My apologies. 
 I feel petulant granting Truman Capote's magnum opus a mere four stars, but I tired of the company of Hickock and Smith. True, their perspectives made the book. Less of the killers, though, might have been more. Correspondence from Perry's sister, in any event, did it for me; and decidedly, by the time of the trial, I preferred the psychiatric review. 
 Just one witness testified, and the expert testimony was brief. Off-the-record remarks in quotes (Exactly who said what to whom?) offered a deeper analysis--but a single opinion, nonetheless--and I wondered how it would stand today. 
 The tragedy wasn't that long ago, but, because of the quaintly rural locale, felt plucked from a culturally distant past. I was struck by the utter decency of victim, Herb Clutter, his pie-baking daughter and Kansas Bureau of Investigations agent/detective, Alvin Dewey. So many quirky characters I thought deserved a greater role: mail messenger, Mother Truitt, for one--and Bess Hartman, owner of Hartman's Cafe, who rebuked a customer heckling Dewey with "Hush your meanness. We're all in the same boat." 
 Looking back, I think what stands out most is the stranger-than-fiction coincidence of Herb Clutter's eerily prescient purchase (the very day the killers arrived) of an $80,000 insurance policy covering his accidental death. Informed of the crime, his agent, Bob Johnson, of New York Life, thought he faced a delicate quandary. Conferring with his superiors, though, he promptly learned that while legally, the insurers were not obliged to pay, morally, they felt they should, and that's indeed what the company did. 
 As the narrator stated, an honorable stance. 
 I wonder if that would happen today.