While in prison, Dick Hickock (Anthony Edwards), 20, hears a cellmate's story about $10,000 in cash kept in a home safe by a prosperous rancher. When he's paroled, Dick persaudes ex-con Perry Smith...

While in prison, Dick Hickock (Anthony Edwards), 20, hears a cellmate's story about $10,000 in cash kept in a home safe by a prosperous rancher. When he's paroled, Dick persaudes ex-con Perry Smith (Eric Roberts), also 20, to join him in going after the stash. On a November night in 1959, Dick and Perry break into the Holcomb, Kansas, house of Herb Clutter. Enraged at finding no safe, they wake the sleeping family and brutally kill them all - the rancher, his wife, and their teenage son and daughter. The bodies are found by two friends who come by before Sunday church. The murders shock the small Great Plains town, where doors were routinely left unlocked. Detective Alvin Dewey (Sam Neill) of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation heads the case, but there are no clues, no apparent motive and no suspects...