Ocean Drive is a contrast of glamour and decadence by the seaside. It’s the street Miami locals avoid on nights and weekends, yet it continues to allure and attract producers, filmmakers, artists, and visitors who consider it a must-see when in Florida. One of Miami Beach’s best-kept secrets for local true crime readers is found within the pages of Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood.
In 1954, young Perry Smith and Richard Hickock also succumbed to Ocean Drive’s charm. They had met at the Kansas State Penitentiary, each serving time for lesser offenses. Despite nearing parole, their future seemed bleak in a small, conservative town with few opportunities. However, Hickock befriended a former farmhand from the Clutter family farm in Holcomb, Kansas, who revealed that Herbert Clutter, the patriarch, was wealthy and kept a significant sum in his safe—a potential fresh start for them.
In the early hours of November 15, a black Chevrolet parked outside the Clutter home. Inside were Smith and Hickock, who had traveled across Kansas to execute their plan to rob Herbert Clutter and flee to Mexico. Things took a brutal turn when they found nothing in the safe, leading Perry Smith to fatally stab Clutter in the neck before shooting him, his wife and their two children.
Smith and Hickock had just committed one of the most brutal murders in U.S. history and now had to evade justice, embarking on a journey through various cities, including Acapulco. By the year’s end, fate drew them to Miami Beach, a young city less than thirty years old, offering itself to the rest of America as a paradise frequented only by the wealthy— a place once put on the spot by Al Capone and Marilyn Monroe, featuring innovative Art Deco architecture in pastel colors, blondes in their bikinis sipping daiquiris, and the most luxurious hotels like the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc guarding its shores.
From its inception, Ocean Drive was envisioned as the mecca of Art Deco, and it welcomed Perry Smith and Richard Hickock to the Somerset Hotel, Building 335—a small, white structure with lavender accents.
The Somerset’s attractions consisted only of two umbrellas across the street, stuck in the sand—one pink, one blue. They stayed there for five days in a double room, paying a weekly rate of eighteen dollars. Their stay in Miami passed between this decadent winter picture and the pool at the Fontainebleau Hotel, until, six weeks after the Clutter massacre, they were arrested in Las Vegas, extradited to Kansas, tried, and sentenced to death.
Truman Capote documented and recounted the case of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock in his 1966 book In Cold Blood, considered a seminal work in non-fiction narrative and the second best-selling true crime book of all time. Today, the Somerset is a residential building whose inhabitants, as noted in a local newspaper, may not know who Truman Capote was, and even less have read his book.
