[DaveHerbert]

Good questions. Journalists often rely on the previous reporting of their peers. If newspaper reporters, who work on tight deadlines, needed to fact check every single word in a story, they'd never publish anything. Instead, they check an old NYT story, confirm the details as previously reported, and move on.

This reasonable instinct can also give way to a broader laziness in reporting, though. Existing narratives are repeated verbatim, and we forget to go back to the bare facts and ask "what really happened, here?"

In this case, I saw the official narrative that the press had reported for 40 years. And then I saw scattered breadcrumbs that told a very different story about Richard Walter. I followed that trail, and here we are.