Cold Blood and Weak Tea

TCM was promoting the 1967 Richard Brooks film, In Cold Blood, last week and it got me to thinking, given the Zal Rule* at Fakeopedia, that the killing of the Clutter family in 1959, the basis for Truman Capote’s book of the same name and subject, would likely be a hoax.

*Zal Rule: If there is a major motion picture of a “real” event, you can be certain the event is a hoax- 

High Society’s Child

Lets start with Capote. He was born Truman Strekfus Persons but was adopted by his stepfather and renamed Truman Garcia Capote. Persons and Capote are barely listed in the peerage, but the name Capote has Comte’s (Counts) in the bloodline.

Truman attended Greenwich High in Spooksville Conneticut and the Franklin School (now Dwight School) in Manhattan. Notable fellow alumni from Dwight include Henry Morgenthau and Fiorello La Guardia, plus arch-propagandist Walter Lippmann- (Paris Hilton and Vin Diesel, also). Clearly, Capote was being nurtured for elite purposes.

For me the red flags include the absence of the biological father at an early age which smacks of illegitimacy, a condition I believe probably all of the public figures out there have. They are, again in my opinion, planned for bastards of the unseen uber elite to be the hollow faces deflecting from the hidden hands.

IMO, Capote’s education as a spook is a gimme. His slight stature and brazen homosexuality are other features of heavily promoted entertainers. They can be brazen because they will not be inconvenienced by law or press, both institutions in the employ of the same elites. Their sexual profile is, possibly, part of the in vitro neutering procedures I suspect in use that then produce gay or latent assets who won’t be burdened by actual family obligations. (That last bit is pure speculation but a useful placeholder until I can get to the bottom of this) I suspect their contributing biological parents are cousins, the mothers themselves illegitimate,  thus certain physical traits, like height or lack thereof, become pronounced amid this milieu.

Capote’s books marinate in neurosis as a favored state of mind, even if some lip service is given to a state approved balance of nature. He is one of the ersatz southern writers of the greater Manhattan gay literati that has done so much to promote mental illness and anxiety amongst women, especially. Without these authors (including movie and TV writers), Big Pharma would not have the stranglehold on the collective imagination that they do.

And now, a digression…

George Ronald York and James Douglas Latham were in training as privates in the US Army when they allegedly went AWOL and bat shit crazy and murdered several people while stealing their vehicles and money and tearing the country a new one from the Deep South to Utah in the summer of 1961.

(There are plenty of Yorks in the peerage and even more Lathams)

Red Flag: Military.

Red Flag: While on death row in Kansas, they associated with then incarcerated Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, the two killers in Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’.

(The purpose of the York/Latham hoax is to buttress the ‘reality’ of the Smith/Hickock team. One duo might not be believed- Two, well, now we have a trend. These hoaxes come in bunches to sell the trope of killers at large, mentally ill mass shooters, swarthy terrorists with back pack bombs, etc…)

Red Flag: Richard ‘Dick’ Hickock: executed at age 33. A double phallic name a queer writer like Capote could concoct for a private laugh.

(I also think of Wild Bill Hickok, nee James Butler Hickok, AKA, William Haycock, a man with as spooky a CV as any in the Civil War era. There are Hickox in the peerage and an abundance of Smith-Hyphens.)

In Cold Blood’s Perry Smith has been given a Manson-like upbringing of poverty, periodic incarceration and the attendant abuses those correctional institutions routinely provide from an early age. His assigned parents were alcoholic rodeo performers, a very Capote-esque detail similar to some of the marginal freaks appearing in his stories.

The itinerant life of travelling show folks is always a convenient cover for travelling spooks. Old man Smith allegedly committed suicide at age 92. One sister disowned Perry at an early age, mom dropped dead when he was thirteen, and two other siblings also committed suicide. By the time Smith was a public figure of sorts, only the father and the estranged sister were still around to vouch for Smith’s backstory. Two voices would make the falsehoods seem to have more veracity than just one. Even with contradictory details at times, both characters seem to know the same blood relative and that makes him appear much more real.

Smith was portrayed as sensitive (relatively speaking), short, toned, a misunderstood talent with, get this, immaculate penmanship. Put this Lil’ Bulldog in a tony prep school back east and whom do you think of?

