THE NONFICTION NOVEL AS PSYCHIATRIC CASEBOOK: TRUMAN CAPOTE'S IN COLD BLOOD
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J. TECHNICAL WRITING AND COMMUNICATION, Vol. 29(3) 289-303, 1999
THE NONFICTION NOVEL AS PSYCHIATRIC CASEBOOK:
TRUMAN CAPOTE’S IN COLD BLOOD
CHERYL A. KOSKI
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and
Bechtel Jacobs Company LLC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
ABSTRACT
As proposed in the classic work by Hervey Cleckley, M.D.—The Mask of
Sanity—a psychopath typically meets sixteen diagnostic criteria. Every one
of them applies to Richard Hickock as he is revealed by Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood, a nonfiction novel about the murder of Kansas farmer Herbert
W. Clutter and his family forty years ago. It transcends the boundaries of
traditional journalism by closely examining the entire constellation of
antisocial personality traits that Hickock exhibits. Drawn in large part from
jailhouse interviews, Capote’s portrait of Hickock breathes life into the
psychiatric literature, thus rendering intelligible the mental evaluation
provided by the physician who examined the accused in preparation for
his upcoming trial. In so doing, Capote’s best-selling masterpiece serves
as a case study of a psychopath, one that conforms to established medical
authority while maintaining its popular appeal.
Had it not been for Truman Capote’s best-selling masterpiece, In Cold Blood,
the murder of Kansas farmer Herbert W. Clutter and his family in 1959 would
have been long forgotten by now. Concern for the victims gave way to fascina-
tion with the perpetrators [1, p. 473] as Capote strove to understand the two
figures central to his “True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Conse-
quences”: convicted murderers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. During an
interview conducted shortly after the book’s publication, Capote explains how
he schooled himself in preparation for writing his true crime story:
289
© 1999, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc.290 / KOSKI
I did months of comparative research on murder, murderers, the criminal
mentality, and I interviewed quite a number of murderers—solely to give me
perspective on these two boys. And then crime. I didn’t know anything about
crime or criminals when I began to do the book. I certainly do now! I’d say
80 per cent of the research I did I have never used. But it gave me such a
grounding that I never had any hesitation in my consideration of the subject
[2, pp. 52-53].
Then, too, after Dick and Perry were incarcerated, Capote spent endless
hours talking with them over a period of four years: “I was very attentive to
them. I was drawing them out: out of boredom and out of loneliness, if nothing
else. Who else was paying any attention to them?” [3, p. 126]. All of the
hard work that Capote invested in the book paid off handsomely, and not only in
royalties totaling millions of dollars. For there is little question that in Capote’s
hands, the Clutter murder case transcends the boundaries of traditional
journalism, instead “receiving the full news-as-sociology/psychology treatment”
[4, p. 245].
JOURNALISM VERSUS THE NONFICTION NOVEL
Contrast the book with the front-page story that appeared in the Kansas City
Star on the day that Dick and Perry were hanged:
Two condemned killers, their last pleas for mercy refused by a governor, a
federal judge and a member of the U.S. Supreme court, were hanged shortly
after midnight today.
Gov. William Avery refused to commute the death sentences and Judge
George Templar of Topeka refused a writ of habeas corpus for the two. They
are Richard Eugene Hickock, 33, and Perry Edward Smith, 36, convicted at
Garden City five years ago of the murders of four members of the Herbert
Clutter family.
For the Associated Press reporter who wrote the story, the two men and
their deadly deed are quite easily distilled into one sentence. And their
mental state receives no more than brief mention. According to Kenneth
Harton, deputy warden of the Kansas penitentiary at Lansing, both men
appeared “as though they expected” the turndowns [5, p. 1]. Nobody expects
a newspaper account to provide enough detail to satisfy students of criminal psy-
chology. But that is precisely what critics of the book have hoped to find, given
Capote’s claim that In Cold Blood is a “nonfiction novel”—that is, “a work of
reportage to which fiction techniques are applied” [6, p. 62]. Capote himself
explains:PSYCHIATRIC CASEBOOK / 291
The motivating factor in my choice of material—that is, choosing to write a
true account of a murder case—was altogether literary. The decision was
based on a theory I’ve harbored since I first began to write professionally,
which is well over 20 years ago. It seemed to me that journalism, reportage,
could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the “nonfiction novel,” as I
thought of it. . . . [O]n the whole, journalism is the most underestimated, the
least explored of literary mediums.
