr. Capote in 1965 required Columbia Pictures to offer Mr. Dewey’s wife a job as a consultant to the film version of his book for a fee far greater than the U.S. median family income that year.
The details are to be found in papers from the Clutter case that a now-deceased KBI agent, Harold Nye, carried home with him years ago. Those documents, reviewed in August by the Journal, are the subject of litigation between the adult son of Mr. Nye, who hopes to publish or sell them, and the KBI, which claims to own the material.
Today, the KBI declines to explain the five-day delay in visiting the suspect’s farmhouse or to answer other questions delivered via email as well as by hand to a receptionist at its Topeka headquarters. Over the decades, literary sleuths have turned up numerous journalistic sins in “In Cold Blood,” ranging from minor inaccuracies to outright fabrication. The latest revelations, though, are particularly damaging because they undermine one of the longest-standing defenses of the book: that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation hailed the book as true. Mr. Dewey many times called the book accurate.
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