Red Flag: Perry Smith joined the merchant marines at age 16. Oliver Stone and Jack Kerouac, off the top of my head, were also associated with the merchant marines. It’s a good cover for transporting assets without the need for embedding them in proper military environments. Later Smith joins the regular Army. It’s reported that he was often in the brig but was honorably discharged anyway. I’m not that conversant with military discharge procedures but my sense is one has to be extremely incorrigible to earn a dishonorable designation. Routine fuck ups probably get cut some slack so they can get a job once back in civilian life. These details of the military seem to me to be a contribution from whatever spook committee was controlling the Capote project.

Further it is reported that Smith and Hickock met in prison and when Hickock was paroled in 1959, the two met up again on the outside. The story is that Smith was actually looking for a prison bunk buddy named Willie-Jay when he encountered Hickock, and that later, Capote and Smith were allegedly getting jiggy with it while Capote met privately with Smith on several occasions to research the book. This is, of course, a complete violation of prison protocols and is yet another layer of deceit that Capote lets hover in innuendo and rumor to give these fictional characters some seemingly human, if flawed, traits. In broader terms I would label these details as a species of urban legend, that is, those names and events surrounding larger events that give apparent credence to the main event itself. For example: Dead, pulverized firefighters that several people absolutely insist they knew and that are now pronounced dead by law verifies ALL of 911 as real. The idea that these assets moved to NY a few years earlier with false ID’s just to be known later as a dead fireman to the locals they commiserated with would not occur to the emotionally distraught.

Big Dick Hickock

He reads, initially, as something like Tex Watson. Up through high school, Hickcock had done everything right. Intelligent and popular, an athlete- a big man on campus. From there it starts to go south. He gets into a car accident and is somewhat disfigured. He wants to go to college but there is no money for it. He gets hitched, works as a mechanic and screws around, a bastard arrives from a mistress and he dumps his wife to marry the mistress. After two more kids that marriage dissolves and he turns to kiting checks and other bunco schemes to make ends meet and winds up in stir with Perry Smith. Sure, why not. There are cars everywhere and I’m sure a mechanic with any skill can get a job. But no, this guy went from BMOC to psychopathic in the space of three kids so that’s what we are left to work with.

The Clutter Murders

From Wickedpedia: Herb Clutter was a widely respected self-made man, who had established a successful and prosperous farm in western Kansas from modest beginnings. He employed as many as 18 farmhands, and former employees reportedly admired and respected him for his fair treatment and good wages. His four children—three girls and a boy—were also widely respected in the community. The elder daughters, Eveanna and Beverly, had moved out of their parents’ home and started their adult lives. The two younger children, Nancy, 16, and Kenyon, 15, were high school students living at home. Nancy was known to be a great pie baker and many people would send their kids to the Clutter house so Nancy could help them bake pies, cookies, etc. Clutter’s wife, Bonnie, a member of the local garden club, had been incapacitated by clinical depression and physical ailments since the births of her children, although this characterization has been disputed by surviving family members.

More from Whacky: Two ex-convicts recently paroled from the Kansas State Penitentiary, Richard Eugene “Dick” Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, committed the robbery and murders in the early morning hours of November 15, 1959. A former cellmate of Hickock’s, Floyd Wells, had once worked as a farmhand for Mr. Clutter and had told Hickock about a safe at the farmhouse where he claimed Herb Clutter kept large amounts of cash. Hickock soon hatched the idea to steal the safe (which he believed contained as much as ten thousand dollars), leave no witnesses, and start a new life in Mexico. According to Capote, Hickock described his plan as “a cinch, the perfect score.” Hickock later contacted Smith, another former cellmate, about committing the robbery with him.^[5] The information from Wells ultimately proved to be false, however, since Herb Clutter did not keep cash on hand, had no safe, and did all his business by check, to keep better track of transactions.

After driving more than four hundred miles across the state of Kansas on the evening of November 14, Hickock and Smith arrived in Holcomb, located the Clutter home, and entered through an unlocked door while the family slept. Upon rousing the Clutters and discovering there was no safe, they bound and gagged the family and continued to search for money, but found little else of value in the house. Still determined to leave no witnesses, the pair briefly debated what to do; Smith, notoriously unstable and prone to violent acts in fits of rage, slit Herb Clutter’s throat and then shot him in the head. Capote writes that Smith recounted later, “I didn’t want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.”^[6] Kenyon, Nancy, and then Mrs. Clutter were also murdered, each by a single shotgun blast to the head. Hickock and Smith left the crime scene with a small portable radio, a pair of binoculars, and less than fifty dollars in cash.

Question: Where’s the dog?

