But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers ... it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped.

In Cold Blood
By Truman Capote

Chilling, sad, disturbing. People like Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith still exist today & always will -- that's the saddest, most disturbing part. That innocent, good people will still die at the hands of ruthless murderers. It's disheartening. I can see why this book was lauded, as it's an impressive in-depth account of the events leading up to the murders, and during and after. A bit of timeliness, too -- apparently a Florida detective wants to exhume their bodies because he believes Richard and Perry were connected to a similar Florida murder that happened around the same time. (Truman mentions this in the book, but states that at the time of publication the killers were still at large. It's a bit suspicious. Perry maintained that it was probably done by crazy people who saw what him and Richard did & wanted to copy. Even though they were both in Florida when the similar murder occurred.) Also, the governor at the time, a strong supporter of the death penalty for the two of them, recently died.

I identified with the following passage because this year I started doing what Nancy did. Maybe I see her in me a little.

"Before saying her prayers, she always recorded in a diary a few occurrences ("Summer here. Forever, I hope. Sue over and we rode Babe down to the river. Sue played her flute. Fireflies.") and an occasional outburst ("I love him, I do"). It was a five-year diary; in the four years of its existence she had never neglected to make an entry, though the splendor of several events (Eveanna's wedding, the birth of her nephew) and the drama of others (her "first REAL quarrel with Bobby" - a page literally tear-stained) had caused her to usurp space allotted to the future. A different-tinted ink identified each year: 1956 was green and 1957 a ribbon of red, replaced the following year by bright lavender, and now, in 1959, she had decided upon a dignified blue. But as in every manifestation, she continued to tinker with her handwriting, slanting it to the right or to the left, shaping it roundly or steeply, loosely or stingily--as though she were asking, "Is this Nancy? Or that? Or that? Which is me? (Once Mrs. Riggs, her English teacher, had returned a theme with a scribbled comment: "Good. But why written in three styles of script?" To which Nancy had replied: "Because I'm not grown-up enough to be one person with one kind of signature." Still, she had progressed in recent months, and it was in a handwriting of emerging maturity that she wrote, "Jolene K. came over and I showed her how to make a cherry pie. Practiced with Roxie. Bobby here and we watched TV. Left at eleven."" (pp. 65-6)

"As long as the sun lasted, the day had been dry and warm--October weather in January. But when the sun descended, when the shadows of the square's giant shade trees met and combined, the coldness as well as darkness numbed the crowd. Numbed and pruned it; by six o'clock, fewer than three hundred persons remained. Newsmen, cursing the undue delay, stamped their feet and slapped frozen ears with ungloved, freezing hands. Suddenly, a murmuring arose on the south side of the square. The cars were coming.
Although none of the journalists anticipated violence, several had predicted shouted abuse. But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers, with their escort of blue-coated highway patrolmen, it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped. The handcuffed men, white-faced and blinking blindly, glistened in the glare of flashbulbs and floodlights. The cameramen, pursuing the prisoners and the police into the courthouse and up three flights of stairs, photographed the door of the county jail slamming shut. No one lingered, neither the press corps nor any of the townspeople. Warm rooms and warm suppers beckoned them, and as they hurried away, leaving the cold square to the two gray cats, the miraculous autumn departed too; the year's first snow began to fall." (p. 286)