Contending that In Cold Blood is the first book of its kind, Capote points out
that the Dicks and Perrys of this world are not easy to depict accurately: “the
reporter must be able to empathize with personalities outside his usual imagina-
tive range, mentalities unlike his own, kinds of people he would never have
written about had he not been forced to by encountering them inside the journal-
istic situation” [2, pp. 47-50].
THE BOOK REVIEWS
The vast majority of critics are satisfied with how Dick and Perry are ren-
dered in Capote’s book. One exception is Stanley Kauffmann, who argues that
its psychological inquiry is insufficient. “We do get fairly clear pictures of the
two murderers, but this is surely minimal in so long a book; and the portraits,
though extended, are not deep. . . . [W]e do not know enough about these two
men at the close to justify the time we have spent with them” [7, pp. 93-94].
Tony Tanner agrees, adding that the book’s limitations are endemic to the
nonfiction novel. An assembly of facts, it cannot offer “profound inquiring
insights into the significance of the psychopath” [8, p. 102]. But other critics
have an entirely different take on the book. One of them contends that more
finely drawn portraits of Dick and Perry are provided by Capote than by the
“exceptionally competent” [9, p. 268] Dr. W. Mitchell Jones, a specialist in
criminal psychology:
Although the psychiatrist’s report is included in the data pertinent to the case
file on Smith and Hickock, by the time the reader reaches this report in the
book, the medical diagnosis does not seem to mean very much. Its conclu-
sions are intelligible in terms of the evidence Capote had previously pre-
sented. But the conclusions as such seem no more than a professional label
fixed on a pair of consciousnesses that have been rendered more justly and
more emphatically in the material that has preceded [10, p. 119].
For the most part, the critics have neglected Dick, focusing instead on Capote’s
treatment of Perry. Arguably the “most interesting character in the book” [8,
p. 102], Perry “dominates” In Cold Blood [11, p. 117] supposedly because
Capote personally identified with him: as children, neither had the benefit of
adequate parenting. But at least one reviewer of the book is particularly taken292 / KOSKI
with Capote’s portrayal of Dick: “As he appears in In Cold Blood he is the most
complete study I can remember of the spite which makes a certain sort of crimi-
nal” [12, p. 96].
THE PSYCHIATRIC LITERATURE
One way to resolve the question of whether the book succeeds as a nonfiction
novel is to examine it against the psychiatric literature. Consider Dick in particu-
lar—exactly what “sort of criminal” is he? According to Dr. Jones, the antisocial
behavior that Dick exhibits can point to only one diagnosis: severe character dis-
order [9, pp. 294-295]. In other words, Dick is a psychopath, a term that is
defined more precisely by the medical community than by the public at large.
The bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disor-
ders, 4th edition (DSM-IV), identifies the essential feature of the antisocial
personality: “a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of
others” [13, p. 645].
First recognized at the turn of the century, antisocial personality disorder
is still popularly known as “psychopathy” or “sociopathy,” designations
that for the most part have gone out of favor in the medical community
because they have been used indiscriminately by the general public to
indicate little more than “disapproval or lack of comprehension” [14,
pp. 35-37]. Consider, for example, a comment made by Sheriff Earl Robinson
when the bodies of the Clutters were discovered: “This is apparently the
case of a psychopathic killer,” he said [15, p. 7], falling prey to the common
misconception that the words “psychopathic” and “killer” are inextricably
linked.
Despite employing the now-outdated term “psychopath,” the classic work on
the topic otherwise remains as authoritative today as when it first appeared
decades ago. Published in five editions from 1941 to 1988, Hervey Cleckley’s
The Mask of Sanity still has no close rivals. “We shall refer often to this vol-
ume,” announce Samuel Yochelson, M.D. and Ph.D., and Stanton E. Samenow,
Ph.D.—who are themselves cited as leading experts on the criminal personality
[16, pp. 11, 18]—noting that Cleckley offers what is to their knowledge “the
most thorough description of psychopaths” available today [17, pp. 89-90]. In an
attempt “to follow the general methods of science,” Cleckley, a psychiatrist, lists
and discusses sixteen “characteristic points” of the psychopath “so that we may
recognize him readily and distinguish him from others” [18, p. 337]. As Capote
presents him, Dick meets every one of Cleckley’s sixteen criteria. Eschewing
what one physician calls “the flattened language of modern psychiatry,” Capote
turns instead to the literary method, “the soundest technique ever devised for
investigating human experience” [19, pp. 132-133].PSYCHIATRIC CASEBOOK / 293
CLECKLEY’S SIXTEEN CRITERIA
1. Superficial charm and good “intelligence”: More often than not, the typi-
cal psychopath will seem particularly agreeable and make a distinctly positive
impression when he is first encountered. . . . Nor does he, on the other hand,
seem to be artificially exerting himself like one who is covering up or who wants
to sell you a bill of goods. . . . He looks like the real thing. . . . Psychometric tests
also very frequently show him of superior intelligence [18, p. 338]. Bob Sands,
the owner of the body shop where Dick last worked, is one of those interviewed
by Special Agent Harold Nye of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI).
