Still a Mystery...

Well, I’ve finally reached the best part of the book where we actually find out what happened in the Clutter home that night. Dick and Perry were caught when a police officer spotted their car license plate in Las Vegas. The two are taken in for questioning, under the pretense that it is for the bad checks that they had been cashing all over the place. While first being questioned, both appear confident, not realizing the seriousness of their predicament. Their questioning slowly leads up to their visit to Fort Scott, and when the accusation that they committed the murders is brought up, both are shaken up.

                What I find truly interesting about their questionings is that Dick confesses first when Perry has been portrayed as the most guilt-ridden of the two. Dick does after only one night of being in the cell, but when the evidence of the matching footprints is brought up placing him in the house, he claims that Perry is the only one who did any of the killings. Perry, on the other hand, only confesses when he is one hundred percent sure that Dick as done the same. I would have thought that Perry would have cracked as soon as the murders were mentioned considering his thoughts have been completely been preoccupied of this notion since it happened. The only reason he does is because Dewey mentions the murder of the black man, which is something that only Dick knew, so he knew that he told them everything.

                The actual night went like this: they went in looking for a safe that they believed to be there. When they couldn’t find it, Perry wanted to leave but Dick wanted to question the family, so they tied each of them up and Dick even contemplated raping Nancy, but Perry was adamant against this. Perry stated that after this, he shot the two downstairs, and Dick shot the two upstairs. Which one of them was telling the truth is hard to say. I always imagined that Dick was the only one with a killer streak, given that he did not have a guilty conscious whatsoever, and Perry was terrified of being caught because he didn’t want to do it at all. However, it would actually make sense if Dick didn’t do any of the actual killings and Perry committed them all, which is why Dick could be so carefree of the whole thing; he wasn’t the one with blood on his hands.

                Capote is still leaving little mysteries, even when the murderers have been caught and have confessed, and the events of the night have been revealed. He’s careful to present them solely in the eyes of the men who were there, and not to speculate at all. All that the police had to go off of was their confessions, which is also was Capote had to work with, therefore what happened that night can never really be known for sure by anyone except for Dick and Perry. It’s entirely based on their words. It’s really frustrating because I just want to know what really happened, but Capote wanted to be as real as he possibly could when writing this novel, and the truth is that you never really know what happens in any given situation unless you are there. In this situation, Dick, Perry, and the dead Clutter family are the only ones who will ever truly know what happened.