In Cold Blood: Part 3 Summary & Analysis

Floyd Wells, a former employee of Herb’s and a current inmate at Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing (imprisoned for stealing lawnmowers, in a failed attempt at starting a lawn care business), learns of the Clutter murder. He had shared a cell with Dick that summer, and had mentioned to him that the Clutter family was well off. Dick subsequently boasted that he and Perry were going to rob and kill the Clutters. Floyd is afraid to squeal on Dick, fearing retribution, but a fellow inmate (a staunch Catholic) helps Floyd gain an alibi for visiting the deputy warden’s office. Floyd goes to the deputy warden and tells him what he knows.

The Dewey residence. Alvin and his wife, Marie, are in the kitchen. Alvin has just gotten word that Dick and Perry are the main suspects in the Clutter killing. He shows his wife the photographs, and Marie considers their faces. Dick - with his narrow eyes - certainly looks like a criminal, but Perry – with his soft eyes that are “dreamy” and “rather pretty” – doesn’t look like a criminal at all.

Dick’s family’s house. Mr. and Mrs. Hickok are speaking to the KBI. Dick’s father tells Agent Nye that Dick was a normal boy, but he seemed resentful that his family couldn’t afford to send him to college. Mrs. Hickok blames Perry for Dick’s continued criminal behavior. Agent Nye catches a glimpse of a 12-gauge shotgun leaning against the wall. Mr. Hickok explains that the gun belongs to Dick.

Dick and Perry hitch a ride with a traveling businessman. Dick chats up the businessman, all the while plotting to give Perry the signal to crack his skull with a rock. Perry feels nauseated – the businessman’s laughter reminds him of his own father’s laughter, and this makes him feel even more nervous. Just before Dick gives the signal, the businessman pulls over to pick up a third hitchhiker – a black soldier. Perry, relieved, considers this “a goddamn miracle.”

Agent Nye visits a rooming house in Las Vegas where Perry had once lived. The landlady remarks that she’s expecting Perry to turn up any day, given that he had sent her a package from Mexico for safe keeping until his return. Nye then travels to San Francisco and pays a visit to Perry’s sister Barbara, who is not happy to discuss her brother. Barbara – a suburban housewife - has no leads for Nye. She asks Nye to not reveal her whereabouts to Perry. “I’m afraid of him,” she says. “He can seem so warmhearted and sympathetic. Gentle. He cries so easily….He can make you feel so sorry for him.” The episode leads Barbara to brood about her family’s past.

Iowa. Dick and Perry seek shelter from a rainstorm in a barn. They’re headed for Kansas City, where Dick claims he can “hang a lot of hot paper.” Dick speculates that the duo should spend the winter in Florida with their spoils. Perry sulks – he’s convinced the duo will get caught. They discover a car in the barn and decide to steal it.

The KBI decides to keep information about Dick and Perry secret for the time being – they still aren’t sure that they’re the killers, given the lack of hard evidence. Meanwhile, rumors still abound in Holcomb. Mrs. Hartman (of Hartman’s Café) has noticed that in spite of this, things are beginning to quiet down.

Kansas City. Perry is at the Washateria, doing laundry and waiting for Dick to return. He feels sick with worry. He spies a woman’s purse and briefly considers snatching it. He realizes that his life hasn’t changed much since his childhood purse-snatching days. “He was still…an urchin dependent, so to say, on stolen coins.” Dick finally arrives, and he is triumphant. He’s written one bad check, has plans for where he can write some more, and has secured plates for their stolen car. “Then Florida here we come,” Dick says. “Just like all the millionaires.”

Alvin, in the midst of a dream about catching Dick and Perry, is awakened by a call from Agent Nye. Dick and Perry have been traced to Kansas City, but no one is able to track them down. Alvin has a hunch that they won’t be caught – he feels Dick and Perry are invincible.

Christmas Day. Dick and Perry are on the beach in Miami, Florida, where they’ve been for several days. Dick collects seashells and reflects on the envy he felt a few days earlier when, in the lobby of a luxury hotel, he spotted a man his own age, accompanied by a blonde woman, who “looked as though he knew the glories of money and power.” Dick felt a surge of violent rage (“Why should that sunofabitch have everything, while he had nothing?”) and left the hotel. Dick gives his seashells to a twelve-year-old girl, and he attempts to hold her hand. He’s sexually attracted to her, and he “was sorry he felt as he did about her, for sexual interest in female children was a failing of which he was ‘sincerely ashamed’…because other people might not think it ‘normal.’”

