Furious Hours

by Casey Cep

  Those pamphlets typically had salacious titles and grisly covers, with bold fonts and bolder declarations about roguish rogues, horrid homicides, fiendish fiends, and crimes of the century. Rival printers produced their own versions of whatever trial captivated the public, and a single case could produce more than a dozen pamphlets. When the Reverend Ephraim Avery was tried for the murder of a factory worker in Tiverton, Rhode Island, in 1833, the tale was told in twenty-one separate pamphlets. Readers could choose between a brief narrative, the full narrative, an authentic narrative, particulars of the seduction and murder, a report on the examination of the accused, a report on his trial, an explanation, a facsimile of letters belonging to the victim, strictures on the case, and a vindication of the trial’s result. When Avery was acquitted, first by a criminal court and then by an ecclesiastical one, he felt the need to publish something of his own—an exonerative pamphlet called The Correct, Full, and Impartial Report of the Trial of Rev. Ephraim K. Avery.

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  These pamphlets are the ancestors of what we now call true crime, but they weren’t the invention of the American colonists. Trial narratives are as old as the Oresteia, Aeschylus’s account of the murders of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and as famous as the Gospels, which culminate in an account of the prosecution, conviction, and execution of Jesus, and trial pamphlets had long since taken hold in England. But they flourished in colonies established as experiments in the possibility of moral living and populated by a peculiar mixture of refugees from religious persecution and from prison. Crime in America had a ready audience and a nascent legal community eager to learn from records of court procedures, which at the time could be cited as case law. An emergent national literary culture likewise took note of the way literal transcripts could be edited into stories, learning one trial at a time how to shape public sympathy while tracing the course of a crime from its commission through to exoneration or execution.

  Trial pamphlets proliferated in America as printing presses arrived in ports and were distributed around the country, and began to decline only when newspapers started to take over, offering frequent accounts of a trial as it was unfolding rather than a single summing-up at the end. Soon enough, a canon of American crime writing began to take shape. In addition to lawless cowboys and legendary bank robbers, that canon included heavily politicized murderers, or alleged murderers, like Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, the anarchists accused of killing two people during a shoe factory robbery in 1920, as well as heavily psychologized murderers, like the students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who killed a fourteen-year-old in an effort to prove that, like Nietzsche’s Übermenschen, they were intellectually superior and above the law. So feverishly did journalists cover these and other murder trials that they became a perverse form of entertainment and, in short order, created a massively lucrative publishing market.

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  By the time that Lee and Capote headed to Kansas with their notebooks and without any press credentials, true crime had been a popular genre in America for well over three hundred years. But it was In Cold Blood that would make crime writing respectable. Back in the 1930s, a librarian turned crime reporter named Edmund Pearson had written a few murder stories for The New Yorker, as had the humorist and occasional journalist James Thurber around that same time. Yet it was only when Capote’s articles on the Clutter killings appeared serially in four issues of the same magazine that true crime became something critics and scholars took seriously.

  The obstacle, before then, hadn’t been homicide itself. The murder plot, like the marriage plot, had long been a favorite of highbrow literature (Crime and Punishment, for example, to say nothing of Macbeth), and noir films like Laura (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950) had been rewarded with Oscars. Yet journalists, before Capote, rendered crime stories only a few column inches at a time, leaving it to novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters to turn violence into murder mysteries, detective stories, spy thrillers, and courtroom dramas.

  “Journalism is the most underestimated, the least explored of literary mediums,” Capote declared, then set out to make himself into the Marco Polo of his profession. Building on the work of John Hersey, Joseph Mitchell, and Lillian Ross, Capote borrowed the strategies of fiction writers in his nonfiction, rendering settings that were more than just datelines, crafting characters who were more than just quotations and physical descriptions, and identifying within his reporting, or imposing on it, moods and themes that made a story more than the sum of its parts. Although he called the resulting work a “nonfiction novel,” he insisted—despite the obvious questions raised by the “novel” part—that every line of In Cold Blood was pure fact.

  That, in itself, was not a fact. Yet Capote’s panoptic account of what had happened in Holcomb—his profile of the town, the crime, the victims, the killers, the survivors, and the system that adjudicated all of their fates—permanently changed the way that writers wrote about crime and readers read about it. What people had long admired in the work of Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Theodore Dreiser, they now expected to encounter in nonfiction accounts of criminality, too: misdirection, symbolism, suspense, and the psychological portraits that had previously been the purview of novelists alone.

  Not everyone was happy with this novelization of crime, and not everyone was convinced by Capote’s declaration that his book was strictly factual. A month after its publication, a journalist for The Kansas City Times re-reported most of it, discovering along the way a series of inconsistencies, from the fact that Bobby Rupp wasn’t a basketball star to the actual price paid for Nancy Clutter’s horse. A month later, a writer for Esquire named Phillip Tompkins also went looking and found far more substantial concerns. “In Cold Fact,” which appeared in June 1966, challenged Capote’s insinuation that the murders were not premeditated and the idea that either of the killers had experienced remorse. None of those present for the executions, Tompkins learned, would confirm the apology that Capote claimed Smith had uttered from the gallows, and he argued that even a cursory read of the case files—in particular the confessions—revealed very different murderers from those Capote conjured in the pages of In Cold Blood.