According to Sands, “Dick kind of has a way with him, you know. He can be
very likeable” [9, p. 168]. And Mr. Sands isn’t alone in his opinion. The clerk at
a Kansas City clothing store has no idea that Dick is there for the purpose of
“hanging paper” in the form of a worthless check:
For the task proposed, it seemed, Dick had perfect pitch. He breezed in,
breezily introduced Perry to the clerk as “a friend of mine about to get mar-
ried,” and went on, “I’m his best man. Helping him kind of shop around for
the clothes he’ll want. Ha-ha, what you might say his—ha-ha— trousseau.”
The salesman “ate it up.”
Dick is so convincing that when he claims to have forgotten his wallet—“a ploy
so feeble,” it seemed to Perry, “that it couldn’t possibly `fool a day-old
nigger’”—the clerk “produced a blank check, and when Dick made it out for
eighty dollars more than the bill totaled, instantly paid over the difference in
cash” [9, p. 97]. Even under the most stressful of circumstances, Dick is particu-
larly agreeable. As he is about to be hanged, for example, he goes so far as to
shake hands with Nye and three other KBI agents: “`Nice to see you,’ Hickock
said with his most charming smile; it was as if he were greeting guests at his
own funeral” [9, p. 339]. More than just personable, Dick is also highly intelli-
gent: “An I.Q. test taken in prison gave him a rating of 130; the average subject,
in prison or out, scores between 90 and 110” [9, p. 31].
2. Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking: Excellent logi-
cal reasoning is maintained and, in theory, the patient can foresee the
consequences of injudicious or antisocial acts, outline acceptable or admirable
plans of life, and ably criticize in words his former mistakes. . . . He seems to
respond with adequate feelings to another’s interest in him and, as he discusses
his wife, his children, or his parents, he is likely to be judged a man of warm
human responses, capable of full devotion and loyalty [18, p. 339]. Perry is con-
vinced that Dick is grounded in reality, characterizing his partner in crime as
“shrewd, a realist, he `cut through things,’ there were no clouds in his head or
straw in his hair” [9, p. 44]. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Dick
can foresee the consequences of his actions. After writing bad checks all over294 / KOSKI
town, he makes an accurate prediction about his father: “I know Dad. He’ll want
to make them good. Like he tried to before. And he can’t—he’s old and he’s
sick, he ain’t got anything” [9, p. 99]. Then, too, Dick is able to outline accept-
able plans of life, as he once did for the parole board that heard his case: “I have
three boys who I will definitely take care of” [9, p. 31]. Clearly, he cares about
his father and his children—right? Maybe not. For he heads to Mexico without
giving his family a backward glance. “There were those Dick claimed to love:
three sons, a mother, a father, a brother—persons he hadn’t dared confide his
plans to, or bid goodbye, though he never expected to see them again—not in
this life” [9, p. 106]. And even though Dick cannot keep himself from molesting
young girls, he is capable of acknowledging that his pedophiliac impulses led to
“some of the lowest things I have ever done” [9, pp. 201, 278].
