Based on the acclaimed novel by Truman Capote, In Cold Blood is the true story of a senseless small-town killing that shocked and fascinated America. In 1959 Perry (Robert Blake) and Dick (Scott Wilson) are broke ex-con drifters, whose fateful meeting in Kansas will set them on a course to ruin. The two concoct a plan to pull off what should be an easy score: a nighttime raid on an isolated farm to empty the safe of the supposedly wealthy Herb Clutter. Things go awry and in a panic the would-be robbers decide to eliminate all witnesses, before taking off on a desperate directionless run for the border in an attempt to evade the authorities on their tail.

Director Richard Brooks (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) co-wrote the screen adaptation with close friend Capote and cast relative unknowns to enhance the quasi-documentary feel of the film, along with shooting on location in Holcomb, Kansas and the Clutter farmstead. Compared with the pulp detective genre the book and film can be seen as the first modern works of "True Crime", with a focus on the lives of both the victims and criminals and a strong sentiment against retributive justice. Using stark black & white imagery of the Midwest, Brooks avoids lurid sensationalism to explore something much deeper in the psyche of two unstable people drawn together, and something very dark at the bottom of the American dream.