  Other sources, closer to the original case, also questioned the integrity of Capote’s book. In addition to pointing out various errors, Agent Harold Nye, one of the lead investigators with the KBI, objected to how In Cold Blood portrayed his interview with Hickock’s family—which, in real life, did not take place at night, did not include both parents, and involved three agents, not just Nye himself, all of whom, contrary to Capote’s claim, were honest with the suspect’s mother about the crimes her son stood accused of committing. Perhaps most critical of all the responses was the one that came from the two surviving Clutter daughters, who declined nearly all interviews afterward, saying once, “Truman Capote made a similar request to write an article for the New Yorker magazine that he said would be a ‘tribute’ to the family,” but then failed to honor his promise that they would be able to read what he wrote before publication. Capote, the sisters said, produced a “sensational novel, which profited him and grossly misrepresented our family.”

  Capote had waited until Hickock and Smith had been executed before publishing In Cold Blood, which meant that its two main characters, at least, could not offer any corrections or voice any objections. But Harper Lee was alive and well, and she had been with Capote on four reporting trips and in the room with him for almost every interview he had conducted, including with the killers. That meant that she, more than anyone, could see how the facts they had gathered in Kansas had become the flesh and bones of In Cold Blood—and also how many fictions her friend had used to hold it together at the joints. For all his public insistence that his novel was 100 percent true, Capote, in private, was not coy about those fabrications. “Do you remember telling me that the first tim
e you ever heard of Hickock and Smith was when Alvin came home one night and showed you their ‘mug-shots,’ the ones with the vital statistics on the back?” he asked Marie Dewey in a letter he sent to her and her husband from Palamós, Spain, in August 1961. “Well, I want to do this as a ‘scene’ between you and Alvin. Can you remember anything more about it (not that I mind inventing details, as you will see!)?”

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  Harper Lee, however, minded very much. Capote’s inventions were legion, going far beyond the ones uncovered by The Kansas City Times, Esquire, and others. They included the claim, vehemently denied by its ostensible source, that Perry Smith had cried in his jail cell and, perhaps most gallingly, the wholly fabricated scene in the cemetery between Agent Dewey and Susan Kidwell that Capote used to end his book. Lee never aired her objections to those falsehoods or any others publicly, but in letters to Sandy Campbell, who had been Capote’s fact-checker at The New Yorker, and Campbell’s partner, Donald Windham, she lamented, “Truman’s having long ago put fact out of business had made me despair of ‘factual’ accounts of anything.”

  Unsurprisingly, perhaps, that rift over the meaning of nonfiction corresponded to one between Capote and Lee. For years, people speculated that what had ended their friendship was his enormous and spiraling envy of all the success she had found with To Kill a Mockingbird—of the Pulitzer, the Oscars, the seemingly endless sales. Yet the two of them traveled back to Kansas together in 1962 and 1963, after the novel and the movie had both already earned extravagant accolades, and she wrote a glowing profile of him in 1966 for the Book-of-the-Month Club News to help promote In Cold Blood. “For over five years,” Lee wrote admiringly in that piece, Capote “gave Kansas his best—identification complete, involvement total.”

  There and elsewhere, she suppressed, in public, her objections to his work, as well as her disapproval of his increasingly self-destructive habits. But Capote still pulled away from her. Even though he lived just two miles south of her in the city, they saw less and less of each other after his book came out. Later, she confided to Windham and Campbell, “Truman did not cut me out of his life until after In Cold Blood was published. I never knew why he did it, the only comfort I had was in the discovery that he had done the same to several others, all faithful old friends. Our friendship, however, had been life-long, and I had assumed that the ties that bound us were unbreakable.”

  What Capote had done with In Cold Blood gave Lee qualms and compromised their friendship, but it also presented her with a challenge: whether she could write the kind of old-fashioned, straitlaced journalism she admired, and whether it could be as successful as the fact-bending accounts of her contemporaries. Capote, after all, was part of a whole movement of writers trying to make nonfiction read more like fiction, a movement whose members included Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion. The stories they wrote had their foundations in reportage but often included upper floors of psychological speculation, sociological exploration, or political manifesto. Swaths of dialogue in some of these authors’ works were wholly or largely invented, and the narrative perspective sometimes hewed impossibly close to the consciousness of the characters. But readers, for the most part, loved them. By 1973, when Tom Wolfe co-edited an anthology of The New Journalism, he could write with some credibility that nonfiction had eclipsed the novel and that it was “the most important literature being written in America today.” Yet Lee would never identify with the New Journalists. At the Union Building, where she had spent so many late nights and early mornings while a student at the University of Alabama, the nonfiction publications were physically divided from their fictional counterparts by a row of filing cabinets, and she always maintained that same division in her own mind and work.