Perry – aware of his friend’s pedophilia - is concerned that Dick will try to rape the girl, and he is relieved when the child slips away from Dick. Perry overhears Christmas carols on a radio and he is moved to tears. He idly contemplates suicide, which, given his family’s history, seems “like the specific death awaiting him.” Perry feels that his dreams of treasure hunting have been destroyed, along with his dreams of being a nightclub singer. He realizes that he and Dick are “running a race without a finish line” – their money is almost gone, and the two are leaving Florida tomorrow, with the aim of heading west.

The same day, Bobby goes for a walk and unintentionally ends up walking to the Clutters’ farm. Herb’s orchard smells of rotting fruit, and the house has an air of abandonment and disrepair. The only sign of life comes from the livestock corral, where the family’s pet horse, Babe, still lives.

Dick and Perry pick up a couple hitchhikers – an old man and a young boy. Dick is initially annoyed by the passengers, but quickly warms up to them when the young boy introduces him to the art of finding returnable bottles by the roadside. Together, they load the car full of bottles, and the boy exchanges them at a motel. They split the money and eat a big dinner at a diner.

December 30th. The Dewey household. Alvin gets a call notifying him that Dick and Perry have been arrested in Las Vegas. Alvin is at first delighted and then is overcome with dread that the KBI won’t be able to put together enough evidence to convict Dick and Perry. Alvin sets off for Las Vegas.

Earlier that day, Dick and Perry arrive at the post office in Las Vegas to pick up a box they mailed from Mexico (containing, among other things, the boots they wore the night they murdered the Clutters). Dick has hatched a new plan to impersonate an officer and write bad checks at the casinos. He also secretly plans to ditch Perry, once he’s made a bundle. (“Dick was sick of him – his harmonica, his aches and ills, his superstitions, the weepy, womanly eyes, the nagging, whispering voice.”) Perry and Dick drive to the Las Vegas rooming house to pick up the second box, and the police arrest them when they arrive.

Dick is interrogated at the Las Vegas City Jail. Agent Nye is surprised by how skinny Dick is. (“I’d imagined a bigger guy. Brawnier.”) Dick coolly lies to Agents Nye and Church, offering a tidy alibi for what he did the night of the Clutter killings. The investigators catch his lies, but Dick still denies his involvement with the murders. Agent Nye emerges from the interrogation room and spots Perry. He’s fascinated by Perry’s short legs, tiny feet, dark complexion, and “pert, impish features.” Alvin and Agent Duntz interrogate Perry, who stumbles over his recitation of the alibi he and Dick had agreed on. The agents accuse him of killing the Clutters, and Perry falls silent. His knees pain him.

Perry and Dick are jailed in separate cells, and they ruminate about their respective interrogations. Perry longs to talk to Dick. Dick, meanwhile, realizes that Floyd has ratted him out. He considers that he should have killed Floyd while he was in prison. Then he realizes that Perry is a greater liability, and regrets not killing Perry while they were wandering the desert.

Perry and Dick are interrogated a second time. Perry sticks to the alibi. Dick, on the other hand, when presented with a photograph of a bloody footprint from the scene of the crime, rats on Perry. “Perry Smith killed the Clutters,” he says. “It was Perry. I couldn’t stop him. He killed them all.”

Holcomb is abuzz with gossip and speculation following the news report on Dick’s confession. Many of the townspeople are puzzled that the killer wasn’t one of their own, and there are rumors that the real killer, or perhaps the person behind the killings, is still at large.

Dick and Perry are being driven back to Garden City in a police caravan. Perry sits in the passenger seat beside Alvin, who is driving. Perry is handcuffed, and when Perry requests a cigarette Alvin is forced to light it for him and place it between Perry’s lips – something Alvin finds “’repellent,’ for it [was]…the kind of thing he’d done while he was courting his wife.”

Once in Garden City, the agents turn Perry against Dick, and Perry fills the investigators in on details of the murder. Perry recounts how frustrated he and Dick had been to discover that the family had no cash on hand. Perry had been reduced to scrambling for a silver dollar that had fallen out of a doll’s purse in Nancy’s room. “I was just disgusted…One dollar. And I’m crawling on my belly to get it,” Perry says.

Perry describes how he’d tried to make the Clutters more comfortable after he’d tied them up. He describes how he had to guard Nancy from Dick, who wished to rape her. Perry reveals that, for a split-second after the murders, he’d considered killing Dick, given that he was a witness. Alvin listens with horror, but also with a measure of sympathy for Perry, given that his life had been “…an ugly and lonely progress toward one mirage and then another.”

Two gray tomcats wander the streets of Garden City, picking dead birds from the grilles of automobiles. Nearby, a large crowd has gathered outside of the courthouse to see Dick and Perry get escorted to jail. The crowd falls silent when they finally arrive, “as though amazed to find them humanly shaped.”