3. Absence of “nervousness” or psychoneurotic manifestations: Regularly we
find in him extraordinary poise rather than jitteriness or worry. . . . Even under
concrete circumstances that would for the ordinary person cause embarrass-
ment, confusion, acute insecurity, or visible agitation, his relative serenity is
likely to be noteworthy [18, pp. 339-340]. Following the crime, Dick returns
home, having driven over eight hundred miles in a twenty-four hour period. Yet
not one member of his family notices anything different about him at dinner:
“The others at the table—his mother, his father, his younger brother—were not
conscious of anything uncommon in his manner.” As his father later tells Nye,
“He seemed the same as ever” [9, pp. 73-74, 170]. Even Nye himself is
impressed with Dick’s poise. Upon meeting the prisoner in the interrogation
room, Nye shakes hands with him. The KBI agent recalls, “his hand was drier
than mine.” Even after Nye reads Dick his rights, “He was calm as could be” [9,
pp. 216-217]. The threat of a death sentence does not visibly affect him, either:
Outwardly, Hickock seemed to one and all an unusually untroubled young
man. When he was not socializing or sleeping, he lay on his cot smoking or
chewing gum and reading sports magazines or paperback thrillers. Often he
simply lay there whistling old favorites (“You Must Have Been a Beautiful
Baby,” “Shuffle Off to Buffalo”), and staring at an unshaded light bulb that
burned day and night in the ceiling of the cell [9, p. 262].
The phrase “cool as a cucumber” seems to have been coined just for Dick.
4. Unreliability: Although the psychopath is likely to give an early impression
of being a thoroughly reliable person, it will soon be found that on many
occasions he shows no sense of responsibility whatsoever. . . . If such failures
occurred uniformly and immediately, others would soon learn not to rely upon
psychopaths or to be surprised at their conduct. It is, however, characteristic for
them during some periods to show up regularly at work. . . . They may apply
their excellent abilities in business . . . for a week, for months, or even for a year
or more [18, p. 340]. Even though Dick had “hammered home the every-minutePSYCHIATRIC CASEBOOK / 295 importance of the next twenty-four hours,” he is over a half-hour late meeting Perry at the Little Jewel cafe in Olathe, Kansas [9, pp. 14-15]. And that isn’t the only time he is late meeting Perry. “Dick had dropped his partner at the Washateria, promising to come back for him within the hour,” and when he doesn’t show, Perry is overcome with anxiety. Dick’s reaction? “I’m sorry, honey. I knew you’d get the bends” [9, pp. 192-194]. Tardiness isn’t the only sign of Dick’s unreliability. After working at the Bob Sands Body Shop for several months in the fall of 1959, Dick leaves without giving his employer any notice: “From August until—Well, I never saw him after the nineteenth of November, or maybe it was the twentieth. . . . Surprised? Well, yes. Yes, I was. We were on a fairly friendly basis.” Dick’s father has a similar story to tell: “lately there, he seemed to be settling down. Working for the Bob Sands Body Shop, over in Olathe. Living here at home with us, getting to bed early, not violating his parole any shape or fashion” [9, pp. 167-168]. And even Dick himself seems to believe that he had turned over a new leaf after being released from prison: “I figured I had every chance to start new. I got a job in Olathe, lived with my family, and stayed home nights. I was doing swell—” [9, p. 218]. 5. Untruthfulness and insincerity: The psychopath shows a remarkable disregard for truth and is to be trusted no more in his accounts of the past than in his promises for the future or his statement of present intentions. . . . Whether there is reasonable chance for him to get away with the fraud or whether certain and easily foreseen detection is at hand, he is apparently unperturbed and does the same impressive job [18, p. 341]. Stopping for gas about seven miles from the Clutters’ River Valley Farm, Dick demonstrates that he is a facile liar: “Just passing through,” he says to the service station attendant. “On our way to Arizona. We got jobs waiting there. Construction work. Any idea the mileage between here and Tucumcari, New Mexico?” [9, p. 54]. Once at the Clutters’ farm, Dick finds that sixteen-year-old Nancy Clutter is as gullible as they come: “wow, did he toss her a tearjerker,” Perry tells two KBI agents, “said he’d been raised an orphan in an orphanage, and how nobody had ever loved him, and his only relative was a sister who lived with men without marrying them” [9, p. 242]. But Perry is taken in, too. Had Dick not “proceeded to woo Perry, flatter him—pretend, for example, that he believed all the buried-treasure stuff and shared his beachcomber yearnings and seaport longings,” the two would have never become partners. Eventually, though, Perry suspects the truth, that “all along Dick had only been pretending, just kidding him” [9, pp. 55, 100], and finally, Dick lets it fly: “Diamonds. Buried treasure. Wake up, little boy. There ain’t no caskets of gold. No sunken ship” [9, p. 124]. Even an experienced detective like Nye feels himself drawn into the web of lies that Dick spins: “His poise, his explicitness, the assured presentation of verifiable detail impressed Nye—though, of course, the boy was lying. Well, wasn’t he?” [9, p. 221]. Not one to waste his talent for deceit, Dick decides to impersonate an Air Force
296 / KOSKI
officer: “It was a project that had long fascinated him” [9, p. 214]. His arrest is
all that prevents him from implementing it.
