In Cold Blood

According to Dr. Jones, Perry kills Herbert in a dissociative state triggered by a reminder of past trauma. Jones doesn’t specify what that reminder was, but in Perry’s testimony, it was clearly the silver dollar he found in Nancy’s room. The act of kneeling next to Herbert recalls the humiliation he felt “crawling on [his] belly to steal a child’s silver dollar” (277), and he lashes out in response. Even then, the violence of his reaction only makes sense in the full context of Perry’s life, throughout which he is abused and made to feel emasculated. Perry describes himself thinking about this in the moments before he kills Herbert, alluding to both the motorcycle accident that left him physically weakened and the parole officer who ordered him not to return to Kansas: “[T]he pain of kneeling—I thought of that goddam dollar. Silver dollar. The shame. Disgust. And they’d told me never to come back to Kansas” (281-282). For Perry, the degradation of crawling to retrieve a single dollar symbolizes the shame his father, the nuns at the orphanage, and his parole officer all made him feel.

In Cold Blood takes place in a highly Christian setting—1950s rural America—and Christianity plays a major role in how the book’s characters evaluate and respond to various events. This is particularly clear as Capote shifts focus to Perry and Dick’s trial and the question of capital punishment. For a variety of reasons, many of the Christians in the novel oppose the death penalty on principle; one minister observing the trial remarks that it “doesn’t give the sinner time enough to come to God” (353). Bonnie’s own brother pens a letter urging the community to “forgive as God would have [them] do” (124). and Others simply interpret the Commandment “thou shalt not kill” to forbid intentional killing of any sort. The depth of Christian feeling on this subject influences the course of the novel’s events, in that it dissuades Perry and Dick’s lawyers from seeking a change of venue: “We’re probably better off in Garden City. This is a religious community. [...] And most of the ministers are opposed to capital punishment, say it’s immoral, unchristian; even the Reverend Cowan the Clutters’ own minister and a close friend of the family, he’s been preaching against the penalty in this very case” (307).

The work’s Christian backdrop also intersects with several of its themes, including evil, death, and paradise. These three concepts are conceptually linked in Christian mythology, with mortality and expulsion from Eden as the punishment for Adam and Eve’s sin. It is a framework that emphasizes both human frailty and mortality. Its flipside, however, is that no one is so sinful as to be beyond the possibility of redemption and entry into heaven. This is what motivates Don Sullivan to try to help Perry. He explains, “Perry’s lawyer wrote me asking if I would be a character witness; the moment I read the letter I knew I had to do it. [...] [B]ecause—well, I believe in the life everlasting. All souls can be saved for God” (332).

Not all the Christian figures in the novel are so charitable. The nuns at the Catholic orphanage where Perry briefly lived were outright abusive, beating him for wetting the bed and leaving him with a lasting aversion to religion. Nevertheless, the idea of Christianity retains a hold on Perry for the rest of his life. He frequently sings and is sometimes moved to tears by hymns. During his first term in prison, he draws a pastel portrait of Jesus. He hears voices asking “Where is Jesus?” while delirious from fasting (368). Like the yellow bird more specifically, Perry associates Christianity in general with a longing for something more than the life he has. 

For both Herbert and the reader, River Valley Farm’s “grove of fruit trees—peach, pear, cherry, and apple” is a symbol of paradise (14). The climate of western Kansas would normally be to dry to support a fruit orchard, but by planting his trees near the river and carefully tending to them, Herbert creates a “green, apple-scented Eden” (14). However, with no one left to care for the orchard after the murders, the fruit rots. When Bobby visits the Clutter farm at Christmas, he smells the “cider-tart odor of spoiling apples” (237). Like the orchard itself, the decay is symbolic; the reference to apples once again recalls the Garden of Eden but now underscores how the murders shattered the innocence of the formerly idyllic town of Holcomb.