«The mistakes in In Cold Blood are especially striking because the material originally appeared in The New Yorker, which, along with Time magazine,
originated the practice of fact checking and has for many years been
famous for the reliability of its content. I recently discovered that
the New Yorker staffer assigned to check “In Cold Blood” was a
man named Sandy Campbell, and that Campbell’s fact checking file for the
story is in the special collections of the library of the University of
Delaware, where I work. I decided to give it a look. The file has not
been mentioned in any book or article about Capote or In Cold Blood
that I’ve found; as far as I can tell, no one has previously examined
it in the context of the book’s veracity. Now that I’ve done so, I think
I understand why the story passed muster at The New Yorker, stretchers and all.»
