In the wee hours of November 15, 1959, two men broke into the home of the Clutters, a well-to-do farming family in rural Kansas. They were searching for a safe rumored to contain upwards of $10,000. When the safe failed to turn up — Mr. Clutter did all transactions by check — the family were all executed by single shotgun blasts to the head. The murderers made off with little more than about $40 cash, a radio and some binoculars.
The resulting media frenzy attracted the attention of one Truman Capote, accomplished author, soft-spoken dandy and self-aggrandizing fixture of the New York City social scene. Deciding apparently on a whim that he wanted to write about the Clutter family murders, he traveled to Kansas with his friend Harper Lee (yes, that one) in tow. After the killers were caught, he developed a rapport with them, becoming in effect their only friend in the world, for the sole purpose of getting them to tell him what happened that chilly night in 1959. The resulting book, In Cold Blood, published in 1966 (a year after the killers were executed on the same night in April 1965) was a smash hit, more or less inventing the modern true crime genre. Fast forward 55 years later and white women thirst over notorious serial killer Ted Bundy because of a hot actor who played him on Netflix. How did we get here?