6. Lack of remorse or shame: The psychopath apparently cannot accept
substantial blame for the various misfortunes which befall him and which he
brings down upon others. Usually he denies emphatically all responsibility and
directly accuses others as responsible [18, p. 343]. Dick washes his hands of the
crime, telling Nye and another KBI agent, “`Perry Smith killed the Clutters.’ He
lifted his head and slowly straightened up in the chair, like a fighter staggering
to his feet. `It was Perry. I couldn’t stop him. He killed them all’” [9, p. 230].
Then, after he is sentenced to die by hanging, Dick writes to Everett Steerman,
Chairman of the Legal Aid Committee of the Kansas State Bar Association,
charging that the two defense attorneys are “the chief cause of the
correspondent’s present predicament” [9, p. 326].
7. Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior: Not only is the psychopath
undependable, but also in more active ways he cheats, deserts, annoys, brawls,
fails, and lies without any apparent compunction [18, p. 343]. In the
autobiographical statement that he writes at the behest of Dr. Jones, Dick
provides a telling detail about his first wife: “After we were married, I worked at
a service-station near Kansas City. I worked from 8 at night till 8 in the morning.
Sometimes my wife stayed with me all night—she was afraid I couldn’t keep
awake, so she came to help me.” Apparently, she was devoted to her husband.
Nevertheless, Dick carelessly drifted into an extramarital affair: “I met this girl
one day . . . and we went to have a cup of coffee. Her husband was away in the
Marine Corps. To make a long story short, I started going out with her” [9, pp.
278-279]. And then there is Dick’s predilection for running down dogs:
The car was moving. A hundred feet ahead, a dog trotted along the side of the
road. Dick swerved toward it. It was an old half-dead mongrel, brittle-boned
and mangy, and the impact, as it met the car, was little more than what a bird
would make. But Dick was satisfied. “Boy!” he said—and it was what he
always said after running down a dog, which was something he did whenever
the opportunity arose. “Boy! We sure splattered him!” [9, pp. 112-113].
Given how Dick treats an old dog, he most certainly would take a dim view of
Perry’s making friends with a squirrel that climbs through the jailhouse window
[9, p. 254]. Dick steals just for the fun of it, too, as Perry explains. “Dick loves
to steal. It’s an emotional thing with him—a sickness. I’m a thief, too, but only
if I don’t have the money to pay. Dick, if he was carrying a hundred dollars in
his pocket, he’d steal a stick of chewing gum” [9, p. 290].
8. Poor judgment and failure to learn by experience: Despite his excellent
rational powers, the psychopath continues to show the most execrable judgment
about attaining what one might presume to be his ends. . . . This exercise ofPSYCHIATRIC CASEBOOK / 297
execrable judgment is not particularly modified by experience, however chas-
tening his experiences may be [18, p. 345]. What Cleckley calls “execrable
judgment,” Perry calls “a crazy-man stunt”:
Money was the problem. Their utter lack of it had led Dick to decide that their
next move should be what Perry considered “a crazy-man stunt”—a return to
Kansas City. When Dick had first urged the return, Perry said, “You ought to
see a doctor.” Now, huddled together in the cold darkness, listening to the
dark, cold rain, they resumed the argument, Perry once more listing the dan-
gers of such a move, for surely by this time Dick was wanted for parole viola-
tion—“if nothing more.” But Dick was not to be dissuaded [9, p. 188].
Soon they are back in Dick’s hometown of Kansas City, driving a stolen car [9,
p. 192].
9. Pathological egocentricity and incapacity for love: The psychopath is
always distinguished by egocentricity. This is usually of a degree not seen in
ordinary people and often is little short of astonishing. . . . His absolute indiffer-
ence to the financial, social, emotional, physical, and other hardships which he
brings upon those for whom he professes love confirms the appraisal during psy-
chiatric studies of his true attitude. We must, let it never be forgotten, judge a
man by his actions rather than by his words. This old saying is especially signifi-
cant when it is the man’s . . . real feelings that we are to judge [18, pp. 346-348].
