Essay....

“Flaws in ... [the] book ... make my left eye twitch whenever I open the book, which is becoming increasingly difficult to do.” This statement comes from K.G. Schneider's angry response to In Cold Blood. She claims that Capote has rushed into the Clutters' murders, “making them seem cartoonish and trivial.” Personally, I agree with Schneider's statement and believe that Capote overlooks the real tragedy at hand because he is obsessed with his senseless killers.
Capote does a poor job of properly representing the Clutter family. He claims that the late Mrs. Clutter was an “invalid” and was helpless, a statement that the eldest Clutter daughters argue is not true. Although the Clutters were a well-respected family, Capote puts little emphasis on the town's reaction to the murders. He describes the town people as rustic country folks and shows little insight into the lives of the family. Granted, he spent days with Perry collecting his account of the murders and obviously could not have done the same with the Clutters, seeing as they were dead, but he could have tried to speak for them by describing the fear and pure terror they must have felt in the hours before their deaths. To add to the lack of sympathy for the deceased, Capote never once interviews the elder Clutter sisters on their opinions of the murders. Except for mentioning them as a part of the family, Capote failed to include their feelings and describe the pain they felt after learning that they too could have been killed that night.
Instead, Capote repeatedly defends Dick and Perry by suggesting that they were mentally unstable and had terrible childhoods. Capote himself had an unstable childhood and could relate to Perry's situation. Capote sympathized with Perry and it has been rumored that the two had an intimate relationship. The fact that Capote was so close to Perry blurs the image he presents of the murders. Capote is biased towards the killers and makes it seem like their crime was justified because of their past experiences. The killers were able to determine right from wrong and should have been able to to prevent themselves from committing this crime, yet Capote countlessly mentions in the book the different rules used to determine insanity, suggesting that if the state had simply used the Durham Rule instead of the M'Naughten, Perry could have been considered mentally insane at the time of the first murder and therefore the sentence would have been mitigated.
Apart from Dick and Perry's simultaneous travel scenes, one can see that Capote wrote his book in the order information came to him. He begins by describing the town, then the murder from the eyes of the townspeople, and then, as he spends more time with Perry, the book's focus shifts to the imprisonment, Perry's memories of the murders, and, finally, the hanging of the two men. The book revolves around the information he gets from Perry and Capote fails to investigate the family in further detail. Because Capote is so obsessed with Perry, he delves deeply into his past. Capote sees himself in Perry and extensively interviews him. He then writes his book based on these interviews, rather than from public opinion or fact. Capote's goal is to expose Perry's thoughts and problems to the world, so that his reader's can understand what goes on inside a criminal's mind rather than give an unbiased account. But Capote is so absorbed in Perry that he ignores the rest of the town, and the truth, completely.
Capote makes the murders appear less morbid and violent than they actually were. He puts more emotion into the courtroom scenes and the lengthy imprisonment than in both accounts of the murders combined. He never describes the murders from the family's point of view or how they awaited their inevitable deaths in silence. Simply the fact that he spends half of the book chronicling the killers' road-trip and imprisonment shows that he has almost no sympathy or respect for the family and the horror they endured. To Capote, the book is about Perry and not about the murders themselves or about the victims; it's just another story to be told.