National Attention

Many people were shocked to hear that the Clutter family, who was a highly respected farming family in the town of Holcomb, Kansas was killed. All four family members in the house were killed. The murder of these four family members drew the type of attention to Holcomb that the people of Holcomb did not want. The reason that they were getting all of this attention was because of the crazy act of killers. Also, there was so much of the murder that was weird to people. They didn't even know at first how many killers there were or what the motive of the killings was. All they knew was that someone broke into the Clutter family house and murdered one of the best families in the city. The national recognition that this was getting is what drew the author Truman Capote to the city. As we saw in the movie, Capote was reading the New York Times, and he called someone and told them that he wanted to write a story as this book. Capote then spent the next three years in Holcomb. The story was all over the news and in every major newspaper in the country, "There are all these out-of-towners, and all of this newspaper fuss" (81). Holcomb became a nationally recognized name in one night because of these murders. Thousands of people went to the Clutter's funeral, and everybody started helping out the police department in trying to find the killers. The nation was hoping for the killers to be caught after they heard of this horrible crime, and the people of the United States were following this nationally recognized story from a town of 300 people, that got national attention when four people from the Clutter family were murdered.