Free Republic

DNA testing on the two killers profiled in the book "In Cold Blood" does not link them to a quadruple homicide Florida more than 50 years ago, ending perhaps the best chance police and the victims' family had at solving the cold case. Capt. Jeff Bell of the Sarasota Sheriff's Office told The Associated Press on Tuesday authorities were unable to make a match between killers Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, and Christine Walker, who was slain in 1959 in Sarasota with her husband and two children. The family was killed about a month after Hickock and Smith murdered a...

Truman 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...

It's one of America's most haunting crime stories: four members of a Kansas family brutally murdered on Nov. 15, 1959, at their rural farmhouse. The slayings of the Clutters — chronicled in Truman Capote's book, "In Cold Blood" — have overshadowed the town of Holcomb for the past half century and the trial and execution of the culprits has brought little, if any, closure. For many townsfolk, the wounds have been slow to heal partly because of Capote's critically acclaimed, nonfiction novel that spawned a new literary genre. The book has been reviled in its birthplace by residents because of...

In Cold Blood: What Truman Capote did not want you to know How a gay writer became famous covering up the homosexuality of a gay couple who killed an evangelical family 50 years after the hideous slaughter of the Clutter family, Brazilian writer Julio Severo questions Truman Capote and his book By Julio Severo“Homophobia” crimes are, spurred by gay activists, fast becoming an incessant and omnipresent propaganda in the liberal media. Such propaganda is leading most people to see homosexuals as eternal innocent victims and the rest of society as potential oppressors. Crimes committed by homosexuals? This is a new...

Rep. Jack Murtha’s (D-Johnstown) opponent in this year’s congressional race -- Lt. Col. William Russell, a decorated Iraq war veteran who was in the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 -- has just released an ad titled “In Cold Blood.” So far, it is one of the most powerful campaign spots to hit the airwaves in the down- ballot races this cycle in the Keystone State.

...I saw "Capote" on a recent Saturday evening, and got more than I bargained for. The film is built around Gerald Clarke's 1988 biography and "In Cold Blood"--Capote's "non-fiction novel" about the brutal murders, by drifters Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, of the four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kan., in 1959... This is not a Hollywood message movie like George Clooney's Edward R. Murrow film, waving warnings about McCarthyism. One can take from "Capote" what one wishes, and what I took away was how far the distance was in 1959 from New York's Upper East Side to...

Hunter S. Thompson did not invent Gonzo Journalism—but in a line borrowed from David Mamet, he gave it a name. Truman Capote attempted, with “In Cold Blood,” to fuse the fictional with the factual. Thomas Wolfe is a pioneer of the “new journalism” of the sixties, the meshing of the personal with the public. In academia, Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicists solidified the idea that history could only be known fully by being reduced to the personal. But Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream” (1971) sits as a...

The gun that Los Angeles cops say was used to kill Robert Blake's wife has been traced back to the actor, police sources have told the Daily News. The serial number on the murder weapon, a .38-caliber Walther PPK handgun, had been filed off. But using techniques straight out of the CBS show "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," forensic sleuths were able to read the number and trace the gun to Blake, the sources said. The star of the 1970s detective show "Baretta" is scheduled to be arraigned tomorrow in a Van Nuys, Calif., courthouse. His bodyguard, Earle Caldwell, also is...