Risk Factors In Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

I read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, where two men, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock brutally murdered the Clutter family in the small town of Holcomb in the year of 1959. Throughout the novel, Smith and Hickock’s motives and characteristics are revealed, so I decided to analyze Smith and Hickock. I will use a topic learned in seminar “Risk Factors” to answer why Hickock and Smith are criminals. Hickock seems to be a criminal by birth (nature), whereas Smith by environment (nurture). Risk factors is a topic that was studied in our seminar “Crime and Punishment.” Risk factors is a “tool” that can be used to almost assess a person’s likelihood of being a criminal. However, just because a person meets many of the factors a criminal would have …show more content…
Hickock shows many signs of being a psychopath and psychopaths cannot be made. First, Hickock is very smart, he has an I.Q. of 130 (Capote 31). The risk factors of being classified as a psychopath is one must be smart and having an I.Q. of 130 places Hickock at the superior category of the I.Q. scale. Hickock also seems to be a pathological liar, a trait psychopaths tend to have: “Hickock said he’d been raised an orphan in an orphanage, and how nobody had ever loved him, and his only relative was a sister who lived with men without marrying them” (Capote 242). Most (maybe all) of what Hickock is a lie. He is not an orphan and had more relatives than just one sister. Psychopaths also don’t show remorse for their action and Hickock intended to kill, rob, and strangle a stranger in the desert (Capote 242). The fact that that Hickock intended to do this, shows he has not remorse. Psychopaths finally have been characterized to be promiscuous and Hickock has seduced seven to eight pubescent girls in the span of one to two years (Capote 201). Based on Capote’s novel In Cold Blood, Dick Hickock seems to possess many characteristics of a psychopath. If he is a psychopath, Hickock had to have been born a psychopath as they cannot be made environmentally or

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