The genre of true crime is a complex one; the appeal of the genre is the entertainment value of a person victimizing another. Because of the necessity of victimization, the authors of these true crime stories must keep these victims in mind. Yet, they also have their duty to the audience to tell what they view to be the truth even when the victim may disagree, or even when there is no abundant evidence to point to as support. On top of these perspectives to juggle, they often have an academic, political or literary point to make, from the ineffectiveness of decentralized police[1] to the unjustness of the death penalty[2] to the creation of a new literary genre.[3] Authors of nonfiction crime histories juggle clear truth with speculation, and some like Truman Capote may even declare undeniable falsehoods to be truth. This paper will analyze these three types of truth—clear undisputable truth, speculation, and lies—surveying how they can be treated in nonfiction crime histories and how effective these different techniques are. If an author is transparent with what is truth and what is not, they force their readers to completely believe their truth, but they also risk their readers not at all believing their argument. If an author blurs the line between the two, everything is partly, but not fully believed.
Clear, undisputable truth is that which is not even debated because it is either so abundantly evident or because it is not contested among the people that were there. It can be something so mundane and relatively unimportant as a person’s appearance[4] or something as important and difficult to reconstruct as who murdered a family of people,[5] but if all available evidence points to only one outcome, it must be viewed as the truth. Such truths can be treated a number of ways. They can be notated with a citation to an authoritative source, a technique that historians and other academics like Richard J. Evans employ regularly. This allows the readers to verify that the statement is true by viewing the source material that is directly referenced. Additionally, if the source turns out to have false information, Evans somewhat separates himself from the blame for the falsehood. Another handling of such truth would be to describe it as clearly true, but leave no citation, as Michel Foucault does in the opening of his essay “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry.”[6] Foucault details a court case that he wants us to believe definitively happened, but he leaves us no reference of where to find it. We can therefore choose to believe him, and we probably do for a number of reasons: the account seems plausible, there’s a believable preface to it, the quotation marks surrounding each line make us think Foucault heard it himself, and because Foucault is an academic and we don’t expect an academic to lie. The third choice of how to treat what should be viewed as truth is to lump it in equally with clear literary embellishment, as Capote does, without so much as a paragraph letting the readers know what he personally heard, let alone a citation to another source. This choice makes us distrustful of everything, even the things that are otherwise abundantly evident.
When an author puts his undisputable truths next to his embellishment or argument without a rhetorical distinction, readers do not know what to believe and what not to. Instead of treating the truth with almost total faith and the argument with intense skepticism, possibly never believing the argument, they view all types of truth employed in the writing to be some middle ground between truth and not, a sort of part-truth. This has the effect of diminishing the faith the readers had in the truths, but also elevating the faith the readers had in the argument or even the falsehoods. When Foucault tells the true, cited story of how a man is brutally tortured[7] and then draws the uncited conclusion that criminal justice was largely about the body at the time, we can tell which part is the true story and which part is Foucault’s deduced argument, so we completely believe the truth and skeptically analyze the argument. But when Capote builds sympathy for Perry Smith without citing what about Perry is undeniably true and citable and what about Perry is just deduced or even made up, we cannot distinguish fact from deduction. Unable to distinguish, the readers have greater faith in Capote’s speculation and deduction and diminished faith in the real truth he details. The readers see everything as part-truth, nothing as clear truth and nothing as clear deduction.
Unlike deduction and truth, Capote uses one tool that isn’t ethically available to academics: utter falsehoods, where the primary sources have information unreconcilably different from the secondary source writing. This is most evident in the example of Nancy’s horse Babe, who Capote writes was sold for $75 to a Mennonite farmer,[8] but was actually sold for $182.50 to a local postmaster.[9] It is possible that this sort of undeniable falsehood serves a purpose in Capote’s novel, perhaps to make some point about the impersonal nature of estate auctions. It is also possible that Capote simply made a mistake and did not care to fact-check it, since he did always rely on his memory. But because the actual truth is knowable and unreconcilably different, this small falsehood leads the readers to question everything that has been given to them in In Cold Blood.
These three levels of trueness, that which is undisputed and/or abundantly evident, the realm of possible speculations and arguments afforded to experts, and undeniable falsehoods, can each serve a different role in nonfiction crime stories, each with differing effects. When truth is attributed to a previous and authoritative source, it is privileged to the level of reasonably unquestioned by most audiences. When it is uncited but displayed as a higher level of truth than the rest of the writing by an introduction or by quotes setting it off, audiences will probably believe it because of its presentation. If the absolute truth is mixed in with speculation or pure fiction, audiences may trust the truth less than otherwise and trust the speculation more than otherwise. This balancing act is a difficult one for true crime authors; they each make their own choices, and the audience’s trust in their levels of truth reflect those choices.
Bibliography
Capote, Truman. 1965. In Cold Blood. NY: Random House.
Evans, Richard J. 1998. Tales from the German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century Germany. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry.” Translated by Alain Baudot and Jane Couchman. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry1 (1): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-2527(78)90020-1.
Foucault, Michel. 1975. Discipline and Punish. NY: Pantheon Books.
Voss, Ralph F. 2015. Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.
[1] Evans, Richard J. 1998. Tales from the German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century Germany. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press
[2] Capote, Truman. 1965. In Cold Blood. New York: Random House.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Evans, Tales, 136.
[5] Capote, In Cold Blood.
[6] Foucault, Michel. 1978. “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry.” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry1 (1): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-2527(78)90020-1.
[7] Foucault, Michel. 1975. Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon Books.
[8] Capote, In Cold Blood, 271.
[9] Voss, Ralph F. 2015. Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 85.