Patrick Radden Keefe

And we essentially said to them, why didn't you call this person?

Why didn't you call that person?

I was able to track this person down.

Why didn't you?

Fairly obvious, I would think, kind of elementary investigative steps that they didn't take.

You know, when I first met Matthew and Rochelle and they were deciding whether or not they wanted to talk to me, I said to them, I really want you to tell me your story, but I also don't want you to do it out of some implicit expectation that I will bring you the justice that the authorities didn't.

You can't go into this hoping for a new investigation.

i hope that this puts a lot of scrutiny on the police i hope that for most people and i should say i mean as matthew and rochelle would tell you this is a well-connected highly educated white prosperous family in a fairly nice neighborhood in central london

If this is what happens to them when their kid dies, I mean, imagine if this was an immigrant family or a homeless family.

It does beg real questions when the authorities are unable to help even the people that historically, in a kind of unfair way, did tend to get the benefit of these kinds of services, the sort of all the attention of the police and what have you.

I mean, London's a city that's very, it's a city I feel very close to.

I lived there as a young graduate student in 2000, 2001, and I've come back virtually every year since.

So I've seen those changes unfold, but I think that the level of kind of shiny...

dodginess was sort of startling to me once i dug into it the extent to which sort of everywhere you turn there are these really um you know these kind of slightly crooked businessmen i remember years and years ago i wrote a big piece about the sinaloa drug cartel and we were fact-checking the story

And my sources in Mexico would sort of, they would kind of laugh at the whole concept of fact-checking because you'd have a death that happened or you'd have some allegation of corruption on the part of some public official.

And we would want to get to the bottom of it.

And my sources would sort of chuckle in a world-weary way and say, how naive of you gringos to think that you can sort of get to the bottom of something if you just apply enough logic.

enough effort.

And I remember at the time sort of thinking, God, it would be a weird thing just on a kind of existential level to live in a state where you were surrounded by these mysteries that, you know, that there were people who die and maybe it was an accident or maybe it was a murder and we'll never know, far be it from us as citizens to demand any kind of accountability or any sort of an empirical record.

I think what was strange was to realize that