Here’s the explanation from In Cold Blood: “The windows were dark, the Clutters asleep, and as for Teddy, the farm’s watchdog—well, Teddy was famously gun-shy. He would have cringed at the sight of the intruder’s weapon, whimpered, and crept away.”

Simply not believable. He would have smelled them first, then heard them and then seen them. He would have been howling his head off long before he saw any guns.

Successful farmers have working dogs; and, like dogs everywhere, they bark at unfamiliar sights, sounds and smells. The dog(s) had the night off, apparently. (No dogs at Cielo Drive gave warning either)

Alpha Dog

This from In Cold Blood:

“The master of River Valley Farm, Herbert William Clutter, was forty-eight years old, and as a result of a recent medical examination for an insurance policy, knew himself to be in first-rate condition. Though he wore rimless glasses and was of but average height, standing just under five feet ten, Mr. Clutter cut a man’s-man figure. His shoulders were broad, his hair had held its dark color, his square-jawed, confident face retained a healthy-hued youthfulness, and his teeth, unstained and strong enough to shatter walnuts, were still intact. He weighed a hundred and fifty-four—the same as he had the day he graduated from Kansas State University, where he had majored in agriculture. He was not as rich as the richest man in Holcomb—Mr. Taylor Jones, a neighboring rancher. He was, however, the community’s most widely known citizen, prominent both there and inGarden City, the close-by county seat, where he had headed the building committee for the newly completed First Methodist Church, an eighthundred-thousand-dollar edifice. He was currently chairman of the Kansas Conference of Farm Organizations, and his name was everywhere respectfully recognized among Midwestern agriculturists, as it was in certain Washington offices, where he had been a member of the Federal Farm Credit Board during the Eisenhower administration.”

Does Herb Clutter sound like a man who would let two punks do anything to his women and only begotten son? This tripe is from the diseased mind of a lisping, mincing trollop that had been in and out bedrooms, probably tricking with wealthy men, from his early teenage years. His idea of farmers is John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart; or Montgomery Clift, who I’m certain he dished with like two old dowagers at high tea.

The demimonde of backwater criminals that Intel created for scare tactics to promote pro-federalist propaganda from the late twenties on provided for chilling stories of wayfaring monsters capable of careful forethought and prone to obscene, uncontrollable violence. Capote’s fiction is a later iteration of what I labeled Corn Belt bin Ladens in an earlier post. Vintage Psy-Opera: Corn Belt bin Ladens The stories of rural gangsters, in my opinion, are utter fictions. These crazed convicts and AWOL thugs of the late fifties/early sixties Capote was helping concoct eventually gave way to the serial killer hoaxes. This is an evolving Grimm’s fairy tale sampler that updates with the times as they are rolled out to scare a new generation with new labels pasted over old merchandise.

Dissent amongst the ranks

There were, from the get go, writers who questioned the veracity of Capote’s ‘non-fiction novel’. The loudest voice was from one Jack Olsen, the ‘dean of crime writers’ whose CV is all spooked up with the main propaganda rags like the Washington Post and Time magazine giving him employment. According to Wiki he’s sold over 33 million copies of his various ‘true crime’ books. Olsen promotes serial killers and the like and seems to have been assigned the lint catcher position to control the gripes of lesser dissenters of Capote’s claims. Olsen himself said in effect that no one wanted to follow up on his charges because the book was making too much money to be derailed by something as petty as the truth. I think he admitted to more than he realized. The truth is free when you think about it. It’s all around us and immutable. It is up to us to face it because it ain’t going no place and it isn’t ever going to play favorites. Like the air we breath, it is also indispensable for life to continue even as we struggle against it. So then consider this, Jack: If someone is charging for something purported to be true, he is almost certainly lying.

One last slice from Wicked: Another work described by Capote as “nonfiction” was later reported to have been largely fabricated. In a 1992 piece in the Sunday Times, reporters Peter and Leni Gillman investigated the source of “Handcarved Coffins”, the story in Capote’s last work Music for Chameleons subtitled “a nonfiction account of an American crime”. They found no reported series of American murders in the same town which included all of the details Capote described – the sending of miniature coffins, a rattlesnake murder, a decapitation, etc. Instead, they found that a few of the details closely mirrored an unsolved case on which investigator Al Dewey had worked. Their conclusion was that Capote had invented the rest of the story, including his meetings with the suspected killer, Quinn.^[44]

Your Honor, I rest my case-