Stranger Than Fact

New Files Taint ‘In Cold Blood’

True-crime book not entirely factual.

Truman Capote always maintained that his true-crime bestseller In Cold Blood was “immaculately factual.” But a new discovery implies that he was probably lying. A forgotten stash of Kansas City Bureau of Investigation files on the murders in the book was recently dug up, showing that the events of at least two chapters in the book differed significantly from Capote’s description. In the novel, after weeks of stagnation, an informant comes forth and names the killers, prompting the KBI to send an agent to a suspect’s farmhouse that very night. But as it turns out, the bureau waited a full five days before taking action. A difference that big? Probably not a typo.