  That commitment would determine not only her style but also her subject. With In Cold Blood, Capote had chosen an exceptional crime. “Of all the people in all the world,” he quoted one of the investigators on the case as saying, “the Clutters were the least likely to be murdered.” That was true, and much the same could be said of the victims in most popular works of true crime that followed; except for accounts of domestic violence, not many of the murders described in those books were representative of violent crime in this country. Their victims were typically wealthy and white, while murder victims, statistically speaking, are more likely to be economically disadvantaged and people of color; their killers were often calculating or deranged outsiders, while most homicide victims are killed by someone they know. Capote, in particular, had gone looking for what amounted to a horror story in the heart of white America: the murder of an entire middle-class household by total strangers.

  Lee, by contrast, found a case where the only white characters were the lawyers and law enforcement officers. To portray the victims, the killers, and the survivors, she would be writing about black lives and black deaths, black families and black communities—an unusual move for the genre even today, and a challenge for her, as the black characters in To Kill a Mockingbird are essential to the plot but hardly as realized as their white counterparts. But she had already demonstrated her ability to depict crimes that confronted readers with their own prejudices and those of the criminal justice system, and she’d wanted to go even further before Tay Hohoff discouraged her. To Kill a Mockingbird featured two parallel stories about violence: in one, a black man, Tom Robinson, dies because he is falsely accused of rape; in the other, a white man, Arthur “Boo” Radley, is spared from even being charged for a murder the authorities know he committed. The former portrayed the power of a mob to enforce a distorted vision of justice, the latter portrayed the prerogative of law enforcement to exercise personal preferences, and both dramatized the way that the biases of society are reflected in the criminal justice system. Although Atticus Finch has to be talked into sparing his son, Jem, and their neighbor Boo Radley a trial for the murder of Bob Ewell, it takes only a few pages for Sheriff Tate to convince him of the expediency of vigilantism: “There’s a black boy dead for no reason, and the man responsible for it’s dead. Let the dead bury the dead this time, Mr. Finch. Let the dead bury the dead.”

  The Maxwell case had a vigilante, too, but he was black and heralded as a hero not only privately but publicly. That made the politics of her new book less palatable than those of her previous one, and its plot contained far more complexities: an alleged black serial killer who was also the victim of violence; a crusading white attorney who was also profiting off black death; crimes that looked like murder but were mostly tried like fraud; white and black lives that existed almost side by side in small southern towns but were worlds apart. Yet because the story Lee had found was fact, not fiction, no editor could tell her it wasn’t believable or insist that she simplify it for her readers.

  By the time Lee learned about the Reverend Willie Maxwell, she already knew something about Alexander City. The summer before the shooting in the funeral home, her niece—one of her late brother’s children, Mary McCall Lee, known as Molly—had married a native, John Robert Chapman Jr., known as Bobby. But it was not only her relatives in town who made Lee feel at home in Alex City when she showed up for the trial of Robert Burns. Everything down to the oppressive heat that fall would have felt familiar to her; as a child, she had chipped ice off the block kept on the steps of the Monroe County Courthouse for that purpose, crunching it to stay cool while listening to cases. Like all children, she had been expected to be unobtrusive back then, and she chose to conduct herself that same way in Alex City. She didn’t sit with the press in their reserved row near the prosecution table, and she kept a low enough profile to observe without being observed.

  If you are in the market for facts, as Lee was, trials are an excellent place to find them. As Calvin Trillin noted in Killings, a collection of his true-crime stories from around the country, reporters love trials because they “are transfixed by a process in which the person being asked a question actually has to
answer it. He cannot say he would rather not comment. He cannot tell an anecdote on a different subject. He has to answer the question—under oath that he is telling the truth.” Lee knew that whatever transpired over the course of State of Alabama v. Robert Lewis Burns, the case was likely to be one of her greatest troves of facts, and when she was informed that no recording devices were allowed in the courtroom, she introduced herself to the court reporter, Mary Ann Karr, and asked whether she might buy a copy of the transcript.

  Karr had followed her heart to Alabama from Ohio. Her husband was a local boy, but unable to find work, he had moved to Youngstown to take a job at a steel mill during the day and an ice cream parlor in the evenings. Karr had seen him working there, liked how he looked, and turned over her water glass; when he came to her table to clean up the mess, she asked him out. Eventually, they married and moved to Tallapoosa County, where the private-schooled, college-educated Karr learned that her in-laws weren’t just poor; they were no-electricity, no-running-water, use-the-outhouse-out-back poor. Her own mother worried that Mary Ann had “died and gone to Hell,” but Karr took to Alabama, and she adored her husband. Years into their marriage, they were still so smitten that they had lunch together as often as they could, which is why, when Harper Lee introduced herself, Karr brought the writer home to her house on Lafayette Street.