Even Perry cannot help but think that Dick is “egomaniacal.” Having hitched a
ride with a traveling salesman from Omaha, the two partners in crime wait for
the right moment to strangle their unwitting chauffeur. As Perry sits in the back
seat of Mr. Bell’s car, “listening to Dick’s conceited chatter, hearing him start to
describe his Mexican `amorous conquests,’ he thought how `queer’ it was, `ego-
maniacal.’ Imagine going all out to impress a man you were going to kill, a man
who wouldn’t be alive ten minutes from now” [9, p. 173]. Likewise, Perry has
reason to doubt whether Dick is as “devoted” to his parents as he claims to be
[9, p. 193]. Oh, he nods when Perry tells him, “They’re good people” [9, p. 24].
Then, too, some time back he adorned his body with a tattoo, “a bouquet of
flowers dedicated to MOTHER-DAD” [9, p. 30]. But his actions belie his true
attitude toward his parents. Certainly he is not above causing them financial
hardship: “That gun cost over a hundred dollars,” Mrs. Hickock tells Nye, add-
ing, “Dick bought it on credit. . . . He used our names to buy it—his daddy let
him—so here we are, liable for the payments, and when you think of Walter,
sick as he is, and all the things we need, all we do without” [9, p. 171]. Neither
does Dick hesitate to “fleece a few old friends” when he finds himself short on
cash [9, p. 195].
10. General poverty in major affective reactions: Vexation, spite, . . . peevish
resentment, shallow moods of self-pity, puerile attitudes of vanity, and absurd and
showy poses of indignation are all within his emotional scale and are freely298 / KOSKI
sounded as the circumstances of life play upon him. . . . Even in the situations of
squalor and misery into which he repeatedly works himself, when confined in jails
. . . he does not show anything that could be called woe or despair or serious sor-
row. . . . Psychopaths are often witty and sometimes give a superficial impression
of that far different and very serious thing, humor. Humor, however, in what may
be its full, true sense, they never have [18, pp. 348-349]. Having been convicted of
four counts of first-degree murder, Dick shares his most pressing concern with his
mother: his hair, or more precisely, the lack thereof. “`My hair is coming out by
the handfuls,’ he confided in yet another letter to his mother. `I’m frantic. Nobody
in our family was baldheaded as I can recall, and it makes me frantic the idea of
being an ugly old baldhead’” [9, p. 322]. Four people are dead, and Dick worries
about his hair while awaiting the hangman’s noose. Anyway, the sentence that he
received is far too harsh:
“All I can hope is that some day we’ll get a new trial, and Perry will testify
and tell the truth. Only I doubt it. He’s plain determined that if he goes I go.
Back to back. It’s not right. Many a man has killed and never seen the inside
of a death cell. And I never killed anybody. If you’ve got fifty thousand dol-
lars to spend, you could bump off half of Kansas City and just laugh ha ha.” A
sudden grin obliterated his woeful indignation. “Uh-oh. There I go again. Old
crybaby. You’d think I’d learn” [9, p. 334].
All of his appeals exhausted, Dick still does not exhibit any serious sorrow;
quite the opposite. “That Hickock’s got a sense of humor,” says one of the wit-
nesses at the hanging. “They was telling me how, about an hour ago, one of the
guards says to him, `This must be the longest night of your life.’ And Hickock,
he laughs and says `No, the shortest’” [9, p. 338].
11. Specific loss of insight: He has absolutely no capacity to see himself as
others see him [18, p. 350]. If there’s one thing Dick is sure of, it’s that he’s “a
normal” [9, pp. 93, 108, 210, 229]. Troubled by the murders, Perry suggests, “I
think there must be something wrong with us. To do what we did.” When Dick
remains silent, Perry tries again: “There’s got to be something wrong with some-
body who’d do a thing like that.” Finally, Dick responds: “`Deal me out, baby. . .
. I’m a normal.’ And Dick meant what he said. He thought of himself as bal-
anced, as sane as anyone—maybe a bit smarter than the average fellow, that’s
all” [9, p. 108].
12. Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations: The psychopath can-
not be depended upon to show the ordinary responsiveness to special
consideration or kindness or trust. . . . The psychopath who squanders $1,000 on
a lady of the night usually seems not to share very actively in the distressing worry
and deprivation that his wife and children (or his parents) may experience quite
substantially [18, p. 354]. The two fugitives make their way to Acapulco, where it
dawns on Dick that “the dough’s going-going-gone.” So he makes a suggestion:PSYCHIATRIC CASEBOOK / 299
“We’ll sell the wagon. Find a job. Save our dough. And see what happens.”
