On November 15, 1959, intruders entered a lonely farmhouse in the wheat fields of a small rural community, Holcomb, Kansas, and murdered the owner, Herbert Clutter, his wife, Bonnie, and their two children Kenyon and Nancy. In mid-December, Truman Capote went to Kansas to write about the case for this magazine, initially to explore the effect on a small town of multiple murders thought to have been committed by locals. In fact, the killers were two ex-convicts, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, who had been misinformed by a prison inmate that Herbert Clutter kept a large amount of money in a safe. In his classic “In Cold Blood,” Capote writes of the “long ride” the two men take after leaving Holcomb, their capture by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, their trial, and their subsequent execution. Capote liked to say, and often did, that with “In Cold Blood” he had invented a new literary form, the “nonfiction novel”—that is to say, a work of reportage to which fiction techniques are applied. Some of his peers were wary of the apparent contradiction in the term, among them Norman Mailer, who said that a nonfiction novel sounded like a “prescription for some nonspecific disease.”

What follows is yet another literary form, often referred to as “oral biography” (which also sounds like a prescription for a nonspecific disease), in which various voices are knitted together to form a whole. A more accurate term might be “oral narrative.” It reveals new details about Capote’s unusual style of reporting, his extraordinary impact on a small Kansas community, and his conduct on the day the killers went to the gallows.

SLIM KEITH (friend): He called me up one day. “The New Yorker’s given me a choice of assignments. I can either follow a day lady around New York who never sees the people she works for and write portraits of them just by what I see; or I can go to Kansas, where there’s been some murders. Which one do you think I ought to do?”

“Do the easy one,” I said. “Go to Kansas.”

BRENDAN GILL (writer): There was never a real assignment. William Shawn [The New Yorker’s editor] would always say, “Well, that sounds interesting.” I think Shawn told Truman that he was interested in seeing the effect of a murder—a story of a small Midwestern town responding to an unprecedented catastrophe in their midst. That would have appealed to Shawn. Gore, blood, the criminal mind, or whatever, would not have appealed to him. He would have been reluctant to say go ahead to Truman if he had known what, in point of fact, “In Cold Blood” proved to be. I suspect both Shawn and Truman himself were surprised to find what the piece became.

JOHN KNOWLES (writer): He went into outrageous detail at dinner . . . at Le Pavillon, of course, where else? He drew the house and where the bodies were found. At the time, the murderers had not been apprehended. So I said, “Truman, if they find out you’re out there nosing around, don’t you think you, too, might . . . I mean, they’ve already committed four murders—how safe do you think you’ll be?” So he went out there with Harper Lee as an assistant, and I called him up in the first couple of days and I asked, “Truman, do you feel safe?” And he said, “Reasonably.”

JOHN BARRY RYAN (friend): Harper Lee was a fairly tough lady, and Truman was afraid of going down there alone. People wouldn’t be happy to have this little gnome in his checkered vest running around asking questions about who’d murdered whom. He asked Harper, “Would you get a gun permit and carry a gun while we’re down there?”

DUANE WEST (Holcomb resident): He was an interesting little fellow. He’d make a kind of deliberate effort to play the part of the kook. In the wintertime, he ran around in a huge coat and with a pillbox hat on his head. It made him look extremely . . . “funny” is the term that comes to mind.

ALVIN DEWEY (Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent): I first met Truman at the courthouse here in Garden City. Truman and Harper Lee showed up at the courthouse. They introduced themselves, and I had a little visit with them. The first time I saw him he was wearing a small cap, a large sheepskin coat, and a very long, fairly narrow scarf that trailed plumb to the floor, and then some kind of moccasins. He was dressed a little different than our Midwest news reporters.

I’d never heard of Truman or Harper Lee before. I asked to see his credentials. He didn’t have any. He’d never been asked for such a thing before. But he said that he did have his passport, which he brought to show me the next day.

HAROLD NYE (K.B.I. agent): Al Dewey invited me to come up and meet this gentleman who’d come to town to write a book. So the four of us, K.B.I. agents, went up to his room that evening after we had dinner. And here he is in kind of a new pink negligee, silk with lace, and he’s strutting across the floor with his hands on his hips telling us all about he’s going to write this book.

It was not a good impression. And that impression never changed. There is one thing I’ll throw at you which will kind of give you why I feel the way I do. My wife is a very strict individual, straight as an arrow. One time in Kansas City, Truman asked us if we wanted to go out for the evening. Sure, you don’t turn him down. First, we get a cab, and just off the main street, about a block and a half off Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth, he pays a hundred bucks to get us into a place above a gallery to watch what’s going on in a lesbian bar. Now, here was what it was: they were eating, tables, dancing, probably a hundred people in there, female couples doing their thing. This was horrible to my wife. She tried to turn away from it, but she didn’t dare say anything to Truman. We leave and he takes us over to a male gay bar. We sit down at a little table and order a drink, and it isn’t three minutes until some of these young bucks nail him, talking to him, playing with his ears, just right in front of my wife. But how the hell do you say anything to a man as famous as Truman Capote that you don’t like what he’s doing? We finally tried to excuse ourselves and leave. But Truman gets us to go on to the Jewel Box, a little theatre, and, you know, I expect there must have been thirty female impersonators in there . . . and they’re damn good. I mean, they looked as good as any beautiful babes in New York. But at the end of these little skits they revealed that they were males. Now, to take this lady—and Truman knew what kind of lady she was, because he had been to my house—and subject her to this . . . Well, his stock went down from sixty per cent to about ten.

ALVIN DEWEY: I never treated Truman any differently than I did any of the other news media after the case was solved. He kept coming back, and we naturally got better acquainted. But as far as showing him any favoritism or giving him any information, absolutely not. He went out on his own and dug it up. Of course, he got much of it when he bought the transcript of record, which was the whole court proceedings, and if you had that you had the whole story.

MARIE DEWEY (wife of Alvin Dewey): Neither Harper nor Truman took any notes when they interviewed people, but then they would go back to their rooms and write down their memories of the day, check one against the other.