Fifty-five years ago this week, a Kansas farmer, his wife and two youngest children were murdered by a pair of ex-convicts.  The cons didn’t get away with much (other than the lives of their victims) and they didn’t get away for long because they were under arrest within six weeks, under sentence of within six months and under the ground within six years, executed for the crimes they’d committed.   In today’s 24/7 news cycle, that story would have been buried as quickly as the principals.  Instead, a fairly large group of people continue to mark this sad anniversary because Truman Capote wrote a book about the crime that set a new style and standard for writers and readers.  You could say the book, In Cold Blood, was a literary event in the ’60’s that stayed popular for a number of years.  For the generation who lived or grew up in Kansas in the aftermath of that book, the repercussions continued much longer

My family moved first to Kansas and then to Garden City (the county seat where the defendants were tried) shortly after Hollywood released a film adaptation of Mr. Capote’s book.  Because of the popularity of the book and film, In Cold Blood rested on the shelves of many Kansas homes and many of the kids I knew had either read it or pretended they had.  Of course my friends weren’t interested in the strong narrative or character development: it was a sensational story set a well-known area and they were looking for gore.  To our parents, these were characters at all but a retelling of one of their worst memories.  What we  allgot was a great book about a terrible crime.  The actions of the murderers terrified a small group of Kansans but  I suspect Mr. Capote’s storytelling skills fed the nightmares of many more people lucky enough not to have first hand knowledge of the crime.

For years I stayed in a quandry over this book because I wanted to read Capote’s masterpiece but the subject scared me to pieces.  The victims were very real to me: the farmer had been a deacon at our Garden City church and my dad drove over roads near the victims’ house on his way to work.  The material was all too near, I suppose and I never managed to finish the book until decades after I’d left the Kansas plains.  I finally picked it up in 2005, shortly after my father died.

In retrospect, I can see how those events were tied together.  As a kid, the thing that scared me the most was losing my family (later I feared I’d never get away from them) and the book was about how a family all lost each other one terrible night.  Even as I grew, a seed of little-kid fear remained until the event I dreaded actually happened and one of my parents died.  As much as Dad’s passing hurt, the years of dread I endured fearing his death were far more frightening than the actual event.   When I realized that, I picked up the book and found much in the work that is good.

Everyone talks about the crime, and it is the central event of the story, but In Cold Blood does a good job of capturing the type of mid-westerners I grew up around.  They’re capable folks with enough sense of self to avoid any semblance of bragging.  They believe in hard work more than brilliance and most of their humor is dry.  (some of the counties were too back then).  With a seasoning of detail and dialogue, Mr.Capote brings the residents of Garden City and Holcomb to vivid life and he doesn’t condescend to them.  These are not quaint or rural types.  They are caring kids and tough adults who have to face the unthinkable and then get past it.