As though Perry couldn’t predict precisely what would happen. Suppose they
got two or three hundred for the old Chevrolet. Dick, if he knew Dick, and
he did—now he did—would spend it right away on vodka and women [9,
pp. 118-119].
And as it turns out, “everything had evolved as Perry had prophesied: Dick had
sold the car, and three days later the money, slightly less than two hundred dol-
lars, had largely vanished” [9, p. 123]. Then later, once the two are captured and
lodged in separate cells, each begins plotting an escape. Concerned about Dick
as well as himself, Perry is emphatic: “All preparations must include him” [9, p.
265]. Dick is not nearly as generous. He plans to head to the Colorado moun-
tains—“alone, of course; Perry’s future did not concern him” [9, p. 263]. Even
before the two are arrested, Dick plans to ditch his partner: “And there was but
one way to do it: Say nothing—just go” [9, p. 215].
13. Fantastic and uninviting behavior with drink and sometimes without:
Although some psychopaths do not drink at all and others drink rarely, con-
siderable overindulgence in alcohol is very often prominent in the life story. . . .
A major point about the psychopath and his relation to alcohol can be found in
the shocking, fantastic, uninviting, or relatively inexplicable behavior which
emerges when he drinks—sometimes when he drinks only a little. It is very likely
that the effects of alcohol facilitate such acts [18, pp. 355-356]. Dick is the one
who keeps a pint of Orange Blossom in the car’s glove compartment, and Dick
is the one who suggests, “How about a cocktail?” on the drive to the Clutters’
farm. Perry joins him, but only half-heartedly. “Personally, Perry didn’t care
what he drank, for he was not much of a drinker” [9, p. 48], unlike Dick, who
frequently resorts to alcohol and admits to once having gone on a binge that
lasted “almost a month” [9, pp. 99, 124, 220, 279]. When the pint is half gone,
Dick hands the bottle to Perry with a caution: “Save the rest. . . . We may need
it” [9, p. 49].
14. Suicide rarely carried out: Despite the deep behavioral pattern of
throwing away or destroying the opportunities of life that underlies the
psychopath’s superficial self-content, ease, charm, and often brilliance, we do
not find him prone to take a final determining step of this sort in literal suicide
[18, p. 358]. The idea of suicide is so foreign to Dick that he thinks Perry’s
jailhouse hunger strike must be nothing more than a superb job of play-acting:
“So they’ll say he’s crazy and put him in the crazy house.” Even when Perry is
reported to be lying comatose in a prison hospital bed, his weight having fallen
from 168 to 115 pounds, Dick “would not concede that his purpose was suicide”
[9, p. 318].
15. Sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated: The psychopath’s sex
life invariably shows peculiarities. . . . The male psychopath, despite his usual
ability to complete the physical act successfully with a woman, never seems to300 / KOSKI
find anything meaningful or personal in his relations. . . . Psychopaths some-
times seem by preference to seek sexual relations in sordid surroundings with
persons of low intellectual or social status. . . . Entanglements which go out of
their way to mock ordinary human sensibility or what might be called basic
decency are prevalent in their sexual careers. . . . Sexual exploits often seem cho-
sen almost purposively to put the subject himself, as well as others, in positions
of sharp indignity and distastefulness [18, pp. 359, 362-363]. Having become
simultaneously engaged to an eighteen-year-old prostitute and a wealthy widow
of fifty, Dick brings the younger of his two fiancees to the hotel room in which
he and Perry are staying. The next afternoon, Perry reminds Dick that they must
check out by 2 P.M.: “`Dick? You hear me?’ Perry said. `It’s almost one o’clock.’
Dick was awake. He was rather more than that; he and Inez were making love.
As though reciting a rosary, Dick incessantly whispered: `Is it good, baby? Is it
good?’ But Inez, smoking a cigarette, remained silent” [9, pp. 118-119, 147].
The presence of a third party is no impediment to Dick’s enjoyment of the sex
act.
16. Failure to follow any life plan: The psychopath shows a striking inability
to follow any sort of life plan consistently, whether it be one regarded as good or
evil. He does not maintain an effort toward any far goal at all [18, p. 364].
