Detection

While an engrossing and superbly told story, parts of In Cold Blood have long been laid bare as exaggerated, contrived, wrong, or plainly fabricated. Of course, the author can be forgiven his immodest swaggering about the book’s being “immaculately factual” since he did produce a sensational form of narrative nonfiction journalism comprising the best elements of fiction: setting, plot, and character.

To Capote’s credit, his artful use of the phrase “non-fiction novel” in describing his new genre goes a long way toward reconciling these problems with the facts. Yet, truer facts remain.

Had Capote not pressed his repeated assertion about the book’s accuracy, much of the negative criticism might have stayed at a lower volume. Indeed, the title of this book is taken from an actual quote Truman gave to Newsweek reporter Karen Gunderson, who interviewed Capote at his home on Long Island for the 1966 documentary With Love from Truman.^[30]

In the interview, the author emphatically states about his book that, “It’s a completely factual account and every word is true.” Claiming such a lofty standard, however, demands being held to account for it. And held accountable he was.

In Cold Blood had taken the literary world by storm in 1966, making Truman Capote the most famous writer in America. As noted critic Irving Malin observed, “...some consider In Cold Blood a ‘lightweight’ effort; others praise it as a ‘grave and reverend book.’”^[31] Malin’s superb anthology includes ten notable reviewers who contrasted the book’s “public ambiguities and American life in general,” in good company with other prominent writers appraising the Capote oeuvre in relation to his new masterwork.

In Cold Blood had been on bookstore shelves only a month when Phillip K. Tompkins, writing for Esquire magazine, rebutted Capote’s daring claim of accuracy in a scholarly critique titled “In Cold Fact.”^[32] Tompkins, after reading Capote’s book, had set off on a nine-day trip to Kansas to determine the veracity of the author’s declaration that, “One doesn't spend almost six years on a book, the point of which is factual accuracy, and then give way to minor distortions.”^[33]

But the unveiling of minor distortions, along with several major errors in fact, form the hallmarks of Tompkins’s incisive work.

There is one assertion Dr. Tompkins makes, however, that does bear reconsideration, as confirmed by documents now available to which he did not have access at the time: the intimate correspondence between Perry Smith and the Meiers.

As Tompkins relates: ”During our telephone conversation, Mrs. [Josephine] Meier repeatedly told me that she never heard Perry cry; that on the day in question she was in her bedroom, not the kitchen; that she did not turn on the radio to drown out the sound of crying; that she did not hold Perry's hand; that she did not hear Perry say, ‘I’m embraced by shame.’ And finally—that she had never told such things to Capote. Mrs. Meier told me repeatedly and firmly, in her gentle way, that these things were not true.”^[34]

The notion of the undersheriff’s wife being friendly, even overtly caring for one of the Clutter murderers would have been viewed, at best, as indecorous for the time and place. So Josie Meier may have told the young journalist, many years later, what she had to in order to deflect any perceived improprieties by friends and, politically, for her husband’s career as former Finney County sheriff and, at the time, an officer of the Garden City Police Department.

Despite the undersheriff’s early cautions to his wife, however, it appears that both Meiers came to better know and care for Perry Smith in the years leading up to his execution—in correspondence, holiday cards, and at least two personal visits to him on Death Row at Kansas State Penitentiary (a 750-mile round trip they undertook by car).

Prior to his execution, Perry handed a leather satchel to Josie Meier containing his personal journals, some family photos, a few handwritten pages of poetry, and what meager possessions he had remaining, saying, “Here. Take all this stuff. I won’t need it.”^[35]

Figure 2. Perry Smith’s journals and memorabilia

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Truman Capote has been quoted as saying that as much as 80% of his research for the book was never used.^[36] Even so, it’s very likely that neither he nor Harper Lee were aware of the facts that appear here.

It has been well established that Alvin Dewey, the KBI agent coordinating the investigation, provided Capote with ample confidential details of the crimes, including those with highly sensitive elements, the kind that gave the book such human intimacies as passages from Nancy Clutter’s private diary, containing her last entry written an hour before a shotgun blast ended her life. Apart from this ongoing and widely acknowledged ethical breach lasting years, given what follows, one is left to wonder if Dewey hadn’t actually been the guiding hand behind the story that ultimately appeared in print; the story the KBI itself has eagerly promoted for decades.

When I began helping our legal team build our defense in 2012, I dug into the task wholly exasperated at the time and effort it would take away from my business and my life. Reading and digesting all that “closed-case” documentation might have been a true crime devotee’s idea of a good time, but it wasn’t mine. The lawyers, however, urged a thorough index of everything, and doing that required a submersion into material that, over time, both challenged and intrigued the lay historian in me.

Peeling back the layers, each scenario laid out here made little sense on its own. But, as with many mysteries having too many threads, when woven together properly a different tapestry began to emerge. And it wasn’t just me seeing new patterns. Others of note to whom I turned for periodic sanity checks—criminologists, legal experts, journalists, law enforcement officials, psychologists, crime writers—all professed astonishment when presented with new and materially relevant facts to a story that had been pretty well known. Or so they thought.