In Truman Capote's nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, the Clutter family killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, are exposed like never before. The novel allows the reader to experience an intimate understanding of the killer's past, thoughts, and feelings. It goes into detail about Smith and Hickock's pasts, which helps explain the life path they were on before the murder, as well as the thoughts running through their minds after the murders. Perry Smith was a short man with a large torso. At first glance, “he looked like a man of more normal stature, a powerful man, with the shoulders, arms, thick, crouching torso of a weightlifter. [Yet] when he stood up he was no taller than a twelve-year-old” (15). What Smith lacked in stature, he made up for in knowledge. Perry was “a dictionary enthusiast, a devotee of obscure words” (22). As a teenager, he craved literature and loved learning about the imaginary worlds he escaped into, as Perry's reality was nothing more than a living nightmare. “His mother [was] an alcoholic [and] had strangled to death with her own vomit” (110). Smith had two sisters and an older brother. Her sister Fern had committed suicide by jumping out of a window and her brother Jimmy followed Fern's example and committed suicide the day after his wife killed herself. Perry's sister Barbara was the only normal one and had made a good life for herself. These traumatic events left Perry mentally unstable and eventually landed him in prison, where he met Dick Hickock, who was in prison for passing bad checks. Dick and Perry became friends and this new friendship changed the course of their lives forever. Hickock immediately took note of Perry's strange personality and stated that there was “something wrong with Little Perry. Perry might be such a kid, who always wets the bed and cries in his sleep. And often [Dick] had seen him sitting for hours just sucking his thumb. In a way the old Perry was damn creepy. Take, for example, that character of his. He could fly into a rage faster than ten drunken Indians. Yet you wouldn't know it. He might be ready to kill you, but you would never know it without looking at him or listening to him” (108). Perry's short fuse and dysfunctional background were the two pieces of the corrupt puzzle of Perry's life that soured and tainted the final "picture".”.