Perry, who allows Dick to call all the shots, nevertheless is uncomfortable with
the aimlessness of the odyssey that they begin after the killings:
He and Dick were “running a race without a finish line”—that was how it
struck him. And now, after not quite a week in Miami, the long ride was to re-
sume. Dick, who had worked one day at the ABC auto-service company for
sixty-five cents an hour, had told him, “Miami’s worse than Mexico.
Sixty-five cents! Not me. I’m white.” So tomorrow, with only twenty-seven
dollars left of the money raised in Kansas City, they were heading west again,
to Texas, to Nevada—“nowhere definite” [9, p. 202].
Their flight from the law ends in Las Vegas, where they are promptly arrested
and taken into custody.
SOME FINAL REFLECTIONS
Despite meeting all sixteen of Cleckley’s criteria, Dick is atypical in one way:
the psychopath “usually does not commit murder or other offenses that promptly
lead to major prison sentences” [18, p. 262]. In fact, Dick would have us believe
that he was ambivalent about going through with the murders. At least, so he
says in a fascinating magazine article that he wrote and published with the help
of reporter Mack Nations some three years before he was hanged. Describing
the night of the killings, Dick claims that Mrs. Clutter almost talked him into
leaving when Perry was occupied in another part of the house: “as I look backPSYCHIATRIC CASEBOOK / 301
on it I know it wouldn’t have taken much to have induced me to walk out. I was
getting pretty soft-hearted” [20, p. 15].
Of course, Dick does not blow away four people all by himself; moreover,
there is good reason to believe that Perry is the sole trigger man [6, pp. 65, 69].
Yet the fact that they act in concert is essential to understanding the crime. It is
the combination of Dick’s psychopathy and Perry’s mental disorder—most
likely, paranoid schizophrenic reaction, according to Dr. Jones [9, p. 298]—that
is lethal. Alone, neither Dick nor Perry would have committed the murderous
act. But together, they turn into a powder keg that quite literally blows up in the
faces of four members of the Clutter family. Or as Capote notes, paraphrasing
Dr. Joseph Satten of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, “the crime would
not have occurred except for a certain frictional interplay between the perpetra-
tors” [9, p. 298].
Given how thoroughly Capote examines both Perry and Dick, In Cold Blood
essentially becomes a psychiatric casebook. So it’s no wonder that Capote
becomes frustrated with critics who charge that the book falls short as a nonfic-
tion novel: “does Capote ever really explain, or recreate, or illuminate that dark
moment of destruction in the Clutter home?” Dave Godfrey asks in the Tama-
rack Review. “Not to my satisfaction,” he answers, adding, “nor does the whole
book form an inevitably instructive web about that dark moment which is its
structural core” [21, p. 92]. Responding to such critics during an interview con-
ducted three years after the book was published, Capote minces no words: “I’m
always surprised to read reviews of In Cold Blood that lament, `But Mr. Capote
didn’t tell us why.‘ Well, short of getting a baseball bat and clubbing you over
the head with it, I don’t see how I could have made the point any more clearly”
[22, p. 133].
Amen.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author is grateful to Dr. Paul Ashdown, Professor of Journalism in the
College of Communications at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who
reviewed an early draft of the manuscript.
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sissippi, Jackson, pp. 47-68, 1987 (originally published 1966).
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Jason Aronson, Northvale, New Jersey, 1997.
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the So-Called Psychopathic Personality (5th Edition), Emily S. Cleckley, Augusta,
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19. D. Hellerstein, Keeping Secrets, Telling Tales: The Psychiatrist as Writer, Journal of
Medical Humanities, 18:2, pp. 127-139, 1997.
20. R. E. Hickock and M. Nations, America’s Worst Crime in Twenty Years, in Truman
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California, pp. 8-24, 1968 (originally published 1961).
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sippi, Jackson, pp. 110-163, 1987 (originally published 1968).
Other Articles On Communication By This Author
Koski, C. A., Science Writers as Characterized in Medical Journals: What Are Physicians
Saying about Us?, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 28:1, pp. 63-75,
1998.PSYCHIATRIC CASEBOOK / 303 Koski, C. A., Down the Rabbit-Hole: Exploring Health Messages on the World Wide Web, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 27:1, pp. 49-55, 1997. Direct reprint requests to: Cheryl A. Koski College of Communications University of Tennessee 426 Communications Building Knoxville, TN 37996-0347
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