Truman Capote In Cold Blood Analysis

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On the night of November 15, 1959 in a small Kansas town, a crime was committed that caused chaos in the media across the nation. Two ex-convicts, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, brutally murdered four members of the Clutter Family in the family’s home. The murders were the result of a failed robbery of the home that led to the convicts choosing to execute the family. After much investigating and a nationwide manhunt, the murderers were eventually found and later sentenced to death by hanging. Smith and Hickock had been searching for a safe within the house that they had learned of from another inmate during their time in the Kansas State Penitentiary. The duo would later make the discovery that there was in fact no safe to be found and no …show more content…

Cheryl Koski, a professor of journalism at the University of Tennessee, published a work titled The Nonfiction Novel as Psychiatric Casebook: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. In brief, the work is a case study of Richard Hickock using Dr. Hervey Cleckley’s “Sixteen Criteria” to prove Hickock a psychopath. Dr. Hervey is a psychologist who developed his “Sixteen Criteria” in order to diagnose patients with psychopathy. The criteria includes: “superficial charm and good “intelligence”, absence of delusions and other sign of irrational thinking, absence of nervousness or psychoneurotic manifestations, unreliability, untruthfulness and insincerity, lack of remorse or shame, inadequately motivated antisocial behavior, poor judgement and failure to learn by experience, pathological egocentricity and incapacity for love, general poverty in major affective reactions, specific loss of insight, unresponsive in general interpersonal relations, fantastic and uninviting behavior with drunk and sometimes without, suicide rarely carried out, sex life impersonal, trivial and poorly integrated, and failure to follow any life plan” (Koski 5-12). …show more content…

In Cold Blood. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Web. 19 Apr. 2015. <http://hrsbstaff.ednet.ns.ca/engramja/ENGLISH%2012/In_cold_blood.pdf>.
Keglovits, Sally J. "In Cold Blood Revisited: A Look Back at an American Crime." Federal Probation 68.1 (2004): 39-42. ProQuest. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.
Koski, Cheryl A. "The Nonfiction Novel as Psychiatric Casebook: Truman Capote's in Cold Blood." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 29.3 (1999): 289-303. ProQuest. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.
Malaspina, Dolores, et al. "Traumatic Brain Injury and Schizophrenia in Members of Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Pedigrees." The American Journal of Psychiatry 158.3
Pham, Thierry H. "Psychopathy and Traumatic Stress." Journal of Personality Disorders 26.2 (2012): 213-25. Print. (2001): 440-6. ProQuest. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.
"Psychopathy." Psychology Today. Psychology Today, 2015. Web. 27 Apr. 2015. <https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/psychopathy>
"psychopathy." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 27 Apr. 2015. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/psychopathy>.
"Schizophrenia." NIMH RSS. National Institute of Mental Health, n.d. Web. 22 Apr. 2015.

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