Word: hickock
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...typical Americans, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, methodically shotgunned a family of four to death for no apparent reason, on November 14, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas. Five years later in Manhattan, for even less apparent reasons, the New Yorker sustained an equally violent, scattershot attack by teddy-boy journalist, Tom Wolfe...
...Hickock and Smith requested his presence at their joint hanging, and Capote was faced with the fact that he had reached them as a friend as well as artist and biographer; that his trust and warmth, especially for Perry Smith, was the very thing their lives had lacked. When you hear Capote accused of capitalizing on the results of that lack, bear in mind that it was the most extreme test of his objectivity. As a friend of the killers he suffered privately and had their graves marked; as artist and craftsman he raised a public monument to the questions...
...which balance and pace the actual story, he has given the speculators on crime and criminal processes much more than an abused rhetoric about society's chickens coming home to roost. Subtly but tellingly, In Cold Blood dispassionately surveys the roost itself: a society in which men such as Hickock and Smith, with IQs of 130, will continue to destroy themselves and others. It is the sort of survey which makes the Police Gazette, criminologists' case histories, liberal weeklies' temporiz- ing, and the babbling reportage of slicksters such as Tom Wolfe, seem like very shallow voices...
...Hickock and Smith, veteran lawbreakers sent to Lansing on larceny and burglary raps, were paroled in mid-1959. Fortnight ago, ending a man hunt set off by a tip from the imprisoned farm hand, police in Las Vegas, Nev. arrested Hickock and Smith at the request of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. Weak-faced Richard Hickock, 28, and runty (5 ft. 4 in.) Perry Smith, 31, broke down under questioning, were arraigned last week on charges of murder. In November, they confessed, they drove to the Clutter farm in the middle of the night, entered the house through an unlocked...
...shooting each in the head with a shotgun held a few inches away. Then, after carefully collecting the fired shells, the killers hurried away with their skimpy loot: a portable radio, a pair of field glasses, about $40 in cash. Why did they murder the Clutters? Explained Hickock: "We didn't want any witnesses...