In Cold Blood by Truman Capote On November 15th, 1959, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith brutally murdered the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. This superb work, an exhaustively researched narrative of the lives of the family and the men who killed them, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965.  Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions.