Cold-Blooded Curriculum
Capote’s true-crime masterpiece is a good start for a discussion of capital punishment
It’s been 61 years since the prosperous farmer Herb Clutter and three of his family members were found dead in their rural farmhouse outside Holcomb, Kansas. Every year about this time, I think about the Clutters — and the two men who killed them. I never knew the family, except through the pages penned about their murder and the case that unfolded in the aftermath. Author Truman Capote is the one who introduced me to Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon. And I spent two decades, more or less, introducing the Clutters and their killers to my high school English students.
About 30 years after its initial publication, I first taught Capote’s quintessential who-done-it, In Cold Blood, to my AP Lang cherubs in Room 215. This true-crime masterpiece had always been my Number 1, and I couldn’t wait to share my enthusiasm for Capote’s mammoth accomplishment — writing a non-fiction “novel” wherein the facts speak for themselves, as the author employs the drama of rising and falling action— with my students.
History will record the year 2020 as many things, but last month marked more than six decades since the Clutter family was terrorized and torn apart in their rural western Kansas farmhouse. The family died in cold blood…
